Mendenhall - Arabic in Semitic Linguistic History PDF

Arabic in Semitic Linguistic History
Author(s): George E. Mendenhall

Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 126, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 2006), pp.
17-26
Published by: American Oriental Society
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Arabie in Semitic Linguistic History
George E. Mendenhall
University of Michigan
INTRODUCTION: THE PRESENT STATE
The nineteenth-century classification of Arabic and Ethiopie as a separate, South Semitic,

category of the Semitic languages has had serious deleterious effects upon progress in
Semitic historical linguistics. In recognition of this, some scholars recently have begun
placing it instead alongside the various Northwest Semitic languages in a category labeled
"Central Semitic." It is the purpose of the present paper to point out manifold connections
between Arabic and what is usually termed Northwest Semitic, connections that call into
question the established tradition (embedded in the standard textbooks and handbooks) of
treating Arabic as a South Semitic language. At the same time it calls for a drastic overhaul
of present ideas about Semitic social and linguistic history, and the placement of Arabic in
that history.
The fact that the various languages of the Semitic family have common features that make
the classification possible implies also the necessity of recognizing the fact that at some time
and place in linguistic history those various populations had been in verbal contact with each
other. In the nineteenth century the theoretical "common Semitic" or Ursemitisch furnished
the point of contact, but only in theory. Some scholars today are beginning to move away
from the idea that there ever was any such thing as a coherent and uniform "Primitive
Semitic." Regardless, it is a theory that has only limited usefulness in accounting for the
observed diversity within the Semitic family of languages. There is now a need for a much
more historically oriented method of research. This process is long overdue, and is made
possible now because of a number of discoveries and developments in the past several
decades. However, in some circles a major handicap to progress is the persistence of the
old nineteenth-century obsession with nomads, and the concomitant idea that the Semitic
language population groups originated in nomadic tribes of the Arabian Peninsula (K?pper
1957: xiv-xv). This misguided idea doubtless originated from the observation of Herodotus
who reported that:
According to the Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians began the quarrel. This
people, who had formerly dwelt on the shores of the Red Sea, having migrated to the Medi
terranean and settled in the parts which they now inhabit. . .
For centuries scholars have jumped to the conclusion that if the Phoenicians came from
Arabia, then the other speakers of Semitic languages, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians,
Arameans, and Hebrews, must also have migrated to their respective parts of the Near East
from the Arabian homeland. This old nineteenth-century theory of successive waves of
nomads each bringing a new Semitic language from the Arabian desert was seen to be
ridiculous by Albert Clay already in 1919, yet some scholars still hold to it, perhaps because
so far there has not been a plausible alternative available. Recent attempts to redirect the
I wish to express my deep gratitude and appreciation to Professor Gary Herion for many corrections, suggestions,
and improvements to this paper.
Journal of the American Oriental Society 126.1 (2006) 17
18 Journal of the American Oriental Society 126.1 (2006)
search for the "homeland" of the Semitic languages from Arabia to Africa (see Lipinski
1997: 44) merely substitute one weak explanation for another while ignoring the abundance
of evidence demonstrating influences on East and North Africa/rom Western Asia over the
course of millennia.
No one could question the importance of Arabia for the history of the Semitic languages,
but it is now clear?or it should be?that its importance lies on a plane drastically different
from that which nineteenth-century scholars posited. It has been known for decades (Parr
et al. 1968) that there was no perceptible population in the northwestern Arabian peninsula
contiguous to the Syro-Palestinian region of Northwest Semitic until near the end of the
Late Bronze Age, when five walled towns suddenly appeared in the northwestern Hejaz,
while there are more settlements in EB Palestine and Syria than in any other period until the
Byzantine era. It is here suggested, accordingly, that the origins of the linguistic phenomena
characteristic of Arabic are to be located in the population of Syro-Palestinian groups who,
in response to the increasing turmoil and violence of the Late Bronze Age, migrated south
to the relatively remote and untouched regions of Arabia. Thus, instead of viewing Arabia as
the early homeland from which the later Semitic language groups departed, we should view it
as a late refuge to which population groups from Syria and Palestine migrated. They took with
them, of course, their material culture, and above all their Bronze Age linguistic repertoire.
THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS
In chapter ten of The Syllabic Inscriptions from By bios, I outlined briefly the present state
of knowledge concerning Semitic-speaking populations in the Early Bronze Age, and their
probable relationships to later, better known, languages. Four such regions of high population
density are well attested archaeologically: Mesopotamia with its Akkadian language; north
eastern Syria, the homeland of the Amorites and their language, known only from personal
names and its influence on Akkadian resulting in Old Babylonian and Assyrian, and on West
Semitic resulting in Ugaritic; north-central Syria, for which we have little evidence in the
Bronze Age (I term their language the "Inland Dialect" which became Aramaic); and finally,
the "Coastal Dialect" of the later Palestine/Phoenician region.
Also there is emphasis upon the fact that there cannot be a neat uniformity of speech over
a large population area: that there is always a contrast between urban language and that of the
countryside; that even in an urban environment there is almost certainly a contrast between
the language the educated elite used in composing the officiai documents that archaeologists
unearth for us to read, and the language the man in the street or suq used in everyday con
versation. This phenomenon, which has been termed diglossia, is attested not only at Late
Bronze Ugarit, but has also become increasingly in evidence from pre-Islamic Arabic inscrip
tions. This has been powerfully reinforced by the comments of Graf and Zwettler on two
North Arabian inscriptions from Jordan: "What is striking about both texts is that they are
written completely in an early form of Old or even Classical Arabic. The date is problematic,
but because of the Nabataean cultural elements embedded in the texts, we would date them to
around the beginning of our era" (2004: 53-89).
It is the rapid disappearance of educated elites in times of political and urban collapse?
the elites who produced the written documents from which most of our knowledge of ancient
cultures is derived?that gives the illusion of rapid and drastic linguistic change in ancient
history. This in turn gives rise to many theories of population change, displacement, and mi
gration. The epigraphic evidence that usually constitutes our only source for ancient social
and linguistic history is the product of, and reflects the linguistic usage of, professionally
Mendenhall: Arabic in Semitic Linguistic History 19
?n ? K) S '
Fig. 1. Ostracon from Tell Ji?r.
trained scribes. It is their language that became dead, not

usually constituted a small fraction of the population. Th
migrate in the ancient world, sometimes in large numbers
does not account for all drastic linguistic changes, and th
clusions concerning large-scale population shifts.
This view of linguistic history and processes can, I b
amount of linguistic phenomena that otherwise remain o
lowing pages various sorts of linguistic evidence are poin
this working hypothesis. The evidence consists of six
scriptions, alphabetic forms, phonetic phenomena, lexico
literary-historical tradition.
The first two categories demonstrate that the writing sy
as well as those used for Canaanite derived from a comm
other categories provide similar evidence that the languag
Phoenician/Hebrew likewise had a common source in t
A. BRONZE AGE INSCRIPTIONS
The first example is the ostracon from Tell Jisr in the lo

of Lebanon (fig. 1; Mendenhall 1971). Though the sherd h
double rope-molding feature is very typical of MB potter
Syria, and my colleague C. Lenzen informs me that the s
at Tell Irbid in northern Jordan. The inscription is very d
the d?l and the th? of later pre-Islamic alphabets. The ce
sherd is older than any other alphabetic inscription so f
The second example of Bronze Age inscriptions related
dition comes from Kamid el-Loz, just a few kilometers up
Fig. 2. Ostracon 2 from Kamid el-Loz.
published by Mansfeld in 1969 are securely dated from stratigraphie and ceramic evidence to
ca. 1400 b.c. Their connection with later pre-Islamic alphabets has already been noted by
Cross (1979: 100), who summarily and arbitrarily dismissed this evidence because it did not
fit in with the prevailing theory that only a "Proto-Canaanite" corpus could have existed in
the Bronze Age, when already it was clear that more than one cultural region had its own
alphabetic tradition.
Ostracon 2 from Kamid el-Loz is Arabic (fig. 2). It is true that the forms occur much
later in other regions, and such occurrences simply illustrate a virtually universal principle:
that relict areas typically exhibit archaic features. The inscription reads from left to right (or
top to bottom as the case may be): Imtry. The other ostracon is probably to be read: qr\
Both names occur in ONA inscriptions: mtr, and the fern, form mtrt, in Safaitic, and qrym,
in Sabaean. Neither name occurs anywhere else. They are both rare and without a reason
able explanation from within the Arabic language, which is another indication of their very
archaic origin.
B. ALPHABETIC FORMS
There is a general consensus that distinctively different Canaanite (here termed "Central")
and pre-Islamic Arabic or "South Semitic" (here termed "Eastern") alphabets emerged only
after the end of the Late Bronze Age. Already in 1967 Cross stated that a date around 1300
for the "borrowing" of the alphabet "cannot be far wrong." Now it is clear that the common
features of the Eastern and Central alphabets derived from their common source in the
syllabic repertory illustrated in the Middle Bronze Age inscriptions from Byblos. This is
proven by the fact that in four cases these alphabetic traditions chose and continued to use
different characters of the Byblos syllabic consonant series (fig. 3). Note that the pu-sign
appears as a diamond shape in Old South Arabic lapidary inscriptions, and as an oval in
Dedan, Tayma, and Lihyanite. (Here the o-mikron and the o-mega, the "eye"-sign and the
"mouth"-sign actually appear!)
The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions constitute further proof that the two alphabetic traditions
were not mutually exclusive elements in the fifteenth century, for this earliest corpus of
dal he fa/pe sad
Byblos DA DU HU HI PA PU SA SI
o
"21
pastern y
Central /?
Fig. 3. Continuation of sign forms in several traditions.
inscriptions included a number of forms that were later exclusively

"fish"-sign, = d, as well as others that were later exclusively eastern alph
the he-sign.
Further proof of the close relationship, if not identity, of the two alp
during the Late Bronze Age is the fact that characters that represented ph
in the syllabic system, and perhaps not in the language, were derived fr
notably the sign for ta/teth. To sum up: there is no way there could be a
dition in a region where we now know both the 25-28-consonant proto-A
well as the 22-consonant Phoenician/Hebrew languages were spoken. The i
alphabet gave rise to the multitude of alphabets is precisely the sort of "mo
evolutionary theory" that Albright always rightly scorned. This leads in
category.
C. PHONETIC PHENOMENA
The standard textbooks maintain that the ghayn was an archaic proto-Semitic consonant
phoneme that was lost first in East Semitic and later in Northwest Semitic. The basis for
this view was simply the fact that nineteenth-century scholarship regarded classical Arabic as
virtually identical with "Proto-Semitic." As a matter of fact, there is no epigraphic evidence
whatever for the ghayn in Semitic until the LB texts of Ugarit, and it exists nowhere but in
Ugaritic and the proto-Arabic language complex. There is no evidence for its existence in old
Akkadian (Gelb 1969), Amorite (Huffmon 1965), or the MB language of coastal Byblos
(Mendenhall 1985)?these are three of the four major regions of population density in the
Early Bronze Age. It follows that the presence of the ghayn in Ugaritic and the proto-Arabic
complex is what needs explanation, not its absence in the other linguistic corpora.
I would suggest as a working hypothesis that the large number of Anatolian (Luwian and
Hurrian) words and names that are spelled with a ghayn in Ugaritic, and the large percentage
of Anatolians within the population of Ugarit and northern Syria in the Late Bronze Age
might go far in accounting for the comparatively late introduction of this consonant into a
very restricted segment of Late Bronze Age Semitic. When elements of this population
migrated into the Arabian desert to found fortified cities, they carried this phoneme along
with their language and other cultural traditions.
That this proto-Arabic population was also in close contact with the Anatolian populations
is proven by the fact that this group, which can be identified with the Midianites, consisted
of five members of a confederation (Num. 31:8?five kings). One group was the kashi well
known from Hittite inscriptions as border guards at the Mitanni boundary. They are also
well known from the Amarna letters from Byblos and Jerusalem. In the latter city they were
accused of attempting to kill their Hurrian (i.e., Mitannian) king. These Kashi were com
pletely unknown in the later scribal tradition, and confused with the Kushites of Nubia.
(Num. 12:1: Moses' Midianite wife thus became a Kushite, "Ethiopian," in the King James
version.) Further proof is furnished by the fact that the characteristic pottery of these new
cities in Northwest Arabia consists of locally made copies of the typical Mycenean pottery
of the LB period.
The case is very similar for the consonants za and dad. (This category that was formerly
termed "laryngeals" should now be called "pharyngeals," as my colleague Ernst McCarus
informs me.) Only Ugaritic and proto-Arabic yield any evidence for the former pharyn
gealized consonant, and proto-Arabic stands alone in representations of the dad. Professor
McCarus further informs me that no modern Arabic dialect actually has both of these pharyn
geals. From evidence now available, both East Semitic and West Semitic in the Early Bronze
Age have only the qof and the sad as emphatics. Since it is Ugaritic and proto-Arabic that
alone share the elaboration of these consonants, the conclusion is certainly justified that these
consonants are not characteristic of proto-Semitic or even proto-West Semitic.
D. VOCABULARY
Recently it has been suggested by several linguists that in the real world of spoken lan
guages?as opposed to the somewhat artificial world of formal written documents and
learned scribal conventions?it is vocabulary, not phonetics or morphology, that constitutes
the most reliable index of dialect (Muhlhausler 1983: 50; Mendenhall 1989). Already a half
century ago al-Yasin (1952) published a dissertation under the direction of Cyrus Gordon that
dealt with many lexical similarities between Ugaritic and Arabic. Since the dissertation was
not very well done, the close relationship between the two languages was largely ignored
by the scholarly world, or the similarities simply dismissed as "common Semitic." On the
other hand, I have heard from participants that the late I. J. Gelb stated in a seminar at the
University of Michigan decades ago that the linguistic structures of Ugaritic and of Arabic
are virtually identical. More recently, M. Pope (1988) published a paper on Ugaritic lexical
items that have cognates only in Arabic, citing "approximately forty" such items. Several
years later he informed me that the list had grown to include more than a hundred such items.
Dr. Hani Hayajneh (1992) has now isolated some 265 Ugaritic words that have probable
cognates only in Arabic and pre-Islamic Arabic. The idea that this relationship can be ex
plained by a common descent from a hypothetical Ursemitisch that somehow disappeared
in all the other Semitic languages can now be supplanted by the explanation supplied by the
increasing historical and archaeological evidence.
Further exploration of lexical relationships between historically and archaeologically
attested language communities yields a number of observations that support the present
hypothesis that proto-Arabic represents an evolutionary development out of the old coastal
Semitic of the Early Bronze Age, attested at Byblos in the Syllabic Texts (Mendenhall
1985). Though these texts date to the Middle Bronze Age, there is good reason to believe
that there was relatively little change from the Early Bronze Age language of the region.
One of the characters in the syllabary is identical to an Egyptian sign from the Old Kingdom
period.
The earliest segments of biblical Hebrew as a rule exhibit the highest percentage of Arabic
cognates (Mendenhall 1989). Such cognates can have arisen only at a time and place prior
to the separation of the two language groups, which means of course Palestine in the Bronze
Age. This correlates with the fact that the eastern alphabet did not become isolated from the
central alphabet until near the end of the Late Bronze Age. There is a quite rapid drop in
the percentage of Arabic cognates in later segments of Biblical Hebrew literature, while the
Aramaic component rises equally sharply.
For example, the earliest poems of the Hebrew Bible, such as Judg. 5 and Exod. 15, which
are usually dated to the twelfth or eleventh centuries B.c., exhibit a vocabulary that has 38.4
and 30.7 percent Arabic cognates. In sharp contrast is the sixth-century book of Lamenta
tions, which has only 21.1 percent Arabic cognates.
When we deal with various pre-Islamic Arabic dialects, some interesting results are also
obtained. The vocabulary held in common in the Sabaic and Safaitic inscriptions amounts to
only about forty percent, while the vocabulary of Safaitic that has Ugaritic cognates comes to
about thirty-two percent. In spite of the enormous chronological gap, Safaitic is thus almost
as close to Ugaritic as it is to the old South Arabic dialects. It would appear absurd to derive
Safaitic from South Arabia.
Specific vocabulary items often exhibit fascinating possibilities, if they do not demonstrate
specific historical connections. The famous case of the difference in meaning between North
west and South Semitic yashab/wtb, "to sit," and the standard Classical Arabic, wtb, "to
jump," is a good illustration that by no means stands alone. Yemen received the word and
its meaning from the north.
Another illustration is Hebrew ned, "hill," which occurs in Exod. 15, one of the earliest
poems in the Bible, and only twice elsewhere, in contexts that are almost certainly deliberate
references to the old poem. It is well attested in Arabic sources including one specialized
meaning in Yemeni Arabic (Lane, s.v.). It is tempting to find the explanation for these facts in
the linguistic repertory of the Midianite/Sabaean linguistic substratum of population groups
of the southern Levant, some of which joined the federation of tribes called "Israel" at the
beginning of the Iron Age. See my discussion in The Tenth Generation (1973).
E. PERSONAL NAMES
For years I have been entertained by and amused at Harding's brave attempts to find
Arabic etymologies for the personal names in his Index and Concordance, since quite often
those same names occur in Ugaritic or Canaanite with perfectly good and transparent
meanings. Since a collection of such names has not yet been published, only a single
striking illustration will be given together with some background information of consider
able historical interest. Nabil Atalla (1989) has now identified some two hundred fifty Safaitic
personal names that are found also in Ugaritic.
One of the commonest roots in the pre-Islamic Arabic onomasticon is wt(, "to save,
deliver." It is also one of the most frequent roots in the onomastic tradition of Amorite of
the Middle Bronze Age (Gelb 1980). Yet this verbal root is not listed in any Arabic lexicon
or glossary, and it is also absent from Ugaritic, though it also appears there in personal
names.
Though it is certain from derived forms such as yehoshuay that the root had an initial
waw, the names containing the root in Arabic dialects are always spelled with initial yod,
indicating that the name came into the proto-Arabic onomastic tradition from a dialect in
which the shift from waw to yod in initial position at least had already taken place. This was
true of Amorite already in the eighteenth century b.c., and was certainly true also of main
stream Canaanite by the sixteenth century, if not earlier. It is thus very probable that Safaitic
24 Journal of the American Oriental Society 126 A (2006)
especially had received a considerable segment of cultural inheritance and probably even
population from the Amorite culture of northeastern Syria. The constant connections with
the Syrian steppe well attested in the Safaitic inscriptions certainly did not begin only in the
time of the early Roman Empire. The connection with the Syrian steppe is demonstrated
further by the thesis of Macen Shatnawi (1992), who found that some thirty-four percent of
Thamudic theophoric names have verbs or predicates of Amorite origin, though the deity
names are local and indigenous.
The evidence from proper names does not stand alone. There are also a number of
vocabulary items in the earliest inscriptions that are probably to be derived from Amorite
(Mendenhall 1989), and thus we can observe that the Amorite migrations of the twentieth
century b.c. (or thereabout) did have some linguistic influence on proto-Arabic. That in
fluence was not nearly so great as it was in the coastal region, where it brought into exis
tence a new language blend that has long been known as "Canaanite" (Mendenhall 1985:
ch. 10).
It is not only in the Levant that evidence for the early presence of proto-Arabic names and
vocabulary items is found in abundance. In 1989 W. Ward published a group of twenty-one
non-Egyptian personal names, and twenty-four non-Egyptian loanwords found in inscrip
tions from Upper Egypt dating from the sixteenth through the twelfth centuries b.c. Of the
names eighteen have plausible cognates in Bronze Age Semitic (one is Hurrian), and eighteen
also have cognates in Arabic. Semitic cognates from Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, but mostly
Ugaritic were cited by Ward for all of the loanwords, while fourteen of them occur in Arabic,
a majority in pre-Islamic Arabic sources. This again illustrates the fact that the West Semitic
and Arabic languages were not differentiated until the close of the Bronze Age, when the
Arabic forbear was taken into the Arabian desert sometime after ca. 1300 B.c. There it con
tinued in relative isolation to evolve into the language known as Classical Arabic.
F. HISTORICAL LITERARY TRADITIONS
Earlier in this paper we quoted a passage from Herodotus, whose claim had misled
modern scholars into viewing Arabic as the ancestral homeland out of which all the later
Semitic language groups emigrated. We close by quoting another ancient text centuries
earlier than Herodotus. It records an archaic tradition that coincides with the alternative
view offered here, namely that Bronze Age Semitic linguistic elements were carried into the
Arabian desert by population groups originally indigenous to the Levant:
But to the sons that Abraham had by concubines he gave gifts while he was still living, and he
sent them eastward, away from his son Isaac, to the country of the east (Gen. 25:5).
This source is of uncertain date, sometime between the tenth and sixth centuries, but at
any rate much earlier than Herodotus. It is written in an Iron Age dialect of West Semitic and
preserves an ancient folklore tradition that the source of such social groups as Midian, Sheba,
Dedan, and other proto-Arabic entities was Palestine proper. The linguistic evidence is now
fully in agreement.
To sum up: the remote ancestor of Arabic reflected in the Syllabic Inscriptions from
Byblos is also the ancestor of Northwest Semitic. There is reason to believe that this lan
guage was characteristic even of the Early Bronze Age in this region. It was drastically
modified by the massive Amorite immigration from northeastern Syria that took place at the
transition between Middle Bronze I and Middle Bronze II eras. This resulted in the Ugaritic
language, and the endless arguments about its identity as "Canaanite."
In the course of the Late Bronze Age, massive immigration of peoples from Anatolia?
Hurrians and Hittites as well as others?resulted in the breakdown of the old linguistic
system, the loss of nominal case-endings, and the loss of at least three consonants. The
Ugaritic texts prove that this had already taken place in some urban populations, but not all.
The result was Iron Age Phoenician/Hebrew in the coastal region, and Aramaic in the
inland areas.
Toward the end of the Late Bronze Age, populations of the region, whose language had
escaped the second, Anatolian, wave of linguistic influence, migrated into the Hejaz of the
Arabian desert. It is tempting to speculate that they may have foreseen the horrors of the de
struction and violence that we now know attended the end of the Late Bronze Age, and took
refuge in the wilderness where they established walled cities. Naturally, they took their lan
guage with them, and there it evolved over the course of many centuries into that which we
know as Classical Arabic.
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Arabic in Semitic Linguistic History

Author(s): George E. Mendenhall

INTRODUCTION: THE PRESENT STATE

The nineteenth-century classification of Arabic and Ethiopie as a separate, South Semitic,

Journal of the American Oriental Society 126.1 (2006) 17

THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS

trained scribes. It is their language that became dead, not

A. BRONZE AGE INSCRIPTIONS

The first example is the ostracon from Tell Jisr in the lo

Fig. 2. Ostracon 2 from Kamid el-Loz.

dal he fa/pe sad

Fig. 3. Continuation of sign forms in several traditions.

inscriptions included a number of forms that were later exclusively

F. HISTORICAL LITERARY TRADITIONS

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