xv

THE VOCABULARY OF EASTERN ARABIA

Introduction

Two geographical features are shared by all the Gulf States: desert hinterlands stretching away into central Arabia, from which they are separated by no natural border, and long, shallow-shelved coastlines which afford easy marine access. It would be hard to underestimate the formative significance of these two factors on the culture and language of the Gulf littoral. For millennia, the absence of natural barriers has facilitated easy movement into and out of eastern Arabia, and the cultural, linguistic and political history of the city-states of the Gulf littoral is the synergistic result of population and trade movements along these two vectors. On the one hand, the land vector has for centuries (most recently in the 18th) carried new infusions of tribal blood from the centre of Arabia to the periphery, providing the bedrock of Gulf Arabic vocabulary, which gradually evolved to reflect the different material conditions and life-style of the sedentary life of the coast. On the other hand, the sea has brought a succession of short- lived and long-term foreign cultural and linguistic influences, beginning with the Sumerians five millennia ago, and continuing virtually unbroken with the Babylonians, Persians, Indians, Portuguese, up to the arrival of the British in the 19th century. A glance at the list of languages which have contributed to the present-day vocabulary of the Bahrain dialects (see ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS) illustrates both the impressive time-depth and geographical diversity of these influences. Even if it were feasible, it would be beyond the scope of this introductory essay (and the abilities of the present writer) to attempt an exact periodisation of the development of Arabic dialects of Bahrain, let alone the region as a whole. However, by comparing the Gulf dialects with those of neighbouring regions which have had a different history, it is possible to get some idea of their special characteristics, and the varied nature of the cultural contacts which their speakers have had with speakers of other languages. This is what I will attempt to do in the present essay for the vocabulary of the area. Volume I of Dialect, Culture and Society in Eastern Arabia is a glossary of the vocabulary which was being used in the 1970s by elderly Bahrainis with little or no education (i.e. the generation born and brought up just before or at the time of the discovery of oil in the mid 1930s), and this preliminary essay provides some background notes on the structure and history of this dialectal vocabulary. However, a good deal of what I have to say is also applicable to the dialects of Kuwait, the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Of course, each of these regions has its particular speech quirks and differences, and Oman in particular is a special case because the dialects of the mountainous core of the country are different enough to justify it

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access xvi the vocabulary of eastern arabia being put in a separate sub-group, reflecting its separate cultural and political history (although, as I note below, it has some historical links with the Ba¥¸rna dialects of Bahrain). But it is undeniable that the Gulf states as defined here are much more united than they are divided by their dialects. Until very recently, the whole of eastern Arabia from southern Iraq to the mountains of Oman—a distance of perhaps seven hundred miles—was a place where people moved around, settled and married unconcerned by national borders. The population shared a culture based on the sea and the exploitation of what few natural resources the land provided. For ten centuries until the dawn of the modern age, the whole of the coastal strip from Basra to the Qatar peninsula, as well as the present-day eponymous islands, was simply known to the Arabs as ‘al-Ba¥rayn’; further south was simply ‘{Um¸n’. But cultural homogeneity existed here long before the Arabs became the dominant political force. The archaeologist Dan Potts, describing the situation in the three centuries before Islam, comments ‘as an integrating force, it was Nestorian Christianity that eventually brought the inhabitants of eastern Arabia, Mesopotamia, and south-western Iran into what were arguably the closest relations they had ever experienced. Administered by the catholicos in Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, the Christian populations of Beth Qa«r¸ye [= north eastern Arabia in the Syriac ecclesiastical sources] and Beth Maz¢n¸ye [= south eastern Arabia and Oman] were large, perhaps even dominant in this region until the Islamic conquest…To the extent that it exerted a unifying influence on the region’s population, Nestorian Christianity may have unwittingly helped to lay the groundwork for the conversion of the area to Islam, which, although beset by a certain amount of divisive sectarianism, has unquestionably helped to maintain the unity of the area.’1

The Arabic dialects of the Gulf: shared ‘core’ vocabulary

The explosion in education, communications, and literacy in all of the Gulf States over the last thirty years, as well as their coming together to form new co-operative educational, economic, and political entities, with all the inter- state contacts these developments entail, has had the effect of accelerating a tendency towards the formation of a Gulf-wide educated spoken koiné2 which is used on those increasingly frequent occasions when speakers from different Gulf states have to talk to each other—often at work, or in other public situations where they have to transact business. Typologically, this Gulf koiné resembles those spoken in other parts of the Arab world in its use of a (compared to CLA/ MSA) simpler, more analytical syntax, and reduced set of morphological categories,

1 Potts D. T. The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. Vol II: From Alexander the Great to the Coming of Islam, Oxford, 1990, pp. 353-4. 2 This educated koiné is what is described in my Colloquial Arabic of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia (1984), and Gulf Arabic (1990).

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access the vocabulary of eastern arabia xvii whilst retaining certain salient local characteristics in its phonology and lexicon. Typically, for example, g is retained as the reflex of historical q in items which are not neologisms associated with MSA, as are the interdental fricatives T, D, F, being the commonest dialectal reflexes of historical T, D, and B/F—a phenomenon which can give someone familiar with dialects from outside the Gulf which have replaced the fricatives with stops a superficial impression of ‘classicism’. Other Gulf-wide phonological features, however, such as y as a reflex of G, C as a reflex of k, and G as a reflex of q (via the affrication of g) seem to be avoided in more formal contexts, though they are still commonly heard in relaxed educated speech, especially where the context is purely domestic. As one might expect, the koiné contains many MSA neologisms in its vocabulary and phraseology, but nonetheless retains many local ‘core’ items covering basic concepts. The generations which grew up in the Gulf of the 1930s and 40s and before had less contact with each other than do the generations of today, but several factors conspired to knit together the Gulf of that period socially and linguis- tically. At the lower social levels, there were common patterns of employment, and, in the era before the introduction of passports, free movement of labour among practitioners of cottage industries such as weaving, pottery, palm- cultivation, cash-crop agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing and pearl-diving. In the 19th and 20th centuries, for example, colonies of Ba¥¸rna boat-builders migrated from Bahrain north to Kuwait and south to the Trucial Coast, where their descendants still live to this day. The sea-faring culture based on boat-buil- ding and pearl-fishing developed its own specialised vocabularies which became common throughout the area.3 In the sphere of agriculture, itinerant Omani labourers worked in all the Gulf states for many decades before the political changes which brought the present Sultan to power in 1970 encouraged them to return home4. Marriage also brought about a lot of geographical mixing. Until recently, among the village Ba¥¸rna of Bahrain, the taking in marriage of Ba¥¸rna women from the towns of the eastern province of Saudi Arabia such as al-Qa«ºf and Huf¢f was not uncommon, nor from the towns of southern Iraq such as Najaf and Karbal¸}, for centuries regional Shº{º religious and cultural centres, nor from the predominantly Arabic-speaking city of Khorramshahr (known in Arabic as al-Mu¥ammara) in the south-western Iranian province of Kh¢zist¸n. At more elevated social levels, tribal history and family ties also underpinned the

3 See for example Johnstone T.M. and Muir J. ‘Some nautical terms in the Kuwaiti dialect of Arabic’, BSOAS XXVII (1964), pp. 299-330 and Grosset-Grange H. Glossaire Nautique, Paris, 1993. As well as having a specialised technical terminology, these artisans also had a shared secret jargon known only to themselves which was the same in Kuwait as in Bahrain—see al-Zay§ni R. Al-GhawR wa l-ÞawASa (‘Pearling and the Pearl-Trading’), Bahrain, 1998, pp. 34-5. 4 Omanis are still the most mobile work-force in the Gulf region. In the mid-1980s when I was doing field work in the interior of Oman, a large proportion of the male labour force of the interior villages spent the working week in the United Arab Emirates, many of them employed in the UAE armed forces.

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access xviii the vocabulary of eastern arabia regional social fabric. The ruling families of Kuwait and Bahrain share the same Najdi ancestry, and there are many more humble extended Sunnº Bahraini fami- lies which, as it were, cross the narrow straits which separate Bahrain from the mainland. It is in no way odd that the present Saudi ambassador to the UK, Gh¸zº al-Quªaybº, was actually born a Bahraini national. Nationality as we think of it in the west is a relatively recent concept in the Gulf, and at the time this research was done, many Gulf Arabs still often thought of their prime affiliations in terms of the tribal, family or sectarian ties rather than in terms of the type of passport they held. There is no clearer evidence of this than the Gulf categories of {Arab, Ba¥¸rna, Ýwala and {Ajam none of which designate any national group, but refer rather to ethnic origin and genealogy. Thus in Bahrain, the term Ba¥r¸nº (pl Ba¥¸rna), which denotes an Arabic-speaking Ja{farº Shº{º of local village descent, is categorically different from the etymologically related Ba¥r¹nº (pl Ba¥r¹niy- yºn) which merely refers to anyone, of whatever sect, origin, or first language, who carries a Bahraini passport. Despite the often sharp fault lines which cross-cut Gulf society, and social cleavages within individual nation states, there is unquestionably a ‘bundle’ of dialectal features which characterise Gulf Arabic, although, as already noted, educated speakers now often replace them with equivalents which are less local in flavour. Many of these features also occur in neighbouring areas of Iraq, Najd, Yemen, and Oman, as well as further afield, but it is their unique co- occurrence as a group in all parts of the Gulf which justifies the label ‘Gulf Arabic’. The general impression which the Arabic linguist is left with after examining thousands of words and expressions routinely used by the least educated Gulf speakers is of how archaic their usage is—how closely it resembles the large amount of mediaeval and indeed pre-mediaeval vocabulary recorded in the Classical dictionaries (the LisAn al-PArab, the TAj al-PArUs, Lane, Hava) which did not pass into the vocabulary of modern literary Arabic. The lay belief that the Arabic dialects are the consequence of the foreign ‘corruption’ of the Classical language is shown by such an exercise to be false, at least from the lexical point of view. Foreign words do of course exist in profusion in Gulf Arabic as they do in all Arabic dialects (and for that matter in virtually all known languages at all periods of their history), but the bedrock of everyday, ‘domestic’ Gulf vocabulary, especially of speakers least affected by the modern literary language or the dialectal koiné, reaches back (pace minor phonological and morphological differences) to the oldest strata of the language. A few examples will make the point. The verb bAg, used throughout the Gulf to mean ‘rob, steal’ is simply the Classical bAqa ‘cheat, swindle’ (Lane) with a slight shift in phonology and meaning; the Ba¥¸rna term haGGal ‘to throw out, expel’ has the CLA cognate haGala ‘to throw’ (Hava); sammar means ‘to mix a solid with water’, cf CLA sammara ‘to dilute milk with water’ (Hava); Bahraini JAfaR ‘to play dirty tricks, play practical jokes’ has the exact CLA equivalent JAfaRa, which Lane translates as ‘he took someone unawares, did an evil action to him’;

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access the vocabulary of eastern arabia xix

SamVUV (pl SamAVIV) which in Kuwait is a ‘small piece of cloth cut as a sample’ and in Bahrain ‘baby’s swaddling clothes’ means in CLA ‘torn clothes’ (Hava); in the northern Gulf, the Form II Rayyaf has a range of meanings to do with ‘do s’thing late, come or stay late’, cognate with CLA Form IV QaRAfa ‘to beget a child in old age’; Jabga used throughout the Gulf to denote ‘a light meal eaten at midnight during Ramadan’ is a development of CLA Jabaqa ‘to give s’one the evening draught’ (Hava); id-dinya xirmis is an expression used in the {Arab dialect of Bahrain to describe ‘a pitch-black, moonless night’ identical to layl xirmis ‘dark night’ in the LisAn; fada ‘place where dates are laid out to dry’ in the village Ba¥¸rna dialects is also noted by Ibn Man¬¢r in the LisAn in the form fadAQ with exactly the same meaning, with an appended note that ‘this word is typical of the speech of {Abd al-Qais’—the tribal ancestors of today’s Ba¥¸rna5 (see below). One of the most interesting examples is slEma in the sense of ‘illness, misfortune, ill wind’ in imprecations such as slEma Cabbat-ha! ‘may an ill wind blow her over!’, current in southern Iraq, Kuwait and among the village Ba¥¸rna of Bahrain: slEma is cognate with CLA sulAmA ‘south wind’ (Hava), south winds in eastern Arabia being considered unhealthy as they bring an increase in heat, humidity, and dust (and make navigation in the Gulf difficult). Many Gulf idioms can also be traced back directly to Classical origins with little change in meaning. For example, during the course of my research, a farmer described the employment of an acquaintance in domestic service as yixdim Pala Pakmat baVn-vh ‘he works for his keep’ (lit ‘for the corner of his belly’), a phrase with impeccable Classical credentials: Pakama is ‘to fill up, block up’ and Pakamat al-baVn ‘the corner of the belly’ an expression used when referring to animals eating their fill (see Lane, Hava). Many more examples of this kind of archaism could be given. It is, of course, not just a matter of archaic vocabulary: the vestigial survival of tanwIn in the noun, verbs in which the mabnI li l-maGhUl is still productive, gender distinctions in the plural forms (including the imperative) of the verb, ossified forms of laysa and kAda, and the survival of particles like qad—these and other syntactic features also give the dialects of eastern, central and southern Arabia their distinctively ‘Classical’ tang. The particular combinations of these survivals differ from one area to another, but, taken as a whole, the dialects of Arabia do seem to represent the survival of a relatively archaic form of Arabic. Any two dialects of Arabic will have many words in common, and many of the highest-frequency dialectal words in the Gulf are of course shared with dialects from outside the area: the isoglosses for rAH ‘go’, Ga ‘come, GAb ‘bring’ miSa ‘walk, go’, for example, would cover the entire eastern Mediterranean area as well as Iraq and central and eastern Arabia, and have roughly the same

5 See Al-Tajir M. Language and Linguistic Origins in al-Bahrain, London, 1983, p.7-8. 6 Such general items do, however, obviously form multi-word idioms which can be area-specific, e.g. in the Gulf dialects from the verbs quoted: rAH bOS ‘it came to nothing’, Pumr-vk iGi Cam sana?

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access xx the vocabulary of eastern arabia meaning everywhere6. Such pan-dialectal items are ignored for the purposes of the following discussion, in which we will concentrate on what is typical of the Gulf, at various levels of geographical specificity. At the most geographically all-encompassing, but specifically ‘Gulf’ level, there is a large shared stock of common, non-specialised verbs and nouns found in all dialects. These may be etymologically Arabic, as in the cases described in the previous paragraph, but are either not the usual, default terms for the actions or objects they denote in their MSA cognates and in dialects outside the Gulf (where they may also exist, but have different meanings), or they may not be known outside the Gulf area at all. Many other items in this category of common-core words were borrowed from languages with which Gulf speakers have had close contact at some point in their history. Most are these foreign imports are nouns, but include several high frequency function words. The degree to which some of these items have been phonologically and morphologically assimilated to dialectal patterns (broken plural patterns, verbal nouns) suggests that they may be of considerable antiquity. Some typical examples are7:

Arabic verbs: istAnas ‘feel happy, content’; baVV ‘burst open’; baJa ‘want, need’; bAg ‘steal’; taras ‘fill’; Tibar ‘go out (tide)’; tall ‘pull’; tamm ‘stay, remain’; Gawwad ‘hold, grasp, get hold of’; Hadag ‘fish (with a line)’; tHaCCa/ tHakka ‘talk, speak’; istaHmag ‘get angry’; HAS/ HawwaS ‘get, obtain’; txarbaV ‘get confused’; daSS ‘enter’; dazz ‘push’; rigad ‘sleep, lie down’; rigal ‘wobble’; rAmaH ‘kick and struggle’; zafan ‘dance’; zAP ‘vomit’; siga ‘come in (tide)’; sOlaf ‘chat, con- verse’; samat ‘tighten, fasten’; sawwa ‘make, do’; Sallax ‘tell fibs, lies’; SilaP ‘pluck out, pull out’; Vabb ‘enter, alight on’; Vamm ‘cover’; Varr ‘beg’; VarraS ‘send, send for’; VAH ‘fall’; Pabbar ‘know how to, be able’; Payya ‘refuse, act harshly’; tJarbal ‘get mixed up’; istaJAF ‘get angry’; faRax ‘undress, take off (clothes)’; fakk/ faCC ‘open, undo’; giHaR ‘jump’; gaVV ‘throw’; kadd ‘work, earn’; lAP ‘feel nauseous’; naSS ‘fly up, rise up’; niSad ‘ask’; hadd ‘quit, abandon’; haGG/ hayy ‘go, leave’; hAwaS ‘argue with, quarrel with’; walla ‘go away, clear off’. nouns and adjectives: barAHa ‘open space between houses (in a village)’; dabaS ‘cattle’; GiHH/yiHH ‘watermelon’; GaHla ‘water pot’; GAhil ‘child’; Hibb ‘water pot’; Hurma ‘wom- an’; HaCi ‘speech, matter’; raGGAl/ rayyAl ‘man’; rayUg ‘breakfast’; sAlfa ‘mat- ter, affair, business’; Baw ‘fire’; PES ‘rice’; Jubba ‘deep sea’; JarSa ‘clay pitch-

‘roughly how old are you? GAb gOl ‘he scored a goal’ amSi Pal-allah ‘I’m making ends meet as best I can’. 7 Many of the examples in the etymologically Arabic list can also found in the Najdi vocabulary lists in Ingham B. Najdi Arabic, Amsterdam, 1994, pp.174-186, and Sowayan S. The Arabian Oral Historical Narrative, Wiesbaden, 1992, pp. 244-304.

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access the vocabulary of eastern arabia xxi er, bottle’; gudUP ‘morning snack’; gEF ‘summer’; gAyla ‘early afternoon’; mAya ‘tide, current’; hAbb rIH ‘dextrous, expert’; harfi ‘tender, young (meat)’. particles and other functional items: bass ‘but, only, enough’; CiDi ‘like this’; Hagg ‘for, to, towards’; SlOn ‘how, why?’; ROb, ‘towards’; (mA) miS ‘there is(n’t)/ are(n’t); mAl ‘belonging to (in periphrastic genitive constructions)’; wAGid/ wAyid ‘a lot, very, much’.

Other languages verbs: bannad (Pers) ‘close’; baVVal (origin unknown) ‘open’; tayyat (Eng) ‘tighten’; Cayyak (vn taCyIk) (Eng) ‘check’; fannaS (vn tafnIS pl tafnISAt) (Eng) ‘quit, fire (from a job)’; gazzar (ult from Pers gozaStan ‘to pass’) ‘spend time, survive, get through’; layyak (Eng) ‘leak’; tbandar (Pers) ‘put into port (ship)’; tgaSSat (Pers)‘go on a picnic, trip’; tgaSmar (Pers) ‘joke, play a trick’. nouns and adjectives: Alu (Urdu) ‘potato’; bAdgIr / bAkdIr (pl bawAdgIr) (Pers) ‘wind-tower (in a traditional house)’; bIb (pl byAba) (Port) ‘cask, drum’; Cilla (Pers) ‘most ex- treme weather in a season’; GAm (Pers) ‘glass’; GUti (pl GawAti) (Urdu) ‘shoes’; HafIz (Eng) ‘office’; xASUga (pl xawASIg) (Pers) ‘spoon’; xOS (Pers) ‘nice, good’; dirISa (pl darAyiS) (Pers) ‘window’; dirwAza (pl darAwºz) (Pers) ‘door’; danCal/ Candal (pl danACil/ CanAdil) (Urdu) ‘roof-beam’; drEwil (pl drEwiliyya) (Eng) ‘driver’; rubyAn (Pers) ‘prawns’; rOzana/ rOSana (pl rawAzin, rawASin) (Pers) ‘alcove, window recess’; rwEd (Pers) ‘radishes’; sAmAn (Pers)‘things, gear’; sbEtar (Eng) ‘hospital’; RAlUna (pl RawAlIn) (Urdu) ‘curry’; kUb (pl akwAb) (Eng) ‘cup’; kOt (pl akwAt) (Eng) ‘coat’; mEz (pl amyAz) (Port, poss via Pers) ‘table’; mOtir (pl mawAtir) (Eng) ‘car’; mEwa (Pers) ‘fruit’. particles and other functional items: xOb (Pers) ‘well, so, then’; sIda (Pers, Urdu) ‘straight ahead, immediately’; mUl and mUliyya (Pers) ‘never, at all’; hast (from Pers verb ‘is’) (N. Gulf hassit) ‘there is, are (S. Gulf ‘very’)’; ham (Pers) ‘also’.

Outside this ‘common core’, there are some vocabulary items whose use is more common in one region or other of the Gulf littoral, or even limited to one community within a region (as we shall see below in relation to Bahrain). The following are typical of the dialects of southern Gulf coast from Abu Dhabi to Ras al-Khaima, extending into Buraimi and parts of the northern B¸«ina coast of Oman. They are recognised by Gulf Arabs as ‘southern’ features not normally used in the northern Gulf, and one has the impression that, among the younger generation, they are now being superseded by equivalents with a wider regional currency (here put in brackets after each item): rimas (tHaCCa, tkallam) ‘speak’; HAd (Paraf) ‘know’; xAz (waxxar)‘move (out of the way)’; sAr (rAH) ‘go’; Sall (SAl) ‘take away, remove’; iStall (rAH) ‘set off,

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access xxii the vocabulary of eastern arabia go’; iStaha (baJa) ‘want, desire’; tRawwax, iRVAx (istamaP, tsammaP) ‘listen to’; siHH (tamar) ‘dry date’; Sirwa (miTil, miTlAt)‘like, similar’; Vuwi (GidHa, GalIb) ‘well’; kandUra (diSdASa (Kuwaiti), TOb (Bahraini, Qatari)) ‘man’s long shirt’.

In the same way, there are items which are restricted to the northern end of the Gulf (if we take the Qatar peninsula as the centre point)—Bahrain, Qatar, al- Hasa, Kuwait and northern Najd8, e.g.

Hazza ‘time, period’; dann ‘impose a fine, punishment’; marGila/ maryila ‘manly deed, heroic act’; zaPam ‘supposedly, so-called’; samt (pl smUt) ‘virtue, chivalrous deed’; SigaH ‘jump, leap over’; Rayyaf ‘come late, be delayed’; Vagg ‘hit’; mJandim/ mJaldim ‘frowning, fretting’; fazz ‘jump up, start’; amda-/ mada- ‘have time to do s’thing’; nOda ‘sleepiness, nap’; haga (vn higwa, hagwa) ‘think, suppose’.

Notes on the social and political history of Bahrain

Before turning to the special developments which characterise the vocabulary stock of Bahraini Arabic, it is worth sketching briefly the political and social history of the indigenous Arabic-speaking communities which make up the bulk of the population, the (numerically larger) Ba¥¸rna and the {Arab, since this helps explain both the similarities and differences between their dialects. At the time of my field research in Bahrain, the primary dialectal distinction, which permeated all levels of language—phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon—and which still remains salient (if among the present younger generation less so) thirty years later, is that between the {Arab and the Ba¥¸rna as social groups. Although Bahrainis themselves sometimes label this a speech difference ‘between the ‘Sunna and Shº{a’ (there can by definition, in Bahraini parlance, be no Shº{º {Arab nor any Sunnº Ba¥¸rna), the difference has nothing intrinsically to do with sect. As in other cases of communal dialectal difference in the Arabic- speaking world, such as the so-called ‘Muslim’, ‘Christian’ and (until 1948) ‘Jewish’ dialects of Baghdad9, the historical origin of the difference in Bahrain is geographical, a consequence of population movements, whereas its subsequent survival is to do with the maintenance of social distance between the communities in question. Undoubtedly differences in religious belief played a (perhaps the) major role in maintaining this social distinction in Bahrain because of the virtual ban on inter-sect marriage, but so, until the advent of the foreign-run oil-industry in the 1930s, did differences in patterns of employment, and, until the 1970s and 80s and the efflorescence of new ‘mixed’ towns, differences in place of residence. It wasn’t simply that the {Arab and Ba¥¸rna prayed in different mosques,

8 Of the 400 items listed as ‘typically Najdi’ in Ingham’s list (n. 7), I noted 139 as occurring with the same or a similar meaning in one or other of the Bahraini dialects. 9 Blanc H. Communal Dialects in Baghdad, Cambridge, Mass., 1964, pp. 8-10, 168-171.

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access the vocabulary of eastern arabia xxiii but that they lived in different neighbourhoods (see maps), didn’t mix with each other, and did different jobs. The consequence was that for centuries their social and speech networks were mutually exclusive. The extent to which the two communities tended to act en bloc was vividly illustrated by the results of Bahrain’s one and only general election (in 1972). Because, at that time, there was such a close correlation between place of residence and sectarian affiliation, and because it was obvious, from name if nothing else, which candidates were from which sect, it was possible to see from the voting returns that voters in Ba¥¸rna districts voted en masse for the slate of Ba¥¸rna candidates, and ignored the non- Ba¥¸rna10. In recent years, concerted government efforts have gradually broken down the voluntary social segregation which characterised the demography of Bahrain until the 1970s, as have, in a more accidental fashion, the non- discriminatory employment policies of the many international companies which now operate in Bahrain. To judge from informal observations in the late 1990s, the linguistic consequences of this have been a levelling out, at least in public contexts, of dialect differences among the younger generation compared with the generations of their parents and grand-parents, in the direction of a hybrid dialect which draws heavily in its phonology on the dialect of the socially and economically dominant {Arab. The Ba¥¸rna

In modern eastern Arabian parlance—from Kuwait, through the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, to Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates—the term Ba¥¸rna (sing. Ba¥r¸nº), as already noted above, denotes that part of the indi- genous, Arabic-speaking population which is exclusively Ja{farº Shº{º in religious belief. Local Ba¥¸rna oral tradition traces their ancient origin to the {Abd al- Qais, an Arab tribe who were originally from the Tih¸ma coastal strip, but who had migrated to historical al-Ba¥rayn—the area covered by present-day Kuwait, al-Ýasa and the eponymous Bahrain islands—by no later than the middle of the 2nd century AD. At the time of the Islamic conquest, the majority of them were Christian, possibly through contact with the Christians of al-Hºra, but there may have been among them some Zoroastrians11. Ptolemy, writing in 150 AD, mentions the ‘Abucaei’ (= {Abd al-Qais) as one of several Arab tribes living in eastern Arabia at that time. In addition to the {Abd al-Qais, the Greek sources and the early Arab historians also mention Tan¢kh, Bakr b. W¸}il, sections of their brother tribe Taghlib b. W¸}il, Tamºm and Azd {Um¸n, as other Arab tribal elements present in the population of the area in the centuries immediately before Islam12. Like {Abd al-Qais, these tribes had all migrated from south western and

10 Nakhleh E. Bahrain: Political Development in a Modernising Society, Lexington, 1976, p. 154. 11 Potts op.cit. Vol II, p. 242. 12 Potts op.cit. Vol II, p. 227.

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access xxiv the vocabulary of eastern arabia central Arabia, or in the case of Taghlib b. W¸}il, been exiled there by the Sasanian ruler Sh¸p¢r II, and eventually continued their migration north into Iraq and the Fertile Crescent. Some present-day Ba¥¸rna villagers claim a different, but still south-west Arabian origin: those in the north western corner of the main island, especially the village of Banº Jamra, claim southern Yemeni ancestry, and there was indeed a pre-Islamic Yemeni tribe known as al-Jam¸r¸t13, a term similar to the one—al-Jam¸ra—still used to refer to the present-day inhabitants of the village. In addition to these ethnically Arab elements in the eastern Arabian population of the early years AD, and most interestingly from the point of view of Bahraini language history, there may well have been substantial Aramaic and Persian- speaking communities, if we are to judge from the historical and ecclesiastical records (epigraphic evidence is meagre). In describing the pre-Islamic northward migrations of Tan¢kh through Najd and into north eastern Arabia, the early Arab historians—Ab¢ l-Faraj, al-Bakrº, and Ibn Khald¢n—mention that they encountered ‘Nabataeans’, a description which in this context had the general, pejorative meaning of settled, Aramaic-speaking agriculturalists; al-Jawharº’s attribution to a certain Ay¢b b. Kiribba of a statement that north-eastern Arabia before Islam was peopled by ‘Nabataeans who have become Arabs’14 lends support to this account. The origin of these Aramaic-speakers is probably to be sought in neighbouring Mesene (i.e. southern Iraq), then an Aramaic-speaking area. Politically, eastern Arabia was under Persian suzerainty for perhaps four centuries before the Islamic conquest, the religious affairs of its Christian population being in the care of local bishops subordinate to the metropolitan of Fars. Abundant Syriac records attest to the Christianity of the local population15, and a variety of early Arab sources comment on the noticeable admixture of Persian vocabulary in the dialects of eastern Arabia at the time of the coming of Islam16. Thus the elements in the pre-Islamic ethno-linguistic situation in eastern Arabia appear to have been a mixed tribal population of partially Christianised Arabs of diverse origins who probably spoke different old Arabian vernaculars; a mobile Persian-speaking population, possibly of traders and administrators, with strong links to Persia, with which they maintained close contact; a sedentary, non- tribal community of Aramaic-speaking agriculturalists; and a Persian clergy who,

13 KaÈȧla U. MuPjam QabAQil al-PArab, Damascus, 1949, Vol I p. 203. 14 Potts op.cit. Vol II, pp. 223-4. In the LisAn al-PArab the same quotation (sub nabIV) is attributed to #Ayyåb b. al-Qiriyya. 15 In a letter from the patriarch IsoPyahb I to the bishop of DayrÊn (on the coast of Arabia opposite Bahrain) concerning several questions about liturgy, sacraments, moral problems, etc., written between 581 and 585, there is a reference to the difficulty pearl-divers had in ‘observing the day of rest’. This suggests how far down the social scale Christianity had penetrated, pearl- diving then, as in this century, being the employment of the lowest social classes. (Beaucamp J. & Robin C. ‘L’évêché nestorien de Masmahig dans l’Archipel d’al-Bahrayn’ in Potts D (ed) Dilmun: New Studies in the Archaeology and Early History of Bahrain, Berlin, 1983, pp 171-196.) 16 Potts op.cit. Vol II, p.228.

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access the vocabulary of eastern arabia xxv we know for certain, used Syriac as a language of liturgy and writing more generally, probably alongside Persian as a spoken language. These, then, would seem to be the elements out of which the population of eastern Arabia began to be forged in the mid-7th century when Islam arrived. Since then, Bahrain and eastern Arabia have been ruled by many dynasties, both local and foreign, but even if one takes with a large pinch of salt the traditional Ba¥¸rna claim to be literally the ‘original’ inhabitants of the Bahrain islands, the continuous existence of a quiescent, peaceable community of non-tribalised agriculturalists, throughout the vicissitudes of the intervening thirteen centuries, on exactly the lands in eastern Arabia and the Bahrain islands where a community of ‘Nabataeans farmers’ lived before Islam is certainly suggestive. I alluded above to an instance of the 13th century LisAn al-PArab attributing the agricultural term fadAQ ‘place for drying dates’, still in use today, to the eastern Arabian {Abd al-Qais, said by the present-day Ba¥¸rna to be one of their tribal ancestors. Another such interesting attribution to the dialect of {Abd al-Qais in the LisAn is the peculiar word saxxIn (pl saxAxIn), which Ibn Man¬¢r glosses as misHA munPaVifa ‘bent spade’, a description which matches precisely the RaxxIn (pl RaxAxIn) (with R rather than s) used by present-day Ba¥¸rna farmers, with its blade at 90º to the shaft. This non-Arabic word seems to be a local metathesis of the (ultimately) Akkadian word xaRRinnu ‘axe, field-digging tool’, also found in Aramaic, and which is also found in the southern Gulf Arabic dialects in the form xaRIn. If nothing else, these bits of linguistic data tell us that at roughly the mid-point between the coming of Islam and today (1) {Abd al-Qais were still present in eastern Arabia17 (2) some of them, at least, were farmers, and were using Arabic words peculiar to them to denote agricultural implements and activities which survive in almost identical form in the dialects of present-day Ba¥¸rna farmers. As we shall see in more detail below, other farming and material culture terms exist in the Ba¥¸rna dialects which have no plausible Arabic cognates but which turn up in Akkadian and/or Aramaic (as borrowings from Akkadian) with the same meanings as they have in Ba¥¸rna Arabic. These words are certainly not recent borrowings, and in fact appear to be substrate elements which hark back to a period when the ancestors of today’s Ba¥¸rna Arabic speakers were speaking a different Semitic language (Aramaic?), or a form of Arabic heavily influenced by Akkadian or Aramaic. In other words, the tradition which identifies the Ba¥¸rna with the ‘original’ inhabitants of Bahrain and eastern Arabia may not be all that wide of the mark. They may originally have been the result of a coalescence, probably after the Islamisation of the area, of the pre-Islamic Aramaic-speaking

17 In the second half of the 13th century AD, i.e. at about the same date as the completion of the LisAn al-PArab (1290), Ibn al-Muj§wir reports that the island of Bahrain (called here by its old name Uw§l) contained 360 villages, all except one being Im§mÊ (i.e. ShÊ#Ê) (TArIkh al-MustabRir ed. Löfgren, Leiden 1951-4, p. 301).

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access xxvi the vocabulary of eastern arabia agriculturalists and the local Arab tribes, among them {Abd al-Qais, who had migrated from south Arabia to the area before Islam. The suggestion rehearsed by Serjeant some thirty years ago, that ‘they [= the Ba¥¸rna] are descended from converts from the original population of Christians (Aramaeans), Jews and Maj¢s inhabiting the island and cultivated coastal provinces of eastern Arabia at the time of the Arab conquest’18 looks plausible in the light of the linguistic and historical evidence. The question of when the Ba¥¸rna became Shº{a is a matter of dispute. Ba¥¸rna tradition has it that their claimed ancestors, the {Abd al-Qais, sided with {Alº during the caliphal succession crisis of the first Islamic century, and their Shº{ism dates from this very early period19. Others have suggested that the conversion to Shº{ism may date from as recently as about 160020, the point when the Shº{ite Safavids began the last episode of Persian control over the Bahrain islands, and which lasted for about a hundred and fifty years until the mid-18th century, just before the migration to Bahrain from Najd of the Arab tribes from which the present rulers of Bahrain, the @l-Khalºfa, are descended. This view is firmly rejected by the Ba¥¸rna themselves, who emphasise that, whilst there has always been a flow of Persian-speaking Shº{a (and, for that matter, Persian-speaking Sunnºs) into Bahrain, they themselves are not recent converts. Political turbulence and periodic bouts of oppression in Bahrain during the last three hundred years have caused several mass exoduses of Ba¥¸rna to the northern and southern Gulf, and to regions of southern Iraq and Iran where their co-religionists are in the majority. In some sense, the Shº{º cities of southern Iraq in particular are regional cultural, religious and even political centres for the Ba¥¸rna. One consequence of this is a noticeable southern Iraqi turn of phrase in the speech of some of them, and this is especially noticeable in Ba¥¸rna poetry.21 Migrations of Ba¥¸rna from Bahrain occurred during the short Omani occupations of around 1718 and 1800-1; during the early period of rule imposed by the invading tribes from Najd (from c. 1783); during a short period of Wahhabi control (1803-11); and at several periods from 1845 on, when the Daw¸sir tribe invaded from the mainland, occupying the north western corner of the main island of Bahrain, which had formerly been a Ba¥¸rna area. This latter invasion culminated in 1923 in an attack on the Ba¥¸rna village of {@lº, as a result of which some of the Daw¸sir were temporarily expelled from Bahrain by the then

18 Serjeant R.B. ‘Fisher-folk and fishtraps in al-Bahrain’, BSOAS XXXI (1968) p. 488. 19 A view supported by KaÈȧla op.cit. Vol II p. 726-7. 20 Lorimer, reported in Al-Tajir, op.cit. p. 7 21 See my ‘The Rat and the Ship’s Captain: a dialogue (muHAwara) from the Gulf, with some comments on the social and literary-historical background of the genre’ in Studia Orientalia 75 (1995) pp. 101-120, and ‘The Debate of Pearling and Oil-Wells: a poetic commentary on socio- economic change in the Gulf of the 1930s’ in Arabic and Middle Eastern Literatures 1/1 (1998), pp. 87-112.

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British Political Agent, Major C. K. Daly22. The colony of Ba¥¸rna boat-builders in Kuwait is probably a consequence of one of these migrations. At the time of my research, the rural Ba¥¸rna, scattered in about forty small villages, probably still formed the majority of the Ba¥¸rna population. The basis of the rural economy was a mixture of employment in the age-old occupation of agriculture (the produce was sold direct by the farmers themselves) and shift work in BAPCO, the oil company, or the then newly opened aluminium smelter, ALBA. In many cases, allotment farmers would do both, working at ALBA in the mornings and spending the afternoons farming their leased or owned land. There was still also a sizeable number of independently operating fishermen, and owners of fish-traps, selling their catch direct. Village-based crafts—pottery, weaving—were never large employers and were on their way out. The Ba¥¸rna make a social and linguistic distinction between village- and the town-dwelling Ba¥¸rna. The former are often referred to as al-Ýal¸yil, a term which is variously glossed as referring to the livestock and/or land from which they traditionally made their living, or to their claim to be the ‘owners’ of the land (though this latter meaning has no attestation in Classical Arabic). However, the Ba¥¸rna town-dwellers, whose speech appears to have accommodated to the dialect of the {Arab, seem to have come from the same stock as the villagers (Manama is really a Ba¥¸rna village which outgrew itself) and at the time of this research their dialect still shared many linguistic features with rural Ba¥¸rna speech. Massive changes in the demography of Bahrain over the last twenty-five years— the building of new towns with ‘mixed’ populations, the breakdown of sect- related employment patterns, and the demise of agriculture—as well as increased access to public education, have reduced the social and linguistic distinctions between the urban and rural Ba¥¸rna populations on the one hand, and between the Ba¥¸rna as a whole and the {Arab on the other.

The {Arab

In Gulf parlance, the term {Arab collectively denotes not the Arabs as an ethnic whole, but an indigenous population which is historically of tribal Arabian origin. In modern Bahrain, as elsewhere in the region, the term also implies adherence to orthodox Sunnº Islam. The present ruling house of Bahrain, the @l-Khalºfa, are {Arab of eastern Najdº origin23, an off-shoot of the loose tribal confederation the {Ut¢b (as are the @l-Õab¸¥, the ruling house of Kuwait). They arrived in Bahrain in 1782-3 via Zub¸ra, a now ruined town on the western coast of the Qatar peninsula, which they had established from 1766. The conquest of Bahrain and establishment of @l-Khalºfa rule in Bahrain followed immediately on a period

22 Al-Tajir M.A. Bahrain 1920-1945: Britain, the Sheikh and the Administration, London, 1987, pp. 56-58 23 According to their own oral tradition, from a place called al-Had§r (see EI2 #Utåb).

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access xxviii the vocabulary of eastern arabia of Persian control over the islands. The conquest was accomplished with the assistance of an assortment of tribal allies from Qatar and Najd24, many of whom elected to stay in Bahrain. However, the seat of power did not shift immediately from Zub¸ra to Bahrain, but only in 1796, when Sheikh Salm¸n bin A¥mad, the second ruler, chose al-Rif¸{ in the centre of the main island of Bahrain as his residence. During the course of the nineteenth century other tribal elements also migrated from the Arabian mainland to Bahrain, notably from the large al- Daw¸sir tribe, who eventually occupied the north western corner of the main island, and the al-Na{ºm. Until the 1920s, Bahrain, small though it is, seems to have been divided up into different fiefdoms, over which one or other of the @l-Khalºfa sheikhs, or their allies, ruled. The position of the Ba¥¸rna degenerated to the point where, by the beginning of the 20th century, they were little better than landless serfs. The present-day {Arab population is basically descended from the @l-Khalºfa and their 18th century allies, but the fluid or even non-existent borders of the 19th and early 20th centuries mean that there has been a constant inflow of tribally- descended Sunnº population from mainland Arabia who have a similar background. The other indigenous Arabic-speaking Sunnº elements of Bahrain are the so- called Ýwala (also Hwila) (sing. Ý¡lº or H¡lº), a non-tribalised group of Gulf traders who, tradition has it, were originally Arabs who had become Persianised through long residence in the ports and towns of southern Persia. They have gradually become assimilated and intermarried into the {Arab social structure during the latter part of the 20th century, at least in the lower and middle echelons, if not at the top25. This is in sharp contrast to the Ba¥¸rna, who have not assimilated, but rather maintained a clear and separate identity. Only in very recent times, and only among the more liberal-minded urban population has it become possible for Ba¥¸rna to marry {Arab, but this is still unheard of among the more conservative rural Ba¥¸rna. The economic changes of the 20th century—notably the decline of pearling as one of the main bases of the economy in the 1930s, which was more or less simultaneous with the discovery of oil—gradually started the realignment of social relationships between the {Arab and Ba¥¸rna which has led to the relatively harmonious situation of today. A catalyst in this process was the oil industry, which was initially controlled and run by westerners who brought with them no prejudices about which of the local population might make the best employees. As a consequence, the Ba¥¸rna were able to gain the advancement on merit which might otherwise have been denied them.

24 Kelly, J.B. Britain and the Persian Gulf 1795-1880, OUP, 1968, p. 29; Abu Hakima, A.M. History of Eastern Arabia 1750-1800, Beirut 1965, p. 115. 25 Descendants of this originally distinct group are also found today in Qatar and in the United Arab Emirates, where the ruling house of Sharja (the Qaw§sim) are descended from them.

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The Arabic vocabulary of Bahrain

(i) Substrate elements

Linguistically, the chequered political, economic and cultural history of Bahrain has left its mark on the vocabulary of its dialects. There has been borrowing on a large scale, and the pattern and volume of this borrowing reflect the type and intensity of cultural contact Bahrainis had with the speakers of the donor languages, as will be illustrated below. Before we consider the effects of more recent cultural contact, however, it is worth considering whether substrate elements have survived in the Bahraini dialects from the period before the Arab political dominance which began in the mid 7th century. A number of terms of basic material culture still in current use in Bahrain at the time this research was done would appear to be of Semitic but not Arabic origin. The term RaxxIn/xaRIn ‘digging tool’ used the whole length of the Gulf littoral by farmers, has already been mentioned as having an ultimately Akkadian origin, although it also passed into Aramaic, which may have been the immediate source of the Gulf Arabic term. Among other Bahraini Arabic terms associated with agriculture, sea-faring, and the local domestic milieu some of which also occur in Iraqi dialects, which may have a non-Arabic but Semitic origin are zabIl/ zanbIl ‘basket’ (ultimately < Akkadian zabbilu ‘basket’); sannUr ‘cat’ (< Aramaic SunArA < Akkadian SurAnu ); skAr ‘irrigation channel stopper’ and its associated verb sakkar (< Akkadian sekEru ‘close, stop up (a canal, water course)’); kalak which means both ‘metal bucket’ ({Arab dialect) and ‘(square- shaped metal) brazier’ (Ba¥¸rna village dialects) (< Akkadian kalakku ‘container, box, vessel (made of metal)’; fils ‘type of hollow sea-stone’ (< Akkadian pelSu ‘hole’); VibaP ‘to sink, get shipwrecked’: the cognate verb in Akkadian, Aramaic and Hebrew also has ‘sink’ as the basic sense, as in Gulf Arabic, unlike Classical Arabic; and most interestingly of all, the phrases silmat iS-Sams ‘the sun has set’ and sulUm iS-Sams ‘sunset’, phrases used by farmers and seafarers before the advent of watches to signify the end of the working day. As far as I know, this sense of the root s-l-m does not occur either in Aramaic or Classical Arabic, but it is common in the Arabic dialects of the Gulf coast (Landberg also notes it for Oman) and occurs with exactly the same sense in the Akkadian expression Sulum SamSi ‘setting of the sun’. The passage of this sense directly from Akkadian into the Arabic dialects of eastern Arabia—an area where Babylonian influence was strong for many centuries—would appear to be the most likely explanation. On the other hand, Bahraini diminutive forms in -Un(a) such as rIHUna, HabbUna ‘a little bit’, and RJErUn ‘small, insignificant’, are suggestive of Aramaic influence. What is most interesting about all the dialectal forms mentioned here is that they appear to be confined to the coastal strip of the Gulf, including Bahrain. The fact that some of them are also reported as occurring in the Arabic dialects

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access xxx the vocabulary of eastern arabia of Iraq26, where Akkadian and then Aramaic were spoken languages for many centuries suggests that the linguistic history of the Gulf may have followed a similar path to that of Iraq, i.e. the gradual arabicization of an area where other Semitic languages were once spoken. However, so little is known about the detailed ethno-linguistic history of eastern Arabia—in particular whether and to what degree Aramaic may have been a spoken language there in the centuries after the fall of the Babylonian empire and before the Islamic conquests—that we can do little more than speculate on how such vocabulary found its way into the Arabic dialects of the area. A number of Bahraini toponyms are also suggestive of Akkadian/Aramaic influence: the Ba¥r¸nº village (now a suburb of Manama) known as M¸¥¢z (< Aramaic maHOzA, ult < Ak maxAzU ‘town’) and the Muharraq island Ba¥r¸nº village of ad-D¹r, apparently known until the turn of the 20th century by its full name D¹r ar-R¸hib ‘the monk’s monastery’27, in an area which was Christianised, and where Syriac is known to have been in use as a liturgical language before Islam28.

(ii) Foreign elements (a) Persian

The most pervasive foreign linguistic influence on the Bahraini dialects has been that of Persian. There have been several periods of imposed Persian political control over the islands dating back to the beginning of the Christian era (the last of which ended in the mid 18th century), and the trade contacts with Persia have always been close. Iranian political claims to sovereignty over Bahrain were not finally dropped until 1971. Persian immigration into Bahrain—in the most recent past from its southern provinces—has been a more or less constant factor in the demography of Bahrain for centuries, and at the time this research was carried out there were neighbourhoods of Manama in which the normal spoken language, at least in domestic contexts, was one or other of the Persian dialects of southern Iran. It is difficult to date the Persian borrowings with precision, beyond observing that many of those in current use pre-date the industrial revolution which occurred in the Bahrain economy of the middle of the 20th century. A further problem is ascertaining whether the route which these bor- rowings took into Bahraini Arabic (and indeed other Gulf littoral Arabic dialects)

26 e.g. Blanc op.cit. p. 74 for the -Un(a) suffix, and p.147 for sannUr in Iraq; Woodhead D and Beene W A Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic (1967) p. 201, 206 for zabIl/ zanbIl and p. 409 for kalak which in Iraq has one of the other meanings of the same Akkadian word kalakku, ‘raft’. 27 Lorimer J.G. Gazeteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia (1908) Vol IIA, p. 361. At the time of Lorimer’s work there still existed there ‘ruins…of what the Arabs suppose to have been Christian settlement’. Sachau Die Chronik von Arbela (1915), quoted in Potts, op.cit. Vol II p. 221 notes a concentration of Aramaic toponyms in N.W. Arabia. 28 Masm§hÊg, now known as al-MuÈarraq, was before Islam a Nestorian bishopric (for details see Beaucamp and Robin, n.15). Masm§hÊg has given its name to the modern BaÈr§nÊ village named Sam§hÊÅ, situated on the northern coast of the island a mile or so from ad-D¿r.

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access the vocabulary of eastern arabia xxxi was direct from Persian or mediated through another language, since many of the same borrowings are found in the same or a similar form in neighbouring Arabic dialects (especially of southern Iraq) and the languages of India (chiefly Hindi/Urdu and Baluchi), with all of which Bahrainis have had prolonged contact. A few examples, classified into the main semantic fields in which Persian bor- rowings occur, are given below (the forms of the original Persian words and their translations are taken from Steingass’s dictionary). It can be seen from this representative list that the main contribution of Persian was, unsurprisingly, in items relating to novel foods, clothing and domestic furnishings and equipment. There was also an influence on the vocabulary of architecture and building. foodstuffs and cooking: CAy, CAhi ‘tea’ (< idem); Sakkar ‘sugar’ (< idem); rubyAn ‘prawns’ (< arbayAn ‘sea-locust’); rwEd ‘radishes’ (< roQidanI ‘vegetables’); mEwa ‘fruit (other than dates)’ (< idem ‘fruit’); hamb ‘mango’ (< amba idem); trinG ‘citron’ (< turunG ‘orange’); mirizbAn/ mirzubAn ‘type of high quality date’ (< marzabAn ‘gover- nor’); naxxaG ‘chick-peas’ (< nuxUd ‘pulse’); sabUs ‘bran’ (< sabos idem); bafr ‘ice’ (supplied in large blocks) (< barf ‘snow, ice’); baranyUS ‘dish of cooked rice with molasses’ (< baranG yUS ‘dark-coloured rice’); bACa ‘stew made from sheep offal’ (< pACa idem). domestic equipment: dOSag ‘mattress’ (< dUSak ‘bedding, quilt’); nihAli ‘type of carpet’ (< nihAla ‘a carpet’); istikAna ‘(small glass) tea cup’ (< idem ‘cup’); gUVi ‘packet, box, tin’ (< qUVi idem); CingAl ‘(eating) fork’ (< CangAl ‘fingers, claws, talons’); xASUga ‘spoon’ (< qaSiq idem); JUri ‘kettle’ (< qUri ‘tea-pot’); RifirVAs ‘set of work- man’s metal eating tins which fit one inside the other’ (prob < Rufr ‘copper’ + VAs ‘dish’). textiles, dress-making: bafta ‘calico’ (< idem); zari ‘gilded cord’ (< idem ‘brocaded silk’, or zar ‘gold’); baxi ‘lining, quilting (e.g. of a jacket)’ (< baxya ‘quilting’); sifta ‘type of cloth with golden thread woven into it’ (idem ‘stiff kind of cloth’); lAs ‘silk’ (< idem ‘coarse silk’); malmal ‘muslin’ (< idem). implements, tools and handicraft-related: kAr ‘work, job’ (< idem); Sigirdi ‘building labourer’ (< SAgirdI ‘apprentice’); gOni ‘set-square used by builders’ (< gUnyA ‘carpenter or mason’s rule’); firgAr ‘dividers’ (< pargAr idem); handAza ‘boat-builder’s quadrant and plumb-line’ (< andAza ‘quantity, dimension’); giSbAr ‘wood-chippings, shavings’ (prob < xAS ‘parings’ + bAr ‘load’); GAm ‘pane of glass, window’ (< idem); tanaka ‘container made of tin’ (< idem ‘leaf or sheet of metal’). architecture and housing: dirISa ‘window’ (< darICa idem); dirwAza ‘door, gate’ (< idem); bAdgIr/ bAkdIr ‘wind-tower in a traditional house’ (< idem); rOSana/ rOzana ‘window-recess’ (< rawzana ‘window’); mIzAb/ mirzAb ‘drainage channel on the roof of a house,

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access xxxii the vocabulary of eastern arabia or on a boat’ (< mIzAb ‘canal, aqueduct, spout, drain’) ; barastaG/ barasti ‘type of palm-branch hut’ (prob < birasta ‘village abounding in palms’). agriculture: dUlAb ‘allotment farm in which there are palm-trees’ (< idem ‘waterwheel’ from the means formerly used to irrigate); sirkAl ‘piece of land’ (< sirkAr ‘estate, property’); Cilla ‘extreme part (hot or cold) of a season’ (< idem ‘forty days of Lent, or winter, when the weather is most severe’). the sea: bandar ‘port’ (< idem); firman ‘lateen-yard’ (< idem); sridAn ‘fire-box (for cooking) on a boat’ (prob < sirAG ‘candle’ + dAn ‘holder’); xinn ‘hold of a ship’ (< xAna idem) ; nOxaDa ‘ship’s captain’ (< nau xudA idem). ‘modern’ culture: barwa ‘paper, official document; quittance’ (prob < parwAna ‘official written document’); bIma ‘insurance’ (< idem); Paks ‘photograph’ (< idem (a re-bor- rowing back into Arabic of an Arabic word, but with its Persian meaning)); gaSma ‘spectacles’ (< CaSma idem); darbIn/ darbIl ‘binoculars, telescope’ (< dUr bIn ‘telescope’).

In addition, there are a large number of miscellaneous Persian-derived nouns in common use, e.g. sAmAn ‘stuff, gear’ (< idem); rang ‘colour, type, kind’ (< idem ‘colour’); CAra ‘ruse, trick, stratagem’ (< idem); kaSta ‘trip, picnic’ (< gaSt ‘diversion, recreation’); ROJa ‘present brought back from a trip’ (< RawJAt idem); dast ‘slap, smack’ (< idem ‘hand’); bUz ‘mouth, gob’ (< pOz ‘lip, mouth’); SIr ‘heads (on a coin)’ (< idem ‘lion’ (which is depicted on Iranian coinage)); xinG ‘eye (of a needle)’ (< xAniG ‘hole into which boys throw nuts’); nESAn ‘target’ (< idem ‘mark’); VarVangi ‘wastrel, layabout’ (prob < tartand ‘vain, useless’); GinGAl ‘uproar, commotion; bother, trouble’ (< GanGAl ‘crowd, multitude’). Persian also provided a number of high frequency verbs and functional items which are Gulf-wide in their currency, some examples of which were noted earlier on in this essay. The prevalence of Persian-derived vocabulary in the dialects of Bahrain (and of the Gulf states more generally) is one of the main factors which distinguishes them from the dialects of central Arabia. Much of this Persian vocabulary, however, still current in the mid-1970s, was by the 1990s, obsolete or obsolescent. As in the case of Akkadian/Aramaic, Persian has left its trace on (Ba¥r¸nº) village place-names: ad-Dir¸z (= ‘straight’), ad- D¹h (= ‘village’), Jird¸b (= ‘whirlpool’), D¢mist¸n (= possibly < dimestAn ‘winter’

29 dimestAn ‘winter’ is noted by Bertram Thomas in his article ‘The Kumzari dialect of the Shihuh tribe, Arabia, and a vocabulary’ in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, October 1930, p. 853. The article describes the still little-known Persian-based dialect of an isolated tribe in the Musandam peninsula. Thomas believes this word, and much of this tribe’s Persian-derived vocabulary, to be ‘pure Pehlevi’.

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access the vocabulary of eastern arabia xxxiii an older form of zemistAn29), as well as a number of toponyms with the Persian endings -bAd and -kAn: Salm¸b¸d, Karb¸b¸d, Karzakk¸n, Shahrakk¸n30.

(b) Hindi/Urdu

Commercial contacts between the Gulf states, including Bahrain, and India are of very long standing31. For many years India was the principal source for the import of gold for the Bahraini gold market, and Bahraini gold merchants were frequent visitors to Bombay. A number of the technical and measuring terms still in use in the gold trade are of sub-continental origin, e.g. daram ‘gold- tester’, tOla ‘unit of weight (= 12 grams approx). Until thirty or forty years ago, travel to India was also the normal choice for Bahrainis needing medical treatment not available locally, and India was even a source of marriage partners for impecunious Bahrainis unable to afford local bride-prices32. Until as recently as 1963, Bahraini currency denominations were the pies, annas and rupees of India (from which the British administered Bahrain’s external affairs until Indian independence in 1947). These terms (in the forms bEza (-At), Ana (-At), rubbiya (-At)) were still normal in the speech of much of the population in the mid 1970s, although replaced officially by the fils and dInAr. From the linguistic point of view, probably the most influential factor in introducing Urdu/Hindi words into the Bahraini dialects has been the expatriate Indian labour force. A small army of Indian clerks and managers ran most of the Bahrain public services until the late 1960s and the waning of British influence, and Indian workmen, servants, cleaners and laundry-men were, and remain, a highly visible presence. Few of these workers spoke much Arabic, and, because of the (until very recent times) poor standard of English of the Bahrainis, communication with Indian workmen and servants was often conducted in a kind of Arabic- based pidgin33. Borrowings from Indian languages (normally Hindi/ Urdu, but in many cases via Anglo-Indian) which derive from these kinds of contact include: employment-related: krAni ‘clerk’ (< idem); Citti ‘chitty, note’ (< idem); kaCCa ‘form, protocol’ (< xAkA ‘plan, sketch, draft’); dUbi ‘washer-man’ (< idem); tindEl ‘foreman’ (ult

30 Persian toponyms also occur in other Arab Gulf states, e.g. the town of al-Rust§q, Oman (= ‘garden’). 31 The generic Bahraini term for ‘Indians’, banyAn, is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit vanij ‘merchant’. 32 The Bahraini colloquial poet {Abdurra¥m¸n Rafº{, in his humorous poem il-Pirs il-Padil (‘Proper Marriage’), written in the 1960s, mentions this practice. 33 Smart has outlined the features of a similar pidgin used in Abu Dhabi, in ‘Pidginization in Gulf Arabic: a first report’, in Anthropological Linguistics 32 (1990) pp. 83-119.

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< Malayalam tanBal via Anglo-Indian tandal idem); Cini ‘chisel’ (< CheQoni ‘chisel, punch, piercer’); GUniyya/ yUniyya ‘sack’ (< gOni idem). domestic: kirfAya, CirfAya ‘bed, bed-stead’ (< CArpAQi ‘four-legs’); banka ‘fan’ (< panka idem); biGli ‘type of lamp; torch’ (< idem ‘lightning’); CUla ‘primus stove’ (< idem); CwIt ‘bluing agent’ (prob < CIt ‘printed cloth’). There are also a number of common words for foods and items of clothing and textiles which are of Indian origin, e.g. clothes: sirwAl ‘(women’s) trousers’ (< idem); binGiri ‘bangle’ (< bangri idem); GUti ‘shoes’ (< idem); sAbAt ‘women’s leather shoes’ (< idem); manAris ‘sari-like garment made of silk’ (< banArisi ‘a type of silk used in women’s saris’ (< Benares, a city in India)); CIt ‘multicoloured printed cotton cloth’ (< idem ‘printed cloth’ (whence English ‘chintz’)). food: Alu ‘potato’ (< idem); RAlUna ‘curry, stew’ (< idem).

There are also, as in the case of Persian borrowings, a few common all-purpose items, e.g. Cabb! ‘shut up!’ (< Cup! ‘silence!’); kaCra ‘rubbish’ (< idem); xiCri, xikri ‘mixed-up, muddled’ (< khichri ‘a mess of rice’ (applied metaphorically in Anglo-Indian parlance to a mixture or mess of anything); GOkam ‘difficulty’ (< Gokham ‘risk, danger’).

(c) Turkish

It is probable that the relatively few Turkish loans in the Bahraini dialects are not the result of direct contact with the Turks (the Turks never ruled Bahrain), but of contact with other Arabic dialects, probably those of Iraq, which absorbed much Turkish vocabulary during the period of Ottoman control. In Bahraini Arabic, there appears to be no particular cultural pattern in the type of Turkish borrowing which has occurred, e.g kazma, gazma ‘pick-axe, mattock’ (< kazma idem); VAwa ‘hot-plate for cooking flat bread’ (< tava ‘frying pan’); bUri ‘gramophone horn’ (< boru ‘horn’); timba ‘ball’ (< top idem); baxsam, bagsam ‘dry bread, rusk’ (< peksimet, ult < Greek paksimadi ‘ship’s biscuit, hard biscuit’); titin ‘tobacco’ (< tütün idem); VAbU ‘title-deed to a property; land registration office’ (< tapu ‘title-deed’); bOS ‘empty, useless’ (< bo× idem); sarsari ‘waster, ne’er-do-well’ (< serseri ‘vagabond, tramp’); zigirti ‘smartly-dressed man, fop; chivalrous, brave’ (< züGürt ‘destitute’).

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(d) European languages

The earliest sustained contact with a European language was with Portuguese. The Portuguese briefly controlled the Gulf Coast in the 16th century34, and have left a small linguistic legacy of terms chiefly relating to the sea and shipping, e.g. CAwiya ‘long (16 inch) nail used in ship-building’ (< cavilha ‘pin, dowel, peg’); durmEt ‘sleeping-shelf (on a boat)’ (< dormente ‘sleeping’) ; kAtli, kAtri ‘bench on the poop-deck on which the captain sleeps’ (< cátele, catre ‘bed’); burd ‘side (of a ship, but also more generally)’ (< bordo ‘board, broadside of a ship’); bindEra ‘flag’ (< bandeira idem); GAlbUt ‘small boat for carrying cargo or passengers’ (prob < galeota via Anglo-Indian gallevat). A number of other non-maritime but apparently Portuguese terms are: wAr, wAra ‘yard (in length)’ (< vara ‘rod, pole’); mEz ‘table, desk’ (< mesa idem); bAldi ‘tin mug’ (< balde via Hindi bAlti ‘bucket, pail’); bIb ‘five-gallon drum’ (< pipa or via English cognate ‘pipe’ in the sense of ‘cask, butt, barrel’ (e.g. of port wine); byUn ‘errand- boy, messenger’ (< peão ‘foot soldier, farm-hand’ (cf French pion)). It is unclear whether all of these were direct borrowings or whether some of them came in via Persian (e.g. possibly mEz), or one of the languages of India (? bAldi)) into which they were also borrowed. Among other noteworthy curiosities borrowed from European languages are: the now obsolete term balyOz ‘consul, government advisor’ (< Greek baylos), formerly used colloquially (and even, as government papers show, in official correspondence) as a title to refer to the British Political Agent in Bahrain during the early part of this century; twAlEt ‘(man’s long) western hairstyle’ (< French toilette), a word which was being replaced in the 1970s by jaksan (< ‘Jackson’, from ‘the Jackson Five’, an American pop-group of the time who popularised the bushy ‘Afro’ hairstyle); atrIk ‘torch, light-bulb’, probably a corruption of the first element of the Swedish trycklampa ‘pressure lantern’ which was inscribed on the side of the pressure lanterns imported early in the 20th century. By far the most important European influence on the dialects of Bahrain and the Gulf generally, however, has been English. Starting with the oil industry in the mid 1930s, a veritable tide of English terms associated with industry and technology has washed over the Gulf dialects35. In the Bahrain case, it left a peculiarly British-flavoured flotsam and jetsam of borrowings denoting the favourite comestibles of the 1930s and 40s British expatriate, some of which were adopted by the Bahrainis of that generation: kastar ‘custard’, GAli ‘jelly’, sAgU ‘sago-pudding’, nAmlEt ‘lemonade’, burmIt ‘peppermint’, CaklEt ‘chocolate’,

34 They were expelled from Bahrain by the Persians in 1602. 35 Smeaton, in Lexical Expansion due to Technical Change, Indiana, 1973, has devoted a complete study to the process of the borrowing and assimilation of English technical terms into the dialects of eastern Saudi Arabia as a result of the operations of the oil industry. Very many of the hundreds of terms he lists occur in the same or a similar form in Bahrain.

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access xxxvi the vocabulary of eastern arabia rOl ‘bread-roll’, slEs ‘cream-slice (a type of English patisserie)’ and even gOlgEt ‘tooth-paste’, from ‘Colgate’ a proprietary brand of English tooth-paste. Some of the less technical (and in a pan-Arab context more saliently local) of the mass of English borrowings are now being replaced in the speech of the young and educated by their Modern Standard Arabic equivalents, e.g. sAQiq ‘driver’ for drEwil (< driver), mustaSfa ‘hospital’ for sbEtar (< hospital), sayyAra ‘car’ for mOtir (< motor), but almost as quickly as these are replaced, new borrowings from the international consumer culture of the 21st century are entering the dialect, e.g. dIS ‘(satellite) dish’, rimUt ‘(TV) remote control’, Ginz ‘jeans’. Some of the English borrowings which occurred in the data, particularly in the technical sphere, are highly job specific and probably unknown to the population at large, as in, for example, the aeroplane maintenance man who described his job thus: nbaVVil kawlin mAl il-anGin, nSIl-vh barra ‘we open the engine-cowling and take it off’, where the word kawlin ‘cowling’ has no general currency outside the aviation industry; or the illiterate allotment farmer who, in explaining the problems he was having with an irrigation pump, used the words lEtEnar ‘retainer’ and nibil ‘nipple’ to refer to its defective parts. Some two hundred English borrowings occurred in the data, and below I list some examples in the commonest categories: automobile-related: mOtir ‘car’; bAR, bast, bass ‘bus’; bIkAb ‘pick-up truck’; lAri ‘lorry’; sikswIl ‘six-wheel lorry’; kalakta ‘tractor’; dOzar ‘bulldozer’; sEkal ‘bicycle’; midgAr ‘mudguard, wing’; bambar ‘bumper, fender’; haran ‘horn’; lEt ‘head-light’; banCar ‘puncture’; rEwis ‘reverse’; sifti ‘safety-helmet’; trAy ‘driving test’ (< try); lE- san ‘licence’; rangsEd ‘wrong way (down a one-way street)’ (< wrong side); Gambin ‘bumpy (road)’ (< jumping). machinery, tools: bamb ‘pump’; wilf ‘valve’; bEb ‘pipe’; bElar ‘boiler’ (used in the phrase mAy bElar ‘sweet water’ (dispensed from a tanker)); blAyvz ‘pliers’; tanki ‘tank, cis- tern’; hOz ‘hose’; wayr ‘wire’; Saft ‘(cam-) shaft’; warwar ‘pneumatic drill; revolver’ (< revolver); sbAna ‘spanner’; bulV ‘bolt’; SEwil ‘shovel’; bAko ‘back- hoe’; sling ‘hoist’. industrial materials: smIt ‘cement’; kankari ‘concrete’; Cinku ‘galvanised corrugated iron sheets’ (< zinc); naylUn ‘nylon, plastic’; rabil ‘rubber’; Ayil ‘oil’; gAz ‘petroleum; kero- sene’ employment: kubbani ‘(The Bahrain Oil) Company’; fEnari ‘oil-refinery’; hafIz ‘office’ rigg ‘oil-rig’; wartEm ‘over-time’; (yOm il) Of ‘day off’; bEbfIta ‘plumber, pipe-fit- ter’; kUli ‘labourer, coolie’; fannaS ‘to fire; quit’ (< finish).

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access the vocabulary of eastern arabia xxxvii clothing: kOt ‘coat’; hAf ‘shorts’ (< half); blUz ‘blouse’; nEbi ‘bell-bottomed trousers’ (< navy). food: askrIm ‘ice-cream’; ParanGUS ‘orange-juice’; bastUg ‘biscuit’; buftIk ‘beef-steak’; GigAra ‘cigar, cigarette’ (see also the list above). household: aydIn ‘iodine’; bAkEt ‘packet’; kAtUn, kartUn ‘carton’; buVil ‘bottle’; glAR ‘drinking glass’; GEg ‘jug’; kAb and kUb ‘cup’. sport: balanti ‘penalty (kick)’; kurnar ‘corner (kick)’; winG ‘winger’; Sawwat ‘to shoot’. weights, measures and money: inC ‘inch’; fUt ‘foot’; darzan ‘dozen’; galan ‘gallon’; Ons ‘ounce’; kAS ‘cash’; nOV ‘bank-note’.

Other commonly-used borrowings which do not fit into any particular category include: fuRR iglAR ‘excellent, first class’ (< first class); Cans ‘luck, fortune, chance’; sikrAb ‘scrap, useless’; sikvndhand ‘on the shelf, left over’ (< second- hand), and the denominative verbs kansal ‘to cancel, abolish’; Cayyak ‘to check’; tayyat ‘to tighten’; layyak ‘to leak’.

(iii) Arabic vocabulary: specialised developments

Notwithstanding the foreign borrowing just described, the vocabulary of the Arabic spoken by the older generations of Bahrainis gives a general impression of archaism, illustrated earlier in the context of the discussion of the general conservatism of the Gulf Arabic dialects. But this is not to say that there has been no internal innovation. When the vocabulary of the Bahraini dialects is compared with that of the dialects of inner Arabia (from whence much of its population originally came) on the one hand, and that of CLA on the other, two types of innovation are noteworthy. First, matters of form: by comparison with CLA, there have been developments in the system of derivational morphology. In the verb, to give just a few examples, one notes (1) theme III and VI forms with long mid-vowels O and E, e.g. HOmar ‘to go pink, reddish’, HOHaC ‘to wriggle about’ (< HAC ‘to weave’), tREmax ‘to feign deafness’, tErab ‘to dance the trEnbo (a type of wedding dance)’; (2) the free formation of quadriliteral verbs in various ways: via stem reduplication, especially of doubled verbs, e.g. naVnaV ‘skive off, play truant (by jumping over the school wall)’ ( < naVV ‘to jump, hop’), lamlam ‘collect up, gather together’ (< lamm ‘collect together’), via sonorant (l,n,r) insertion between the first two root consonants of triliteral roots, e.g. sarhad ‘nod off, fall asleep’ (< sahda ‘quietness, silence’), tHanda ‘moan and groan, complain’ (< Hada ‘urge, goad’), via the compounding (i.e. naHt) of elements of other verbs, e.g. daPwal ‘throw

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access xxxviii the vocabulary of eastern arabia away, get rid of’ (< daP ‘leave!’ + wall ‘clear off!’); (3) extension of the use of passivising and reflexivising prefixes in-, ista-, including their prefixing to other derived themes, e.g. inJaVVa ‘to be covered, veiled’, istafAham ‘to come to an understanding’36. Morphological innovation of one kind or another has of course occurred in all Arabic dialects if one takes the CLA system as the yardstick, though the details differ from region to region. Developments in derivational morphology specific to Bahrain and eastern Arabia more generally are dealt with in a comprehensive fashion in Volume III. Second, matters of meaning: there has been large-scale semantic extension of vocabulary brought from Arabia to meet the different circumstances of sedentary life on the coast. The vocabulary of the sea—in particular of pearl-diving— gives many examples of terms used in the central Arabian dialects (and CLA) which acquired a specialised nautical meaning, and sometimes lost their original senses. A few will be given here. Words derived from the CLA root s-q-b are exclusively associated in Bahraini Arabic with the masts on a boat: the verb sigab means ‘to fix a mast on a boat’, and sgUba is ‘a mast’ whereas in CLA saqb is ‘the pole of a tent’. The CLA root n-z-f is most commonly used to denote the drawing off of blood, whereas in Bahrain this verb and its verbal noun nizIfa is normally applied to the drawing off of water, specifically the practice of bailing out wooden boats which had been deliberately capsized in shallow water after being laid up for the winter, in order to cause their planking to expand before they put to sea. In CLA, the root n-h-m had various meanings associated with the urging on of camels by a camel-driver (e.g. Lane nahIm ‘the chiding of camels’). In his glossary of the (non-maritime) dialect of Dathºna, southern Yemen, Landberg also notes the verb naham as meaning ‘roar, stir up camels by shouting’. In Bahrain, however, (and other Gulf states with a pearling tradition) this root exclusively denotes the occupation of singing (naham, verbal noun nahIm), by a specialist singer (nahhAm) of songs (nihma) to encourage pearl-divers engaged in the heavy tasks of rowing, hauling in ropes, and raising sails. In southern Najd37, sigmih means simply ‘provisions, food’, while, for southern Yemen, Landberg gives saqqam ‘to feed’. In pearl-diving parlance, however, saggam and its verbal noun tisgAm came to refer to the first of three loan payments made to pearl-divers in the pearling close-season, the tisgAm being paid immediately on their return (at the end of September), and this is the only sense of this word in Bahrain and other maritime ex-pearling communities such as the ports of the erstwhile Trucial Coast. In Najdi Arabic, and Arabian Bedouin dialects in general, the main meaning of the verb fazaP is ‘to respond to a call for help in time of war’ as in Ingham’s example38 fzaPat Sammar ‘(the

36 Ingham op.cit. 74-5 notes the same kind of development in Najdi dialects. 37 Kurpershoek M. Oral Poetry and Narratives from Central Arabia, Leiden, 1995, Vol II, p. 275 38 Ingham B. op.cit. p. 105.

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access the vocabulary of eastern arabia xxxix tribe) of Shammar responded to the call (to provide assistance in tribal conflict)’. In Bahrain, the root f-z-P became mainly associated with the co-operative team work needed in launching boats—the basic meaning of fAziP pl fazPa is ‘one of a team who help to pull boats in and out of the sea’—and the sense of ‘helping in times of war’, presumably because tribal wars no longer occurred in the sedentarised society of the coast, became obsolete. In my data, it occurred only once in this sense—in an old man’s recollection of the Russian contribution to the allied effort during the Second World War: lO mA fAzPo ir-rUs, CAn rAHat brIVAnya u rAHat fransa ‘If the Russians hadn’t helped, Britain and France would have been done for’. In all these cases—and scores more examples could be given—the shift in semantic scope was associated with a shift in life-style, and/ or the narrowing of the meaning of a general term to a more specialised sense. A more recent semantic shift, but one which illustrates that the same principle is still operative, is provided by the word zAm which originally denoted ‘watch-period on board a ship’ in both CLA and Bahraini Arabic. Now, however, it normally means ‘shift’ in a factory: zAm in-nahAr ‘day-shift’, zAm awwal il-lEl ‘afternoon-shift’.

(iv) Community-based differences in vocabulary

At the time this research was done, Bahrain was still a classic case of a society in which there was major communal dialect differentiation39: dialect differences, which largely corresponded to the {Arab-Ba¥¸rna social cleavage, permeated all levels of language from segmental phonology to vocabulary, and, despite the geographical proximity and intermingling of these groups in public contexts, were maintained by social distance. Subsidiary distinctions could also be made between the dialects of the urban and rural Ba¥¸rna; within the rural Ba¥¸rna community from one region of Bahrain to another; and, to a lesser extent, between the different {Arab towns and villages. These sociolinguistic distinctions are a principal concern of this whole study, and inform the dialect description in Volume III. Here, however, we will restrict ourselves to an illustration of communal differences in the basic vocabulary stock, concentrating on the major differentiation between the {Arab (A) dialects as a whole and the Ba¥¸rna (B) dialects as a whole, though with some separate remarks on the Ba¥¸rna village (B village) dialects. However, it should always be borne in mind that a very great deal of the vocabulary of all Bahraini dialects (and indeed the Gulf dialects as a whole) is shared, as was pointed out and exemplified at the beginning of this essay. The dialectal differences between the A and B communities undoubtedly stem from their different geographical origins. The A community’s dialects are developments of the Najdi dialects their ancestors spoke, whilst the B dialects are seemingly more mixed in origin, incorporating elements of the older strata

39 See Blanc op.cit. pp. 12-16.

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access xl the vocabulary of eastern arabia of Arabic dialects spoken in eastern Arabia long before the arrival of the A speakers. One striking feature of the B village dialects is their resemblance, grosso modo, in phonology, morphology and vocabulary, to a number of other dialects some distance away: to those spoken in the isolated mountainous interior of Oman, to certain dialects of the United Arab Emirates, and to the dialects of southern Yemen as described by Landberg. Each of these widely separated dialectal pockets is cut off from the others by desert populations speaking dialects which are typologically different. How did this situation arise? Broadly speaking, what seems to have happened on the coast of Arabia from Bahrain to the Musandam peninsula is that an older group of related dialects spoken by Arabian sedentaries, some of which anciently originated in southern Yemen, has been ‘submerged’ by Bedouin dialects brought by waves of migrants from central Arabia over a period of centuries. Today, these incoming Najdi (sometimes referred to as {Anazº) dialects are associated with the ruling families of the Gulf states, and are usually described in the literature as ‘Eastern Arabian’40 or ‘Gulf’ Arabic. However, older pre-{Anazº dialects survive as ‘islands’ in this sea of Najdi-derived dialects. In Bahrain, this pre-{Anazº stratum of dialects is represented by those of the B villages, and the distinction between them and the A dialects of the Najdi immigrants has been preserved by a social distance between them born of religious differences. However, the sharpness of the distinction has been somewhat blurred by subsequent internal developments. Basically, speakers of the urban B dialects of Manama have, probably over a long period, accommodated to the dialects of their {Arab neighbours in certain respects—chiefly phonologically and lexically— whilst retaining the original character of the B village-dialect morphology. This process of B dialect accommodation to the socially more prestigious, areally dominant A dialect has now spread to affect B villagers of the younger generation also. Another long-term cohesive factor has been the contact with foreign languages, which seems to have affected the A and B communities equally—it is not possible to distinguish any source or type of foreign borrowing, for example, which is exclusively associated with one community or the other. Nor, most interestingly, is it true that the elements in the dialects which I have speculatively attributed to an ancient east Arabian Akkadian and/or Aramaic substrate are found only in the B village dialects, as might have been the expectation if it is true that the B villagers, as they claim, are descendants of ‘the original Bahrainis’ and the A speakers are relative newcomers. Older generation A speakers in my data used these words just as often as B speakers, so either they must also have been part of the dialects which the A speakers’ ancestors brought with them, or, more probably, they have been absorbed into the A speakers’ dialects since their arrival—but at this point in this almost completely unresearched corner of

40 This is the term used by Tom Johnstone in his classic work Eastern Arabian Dialect Studies, London, 1967. Johnstone gives almost no information about the older pre-{Anazº stratum of Arabic dialects, to which he had difficulty in gaining access in the late 1950s.

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Arabic comparative dialectology, it is impossible to say which explanation is correct. Certainly at the time when this research was done, the vocabularies and phraseology of the A and B communities were still clearly distinct, particularly in the case of the B villagers, whose speech even B town-dwellers, let alone A speakers, sometimes found difficulty in understanding41. The most obvious point of difference was in words associated with employment which was the exclusive preserve of one group or the other. The agricultural terminology used by Ba¥¸rna farmers throughout Bahrain, for example, contained scores of items whose meanings were known only to them, e.g. the verbs baggaS, waggaS, tiPabbaf (roots {-B-TH), banna, karaf (roots Q-R-F), Pammar, which all refer to different types of digging and soil preparation; Sirb, sAba (roots S-Y-B), kiRfa (roots Q-Õ-F), faRla and xAfUr, which denote different shapes and sizes of seed- or growing beds42. Similarly, the vocabulary of pearl-diving, an occupation dominated by the {Arab (though by no means to the exclusion of the Ba¥¸rna) was strongly associated with the A dialect, and tended to reflect A rules of pronunciation and syllabication, e.g. gHama ‘descent to the sea-bed’, mGaddimi ‘boatswain’ (roots Q-D-M), riGa ‘go afloat, put to sea’ (roots R-Q-Y), yazwa ‘crew of a pearling boat’ (roots J-Z-Y). But vocabulary differences were not restricted to technical terminology. Many of the commonest actions and items of everyday life were typically expressed by different words, of which some examples are given below. It is emphasised that the examples given are illustrative only of differences in lexical choice for everyday concepts, and the separate question of communal differences in the morphophonological treatment of what was historically the ‘same’ item, e.g. A yad B Id ‘hand’; A hal B ahal/ ahl ‘family, kin’; A IdAm B UdAm ‘food’; A yaddam B waddam ‘to offer food’ is left to Volume III. Such differences are the result of phonological processes which historically affected the A and B dialects differently, possibly at a time before they were in their present geographical position.

Examples of vocabulary differences: {Arab dialects Ba¥¸rna dialects Fahar VilaP ‘to go out’ Vagg Barab ‘to hit’ xarraP xawwaf ‘to frighten’

41 Village Ba¥¸rna were often jocularly referred to by A speakers as awlAd il-Pafar ‘the lads who say Pafar’, a particle meaning ‘perhaps’ which is frequently used by them. A speakers typically said kalAm-hum JalG (< CLA Jaliq) ‘their speech is obscure, difficult to understand’ to describe the B village dialects. 42 The glossary of Omani agricultural vocabulary put together by Brockett in The Spoken Arabic of KhAbUra, Manchester 1985 shows many parallels with the B-village terms, and is another pointer to the close cultural and linguistic relationship between ancient east Arabian sedentary communities.

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access xlii the vocabulary of eastern arabia taQaxxar mahal ‘be late’ dall indall or dalla ‘to know the way’ tamm Ball auxiliary verb expressing continuous, habitual or iterative action JabIb bayyUt ‘food left over for the following day’ mirfaPa millAla ‘wood and rope hoist for storing left- over food’ xirGa xalaga ‘cloth, rag’ mVawwaP miPallim ‘Koran teacher’ gaVu sannUr ‘cat’

Even common functional items were typically different: for A speakers ‘what?’ was usually Sinhu (or with a feminine referent Sinhi), and for some A speakers SingAyil, but for B speakers it was typically wES or wEShu, or one of a number of other variants with an initial (w)ES- morpheme. Perhaps one of the most curious communal distinctions was between the verbs twaBBa and tmassaH: for the A speakers, the first verb means ‘wipe one’s behind’ and the second ‘perform ritual ablutions before prayer’, whereas for the B speakers the meanings of the two words are exactly the other way round! The B village dialects had a large number of peculiarities of their own in the area of non-technical ‘core’ vocabulary. As noted above, the word Pafar ‘perhaps’ (historical root consonants }-TH-R) is considered a marker of village B speech in Bahrain. A few examples of differences in the stock of common verbs are given here. Instead of the almost universal pan-Arab rAH ‘to go’, many speakers used Jada; the verb ‘to become’ in most of its senses was istawa/ istuwa rather then RAr, the commonest verb with this meaning for A and most urban B speakers; nawas was ‘to be happy’ in B village speakers’ speech, but usually istAnas in the speech of other Bahrainis; ‘to come to a stop, stop work’ was in the B villages often PabbaV, a verb not known in this sense to A speakers; similarly, the verbs PAbal and HaggaV both of which mean ‘to take care of, look after’ were heard only from rural B speakers; the verb Pabaf (cf CLA PabaTa) meaning ‘to work on the land’ was unknown in this sense in A communities; ‘to get, obtain’ was usually gabaB/ kabaB or Haggal/ Hakkal rather than the A and urban B verbs HaRal/ HaRRal and HawwaS; ‘to tear, rip’ was maSSag/ maSSak rather than A and urban B mazzag; ‘to wait’ was typically Haras in the B villages, more often niVar in A communities; in some villages naVa was ‘to give’ (as in Iraq) rather than A (and pan-Gulf) PaVa. Some items in the A and B village dialects seemed to be natural phonological variants of what historically may have been the same form, e.g. the correspondence of the bilabials in A Hamal versus B village Habal/ Hibal ‘to get pregnant, conceive’, A zamar versus B village zabar ‘to scold, tell off’, and other pairs in which the radical consonants show only voiced/voiceless or minor manner and place of articulation differences, as in A iHtAG (or iHtAy) and B villages iPtAz ‘to need’.

Clive Holes - 9789004464568 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:34:06AM via free access