Arabic Dialectology Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics
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Arabic Dialectology Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics Edited by T. Muraoka and C.H.M. Versteegh VOLUME 53 Arabic Dialectology In honour of Clive Holes on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday Edited by Enam Al-Wer and Rudolf de Jong LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arabic dialectology : in honour of Clive Holes on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday / edited by Enam Al-Wer and Rudolf de Jong. p. cm. — (Studies in Semitic languages and linguistics ; v. 53) Includes a bibliography of Clive Holes’ published works. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17212-8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Arabic language—Dialects. 2. Sociolinguistics—Arab countries. I. Al-Wer, Enam. II. Jong, Rudolf de. III. Holes, Clive, 1948- IV. Title. V. Series. PJ6709.A76 2009 492.7’7--dc22 2009014371 ISSN 0081-8461 ISBN 978 90 04 172128 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands contents v CONTENTS Acknowledgements . vii Introduction . ix Bibliography of Clive Holes . xiii Poem: On Your Sixtieth . xix by Said Abu Athera TOPICS IN HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS Indeterminacy and the Comparative Method: Arabic as a Model for Understanding the History of Aramaic . 3 Jonathan Owens From qǝltu to gǝlǝt: Diachronic Notes on Linguistic Adaptation in Muslim Baghdad Arabic. 17 Heikki Palva The g/ǧ-question in Egyptian Arabic Revisited . 41 Manfred Woidich and Liesbeth Zack DESCRIPTIVE DIALECTOLOGY Words and Things . 63 Peter Behnstedt The Arabic Dialect of a Šawāwī Community of Northern Oman . 77 Domenyk Eades The Dialect of the Euphrates Bedouin, a Fringe Mesopotamian Dialect . 99 Bruce Ingham Quelques Données Sociolinguistiques sur l’Arabe Parlé à Damas à la Fin des Années Mille Neuf Cent Soixante-dix 109 Jérôme Lentin CONTACT PHENOMENA Contact, Isolation, and Complexity in Arabic . 173 Peter Trudgill vi contents Loan Verbs in Arabic and the DO-construction . 187 Kees Versteegh SOCIAL DIALECTOLOGY When Najd Meets Hijaz: Dialect Contact in Jeddah . 203 Aziza Al-Essa “Big Bright Lights” Versus “Green and Pleasant Land”?: The Unhelpful Dichotomy of ‘Urban’ Versus ‘Rural’ in Dialectology . 223 David Britain The Variable (h) in Damascus: Analysis of a Stable Variable 249 Hanadi Ismail CODE MIXING The Variety of Housewives and Cockroaches: Examining Code-choice in Advertisements in Egypt . 273 Reem Bassiouney Index . 285 contents vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The contributors to this volume have supported this project at short notice from its inception and throughout. We thank them whole- heartedly for their academic spirit and generosity. Not many people get a poem for their birthday. Hats off to Sa’id for composing a splendid poem and for making this tribute to Clive truly special. From the University of Essex, we thank Mike Jones for his helpful suggestions and support. We are also very grateful to the series editor, Kees Versteegh, who has been, as always, generous with his time and insightful in his comments. From Brill we thank Liesbeth Kanis for her efficiency in dealing with many complications, and for her help and patience. It is customary to leave one extra special thank you to the end line. In this case it goes to Deidre. According to Sa’id’s poem “Deidre has knocked thirty years off Clive’s age”. We agree with him, of course, and would like to add our heartfelt gratitude for her help with editing and supplying material. We thank her also for respon- ding promptly and discretely to our emails and phone calls, while Clive remained blissfully ignorant! viii contents introduction ix INTRODUCTION Arabic Dialectology is a collection of articles written by leading schol- ars and distinguished young researchers. In print, they come together to pay homage to Clive Holes on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. As befits the honouree’s contributions and interests, the collection covers a wide spectrum of the field of Arabic linguistics and linguis- tics in general. Clive’s earliest research on Arabic, in the late 1970’s, was in socio- linguistics, specifically in Labovian variationist sociolinguistics, as it is nowadays known. At the time, sociolinguistics was certainly thri- ving, but sociolinguists were still thin on the ground. In Europe, the Labovian approach took a leap forward at the hands of one of the contributors in this volume, Peter Trudgill, whose study of his belo- ved hometown has made the English city of Norwich itself almost a part of sociolinguistics. Not many places earn this privilege, but just over a decade after the Norwich Study, and thousands of miles away from England, a tiny island in the Arabian Gulf was given equal prominence in sociolinguistic research, this time at the hands of Clive Holes, then an ‘alien’ researcher in the State. Clive’s research on language variation and change in Bahrain is the first work on Arabic dialects which is variationist ‘to the core’, executed with the passion of an ethnographer and the knowledge of an insider. His take on variation in Arabic has lent a fresh and realistic perspective to the subject. As such, his work in the field has not only led but also shaped subsequent studies on Arabic dialects. In his research, Clive is a true nomad, but unlike the nomad ances- tors of the people in whom he is interested, he has ventured into new land while the old ground was still abundant. This journey has led him to many other areas which he has made fertile: language manuals, descriptive grammars, historical linguistics, culture and society and, most recently, popular literature and poetry. His work throughout has remained grounded in field linguistics, exploratory, locally focused and socially sensitive. His research on popular literature and Bedouin poetry gives centre stage to deserving poets working undercover. In addition to docu- menting a wealth of vocabulary and structures, folklore, local values x introduction and local traditions, it ingeniously uncovers a 4,000-year old literary link going back to Sumerian. Vanquished by the modern Arab society, much of this cultural heritage has been unfairly consigned to oblivion, while the rest is being continually eroded. Outside academia, Clive’s work on contemporary Bedouin poetry, satirising current international politics has been cited in the media. “An Oxford don’s research into traditional poetry seems an unlikely place for George Galloway1 to crop up. But he is, professor Clive Holes has discovered, the subject of a stirring verse tribute from a Bedouin tribesman”, writes Maev Kennedy in The Guardian (12 February 2008), with a picture of a jubilant Galloway and the caption ‘Inscribed in the annals of honour his name!’ taken from Clive’s translation of al Hajaya’s poem An Ode to George Galloway. His analyses of Bedouin poetry uncover a wealth of adversarial sati- rists whose poems are a biting satire on society and politics in the Arab Middle East; such poems could not have been published in Arab countries. To the Arab reader, the poems are enjoyable and funny, often painfully so in their original text, but in many parts they are incomprehensible without Clive’s decoding, as one of the editors, a native speaker of Arabic with Bedouin roots, can testify. In one of his articles, Clive astutely describes popular poetry as an exercise of “free speech in the modern Arab World”. Keeping to the traditional metre and rhymes, Clive reproduces Bedouin poetry with its dry wit transposing its imagery to make it accessible to the English-speaking reader. As an example, we cite some verses from Yā Kundalīzza Rāys! (Hey Condoleezza Rice)2. In this poem, George W. Bush is the speaker; Clive renders the poem in the Texan dialect: Mah mood’s good, y’all, on mah lips a smile is crackin’ Ah’m really in high spirits ’cos the bad guys we sent packin’! Say, Powell, come here, ’n fetch some liquor in a flagon! And Rumsfeld get a flautist (Ah ain’t stayin’ on the wagon!), An’ hire a rebec-player—from the Gulf where they like singin’, Where the desert A-rabs nod an’ to mah ev’ry word they’re clingin’ 1 George Galloway is the British MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, known particu- larly for his opposition of the Iraq war. The poem by al-Hajaya was written following Galloway’s win in the 2005 elections. 2 Published (with S. Abu Athera) ‘George Bush, Bedouin Poet’, 2007. The poem was composed in late 2003 by the poet M. F. al-Hajaya when it seemed the Ameri- cans had won the Iraq war. introduction xi Bring some gin with y’all, and some whisky and some beer, With good ole Condoleezza: bring ’em all over here! As epitomised in Clive’s publications, true scientific research reflects a mixture of fascination for the subject, an eye for detail and a thirst for knowledge. If Arabic culture is a well in a dry land, then the study of the Arabic language is the rope and pail to quench one’s thirst. Not only the thirst to research the Arabic language, but also to dis- cover the mechanics of language in general and, perhaps even more so, to understand the culture of a people by which one was drawn to that well in the first place.