Pre-classical Arabic


Pre-classical Arabic is the cover term for all varieties of Arabic spoken in the Arabian Peninsula until immediately after the Arab conquests and emergence of Classical Arabic in the 7th century C.E. Scholars disagree about the status of these varieties.
Some scholars assume that the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran was similar, if not identical, to the varieties spoken in the Arabian Peninsula before the emergence of Islam. If differences existed, they concerned mainly stylistic and minor points of linguistic structure. A second group of mainly Western scholars of Arabic do not regard the variety in which the Quran was revealed as a spoken variety of Arabic in the peninsula. Some of them go so far as to state that the function of the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran was limited to artistic expression and oral rendition. Others are not as clear about the functional load of this variety in pre-Islamic times. A third group of scholars assume that the variety of Arabic of pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran was the variety spoken by Bedouin Arab tribes and non sedentary Arabs, at least in the western parts of the peninsula where trade routes existed.
Some modern scholars of Arabic believe that the Classical Arabic grammarians held their view, that the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran was identical with at least the spoken varieties of some Arab tribes in the peninsula. A first reading of the grammatical texts seems to confirm that grammarians were quite aware of the existence of different language varieties in the Arabic-speaking sphere. They distinguished terminologically between luġa ‘dialect’ and lisān ‘language’. Among several meanings of the word luġa is the technical meaning of a linguistic variety.
As early as the 2nd century A.H., grammarians were aware of differences among the dialects. Among the earliest writers on tribal dialects were Yunus ibn Ḥabīb and ˀAbū ˁAmr aš-Šaybānī, the author of the Kitāb al-Jīm, in which odd and archaic lexical items used in certain tribes are recorded.

Dialects

Hijaz dialect

features appear in the grammarians’ books more frequently than features of any other dialect. It is, therefore, a much better represented dialect in comparison to others, despite the fact that the region's geographical definition is not as clear. In pre-Islamic times,
the Hijaz was the western part of the peninsula, between the Tihama in the southwest and the Najd in the east. It included the Banū Sulaym and the Banū Hilāl. In the north was the territory of Bālī, and in the south that of Huḏayl. After the advent of Islam, the Tihāma was included in the Hijaz, thus the Bedouin tribes in the interior were sometimes included in the Hijaz. It seems that for the grammarians, Hijaz referred to regions defined according to the post-Islamic demarcation. In this way, the urban centers of Mecca, Medina, and Ṯaqīf were included in that region. The term luġa ˀahl
al-Hijaz covers all differences that may have existed within this region.
Phonological features of this region include:
  1. The pronunciation of /ˁ/ as hamza.
  2. The use of the full forms of vowels, without elision or vowel changes, e.g. ˁunuq ‘neck’ as against ˁunq in Eastern Arabian dialects, where short unstressed vowels were elided.
  3. The absence of vowel harmony, which was realized in Eastern dialects, e.g. Hijazi baˁīr ‘camel’, corresponding to Eastern biˁīr. By the same token, uvular and pharyngeal consonants assimilated following vowels in the Eastern dialects, while in the Hijaz they rested immune, e.g. Hijazi ˁuqr ‘the main part of the house’, corresponding to Eastern ˁaqr. In the neighborhood of uvulars and pharyngeals, the Hijaz had /u/, while the Eastern dialects had /a/.
  4. The tendency to shorten the long final vowels in pause positions.
  5. The elision of the hamza.
Morphological features of this dialect include:
  1. The 3rd person suffix pronouns -hu, -humā,-hum, and -hunna did not change to the -hi form after i or ī.
  2. For the singular relative pronoun, the Hijaz used allaḏī rather than the Western and Yemenite ḏī and ḏū. For the feminine plural, the Hijaz used allāˀī. The same form may have been used for the masculine plural as well.
  3. The dual suffix in the Hijaz may have had a single form, -āni, for the nominative, accusative, and genitive cases alike. Ibn Hišām, in his explanation of the nominative case of the demonstrative pronoun hāḏāni ‘these two’ in the verse ˀinna hāḏāni la-sāḥirāni, claimed that in the dialect of the Hijaz, these demonstrative pronouns were indeclinable.
  4. The absence of taltala.
  5. The imperative of geminated verbs was conjugated as the strong verbs, e.g. urdud ‘respond!’.
Syntactic features of this dialect include:
  1. Some nouns were feminine in the Hijaz and masculine in the Najd and Tamīm. Some examples are tamr ‘dates’, šaˁīr ‘barley’, ṣirāṭ ‘path’. The word ṣirāṭ appears in the first sūra of the Qurān followed by a masculine adjective.
  2. In the Hijaz, the predicate of verbal sentences agreed in number with the head verb, unlike Standard Arabic, where the head verb is always in the singular.
  3. In the Hijaz, after the shortened forms ˀin and ˀan, the subject took an accusative case, while in Classical Arabic and in the east, shortened particles lost their effect on the following nominal clause.
  4. After the complementizer ˀinna, ˀanna, etc. the Hijazi dialect put the subject and predicate of the sentence in the accusative case. Ibn Hišām explains the agreement in case between the subject and predicate in a nominal sentence after ±inna ‘in one version of a ḥadīṯ by saying that the Hijaz did not distinguish between the subject and predicate in case endings after ˀinna.
  5. The predicate of kāna and other copulas was given a nominative case, while an accusative case is assigned to it in Classical Arabic.
  6. In the Hijaz, mā, lā, and ˀin had the same effect as the Classical Arabic laysa in assigning to the subject the nominative case and to the predicate the accusative case.
  7. Verbs in the indicative were used after ±an. An example comes from Mujāhid, who read the verse li-man ˀarāda ˀan yutimma r-raḍāˁata ‘for those who want the suckling to be completed’ with an indicative ending, yutimmu.

    ˀAzd dialect

The ˀAzd dialect is rarely mentioned in the literature. Whereas anecdotes and šawāhid from other Yemeni dialects are given, the dialect of ˀAzd receives little attention. More confusing still is the fact that there were two tribes by the name of ˀAzd, one in Oman and the other in the western part of Yemen. The two features that are mentioned, however, show the difference between this dialect and the rest of Yemen.
  1. The retention of the nominal case endings a, i, and u in the pausal position.
  2. The retention of the vowel a in the prefixes of the imperfect, e.g. yaktub ‘he writes’ as against the taltala in other dialects.

    Huḏayl dialect

The tribe of Huḏayl was situated in the southeastern part of the Hijaz, to the north of Yemen and to the northeast of ˀAzd. Its location in the southeast of the Hijaz connected this tribe geographically to the Eastern dialect group, which earned the tribe its fame for speaking wellformed
Arabic. Despite this connection with the east, the dialect of Huḏayl belonged mainly to the Western group and functioned as an intermediate zone between the Hijaz and northern Yemen. The evidence for this claim comes from the grammatical and lexical features it shared with the Western group. They shared, for instance, ˀawwāb ‘obedient’ and jadaṯ ‘tomb’ with Kināna.
Other features mentioned by the grammarians include:
  1. The insertion of short unstressed vowels in the middle of words, e.g. ibin ‘son’ instead of Classical Arabic ibn, and jawazāt ‘nuts’, sg. jawza. In Classical Arabic, words with a singular pattern faˁla receive an anaptyctic vowel a in the feminine plural, to become faˁalāt. This vowel is not added when the second radical in the root is w or y, but Huḏayl added an anaptyctic vowel to roots containing w and y as well.
  2. The absence of vowel harmony.
  3. The absence of the hamza.
  4. It is probable that in Huḏayl the final long vowels were shortened, as was the case in the Hijaz.
  5. The change of the glides wu and wi into the long vowels ū and ī, respectively.
  6. Huḏayl used the relative pronoun allaḏī. The plural of this pronoun was allaḏūna, in all numbers and genders, in opposition to Classical Arabic, which uses allaḏīna.
  7. Concerning the taltala feature, Huḏayl was claimed to have used both forms: -a- imperfect like the Hijaz dialects, and -i imperfect like the eastern tribes. This variation is also common in Ṭayyiˀ. Both tribes had contact with eastern tribes, which may explain the variation.

    Ṭayyiˀ dialect

The Ṭayyiˀ tribe was situated in the north of
the Najd. It occupied the southern frontiers
of the Nufūd desert and was also situated
toward the northeast of the Hijaz region. It
shared with the tribes of the eastern part some
linguistic features, such as the taltala. Rabin
claims that such common features
are suggestive of the connecting role this tribe
played between the dialects of the eastern and
western parts of the peninsula. The territory
of Ṭayyiˀ during the early Islamic period was
not the original habitat of the tribe. The tribe
was traditionally known to have migrated
from northern Yemen together with the tribes
with which it shared some linguistic features.
Features of this dialect include:
  1. The weakening of the final syllable and elision of final nasals, laterals, t, and/or y.
  2. The absence of vowel harmony and vowel elision.
  3. The change of /ˁ/ into /ˀ/, e.g. daˀ-nī ‘let me’; no other data about depharyngealization are available.
  4. The fate of hamza in this dialect is not known due to the absence of direct evidence.
  5. The suffix pronoun of the 3rd person feminine in pause was -ah and -hā in context, which is in accordance with the Classical and Eastern Arabic weakening of final syllables.
  6. The form of the article was am-.
  7. The singular feminine demonstrative was tā, not hāḏihi.
  8. The relative pronoun was ḏū, which was used for the two genders and all numbers.
  9. The -t of the feminine plural was dropped in pause; again, this is in harmony with the weakening of final syllables.
  10. az-Zajjaji claims that as in the Hijaz, the predicate of verbal sentences agreed in number with the head verb.