Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik 73 (2021), pp.

53-70
Pre-typeset version – direct messsage on academia.edu for offprint.

The history of the am- definite article – South Arabian or

Arabic?1
Ahmad Al-Jallad2

Abstract
This essay reconsiders the history of the am-definite article, which by Islamic times
had become one of the most salient linguistic features of Southwest Arabia. Drawing
on historical and epigraphic sources, I argue that this article form originates in north-
central Arabia sometime in the first half of the first millennium CE. The article form
was brought to Yemen as part of an early diffusion of Arabic dialects to southwest
Arabia in the late pre-Islamic period.

Keywords: definite article; Himyaritic; Ancient North Arabian; Old Arabic; pre-Arabic

1. Introduction
This essay reconsiders the history of the am-definite article, which by Islamic times
had become one of the most salient features of the Ḥimyaritic “language” and a
marker of Ḥimyaritic influence on Arabic. The Arabic noun ḥimyar, and its adjective
ḥimyariyy(ah), derives from the name of the final phase of indigenous political rule
in pre-Islamic South Arabia, the kingdom of Ḥimyar.3 The ancient language of Ḥimyar
remains a matter of scholarly debate. The kingdom employed a variety of the Sabaic
language in its monuments and day-to-day documents. Following a close
examination of the texts produced in the Ḥimyaritic period, P. STEIN concludes that
the language of much of the kingdom’s population must have been rather close to
the Late Sabaic dialect reflected in their writings.4 ROBIN, on the other hand, proposes

1 This paper is based on a lecture I gave at Prof. J. WATSON’s online Language and Nature workshop
#10 on June 2nd 2020. I thank Jérôme Norris, Dr. Marijn van Putten, Prof. Maarten Kossmann,
Dr. Adam Benkato, and Dr. Lameen Souag for their helpful comments on an Academia.edu
session in June 2020.
2 The Ohio State University, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; email: al-
jallad.1@osu.edu.
3 110 BCE – 525 CE; for an outline of the political history of Ḥimyar, see ROBIN (2015) and the
references there.
4 See STEIN (2008: 208–10); on the dialect geography of Sabaic and its historical divisions, see
STEIN (2004).
54 The history of the am- definite article – South Arabian or Arabic?

that Ḥimyarites spoke a language distinct from their written register. He interprets
the characteristic features of Late Sabaic as the result of substrate influence, and
regards two poetic texts produced in the Ḥimyaritic period as reflections of the
vernacular.5 Written documents, of course, only afford us a glimpse of the linguistic
diversity of the area in which they were produced. It is entirely possible - and indeed
likely - that other languages were spoken in the kingdom, especially in its later
phases, but whether the main vernacular of the Ḥimyarites was distinct from Late
Sabaic remains unclear.6 Yet STEIN’s remark that there does not seem to be any clear
evidence for the impact of a substrate language considerably different from Sabaic,
even in day-to-day documents, is important, and supports the idea that Late Sabaic
was widely spoken as well as written.7
By Islamic times, the term Ḥimyar took on a new signification: it became
synonymous with pre-Islamic South Arabian civilization in general and local aspects
of identity. When used as a linguistic category, Ḥimyar seems to function as label for
the non-normative - and perhaps sociolinguistically salient - grammatical features of
Southwest Arabia, as appears to be the case in AL-HAMDĀNĪ’s linguistic geography.8 It
is generally thought that the languages called Ḥimyaritic by writers such as AL-
HAMDĀNĪ were simply later, changed forms of the Ancient South Arabian vernacular.
By the 9th century, whatever remained of vernacular Sabaic had experienced
considerable convergence with varieties of Arabic. 9 Indeed, ancient writers did not
define “Arabic” and “Ḥimyaritic” in genetic linguistic terms, and so we should not
assume that all features identified as Ḥimyaritic have their origin in the pre-Arabic
vernaculars of South Arabia.
A famous illustrative example of this is the fantastical anecdote about the Arab
who entered Ẓafār to have an audience with the king. The king told him to “sit”, that

5 ROBIN (2007).
6 A small clue to an unwritten substratum is br ‘son’ that appears in a couple of Sabaic inscriptions
(Jebel Riyām 2006-23; Y.85.AQ/11; see http://dasi.cnr.it/) from the Middle and Early periods,
respectively. The form br is an isogloss of the Modern South Arabian languages in this region
(and of Aramaic in the north). Its rare appearance could suggest that the territory of the MSAL-
type languages extended much further to the west in ancient times. The very few attestations
of this feature, however, could indicate that such languages were isolated in pockets even as
early as the Early Sabaic period.
7 STEIN (2008: 209). This contrasts with the Nabataean Aramaic situation, where their written
Aramaic exhibits considerable influence from vernacular Arabic in all linguistic domains; see
MACDONALD (2010); BUTTS (2018); HEALEY (1989); O’CONNER (1986); CANTINEAU (1934).
8 See the well-known passage in AL-ḤAMDĀNĪ’s ṣifatu ǧazīrati l-ʿarab (see MÜLLER 1877: 134–36)
and the translations of RABIN (1951: 43–44) and ROBIN (1991: 103–5).
9 Following KOSSMANN (2013). RABIN (1951: 42) characterizes the Ḥimyaritic of al-Hamdānī as a
Yemeni Arabic dialect with archaic features and a significant amount of South Arabian
loanwords. For a thorough discussion on the sources for early Islamic “Himyarite”, see ROBIN
(2007) and the bibliography there, as well as RABIN (1951, chap. 5). The only monograph-length
treatment of this subject, the book of A. BELOVA (1996). I have not had the opportunity to
examine BELOVA’s monograph as I do not read Russian, but ROBIN (2007) gives a description of
the work.
Ahmad Al-Jallad 55

is ṯib, and the Arab understood this imperative verb to mean ‘leap’, as it does in
Classical Arabic. And so he obeyed, and leapt to his death. The king scoffed, and said,
‫ ليس عندنا عربيت‬/laysa ʕindanā ʕarabiyyat/.10 This sentence is meant to represent
“Ḥimyaritic” speech, but when examined on its own terms, it is in all ways an Arabic
sentence. It exhibits features entirely unattested in the ancient and modern non-
Arabic languages of South Arabia, such as the negator laysa and the preposition
ʕinda, both of which are Arabic linguistic isoglosses.11 The Ḥimyaritic-ness of this
statement, we are told, lies in the realization of the feminine ending as /at/ in
utterance final position rather than as /ah/. While this might seem odd from a
normative Arabic perspective, the preservation of /at/ in utterance-final position was
the common in most pre-Islamic Arabics and was also a feature of the medieval
Ṭayyiʔ dialect.12
There is no question that the Arabic vernaculars of Southwest Arabia exhibit
influence from the pre-Arabic languages of the region, including Ancient South
Arabian and older forms of the Modern South Arabian languages (MSALs). And since
features taken over from these sources would be unique to this part of the Arabic
Sprachraum, medieval writers would have naturally labelled them Ḥimyaritic,
creating the impression that local, non-standard features always correspond to pre-
Arabic.
An uncontroversial example of Pre-Arabic substrate is the k-endings of the suffix
conjugation, which we find in many South Arabian Arabic dialects. The onset of the
PNG markers on the 1st and 2nd person of the suffix conjugation is a k, compared to t
elsewhere in Arabic. The k endings, as WATSON and others have pointed out, are
shared with the languages of Southwest Arabia and Ethiopia, and, as such, their
presence in the local Arabic dialect is most reasonably explained through
convergence with Pre-Arabic languages.13

10 See ROBIN (2007) for a discussion of this famous anecdote and the bibliography there. Note that
wṯb still retains the meaning ‘to sit’ in modern Yemeni dialects and that the root seemed to have
this meaning in Nabataean Arabic as well, as we find mytb /mīṯab/ ‘a throne’.
11 On the history of the negator laysa, see AL-JALLAD (2018b); ʕnd, like fī, is a functional lexical
isogloss of Arabic.
12 See section 5.
13 For the most recent discussion, see WATSON (2018: 321–22) and the bibliography there.
56 The history of the am- definite article – South Arabian or Arabic?

Amharic: qom-k ‘you (msng) got up’, qom-ku ‘I got up’, säbbär-ku ‘I broke’
Rāziḥīt: sarḥ-uk ‘I went before noon’, sarḥ-ik ‘you (msng) went before noon’
Arabic dialect of Ibb (Yemen): ištarō-k ‘I bought’, ištarē-k ‘you (msng) bought’
Mehri: haṣbaḥ-k ‘I/you (msng) got up in the morning’, syar-k ‘I/you (msng)
went’
Śḥerɛ̄t: ḳhab-k ‘I/you (msng) came at midday’, nfoś-k ‘I/you (msng) went in
the afternoon’

K-endings on the suffix conjugation, from WATSON (2018: 322).

The definite article am-, and other nasal articles such as an- and simply aC with
gemination of the following consonant (here on, the aN-article), has usually been
understood along the same lines as the -k endings, as a substrate Ḥimyaritic feature
arising through contact. However, unlike the former, there are no attestations of
such an article form in the pre-Arabic languages of the region. The Ancient South
Arabian languages marked definite nouns with a suffixed -n, vocalized /ān/, in the
singular and -hn, /han/, in the dual and masculine external plural declensions
(Ḥaḍramitic often uses -hn on singular nouns as well). The MSALs also exhibit a
definite article but its linguistic background is unclear. It is the opinion of my
colleague and renowned expert on the Modern South Arabian languages, A. RUBIN,
that the definite article is not securely reconstructable to the common ancestor of
the MSALs and could very well be the result of influence from Arabic. 14 But if it should
be understood as a Proto-MSAL feature, then the most likely reconstruction would
be a prefixed a-.15 Thus, if one wishes to maintain a South Arabian origin for the am-
(and other nasal) articles, then we would have to posit its existence in a substrate
language that failed to leave any trace on the written languages of the region over
the 1500 years of documentation – not impossible but an argument from silence. 16

14 RUBIN (2005: 89-90).

15 Personal communication on June 4, 2020. On the background of the Mehri definite article, see
SIMA (2002); synchronic descriptions of the article are found in WATSON (2012: 20–22), RUBIN
(2018, chap. 4). The Mehri definite article also differs syntactically from the Central Semitic
articles in that it also occurs on forms with pronominal suffixes, suggesting that it has
grammaticalized independently (HUEHNERGARD 1995: 185).
16 The only example of a prefixed nasal article in South Arabian is the hn of the hymn of Qāniya,
which occurs three times in the composition. While it is conventionally identified as the definite
article, ROBIN (2017) points out that only two lines of this hymn have been successfully
deciphered, neither of which contains the hn-element. STEIN (2008: 208) is, therefore, correct to
question whether this hn is an article at all. He argues that it could be understood equally as a
presentative particle, related to Hebrew hinnê, Arabic ʾinna (STEIN 2008, n.42). Indeed, the
syntax of verse 20 of the Qāniya hymn seems to suggest so. It precedes the first member of a
construction chain, a position where the appearance of the article is forbidden: … hn ḥẓy ʾmlk
rḍḥk ‘indeed, arrows of kings you have broken/you shall break’. These uncertainties should
prevent us from using this element to make any inferences about ‘spoken’ Ḥimyaritic in pre-
Islamic times or attempt to connect it with the latter aN-article.
Ahmad Al-Jallad 57

Putting aside the issue of the status of the Proto-MSAL article, there is another good
reason to doubt the South Arabian origins of the am-article (and perhaps other
dialectal aN-articles). Unlike the k-endings, which are restricted to areas where South
Arabian held sway before the arrival of Arabic, the am-article is attested outside of
this corner of Arabia. It is found as far away as Ḥāʔil, reported for the medieval Ṭāʔī
dialect.17 Its presence in that variety has been explained by the supposed “Yemenite”
origins of this tribe, but, in the following pages, I hope to demonstrate that such a
view cannot be maintained.18
This discussion interrogates the conceptual framework which we use to
understand the linguistic constitution of the vernaculars of Southwest Arabia.
Generally speaking, the same simplified assumptions, to borrow R. STEINER’S term, of
the ancients, like AL-HAMDĀNĪ, continue into modern scholarship. South Arabianisms
are identified by their absence in the literary language, the ʕarabiyyah, and in the
present-day dialectal landscape outside this region. The binary, Arabic - Pre-Arabic,
framework, uninformed by the epigraphic and historical record, makes South
Arabian a sort of pigeon-hole into which all of the exotic features of the dialects of
this region can be placed – a sum of non-mainstream Arabic. And like AL-HAMDĀNĪ’s
method, this practice will ultimately identify legitimate examples of South Arabian
influence, but we cannot assume that every feature absent in present-day Arabic
dialects outside this region traces its origin to a pre-Arabic South Arabian variety,
whether an ancestor of the MSALs or Ancient South Arabian. The am-article, I will
argue, has been miscategorized as a South Arabian feature by the aforementioned
simplifying assumptions. The epigraphic record, in fact, suggests the opposite,
namely, that it is of a northern provenance and was introduced to South Arabia in
the relatively late pre-Islamic period. Nevertheless, the article was firmly in place in
the south by the 9th century, and so became understood as a sociolinguistically
salient feature of Yemeni speech, a “Himyaritic” feature in that sense.

17 The standard description of this variety based on Arabic grammatical sources is RABIN (1951,
chap. 14).
18 For a brief outline of the pre-history of Ṭayyiʔ, see RABIN (1951: 193) and SHAHÎD (2012). While
scholars often use “Yemeni” as a valid genetic (biological) category capable of explaining
linguistic facts, WEBB cautions against the simplified use of the label to support historical and
linguistic arguments. Yemen was many things in the hands of Abbasid writers – as a genealogical
category, it is the product of Abbasid historiography and identity making rather than a reflection
of biological and linguistic pasts (WEBB forthcoming). Many historically northern tribes are
classified as Yemeni in later sources (e.g. GHASSĀN), likely reflecting a politicized view of the past
in the 7th-9th c. CE. CORRIENTE, for example, asks “would it be wise to disconnect the consistently
reported attribution of the relative pronoun /ḏū/, an exact match of South Arabian >ḏ(w)<, to
the tribe of Ṭayyiʾ from their reported Qaḥṭānian extraction?” (2007: 143). In light of WEBB’s
nuanced approach to Abbasid historiography, the answer, I think, is yes. The ḏ-relative pronoun
is, moreover, an archaism that is attested throughout North Arabia as early as the middle of the
first millennium BCE (and certainly earlier), and as such an attempt to identify the feature as
‘South Arabian’ based on later politicized folklore would reflect little more than confirmation
bias.
58 The history of the am- definite article – South Arabian or Arabic?

2. The History of the Central Semitic Definite Article and towards a

History of Ṭayyiʾ
Before treating the am-article, a short discussion on the diachrony of the definite
article in general is in order. Overt marking of definiteness is not reconstructable for
any major node of the Semitic family. The earliest attested Semitic languages lack
this feature – it is absent in Ugaritic, Amarna Canaanite, Gəʕəz, and is rare in the
earliest stages of Hebrew and Aramaic as well.19 The article, therefore, seems to have
emerged sometime in the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE and diffused areally
among the Central Semitic languages.20
All of the Central Semitic definite articles seem to derive from a single
demonstrative/presentative element, *han, which grammaticalized along two
patterns: in Canaanite and Arabic, the article is a prefix, while in Ancient South
Arabian, Aramaic, and Hasaitic, it is a suffix.21

Classical Hebrew Ancient South Aramaic Hasaitic

Arabic Arabian

al-maliku ham-mɛlɛk mlkn /malk-ān/ malk-ā(ʔ) mlkʾ /malk-aʔ/

Table 1: The Central Semitic Definite Articles

Prior to study of the Ancient North Arabian epigraphy, the reconstruction of the al-
article to Proto-Arabic seemed unproblematic; indeed, the few exceptions to this
form in Southwest Arabia were explained away as substrate influence. But now, with
Arabic’s historical record stretching back a millennium before Islam, at the least, the
matter does not seem so simple.22 The epigraphy of North Arabia and the Southern
Levant attest a variety of definite article forms. In the Safaitic inscriptions of the Syro-
Arabian Ḥarrah, we find two common article forms: a prefixing h- and ʾ-. And one less
frequently encounters the ʾl-article proper, sometimes even without the assimilation
of the lām to coronals.23 Further south, in North Arabia, the h-article seems to have
been the commonest form as well, but a non-assimilated han-form is also attested,

19 For a discussion of this, see HUEHNERGARD and RUBIN (2011: 269–70).

20 On the development of the article in the Central Semitic languages, see RUBIN (2005: 65–90);
GZELLA (2006); PAT-EL (2009) and TROPPER (2001), and the bibliographies in those works for
further literature.
21 TROPPER (2001), pace RUBIN (2005).
22 On the linguistic definition of Arabic and the corpus of Old Arabic based on these criteria, see
HUEHNERGARD (2017); AL-JALLAD (2018c); (2019b). See MACDONALD (2000) on the classifications of
the Ancient North Arabian scripts and the hypothesis that the languages they write were
mutually intelligible with Classical Arabic.
23 See AL-JALLAD (2019a: 350–51) on the definite article forms in Safaitic.
Ahmad Al-Jallad 59

especially before laryngeals.24 And again, more rarely in the earliest periods, we find
the al-article, too.25 What is significant to note is that variation in article form does
not pattern with other linguistic isoglosses – the ʾ(l) article occurs in texts that are in
all ways identical to those that employ the h-article. Indeed, there is good evidence
that both of these article forms - that is, ʾ- and h-, could co-exist as variants in the
same dialect.26
This variation suggests that the shape of the definite article itself was not fixed in
the Old Arabic dialect continuum - ʾal-, in other words, was not a Proto-Arabic
feature.27 Once we consider the evidence from the Hismaic inscriptions, which lack
any overt marking of definiteness,28 it seems quite unlikely that Proto-Arabic had a
definite article. I have, therefore, argued that the category emerged in Arabic
through contact with the Canaanite languages sometime in the late second or early
first millennium BCE.29 This clearly did not affect the entire Arabic dialect continuum
at the time, as archaic dialects lacking the feature appear in the inscriptional record
as late as the 1st c. CE.
For reasons that we can only speculate about, the al-article ended up as the
dominant form by the 7th c. CE. But the nasal article attested in the Old Arabic period
remained, and remains, in use in southwest Arabia, where it takes the shape of an-,
am-, or assimilated as aC-. WATSON provides the following illustrative examples:30

im-Maṯṯ̣ ạ h (Yemen): im-raǧul ‘the man’

Khāshir (Yemen): im-ḥēfah ‘the field’
Majz (Yemen): in-ṣaʔbah ‘the female donkey foal’
Rijāl Almaˁ (KSA, ʕasīr): im-brat ‘the girl’

It is impossible to ignore the similarities in the diversity of definite article forms in

South Arabia compared to the Ancient North Arabian situation. Given that there is
no evidence for a prefixing nasal article in South Arabia to act as a substrate source,
it seems more likely that the nasal articles of these dialects were part of the Arabic
introduced to South Arabia. Their peripheral location in the ancient Arabic
Sprachraum perhaps protected them from the diffusion of the al-article from the

24 That is, ʔ, ʕ, ḥ, and h.

25 This variation is seen most clearly in the Dadanitic inscriptions concentrated at the oasis of al-
ʿUlā (KOOTSTRA 2019: 99–101). The h-article is most frequently attested in the Thamudic B
inscriptions (NORRIS 2018) but rare examples of the ʾl-article also exist (AL-JALLAD 2019b). See
MACDONALD (2004) and AL-JALLAD (2018c) for a synthesizing discussion.
26 See AL-JALLAD (2018c: 11; 2020b).
27 Following HUEHNERGARD (2017: 22). RETSÖ (2013) also doubts the validity of defining Arabic by
the phonetic realization of the definite article, but does not provide an opinion as to its status
in Proto-Arabic.
28 AL-JALLAD (2020a: 3).
29 AL-JALLAD (2018C: 10–16).
30 WATSON (2018: 323).
60 The history of the am- definite article – South Arabian or Arabic?

northwest until present times.31 I would therefore argue that the aN-articles of South
Arabia find their origin in the north, namely, in north-central Arabia. In addition to
the evidence adduced above, I believe that the occurrence of the am-article in the
medieval dialect of Ṭayyiʔ provides an important clue to as to the origin of the
feature.

3. The homeland of Ṭayyiʔ and their definite article

Despite Ṭayyiʔ’s presence on the “Yemeni” branch of the traditional Arab
genealogies, there is no pre-Islamic evidence to suggest an original South Arabian
provenance for this group.32 In the 1500 years of South Arabian documentation,
Ṭayyiʔ is only mentioned thrice, each time as an outside group to the north,
positioned already in Nagd.33 Ṭayyiʔ also appears in the Safaitic inscriptions, which
date around the turn of our era, but not likely later than the 4th c. CE. Here, they are
presented as intruders to the Syro-Arabian basalt desert, coming to raid and
plunder.34 It is unlikely that raiders from South Arabia would have made the journey
to Syria just to plunder livestock from the local nomads; rather, they must have been
located much closer.35 NORRIS and AL-MANASER reconstructed the geographic
distribution of the tribes of North Arabia around two-thousand years ago based on
the Ancient North Arabian epigraphy as follows.

31 The earliest attestations of the al-article occur in the Nabataean realm, that is, Northwest Arabia
and the southern Levant, around the end of the first millennium BCE. Herodotus’ αλιλατ (al-ʾilat
‘the goddess’) is also often cited as an earlier example of the al-article in the north, but HÄMEEN-
ANTTILA and ROLLINGER (2001) question the reliability of this attestation.
32 For a summary of the traditional view regarding Ṭayyiʔ’s South Arabian provenance, see SHAHÎD
(2012).
33 The Jebel Riyām inscription, dated to the 3rd c. CE, positions Ṭayyiʔ (ʔrḍ ṭym /ʔarḍu-ṭayyim/ ‘the
land of Ṭayyi’) in northern Central Arabia. Mughayrān 3, dated to the reign of Abrāha in the 6th
c. CE, mentions Ṭayyiʔ in the same area (SCHIETTECATTE and ARBACH 2016: 191). The tribe is also
mentioned, but this time in a definite form, in Maʾsal 3, ṭyn /ṭayyān/ (PRIOLETTA and ARBACH
2016). CASKELL suggests that the Taveni of Pliny referred to Ṭayyiʔ, but it seems the only thing
they have in common in the initial ta-syllable (1966: ii: 555).
34 See the summary of the evidence in SCHIETTECATTE and ARBACH (2016: 191).
35 The mountain of Ṭayyiʔ, ʔaǧaʔ, also seems to be attested in Safaitic as ʾgʾ, as well as possibly
their god, fls (AL-JALLAD and MACDONALD 2015).
Ahmad Al-Jallad 61

Map 1: A map of north-west Arabia showing some of the local peoples and
lineage groups (Map: J. NORRIS, from NORRIS and AL-MANASER 2018)

Working from the evidence, it appears that Ṭayyiʔ was an autochthonous group of
Nagd. The region of Ṭayyiʔ, the area of Ḥāʔil, abounds in pre-Islamic inscriptions and
affords us some idea of what article forms were used in the region. The h-article is
mainly attested in these texts.36 But one Thamudic B inscription invoking the goddess
of ʾgʾ , that is the mountain ʔAǧaʔ associated with the Ṭayyiʔ in Islamic-period
sources, makes use of the hn-article: h bʿlt hn-ʾgʾ smʿ ly ‘O goddess of the ʔAgaʔ, give
ear to me.’37 A man from the tribe of Ḥwlt, a neighboring North Arabian group,
employed the hn-article in his inscription, C 3787: hn-ḥwly /han-ḥawaleyy/.38 The
preservation of the n in both cases is likely due to the following laryngeal. This

36 For examples of these texts, see AL-THEEB (2000); AL-ʿABDALLĀH (2010), and the indices for the
occurrence of the definite article.
37 Massoud (2020: 13). The present interpretation is my own. The editio princeps interprets
the inscription as ‫يا بعلت اسمع يل الدعاء‬. The verb smʿ is likely an imperative 2fs. Thamudic
B orthography does not indicate long vowels in any position. The spelling ly ‘to me’
therefore must reflect the pronunciation /liya/.

38 The entire text reads, following the OCIANA edition: l tmʾ{l} bn qṭʿn bn nʿmn bn mskʾl bn bśmt bn
ṯwr bn ṭylt bn rʿd bn ḫbn bn qnʾl hn-ḥwly w nfr mn-rm ‘by Taymʾel son of Qaṭʿān son of Noʿmān
son of Masakʾel son of Bśmt son of Ṯawwār son of Ṭiyaylat son of Raʿd son of Ḫabbān son of
Qaynʾel, the Ḥawalite, and he escaped from the Romans’. This particular text was discovered in
the Syrian Ḥarrah but its author, based on his tribal affiliation, is clearly from North Arabia.
62 The history of the am- definite article – South Arabian or Arabic?

pattern is observed in the Dadanitic inscriptions of Northwest Ḥigāz as well. 39 Finally,

we have one inscription likely carved by a tribesman of Ṭayyiʔ. This individual must
have been raiding in N. Jordan, where he left the following text.

BS 767 (courtesy OCIANA)40

Reading: l-wʾl bn ʿmm h-ṭ[[]]ʾy {h}-ḫṭ41

Interpretation: ‘By Wʾl son of ʿmm the Ṭayyiʔ-ite is this writing’

This text, if the interpretation is correct, confirms the inference made earlier about
the article form used by Ṭayyiʔ. The h-form is expected before ṭ and ḫ and so it is
unclear if this writer’s dialect would have employed the hn-article before laryngeals,
like the Ḥwlt. Unfortunately, the inscription provides no chronological information
and so it is impossible to determine when it was produced - a pre-4th c. CE date,
however, seems likely.

39 MACDONALD (2000: 41–42); KOOTSTRA (2019: 99).

40 The text was discovered by M.C.A. MACDONALD and A. AL-MANASER on the Badia Survey of 2015 in
Northeastern Jordan. Its coordinates have not been published; it remains in situ.
41 Between the ṭ and the ʾ of the nisbah there is a damage pattern that appears to resemble a
hammered-out incomplete w – this may be a coincidental or perhaps a writing error on the
author’s part, which he tried to erase. The final portion of the text is difficult to make out as
well. It clearly terminates in a ṭ and the penultimate glyph could be either a ṣ or a ḫ from the
angle of the photograph. I believe the latter is more likely as it conforms to an established
signature formula. However, if we do admit ṣ, it is possible to suggest a restoration of ṣṭ[r], that
is, ‘writing’, but with a misspelling of s as ṣ. The letter preceding this word resembles an ʾ but on
closer inspection it is clearly an h, with damage on the upper end of the shaft.
Ahmad Al-Jallad 63

We have so far demonstrated that the nasal article was widespread in Central
and North Arabia, and indeed was likely used by Ṭayyiʔ. But are there any clear
attestations of the am-article in pre-Islamic times? So far, this form has not yet
appeared in the Ancient North Arabian epigraphy, which suggests that it had not yet
emerged prior to the 4th c. CE. However, an unpublished Arabic-script inscription
from the Tabūk region, which dates on paleographic grounds to the late 5th or 6th c.
CE, attests this feature.42 I give my reading and translation below.

FS 1: ‫مسعود بر حسن‬
‫كتبـ(ت) انه‬
‫امعم ىو‬
‫بيرح ملح‬

msʿwd br ḥsn ktb{t} ʾnh ʾmʿm 1x100 b-yrḥ mlḥ

Masʿūd son of Hasan, I wrote the year 100, in the month of Mlḥ

This inscription is dated to the year 100, written in Nabataean numerals, of an

unknown era.43 The word for year is written ʾm-ʿm, that is /ʔam-ʕām/ ‘the year’.
Thus, in the same general region where we find the hn-article before laryngeals in
the pre-4th c. CE inscriptions, we have the ʔam-article in the 5th or 6th century. The
origins of our writer are unknown as is his tribal affiliation, but the use of the Arabic
script speaks against a “Yemeni” origin. In this period the Ancient South Arabian
musnad was still employed and so had our man been an immigrant from the south,
we would expect his inscription to have been carved in those letters. The northern
provenance of this text’s dialect is further confirmed by the use of a local era, rather
than the Ḥimyarite one.

42 The text was discovered by the amateur group Farīq aṣ-Ṣaḥrāʔ, and published on their website:
http://alsahra.org/?p=17938. The text was originally read as: ‫مسعود بر يسن؟ [حسن؟] َكتبُ أَنَه‬
….??.
43 The date 100 points implies a new, local era rather than the normally employed era of Bostra,
which begins in 106 CE. The script is far too advanced in its letter shapes to date to 206 CE. The
syntax following the name is abnormal - it seems that the author employed either the participle
kātib or the suffix conjugation katabt(u) followed by the 1st person pronoun, ʾnh, for emphasis.
The spelling of the pronoun as ʾnh reflects, in my opinion, an Aramaicism (see AL-JALLAD 2018a:
203–4), pace (LARCHER 2010). The dating formula with yrḥ is also previously attested in, for
example, the pre-Islamic Arabic inscription at Dūmat al-Jandal, (NEHMÉ 2017) and Paleo-Arabic
1 from Ḥimà (ROBIN, AL-GHABBĀN, and AL-SAʿĪD 2014: 1087–88). The month mlḥ is known from
Safaitic, where it likely derives from the name of Aquarius, and so we are dealing with a winter
month (cf. milḥān ‘a winter month’ (LANE 1863: 2733a). The use of Zodiacal names as
substitutions for month names is well attested, and while probably not the primary signification
in the Safaitic inscriptions (see AL-JALLAD 2016: 85-86 for a discussion), there are a few texts that
suggest some authors used both systems interchangeably: in two new inscriptions, we have the
term rʾy used with a Babylonian month name, so perhaps the ‘rising (of the asterism) of month
X’ and the use of śhr ‘moon’, ‘month’ with ʿqbt ‘Scorpio’, so perhaps ‘the month (associated
with) Scorpio’. On the details of the Safaitic parapegma, see AL-JALLAD (2016).
64 The history of the am- definite article – South Arabian or Arabic?

4. The development of the ʾaN-article: a rough chronology

This section attempts a synthesis of the history of the aN-article and its impact on
understanding the background of the Southwest Arabian dialects of Arabic. The
earliest form of the definite article attested in Arabic is h(n)-, like Canaanite, with the
likely preservation of the original n before laryngeals. The article is attested
throughout the southern Levant, Central, West, and North Arabia. Already in Safaitic,
the sound change h > ʔ operated, producing the ʔaC-article, where C = gemination
of the following consonant. While the ʔaC-article is not yet attested in North Arabia,
as the documentation is not as plentiful as in the Syro-Jordanian Ḥarrah, we may
hypothesize that a similar sound change operated there as well, producing both the
ʔaC-article and the ʔan-article before laryngeals. In this historical gap, we may also
posit a further development: some dialects generalized the nasal article before all
consonants, producing ʔan in all environments. From this, the ʔam articled
developed, from perhaps an allophone of ʔan before labial consonants that was
subsequently generalized, or through an ad-hoc sound change/analogical
development that is not recoverable from the present data.44 These changes must
have taken place before the late 5th c. CE, at the latest, given the attestation of the
ʔam-article in FS 1. Thus, the aN-articles attested in the medieval and present-day
dialects of South Arabia likely arose in Central and North Arabia in the first half of
the first millennium CE and spread south. The complex set of changes required to
produce the ʔam-article perhaps explain its rarity in the epigraphic record. The pre-
Islamic attestations suggest that it had a very limited distribution until its spread to
Yemen.
It is impossible to know when exactly these article forms began their movement
south. Various aN-articles, as well as ʔl and hl, are attested in personal names of the
Thamudic F inscriptions north of Nagrān.45 But unfortunately, none of these texts is
dated - my colleague A. PRIOLETTA, one of the experts on this material, tells me that
the corpus is likely relatively late, likely corresponding to the Late Sabaic period (4 th
– 6th c. CE). In any case, their occurrence in personal names cannot act as a secure
indicator of the article form in the vernacular of their bearers. The earliest examples
of North Arabian influence on Sabaic date roughly to the turn of the era and so this
may reflect the earliest phase of contact between two language types.46
By the 10th c. CE, it seems that all traces of the aN-articles had disappeared from
North and Central Arabia, with the exception of the dialect of Ṭayyiʔ. It is unclear
when exactly the al-article came to dominate, but it is significant, I think, that there
is only one example of the ʔam-article throughout North Arabia following the 4th c.

44 TROPPER (2001); RUBIN (2005: 78), cf. ʕambar < ʕanbar.

45 PRIOLETTA (2018).
46 These are the inscriptions from Haram, described by ROBIN (1991,3 :97) but see MACDONALD
(2000: 56–57) for an important critique of their linguistic character and ROBIN’S terminology.
STEIN (2004: 228–29) calls these the “northern dialect” of Sabaic. I discuss their linguistic profile
in more detail in AL-JALLAD (2018c).
Ahmad Al-Jallad 65

CE. In fact, the al-article is the only article form attested with certainty in the couple
of centuries prior to the rise of Islam. This would mean that the diffusion and
domination of the al-article was not the result of the spread of Islam but reflects a
process that began centuries earlier. The spread of Arabics with aN-articles south,
therefore, must predate the diffusion of al, which seems to be complete by the 6th c.
CE. We can, therefore, very cautiously suggest that Arabics with the aN-article
diffused to South Arabia from Central Arabia sometime in the first half of the first
millennium c. CE. If we take into consideration the chronology of the ʔam-article,
then we can narrow down the spread of dialects with this feature south to sometime
between the 4th and 6th centuries CE. It is hoped that future epigraphic and
archaeological discoveries will clarify the historical circumstances that enabled the
diffusion of Central Arabian linguistic features southwards in this period.

5. Concluding remarks
I hope that this discussion has demonstrated how the identification of pre-Arabic
South Arabian features in the present-day vernaculars of this region cannot be made
exclusively on the basis of normative literary Arabic and the present-day dialect map,
but must be verified by the epigraphic and historical record. With this in mind, I
would like now to examine briefly a series of other features that are, today,
considered local and possibly the result of substrate influence, but which were much
more widespread in former times. By locating parallels in other regions in the Old
Arabic period, it becomes possible to view these features not necessarily as the result
of Pre-Arabic substrate influence but as part of the package of features introduced
to the region by Old Arabic. They perhaps survive because they were reinforced by
similar features in the local languages. Thus, contact between Pre-Arabic and Old
Arabic would represent the oldest linguistic stratum which was then further modified
through contact with later-arriving dialects of Arabic and the literary language.

Lateral fricatives, lateral emphatics, and affricates

In Rāziḥīt, the reflex of ḍ is a voiceless lateral affricate in traditional words (WATSON
2018: 317). A voiceless realization of the ḍ is attested in Safaitic and, more generally,
in the pre-Islamic Arabic of the southern Levant, where the phoneme is transcribed
in Greek with Sigma, likely reflecting [ɬˁ] or possibly [tɬˁ]. The voiceless ẓ, ṯ,̣ is also
attested in northern Old Arabic, transcribed consistently with Tau.47

47 AL-JALLAD (2017: 133–35).

66 The history of the am- definite article – South Arabian or Arabic?

Assimilation of n
Northern Yemeni Rāziḥīt exhibits total anticipatory assimilation of /n/ to non-
guttural consonants (WATSON 2018: 318). This feature is common throughout the pre-
Islamic epigraphy of Central and North Arabia, and the Southern Levant. 48

Safaitic: bt /bett/ < *bint- ‘daughter’49

Dadanitic and Thamudic B: ʾṯt /ʔiṯṯat/ < *ʔinṯat- ‘wife’50

Indeclinable ḏ relative
A large number of Yemeni dialects exhibit an indeclinable relative pronoun ḏ, which
agrees with the situation in the MSALs and, occasionally, Sabaic. The ḏ relative is also
attested across Arabia in pre-Islamic times, and is a feature of the medieval Ṭāʔī
dialect as well. In Safaitic, as in Ancient South Arabian, the ḏ-relative usually declines,
but there are examples of a generalized ḏ used with both masculine, feminine, and
plural antecedents.51

t-feminine ending
The t-ending in Rāziḥīt is preserved in almost all situations, a situation matching the
MSALs, Sabaic, and Ethio-Semitic. But it is important to note that the preservation of
the t-ending is a pan-Arabian feature, attested as far north as Safaitic in Syria and
reported for the medieval Ṭayyiʔ dialect.52 It is only a small subset of pre-Islamic
Arabic dialects that have undergone the at > ah change, namely, those in the
Nabataean realm in close contact with Aramaic.53

The termination -āy

Certain dialects of Southwest Arabia preserve the termination āy in word-final
position, im-Maṯṯ̣ ạ h bayṯạ̄ y ‘white’,54 cf. Classical Arabic bayḍāʔu. While this
resembles Sabaic s1mym /samāyum/, Van Putten remarks that it is equally possible
to interpret it as an Old Arabic feature.55 Indeed, this sequence is preserved
throughout the Old Arabic dialect continuum, Safaitic smy /samāy/ ‘sky’; Hismaic
ṣḥry /ṣaḥrāy/ ‘desert’; etc.

48 For an overview, see MACDONALD (2004: 501–2).

49 AL-JALLAD (2019a: 348).
50 KOOTSTRA (2019: 71).
51 AL-JALLAD (2019a: 349); MACDONALD (2004: 508). Note also the occurrence of z in Taymanitic and
Thamudic C (AL-JALLAD 2019c).
52 On the contact scenario, see AL-JALLAD (2020c, 48–50). Compare with Safaitic bkrt ‘she-camel’
/bekrat/; for an overview, see MACDONALD (2004: 502–3).
53 AL-JALLAD (2020c: 50-51).

54 BEHNSTEDT (1987).
55 VAN PUTTEN (2018: 208).
Ahmad Al-Jallad 67

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