The Vocabulary of Eastern Arabia
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
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.