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Grammaticalizations Based on the Verb Kāna in Arabic Dialects Otto Jastrow This Paper Discusses a Number of Grammaticalizations

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Grammaticalizations Based on the Verb Kāna in Arabic Dialects Otto Jastrow This Paper Discusses a Number of Grammaticalizations GRAMMATICALIZATIONS BASED ON THE VERB kāna IN ARABIC DIALECTS Otto Jastrow This paper discusses a number of grammaticalizations based on various inflected forms of the Old Arabic (OA) verb kāna, yakūnu ‘to be’ in the modern Arabic dialects. These grammaticalizations which fulfil different grammatical and syntactic functions are spread unevenly over the present- day Arabic-speaking area. Some of them have been discussed in the framework of the description of individual Arabic dialects—sometimes with wrong results—but they have never been treated together as a group of morphemes sharing the same etymological source. 1. Verbum Existentiae Among the expressions used to indicate that something exists (verbum existentiae, ‘there isʼ) there are two forms which are clearly grammatical- izations based on forms of the verb kāna ‘to be’: 1.1 Derived from OA *kāʾin ‘beingʼ OA *kāʾin ‘beingʼ is the etymology of the particle kāyǝn ‘there isʼ which is widely used in Urban Moroccan Arabic. As such it is also found in text- books of Standard (Urban) Moroccan Arabic, e.g. kayen l-biḍ fe-l-keššina?1 Are there any eggs in the kitchen? (Harrell 1965, p. 201) The grammaticalization of this particle is still incomplete as it can show a feminine and a plural form in agreement with the subject of the sen- tence, e.g. kayna bezzaf de-l-xedma There’s a lot of work (Harrell 1965, p. 201) 1 Note that in descriptions of North African Arabic dialects vowel length is usually not marked as it is not considered phonemic. In the textbook quoted, the letter e is used for convenience as notation of the phoneme /ə/. 110 otto jastrow kaynin bezzaf de-n-nas hna l-yum There are a lot of people here today (Harrell 1965, p. 201) 1.2 Derived from OA *yakūn ‘he/it is’ OA *yakūn ‘he/it is’ is the etymology of the particle aku ‘there is’, with the negated form māku ‘there is not’, in Iraqi Arabic. This is one of the hallmarks of Iraqi Arabic which is in use in the whole of Iraq, irrespective of the so-called ‘qǝltu-gǝlǝt split’.2 Examples: aku baʿ ad faš-šī trīd agulla? (Baghdad, musl.) Is there anything else you would like me to tell him? (McCarthy 1965, p. 11)3 aku fad tāǧir min Naṣībīn (Baghdad, musl.) There is a merchant from Naṣībīn (McCarthy 1965, p. 116) w māku wāḥid yištirī (Baghdad, musl.) And there is nobody who would buy it (McCarthy 1965, p. 116) The derivation of aku from *yakūn is not as obvious as the case of kāyən and has been disputed by several scholars. Thus Werner Diem (1974) relates aku to a particle ak- found in Yemen, whereas Christa Müller- Kessler (2003) believes the etymon is an Aramaic particle ‘k’ or lyk’. There are, however, good reasons for the derivation proposed here. As first put forward in Jastrow 1981, p. 164, fn. 1, strong evidence for this etymology comes from a dialect belonging to Anatolian Arabic, thus situated outside Iraq on the fringes of the Mesopotamian Arabic dialect area. In Anatolian Arabic the usual word for ‘there is’ is fī or fīyu but in the dialect of Āzǝx we find the following forms: Present: kīkū, negated māku, ‘there is (not)’ Past: kāykū, negated mā-kāykū/ ‘there was (not)’ Examples from Āzəx: ḥaǧalǝ́ti ṣāḥǝt, ǧā ḥaǧal qataltū bass mā-qǝmtu\ mǝn asāri kī kīkū ḥaǧal-lax 2 For the qəltu-gələt split cf. Blanc 1964, 5 ff. 3 The transcription used in McCarthy has been edited by the present author..
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