Some Remarks on the Evolution of the Arabic Verbal System

CHAPTER 26 Some Remarks on the Evolution of the Arabic Verbal System

26.1 Introduction

Everyone who wants to have a diachronic look at the Arabic dialects faces a grave problem. While we can examine the result of the evolution, i.e. the contemporary dialects, without further ado, this is not true for its starting point because it is generally accepted nowadays that the modern dialects did not develop from Classical Arabic but from the Old Arabic dialects.1 An investiga- tion that wants to find out in which way the modern dialects have become what they are today has to start with the Old Arabic dialects about which we know very little. The Arab armies that set out from the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century to conquer the neighbouring territories consisted largely of Bedouins who brought with them their dialects that were adopted little by little by the native population. The way the new language was adopted and the shaping of the New Arabic speech area took place was very complex and influenced by many factors, among other things by population shifts and different kinds of substrate so that it is impossible to proof a single direct connection between an Old Arabic and a New Arabic dialect.2 It is true that the old grammarians mentioned several peculiarities of the Old Arabic dialects, that have been analysed by Ch. Rabin, but the information supplied in their works do not even allow an approximate reconstruction of the verbal system of an Old Arabic dialect. Another source are the ‘Kutub Laḥn al-ʿĀmmah’ in which—beginning with the eighth century—the only imperfectively educated classes are blamed for their solecisms. The colloquial forms that are found in these books do not originate from the Old Arabic dialects, which were considered correct Arabic, but rather from the New Arabic dialects that developed after Arabic had been spread into the conquered territories and had been adopted by the non-Arab

1 cf. e.g. W. Diem, “Studien zur Frage des Substrats im Arabischen,” Der Islam 56 (1979): 12–80, p. 13. 2 cf. Rabin, “Beginnings,” 26; on the development of the New Arabic dialects in general, see Blau, “Beginnings”; Bruweleit, “ʿĀmmah,” 5–10.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004287549_027 Some Remarks On The Evolution Of The Arabic Verbal System 207 population. The use of these books is, however, pretty limited because they contain hardly any information about the verbal system.3 Finally, we have to make mention of the Middle Arabic texts whose often non-Arabic authors tried to use the standard language but who did not master the Arabic language to such a degree as to meet the requirements of the standard grammar. For that reason, they frequently used colloquial forms or tried to avoid them intentionally by using hypercorrect forms. Although Middle Arabic texts are more useful for the knowledge of early New Arabic than the Kutub Laḥn al-ʿĀmmah—we find there, inter alia, examples for the use of byiqtul4— they do not enable us to study the verbal system of a New Arabic dialect in its entirety, because their authors tried—as I said—to express themselves in Standard Arabic, and consequently most passages of their texts are free of dia- lectal forms.5 Besides the modern standard language and the contemporary dialects there is thus only Classical Arabic that places data at our disposal that are sufficient for a thorough examination of the verbal system. Several linguistic sources joined in the formation and standardization of the classical language the result of which lies before us in a more or less complete form in Sibawayh’s great work. The most important source where the grammarians took their examples for correct usage from were the Old Arabic poems, followed by the Quran, Hadiths and proverbs.6 The language of the poets in its turn was formed by poets from different tribes so that Classical Arabic is to be considered a con- glomerate of different Old Arabic dialects.7 As mentioned above, the differences between the dialects did not escape the old grammarians’ notice, and they do not only inform us about special fea- tures of the vocabulary and the nominal inflexion but also about peculiarities regarding the verb forms. So we learn from their treatises, for example,

3 On the Laḥn-books composed in Western Arabic, see: P.D. Molan, “Medieval Western-Arabic: Reconstructing Elements of the Dialects of al-Andalus, Sicily and North Africa from the Laḥn al-Āmmah Literature” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1978); on the Eastern Laḥn-books, see Bruweleit, “ʿĀmmah”. 4 See Blau, “Middle Arabic Dialects,” 70f; Nöldeke, Beiträge, 63–68. 5 On Middle Arabic in general, see Blau, “Das frühe Neuarabisch,” 39–60. 6 On the documentary evidence of the grammarians, see S. Wild, Das Kitāb al-ʿAin und die arabische Lexikographie (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1965), pp. 42–53; W. Diem, “Das Kitāb al-G�īm des Abū ʿAmr aš-Šaibāni” (PhD diss., University of Munich, 1968), pp. 59–73. 7 On the language of the poets, see J. Blau, The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judaeo-Arabic: A Study of the Origins of Middle Arabic (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 2; M. Zwettler, The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry: Its Character and Implications (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), pp. 111–113.