Arabic Indefinites, Interrogatives, and Negators: A Linguistic History of Western Dialects

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Arabic Indefinites,Interrogatives, andNegators

A Linguistic History of Western Dialects

DAVID WILMSEN

1

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 8/10/2014, SPi

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3Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,United Kingdom

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark ofOxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

# David Wilmsen 2014

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1

Introduction

Theory, conventions, and the assessment of facts

ناسللابالإكبرأمنعةنابإلاوكتاجاحنعةرابعلاعيطتستالكنأ

ناسنإلااهوحنيولةريثكءايشأعملجآلاولجاعلايفناذهو

ةدوجوملوقعملايفاهدجول

ةمولعملوصحملايفو

ةرهتشمقئاقحلادنعو

ةرهاظريبدتلايفو

You cannot express your needs and ambitions except with the tongue.Ultimately, those, along with many things, were people to seek them,They would find them comprehensible,Obtainable, factual, and measurable.

al-Jāh˙iz˙Rasāʾ il Part 4: Risāla 24

This study examines the current manifestations, and what can be deduced of thehistory and prehistory, of an individual grammatical feature of Arabic. Negation withan enclitic -š, or in some environments a loosely bound clitic ši, appears in manyspoken vernacular varieties of Arabic over a broad dialect area stretching from thesouthern Levant, the Nile Valley and Delta, all across littoral North Africa, andincludes varieties from the Yemen and Oman. Spoken varieties of Arabic in theseregions negate with variations on a theme, most with a discontinuous morphememā . . . š (viz: katab ‘he wrote’ > mā-katab-š ‘he didn’t write’), but others, under someconditions, such as, emblematically, the Palestinian, with a post-positive -š alone(fī ‘there is’ > ƒī-š ‘there is not’ bidd-i ‘I want’ > biddī-š ‘I don’t want’).

More correctly, the study begins by examining negation with š/šī, for, in theprocess of exploring the antecedents of this feature, central to the syntax of most ofthose varieties in which it prevails, it becomes necessary to expand the scope ofobservation to include interrogation and indefinite marking with the same mor-phemes (š/šī), exploring the causal link between these phonologically similar butfunctionally distinct phenomena. For it happens that if some varieties of Arabic


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negating with reflexes of /š/ also utilize šī to mark indefiniteness, a great many morevarieties of Arabic, those negating with mā . . . š or a post-positive -š alone and thosenegating with a pre-positioned mā alone, use them in some form to pose questions.Interrogatives formed with a reflex of /š/ are pervasive, asking the question ‘what?’with interrogatives such as āš, ayš, ēš, and iš; āš huwwa, ašu, and šū; or āšinhaw,āšnūa, šinhu, šīnu, and šnu. Less variable and equally widespread is the question‘why?’ formed with variants on a preposition l- ‘to/for’ and aš: lāš, layš, lēš, and lešnu(in North African varieties, ʿ laš). In many other interrogatives across a wide rangeof spoken Arabic varieties, a reflex of /š/ plays a role, for example waqtāš or šwaqt‘when?’ (< waqt ‘time’ + interrogative /š/) and qaddāš or šqadd ‘how much?’ (< qadd‘measure, quantity, size’ + interrogative /š/). Indeed, it is in interrogation andnegation that the grammars of most spoken varieties of Arabic and those of writtenArabic diverge dramatically.1 For, whereas written Arabic poses a ‘what’ questionwith a common Semitic mā, spoken Arabic vernaculars generally negate with thatsame particle. That older Arabic of the written variety may do so too, and thatmodern written Arabic will admit negation with it in certain constrained contexts,has provided impetus for speculations that negation with mā and a discontinuous -šin many spoken varieties, primarily those of the southern and south-western ArabianPeninsula, the southern Levant, and North Africa, descended from an older variety ofArabic that did not negate with a suffixed -š, and that the spoken dialects that do areall relatively new (albeit about 1,000 years old) by comparison with this presumedolder variety, sometimes conflated with an original form. This study contests allaspects of that notion: that the spoken dialects of Arabic are relatively new, sharing acommon descent from the Arabic of writing, and that interrogation and negationwith reflexes of /š/ are later innovations in those varieties in which they appear.In tracing the origins of those reflexes, we shall find that interrogative /š/ must beancient and negating with it may be too, and that, as a consequence, the modernspoken varieties of Arabic that negate with its reflexes cannot be descended directlyfrom the parent variety of the Arabic of modern and classical writing.

Properly speaking a study of grammatical š/šī, the book is intended first forArabists, especially those of a linguistic bent, but also for any who may ever havewondered about interrogation and negation with reflexes of /š/, how they began andwhence they came, and, indeed, for those who may wish for evidence of the age of thedialects. It is secondly addressed to language theorists. This is not to say that itadvocates a particular theory. Quite the contrary: in attempting to explain thephenomena, it demonstrates that various theories as they have been applied to Arabicfail to account for the facts, indeed sometimes delimiting the discussion and conclu-sions to commonplaces, conventions, and speculations. Perhaps foremost amongst

1 The appendix presents a schematic comparison of the techniques of interrogation and negationbetween the Arabic of writing and the spoken vernaculars.


2 Introduction

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these is the speculation, conveniently falling under the theoretical stance often called‘grammaticalization’, that reflexes of /š/ are ultimately derived from one of the Arabicwords for ‘thing’ (šay )ʾ in a series of steps in a process whereby content words arewithdrawn from the lexicon; divested of referential meaning; and lent an analytical,that is to say grammatical, function.

The notion that reflexes of /š/ derive ultimately from the Arabic content word šayʾappears to fit intuitively into a scheme of grammaticalization. Such an assumption isdutifully repeated both in historical accounts of the phenomena and in synchronicattempts at descriptions of its place in the grammar of Arabic—the latter usuallywithout appealing to grammaticalization per se—those repeating it often drawing ananalogy between a supposed development in Arabic from negating with mā to adiscontinuousmā . . . š and the French move from negating with ne alone to ne . . . pasin what has been called ‘Jespersen’s cycle’ operating in European languages, itselfbeing what van Kemenade calls a ‘schoolbook case of grammaticalization’ (2000: 58).In one of the few major contributions to the study of grammaticalization applied toArabic, Esseesy (2010: 11–13)—without, however, invoking Jespersen’s cycle—makesjust this assumption. Meanwhile, Lucas (2007; 2009) has made the case for aJespersen’s cycle operating in Arabic negation explicit. Upon examination, however,the assumption cannot hold. Little evidence in the Arabic language writ large—in anyof its spoken vernaculars or in the Arabic of writing—supports such a scenario, andsuch evidence as does exist is all circumstantial, based upon superficial appearancealone. Through examining living Arabic dialects and the historical record of oldervarieties of Arabic, this book presents a more reliable, evidence-based accounting forthe origin and development of grammatical /š/, for, true to the precepts of gram-maticalization, older forms and their newer grammaticalizations remain present inlanguages, providing clues to the process, whereby the pathways of change remain (tosome degree at least) transparent. Indeed, these could only be detectable in thepresence of other, presumably older, relict forms.

The remnants of the change from lexical to grammatical are apparent in a vastarray of languages and across a broad spectrum of lexical and grammatical words.Theorists of grammaticalization Heine and Kuteva (2002) have compiled an entiredictionary of such forms. This principle can be profitably exploited in explaining agrammatical feature such as interrogation and negation with reflexes of /š/ in Arabicdialects, which in aggregate exhibit ancestral stages of the process. Nevertheless, aswidespread as the feature is in the Arabic dialects, a comprehensive comparison ofthe individual phenomena in all dialects has rarely been attempted, Obler (1975)being the sole noteworthy exception.2 Indeed, focusing on the varying phenomena inlocalized dialects or dialect areas independently and in isolation has perhaps partially

2 While making some mention of negation with -š in peninsular varieties of Arabic, Lucas (2009) largelyrestricts himself to a consideration of Levantine and North African vernaculars, including Maltese.


Introduction 3

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contributed to a superficial treatment of the phenomena. Attempting to force thefacts of negation and interrogation into preconceived theoretical frameworks hassurely done so as well.

A third fundamental principle in theoretical accounts of grammaticalization is thatsuch processes are irreversible or, as the theory has it, ‘unidirectional’, on theassumption that once a content word loses referential meaning, it can generally notregain it. Working against a reversal of the process are the fundamental differencesbetween content words and grammatical markers. Content words belong to openclasses and refer to activities and other concepts in the environment, be they thephysical surroundings or the conceptual and discourse universe of speakers. For theirpart, grammatical markers are structural, always belong to closed classes, andfunction by organizing information in the discourse. Apparently once a word losesits referential meaning and enters a closed class of grammatical items, it cannotescape. Nevertheless, the principle of unidirectionality of grammatical change is notabsolute; instances of reversal, while rare and not always uncontroversial, have beendemonstrated, and they pose a significant enough challenge to grammaticalizationtheory to merit a name of their own: degrammaticalization (Norde 2009). We shalldiscover that this principle, too, applies to the Arabic word for ‘thing’ in the history ofinterrogation and negation with reflexes of /š/.

1.1 Arabic in linguistic theory

Recent applications of grammaticalization theory to Arabic notwithstanding, with afew exceptions, Arabic has largely remained outside the ken of language theorists forthe latter half of the 20th century, when linguistics itself acquired something of atrail-blazing cachet. That alone may have consigned Arabic studies to the dustyshelves of the library, for it does retain something of a 19th-century air of antiquarianarcana about it. Even if Arabic had earlier enjoyed the attention of those labouring inthe field of language study, that came largely for its close relationship to the languagesof the Old and New Testaments and its being, in terms of its number of speakers andin its number of surviving texts, including modern writings, the largest representativeof the family to which those, mostly Semitic, languages belong. At the time, someeminent scholars, outstanding linguists of their own day, working within or havingtraining in the field of comparative Semitics lent their considerable acumen to thestudy of Arabic (and in the process to the understanding of the Semitic languages),contributing insights gained from the Semitic languages to the broader field oflinguistics.3

3 Aronoff (1994: 3) speculates, ‘it may well be that all Western linguistic morphology is directly rooted inthe Semitic grammatical tradition.’


4 Introduction

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Since the middle of the 20th century, however, Semitics, and along with it the studyof Arabic, has turned—or been turned—into a side road of linguistics, there largelypursuing its own aims with but incidental regard for what the rest of the languagesciences were doing. Along the way, it seems that Semitic studies and Arabic studieshave themselves parted company, each to pursue its own destination along that sideroad, not ignoring each other’s progress along their respective journeys, but generallytending toward their own objectives, each casting an occasional glance at the other, astravellers in separate vehicles are wont to do when overtaking and passing each otheralong the same highway. An impetus for their taking this route was occasioned bywhat has often been regarded as a revolution in the field of linguistics proper,beginning just after mid-century with the publication of something of a manifestoon the study of syntax by a student of the Semiticist Zellig Harris, a widely influentiallinguist who left enduring marks on the field, perhaps none more indelible than hisfostering the career of his star pupil, who lent his name to the change of paradigm:the ‘Chomskyan Revolution’.4 With that, linguistics appeared for a time to concen-trate upon a study of English—probably because it was the native (or at leastcommon) language of most of the people working in the new direction charted bythe revolutionaries—in developing a theoretical framework upon which to buildobservations, descriptions, and explanations of how language works, with a strongemphasis on syntax, the study of which came to dominate linguistics in its search forlanguage universals.5 This was bound to shunt the study of Arabic or Semitics onto asiding, for one of the guiding principles of this new science of syntax was an almostmilitant synchronicity, whereas the study of Semitic languages is perforce funda-mentally diachronic, for the large part studying languages that are no longer spokenbut are only represented by the surviving texts that their speakers have left behind.For its part, Arabic, with its hundreds of millions of speakers, remains very muchalive, and has enjoyed the serious attention of western researchers from the 17thcentury onwards, in an earlier period, mostly for the insight its living usage can bringto the study of its mostly extinct relatives (McCarus 1992). Over that period, worksabout Arabic have largely been descriptive, often undertaken from the perspective ofhistorical linguistics or dialectology. Nevertheless, after the ‘revolution’ in linguistics,

4 For a critical retrospective on the ‘revolution’, see the contributions in Kibbee (2010).5 Van Valin (2000) notes the inherent limitations of the theory in which principles of English grammar

are still reflected in many of its crucial assumptions, demonstrating that it is incapable of explainingstructures in languages like Barai, Dyirbal, Lakota, (Argentine) Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog, Warlpiri, orYidiŋ. Writing specifically about the indigenous languages of the Pacific Rim, Mühlhäusler (1999: 331)identifies some of the ‘debits’ of this theoretical stance, resulting in what he calls the ‘linguistic imperialism’of English and other dominant languages: ‘the practice of taking English as the point of departure or eventhe only point of reference for establishing universals has led to an implied denigration of linguisticdiversity. Such studies of traditional languages that have occurred have been in the manner of selectiveransacking for confirmation of general principles rather than anything else.’One of the themes of this bookwill be that the same sort of theoretical blinkering affects analyses of Arabic.


Arabic in linguistic theory 5

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works addressing Arabic informed by the new theoretical orientation eventuallybegan to appear. These, however, have been relatively few, exercising little influenceon the direction of Arabic studies as a whole, or for that matter on the direction oflinguistic theory.6

What is more, regardless of their adopting a synchronic perspective on language,these theoretical works appear to be obliged to approach their topic with somereference to the historical setting of Arabic and its development, for they almostalways draw comparisons between the spoken varieties under study—often the nativelanguages of the researchers, or based in fieldwork or some other evidence thatresearchers have gathered from living speakers of an Arabic variety—and the Arabicof writing, no longer the vernacular language of anyone, if it ever was. Indeed, someof the works about Arabic adopting the tools and traditions of the ChomskyanRevolution treat that variety of writing alone, without however making too manyclaims about the implicit diachronicity in the focus of their study. Regardless, ahistorical perspective is impossible to avoid when examining Arabic. For, loominglarge in any discussion of the language is the historical memory of its long literarytradition, dating to the 8th century ad, the 2nd century of Arab Islamic civilization(ah for anno hegirae, or year of the hegira), when the first manuscripts written inArabic began to appear and the oral literature of pre-Islamic poetry and the Qur’ānfrom the preceding centuries were committed to writing.7 As a consequence, anystudy of Arabic must acknowledge, if only implicitly, the dramatic changes that areseen to have taken place in the language over the succeeding millennium and longer.Accompanying this realization is the conviction that the language is much older thanthe mere seventeen centuries of its attested history. Nevertheless, this temporal depthmay present little difficulty to a purely synchronic and ‘formal’ accounting of theproperties of Arabic,8 for most such accounts do not deign to address the historicaldevelopment of Arabic, even while accepting some accounts of that history as true.

Formal attempts at explaining language, however, precisely because of their strictsynchronicity, have until recently not often undertaken to explain variation andchange in language; first, because variation arises from forces external to syntax, inwhich formal accountings have characteristically taken little interest, and second,

6 This despite a work on Semitic linguistics having been cited in a seminal text in theoretical linguistics(Malone 2002: 44–5).

7 A single manuscript of the Qur’ān dates to the first half of the 7th century (Sadeghi and Bergmann 2010).8 For the sake of simplicity, reference to the dichotomy between approaches to the study of language in

what has been seen since the Chomskyan Revolution as the difference between the study of linguisticcompetence and performance (some may say model-oriented vs. data-driven) will be expressed as thedifference between ‘formal’ and ‘functional’ approaches to linguistic explanation. For definitions and defencesof the two approaches, see the contributions of Noonan (1999) and Lasnik (1999). For a detailed defence of theexplanatory efficacy of the functional and a critique of the formal approaches, see Haspelmath (2002; 2004).An entire issue of Studies in Language (2004, no. 3) is devoted to a debate between proponents of bothapproaches.


6 Introduction

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because language change is for similar reasons dynamic, arising out of speakers’interactions with each other and with their social settings in real time, while formalapproaches treat syntax as atemporal and static (Noonan 1999: 20–21). For thatreason, the very historical depth of Arabic (or any language with a similarly lengthyhistory of documentation, for that matter, even English) must present some difficul-ties to formal approaches to syntax. For changes in the grammar of the language,even in the Arabic of writing, which is held by some to be unchangeable, are obviousand have been documented and collated.9

Because of its claim to account for the development of grammatical features, atheory of grammaticalization has been posed as a foil to formal accountings ofsyntax; but formal linguistics has begun to acknowledge grammaticalization,attempting to accommodate its precepts to formal accountings of language, all thewhile taking little heed of Arabic. This does not mean that there have been no formaltreatments of Arabic; on the contrary, some working squarely within the field ofArabic linguistics approach their study from within a formal framework. Theseformal treatments of Arabic can scarcely afford to ignore interrogation and negationin Arabic, and they do attempt to account for the occurrence of a negative -š in thedialects where it is used. This book will engage their treatments of the subject. Mostof that engagement comes in a later chapter, but implicit in the argumentationthroughout the book is that a strictly synchronic approach such as that advocatedby formal linguists cannot account for all the facts of negation in varieties of Arabicemploying the technique of interrogating and negating with -š. It appears to beespecially difficult to account for both the phenomenon of negation and interroga-tion in their manifold manifestations of a reflex of /š/. Synchronic and diachronicaccounts of Arabic alike tend to treat those as separate processes—even whileproposing a common origin for both in an Arabic word for ‘thing’—whereassimilarity in form obliges us to seek a common process and earlier origin for thetwo functions (if those can be found) before attempting to motivate those distinctroles along late and divergent routes.

1.2 A facts-first approach to theory and a theory-free approach to facts

All of this comes by way of asserting that the approach to the facts of language adoptedhere is functional and data-driven as opposed to the model-oriented approach offormal linguistics. If we are contending with a feature that to all appearances developedout of an older form within a language, earlier usage, if accessible, cannot be ignored,and the only way to ascertain that is to consider its representation in the earliest textswhere examples of it may be found, making comparisons between those and current

9 Esseesy (2010) documents changes in the use of prepositions and subordinators in writing occurringover a millennium.


A facts-first and theory-free approach 7

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usages. The formal linguist’s technique of discovery and explanation cannot beexpected to produce results, for it is based in current usage alone, along with insightsinto that usage drawn from the researcher’s own introspective intuitions or theintuitions of a few informants. Current speakers of a language cannot be expected toprovide introspective intuitions about earlier usage, or at least not reliable ones (thisdoes not rule out their veracity, it simply means that such explanations are arrived at bysuspect means; one may be right for the wrong reasons). Formal linguists wouldprobably counter that they are applying the considerable weight of theory in order toarrive at explanations of current or former states of the language alike. The approachadopted here differs by considering the facts before ascertaining whether and how theymay fit with theory.

This, in turn, does not mean that the book is an attempt at explanation free oftheoretical speculations. One cannot escape the influence of the accumulated think-ing in the field (any field) in conducting investigations and reaching conclusions. Norwould one wish to:

The historical linguist must make use of insights provided by the theory of grammar or, moreprecisely, by the various theories for grammar that have been developed on the synchroniclevel, because he needs these insights as tools to tackle his data . . . A historical linguist whoworks without an explicit formal theory is in danger of interpreting the data in the light of whatthe language later becomes, or in the light of his own necessarily restricted intuitions . . . On theother hand, a historical linguist who bases himself too exclusively on a particular theory maycome to suggest an interpretation of the historical data that can only be called an oversimpli-fication of its complex nature or even worse can lead to the neglect of relevant and by no meansincidental facts. (Fischer 2004: 712–13)

Where Arabic interrogation and negation with /š/ are concerned, formal and func-tional theorizing have both fallen into these snares, by interpreting the data in thelight of what the language has become or in the light of intuitions about how thelanguage now operates, both leading to an oversimplification and neglect of relevantfacts. Even worse, they make assertions about the development of the language or itsmodern state based upon superficial similarities. This work avoids those pitfalls byexamining Arabic interrogation and negation with reflexes of /š/, in those varietieswhere they occur, grounded in an assessment of the facts, as far as those may bedetermined. If any theoretical term may be applied to the orientation adopted here,it would be ‘grammaticalization’, and especially the principal process within thatbody of theorizing, ‘reanalysis’ as it is defined by Campbell and Mixco (2007:165–6):10 ‘a change in which the structure of a linguistic element, usually syntactic

10 Harris and Campbell (1995: 61–96) provide discussion and many examples, clarifying that the change‘does not involve any modification of [the element’s] surface manifestation’ instead affecting its underlyingstructure, seen as including at least its constituency, hierarchical structure, category labels, and grammat-ical relations’ (p. 50).


8 Introduction

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or morphological . . . is assigned a different structure from what it formerly had.’The language of definition leaves out that it is actual speakers of the language whoare doing the assigning, be it as young learners acquiring their native tongue oras adult speakers reanalysing syntactic categories already in use. Formal linguistswould favour the former (van Kemenade 2000), while functionalists would at leastbe willing to consider the latter. To historical linguists, it scarcely matters whoperforms the reanalysis, and indeed, happily both groups can fit into a historicallinguistics scenario (but see Croft 2010, who advocates the latter).

Thus relieved of a need to make a firm commitment to either theoretical perspec-tive,11 but withal remaining within a data-driven orientation, this study shows that adiachronic, historical perspective is necessary to explain adequately how this par-ticular syntactic feature, interrogation and negation with -š, came to be as it is.Within Arabic studies proper, it situates itself in a historical linguistic trend whoseproponents are becoming more vocal in Arabic linguistics—one that claims that thespoken varieties of Arabic must be old, that the evidence for this derives from acomparative framework within and amongst Arabic varieties and in a broadercontext of comparative Semitics, offering itself as a contribution to a growing bodyof work within that trend.

1.3 A guide to the perplexing: chapter summaries

Accordingly, Chapter 2 challenges a reigning paradigm in Arabic studies: that anolder form of Arabic, more or less corresponding to the Arabic of classical writing, isthe ultimate source of the spoken Arabic vernaculars as well as the source ofindividual features within them. Setting the scene by discussing some provocativerecent work indicating that the spoken vernaculars are not directly descended fromwhat is often called ‘Old Arabic’ or ‘Classical Arabic’, appearing some time after themiddle of the 7th century ad, but are themselves quite old, it introduces two themesthat will be contested in the book: the commonly held supposition about thedevelopment of grammatical /š/, which holds that it ultimately derives from one ofthe Classical Arabic words for ‘thing’ šayʾ , and the notion that the progression frompre-positionedmā as a negator to a discontinuous negatormā . . . š, ending in a purelypost-positive -š, finds an analogy in the French ne . . . pas, with the colloquial Frenchtendency to rely upon pas alone and the Arabic tendency to negate with a post-positive -š alone both seen as exhibiting a terminal stage of Jespersen’s cycle.

Chapter 3 begins by demonstrating, with data drawn from an electronic corpus ofmedieval and modern Arabic writing, that no evidence supports the contention thatgrammatical /š/ derived from the word for ‘thing’. From there, it begins to form an

11 For some disquiet with the precepts of grammaticalization as applied to Arabic, see the review ofEsseesy in Wilmsen (2011).


A guide to the perplexing 9

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alternate view, examining the functions of šī as a ‘partitive’ or indefinite determiner, apolar interrogative, and a negator in the Arabic varieties in which it appears,concluding that the origins of grammatical šī probably did not arise directly fromthe word for ‘thing’, and suggesting instead that its beginnings are to be found in itsmodern usage as an indefinite determiner and an interrogative. Here is introducedanother quality of a reflex of šī, as an existential particle, which will be queried moreclosely in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 4 examines the earliest documentation of šī as an indefinite quantifier,interrogative, and negator in historical Arabic writings, finding a few instances in thecolloquial Arabic poetry and proverbs of 13th- and 14th-century Arab Spain, wherethe first documentation of unambiguous indefinite determiners and negators with -šappear. Much of the chapter is devoted to disputing a point with the great scholar ofSpanish Arabic, Federico Corriente, who, along with some of his students, interpretsas a negator an Andalusian Arabic word iš analogous to other dialectal Arabicinterrogatives of the form aš/ayš/ēš/iš. Corriente and his students appear to interprettheir few instances of this peculiar ‘negator’ as a syntactic change in progress in laterAndalusian Arabic, one prematurely brought to a halt by the success of the Recon-quista, after which Arabic went into decline as a spoken language in the IberianPeninsula. A logical conclusion to Corriente’s unique negator in some of its mani-festations (a conclusion that he does not entertain) is that the Andalusian dialects ofArabic, or at least some of them, may actually have passed through Jespersen’s cycleand have reached a terminal stage, in which negation is effected with a post-positive-š alone. On the other hand, viewing the word as having remained as an interrogative,withal sometimes peculiarly configured, leads to a different conclusion altogether.Reinterpreted, Corriente’s negator provides a clue to an interrogative origin ofnegating with reflexes of /š/.

Chapter 5 begins by comparing two of those peculiarly configured interrogativesfrom Andalusian writing with their analogues in 18th- and 19th-century Maltese (alanguage derived from the Arabic spoken in 7th–9th-century North Africa), drawingcorrespondences between those and similar forms in modern Tunisian Arabic, andconcluding that they are actually polar interrogatives, forming yes/no questions.Polar questions posed with a post-positive -š continue to operate in Tunisian Arabicin a manner exactly analogous to the way they had operated in 18th- and 19th-centuryMaltese; the few instances of analogous interrogatives of Andalusi Arabic give reasonto suppose that the same sort of interrogation obtained in some dialects of IberianArabic. Viewing the situation this way permits forming a new perspective onnegating with š, and in the process solves a puzzling problem in Arabic linguistics:the vexed question of copular interrogatives, especially in Egyptian Arabic but also inMoroccan Arabic, which are formed with 3rd person pronouns and are effectivelyinterrogatives posing the question ‘Is it that . . . ?’


10 Introduction

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From there, an argument is brought against the proposition that negating withpost-positive -š alone arose separately as an innovation in the several varieties inwhich it appears, as asserted in some modern studies of the phenomenon. It is arguedthat such assertions fail to adopt a sufficiently comparative diachronic perspective,assigning significance to the inter-dialectal differences between modern spokenPalestinian and Egyptian Arabic or spoken Palestinian and Moroccan Arabic,when, to the contrary, irrespective of such recent differences, the similarities instructure and function point to a common origin, the differences between varietiesarising as mere historical accidents. This is illustrated by data adduced from anexamination of a Druze variety of spoken Arabic of the Syrian H

˙ōrān Plateau,

showing that the features of negation with -š that other researchers claim do notexist in Palestinian varieties of Arabic do exist there, and that they are similar toanalogous features of North African Arabic vernaculars.

Chapter 6 follows the implications of this by querying where interrogation andnegation with reflexes of šī may have arisen, proposing that its origins lie in the pre-Islamic varieties of the southern and western Arabian Peninsula, those labelled‘Yemeni’ by early Arab grammarians and historians. It first shows that an indefinitequalifier analogous to those of Arabic exists in the Modern South Arabian languageMehri, a West Semitic language, where it also exhibits the quality of an existentialparticle, an analogue of which is found in four of the six Modern South Arabianlanguages. The Central Semitic languages, including Arabic, are said to have derivedfrom West Semitic, and some trace of an existential particle, also built upon a reflexof šī, are occasionally attested in some geographically diverse varieties of Arabic,notably Omani, Yemeni, Syrian, Egyptian, and Moroccan. This permits the conclu-sion that these are ancient Western Semitic features, a shared innovation attestedin the Modern South Arabian Languages and those Arabic varieties in which theynow appear.

From there, it reviews historical sources indicating that Arabic speakers from thesouthern Peninsula had enjoyed a significant historical presence in the lands of theFertile Crescent and the Syrian steppes for at least several centuries before the arrivalof Arabic-speaking Muslims in the region and perhaps since as early as the 9thcentury bc. This would mean that Arabic has been spoken in that area for up to 1,400years before the advent of Islam in the 7th century ad, ample time for a southernArabic feature to take root in the vernaculars of the region. This ultimately impingesupon questions of the original home of Arabic, if not that of all the Semitic languages.Two possibilities are considered: that they arose in the Levant with Arabic speakersmigrating southward in early time, and that they arose in the southern ArabianPeninsula, with speakers migrating northward.

Chapter 7 returns to the linguistic history of grammatical šī, arguing for an earlySemitic derivation of the functional reflexes of šī. It draws correspondences between aproposed Proto-Semitic presentative/demonstrative/3rd person pronoun/existential


A guide to the perplexing 11

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particle—also built upon reflexes of /š/—basing the argument on attested corres-pondences between East Semitic Akkadian and surviving forms in West Semiticfound in Modern South Arabian languages, especially Mehri and Arabic. Thisconstitutes evidence for an ancient pedigree for the Arabic dialects interrogatingwith reflexes of šī. At the same time, it gives reason to suppose that the substantivešayʾ ‘thing’ arose from an indefinite determiner, not the other way round. Althoughthis would appear to be an instance of ‘degrammaticalization’, that is, movementfrom a grammatical feature to a substantive lexical word—contrary to the unidirec-tional thesis of grammaticalization theory, which proposes the opposite trend, fromcontent word to grammatical—it happens that one of the few genuine, uncontrover-sial cases of degrammaticalization is the movement from indefinite determiners to aword meaning ‘thing’. Furthermore, it is argued that demonstratives themselves mustbe language primitives, having always been grammatical in form and function, thatthey give rise to other grammatical features, and that grammaticalization theory mustprovide room to accommodate such possibilities. The argument closes by observingthat the change from existential to negator does indeed display a cyclical pattern, butone identified by Croft, not Jespersen.

Chapter 8 finally returns to a full-blown critique of theory, especially minimalistattempts to explain from a synchronic perspective Arabic negation with mā . . . š,arguing that without considering the diachronic sequence by which negation with -šcame about, such explanations go astray. It questions too the predilection of formalapproaches to Arabic for drawing much of their evidence from written Arabic, alanguage that no one speaks as a native tongue. A foundational principle of formalapproaches to linguistics being to account for child acquisition of language, such anapproach is untenable. That aside, even when formal accounts of spoken vernacularsare able to recognize the indefinite determiner, interrogative, and negating functionsof -š, they are unable to explain them adequately.

1.4 A coming to terms

Here it becomes necessary to examine the term ‘western’ itself. The idea that the pre-Islamic dialects of Arabic were divided along an east/west axis was proposed tomodern Arabic studies in 1951 in Rabin’s seminal work Ancient West-Arabian, whichwent so far as to suggest that the eastern and western varieties of pre-Islamic Arabicwere in fact two somewhat mutually unintelligible languages (1951: 2–3). That is notwhat is argued here. It happens that, whereas interrogation with a reflex of /š/ iswidespread in Arabic, found in varieties of Arabic spoken fromUzbekistan in the eastto Morocco in the west, the spoken vernaculars of Arabic negating with -š are largelysituated in the southern Levant and the North African littoral (and, in Egypt, theupper Egyptian varieties too). It is in the sense that these dialects are all in the westernArabophone world that the term ‘western’ is usually meant to apply. In the Arabian


12 Introduction

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Peninsula itself, spoken Yemeni varieties negate with -š, and they too happen to lie inthe southern and western Peninsula. On the other hand, negation with -š is (or was)found in the Arabic of Oman, occupying the south and the east of the Peninsula.Those southern peninsular varieties probably descend from the varieties of pre-Islamic Arabic that the medieval grammarians of the language labelled ‘Yemeni’,by which they meant the Arabic spoken from the southern Hejaz, along the westcoast of the Peninsula, and all through its south and south-eastern regions. In abroader, historical sense, then, the term ‘western’ can apply to those historicalvarieties, too, as well as to pre-Islamic varieties of Arabic spoken in at least thewestern regions of the Fertile Crescent, where some Syrian varieties of Arabiccontinue to negate with -š. In this work, no attempt is made to delineate an ancestralhomeland for the many varieties of Arabic. But it is argued that all varieties retaininga grammatical šī are, in that feature at least, old.

The question of the age of Arabic and its vernaculars in turn obliges a consider-ation of terms, especially when considering ancestral varieties, often referred to as‘proto-’ forms of a language. It is taken as given that Arabic is a Semitic language; inthat sense, an ancestor to all of the Semitic languages is assumed, usually calledProto-Semitic. A Proto-Semitic language or languages must themselves have des-cended from Afro-Asiatic ancestors, so named because of the similarities shared bylanguages spoken in the Horn of Africa, the Nile Valley, and the eastern Mediterra-nean with those of the Arabian Peninsula, the Fertile Crescent, and North Africa. Inthis sense we can speak of a pre-Proto-Semitic, and even pre-Afro-Asiatic, assumingthat Afro-Asiatic languages are also descended from parent stocks. At some point,human languages emerged from non-language, and even in that sense a proto-language can be envisioned. It is not unreasonable to suppose that some fundamentalaspects of language—for example, signalling devices such as demonstratives andpersonal pronouns, which are often developmentally related, and which figure inour discussion of the origins of an interrogative and indefinite determiner šī—mayhave their origins in proto-languages of this pre-language type. It is in that sense,especially, that the concept of proto-language is purely abstract—some hypotheticaloriginal form or forms. The origins of human language are too old, and they have lefttoo few clues, other than their relict ‘living fossils’ in modern languages and attestedwritten forms of at best a few millennia in age, for more to be said about them. Inthat sense, too, hypothetical proto-languages of the fully human language type can beviewed as a combination of all features that can be collected from and sharedcommonly by a language family. No absolute time-frame can be imposed uponsuch concepts; similarly, the relation between hypothesized steps in the descentfrom Proto-Semitic to its daughter languages can only be construed relatively. Inthe end, however, proto-languages and proto-forms must represent varieties thatactually were spoken or could be conceived of as having been spoken. Inherent in thisis the property of variability; languages are not immutable, homogeneous entities,


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and the tendency to variability we witness today must have obtained even in theearliest human languages. This sense of the term should always be kept in mind,especially when we begin to consider proto-Arabic, a form intermediate between aWest Semitic parent and its Central Semitic offspring (themselves hypothetical), ofwhich all attested varieties of Arabic, ancient and modern, are siblings.

Owens (2006: 2, 8) maintains that the object of any historical linguistics is toreconstruct a proto-language and to describe how daughter languages descendedfrom a proto-language. Another way of viewing this is that historical linguisticsattempts to describe how modern languages came to be as they are by attempting tolook backwards to earlier states of the language, eventually (if entirely successful)providing a glimpse of what the proto-language ancestor (or ancestors) must havebeen like. Owens (2005) postulates a pre-diaspora Arabic, by which he meansthe Arabic of the Arabian Peninsula spoken around the time of the large outflow ofMuslim Arabic speakers from the Peninsula into an expansive geographical range fromthe borders of China in the east to the Iberian Peninsula in the west. He conservativelydates the pre-diaspora between 630 and 790 ad, but he also supposes that, ‘a recon-structed pre-diasporic form could turn out to be a proto-Arabic form as well’ (2006: 4).For its part, proto-Arabic should be construed as being older bymillennia than themid-7th century ad, constituting the form or forms of Arabic that began to differentiatethemselves from a Central Semitic stock about or after the time that Central Semiticdifferentiated itself from West Semitic. Just as Owens judiciously advises that pre-diasporic Arabic was not necessarily a unitary variety, neither should proto-Arabic beconceived as having been a single variety. As Owens also observes, we are not at a pointin our research to be able fully to differentiate pre-diasporic Arabic from proto-Arabic,although the immense time-frame alone should suggest that varieties of proto-Arabicdid differentiate into daughter varieties of pre-diaspora Arabic. This work accounts fora series of those differentiations, tracing them as far back as it may be possible to go.

As for those ‘varieties’, the term itself is loaded. In contemplating the variabilitywithin the Arabic of the modern era, the observer is confronted with a bewilderingvariety. When discussing regional variation in spoken Arabic, geopolitical terms suchas ‘Yemeni,’ ‘Egyptian’, or ‘Moroccan’ are often employed, giving the impressionof discrete entities, when dialect continua within and between geographical areas ismore the reality, and the names of political entities wherein particular varieties alongthese continua lie are at best merely shorthand reference points; at worst, theybecome reified entities with some imagined reality of their own. What is more,even within such overarching geopolitical reference points, the number and varietyof spoken forms of Arabic are legion. For example, within the small political entitythat is Lebanon, local folklore identifies forty individual dialects. Yet when we speakof ‘Lebanese Arabic’ we are usually referring to one of the vernaculars of the capitalcity, Beirut, when the most casual observation will reveal that the major cities ofLebanon—Tripoli, Beirut, S

˙aida (Sidon), and S

˙ūr (Tyre)—each exhibits characteristic-


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identifying features in the speech of its inhabitants. The Lebanese recognize these, tosay nothing of the differences in the manner of speech within those metropolitanareas and the differences within and between the inland cities and villages in MountLebanon and the Bekaa Valley; noteworthy examples are the [q] characteristic ofDruze speech, or, in negating itself, the discontinuousʾa . . . š as opposed to the morefamiliar mā . . . š, exemplified in expressions likeʾafīš ‘there isn’t’, orʾabiddīš ‘I don’twant’, of the countrified dialects of the Beirut hinterlands. In all these features andmany more, the dialects of Lebanon are participants in a broader dialectal typeknown as ‘Levantine’, incorporating the Arabic varieties of what is sometimes called‘Greater Syria’, that is, Syria proper, Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon, but also encom-passing Arabic varieties spoken in south-western Turkey.

The variability within and between regions is so great that it is somewhat simplisticto speak of national varieties or even regional varieties. The so-called ‘Levantine’dialects encompass many varieties that are more properly classified as Peninsular orMesopotamian; the spoken vernaculars of the western regions of the modern stateof Syria, for example, exhibit great affinity to the other varieties spoken in the Levantproper, while those in the northern—and especially north-eastern—areas shareaffinities with the Anatolian varieties, peripheral because they now sit across theinternational border between Syria and Turkey. For their parts, the eastern varietiesof the Syrian steppes bear closer affiliation to the spoken vernaculars of Iraq than theydo to those spoken in the Levant proper, certain emblematic features, such as theinterrogative šlōn ‘how/what’, beginning in or near Damascus. Meanwhile, thespoken varieties of Jordan are of at least four types, probably many more, some ofthem decidedly not Levantine in character, and some of them for recent historicalreasons displaying admixtures of varying origins.

The varieties of Arabic spoken in Palestine proper—having been for more thansixty years of Israeli sovereignty somewhat isolated from those spoken in surround-ing political entities, while at the same time coming into close contact with modernspoken varieties of Hebrew—have begun to acquire characteristics peculiar to them-selves. Any restriction of movement between populations—whether posed by polit-ical borders or by physical barriers like rivers, deserts, and mountain ranges—canlead to dialect diversion. Anecdotal reports have remarked upon differences in thespeech between relatives in villages divided for one or two generations by enforcedbarriers between populations in occupied Palestine. Describing more felicitous cir-cumstances, Habib (2011) provides corroborating data from two neighbouring vil-lages in Syria, founded by members of the same family, relational bonds beingreinforced through intermarriage between the two villages, separated by a physicalbarrier no more imposing than a roadway, in which differences in pronunciation incertain vowels and consonants nevertheless mark the local origins of the inhabitants.

This same kind of variability must have obtained in earlier eras. For example, whatis often called ‘Egyptian’ Arabic is an overarching label that properly applies only to



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the Arabics spoken in Cairo and Alexandria and not to all Egyptian varieties(Wilmsen and Woidich 2007). Even there, Egyptians are aware of differencesbetween the varieties now spoken in Cairo and in Alexandria, notable amongstthese is the /n-/ of the 1st person indicative verb of Alexandria, characteristic ofNorth African littoral dialects and documented for Arab Andalusia (Owens 2003).Earlier accounts of the dialects of Cairo show that the Arabic spoken in the city in the19th century and earlier was much closer than it now is to the current dialects ofthe Levant (Blanc 1973; Vrolijk 1998; Woidich 1995; 1997). A catastrophic depletionof the population of Cairo in the 19th century and the city’s subsequent repopulationfrom the countryside (outlined in Woidich 1997) initiated broad changes to theArabic spoken in the city, not simply from contact between the dialects from thecountryside and those of the capital, with long-time city dwellers adopting what hadformerly been rural dialect features, but also from the elites among the urbanpopulation abandoning features of their own dialect that had formerly been commonto both the rural and the urban and (as it happens) also shared between regions of theArabophone world. The emerging dialect came to display what are now seen ascharacteristic Egyptianisms distinguishing the vernacular(s) of Cairo from otherregional varieties.

The difference is between proximal and ultimate explanations. True, at a certainpoint in time—in the case of these recent developments, a known point—the dialectsdiverged and distinguishable features emerged. This is part of a proximal explan-ation. That some dialects may retain features that others have lost is immaterial to anultimate explanation. Crucial to a historical accounting is that remnant forms persistin one dialect or another, in aggregate providing insight into an earlier state of thelanguage. Treating the contemporary differences in dialects as arising from separateorigins is to disregard essential historical depth, obliging researchers to account forsuch differences solely by examining current internal processes, assuming, some-times even acknowledging, but generally ignoring even historically recent develop-ments that the individual dialects may have experienced.

Modern geopolitical identities aside, in surveying the nearly 1,300 years of writingabout Arabic dialects, such as there is, the Arabic varieties called ‘Yemeni’ haveexperienced a particular reification of their own. Medieval Arab writers about Arabictended to relegate to a category that they termed ‘Yemeni’ all varieties of Arabicspoken or originating in the southern Arabian Peninsula, encompassing an areaextending from the southern central coast of the Hejaz in what is now Saudi Arabiainto what is now Yemen proper, all the way to what is now Oman. The dialectvariability within the modern nation-state of Yemen is sufficiently wide that weare safe in assuming a priori that a similar variability prevailed in medieval times, andthat there never was a single Yemeni variety; instead, there were and are Yemenivarieties of Arabic. The same must be true of ‘western’ varieties of Arabic or proto-Arabic as well as the ‘eastern’.


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It must also be true that proto-languages themselves were variable within andamongst groups of their speakers, such that it becomes possible to envision variabilityin Proto-Semitic and continua between early proto-dialects of the Semitic languages(Zaborski 1991; 1995a; 1995b), ultimately leading to what are now generally conceivedas separate languages. Indeed, the observable variability in the modern dialects ofArabic is so great that a dialectologist of modern Semitic languages has observed thatthey constitute a veritable laboratory for observing processes operating in the Semiticlanguages, such that any kind of change proposed as having taken place in theSemitic languages as a whole can be observed in some variety of Arabic (Jastrow2002: 347). This, of course, favours a comparative study of Arabic varieties attemptinga reconstruction of earlier states of the language, wherein traits found in widelydispersed varieties of the language, even if at a remove from each other in space ortime, indicate shared retentions from an earlier ancestor or set of ancestors. At thesame time, the dialectology of Arabic varieties being as complex as it is, it is best tothink of the historical development of individual traits not of entire dialects, eachvariety exhibiting features peculiar to itself owing to a complex interplay of commoninheritance, contact with other varieties, and local developments (Al-Jallad 2006).Sorting all of these out, while beyond the scope of this study, should remain the goalof a complete and mature Arabic dialectology.12

This brings us to the term ‘dialect’ itself. Generally a dialect is conceived as a non-standard variant of a language. In itself, this should not pose any great difficulty,were it not for the hegemonic weight of the written Arabic language on the imagin-ations of its users. So highly revered is this variety of the language that its spokendialects are often regarded as mere degraded forms of this exalted standard, notworthy of study or attention other than for the purposes of ameliorating thepernicious effects of their pervasive presence in Arab life. In that regard, the term‘dialect’ has acquired something of a pejorative meaning, even while no givenequivalent term for a dialect prevails across the many speech communities of thelanguage in the Arab world, with some speakers referring to their natively acquiredlanguage asʿāmmiyya, drawn from the root meaning ‘common’ with its connotationsof vulgarity; dariga, implying both commonality and steps in a graded scale, thevernacular being implicitly lower down the scale; or h

˙aki, ‘a manner of speech’ or,

from the same root, al-luġa al-mah˙kiyya ‘the spoken language’. The term luġa itself is

problematic for its usual collocation with al-luġa al-ʿ arabiyya al-fus˙h˙ā ‘the most

eloquent Arabic language’, referring to the language of the Arabic literary heritage,this sometimes being opposed to lahga, in that respect indicating something associ-ated with speech but not with language in this exalted sense. Even here, the two terms

12 The beginning of a synthesis has been accomplished with the recent compendia of Behnstedt andWoidich: their Arabische Dialektgeographie: Ein Einführung (2005) and their 3-vol. series Wortatlas derarabischen Dialekte (2010–13).



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are unsatisfactory for their confusion in usage dating from the earliest medievalscholarly treatments of Arabic, its practitioners struggling as we all do with coining orotherwise adopting suitable terms with which to describe their subject.

Some modern analytical and pedagogical treatments of the language will use theterm ‘colloquial’ Arabic, to distinguish the various regional spoken varieties from thewritten. Linguistic works often resort to the term ‘variety’ itself, as a neutral way ofreferring to any manner of Arabic usage, thereby levelling the distinctions betweenthe ‘standard’ variety of writing and the many spoken varieties. Some linguistic workshave begun to favour the term ‘vernacular’ Arabic in reference to spoken varieties ofArabic. In many respects this is the preferable term, for its technical meaning as ‘thevariety of language learned in the domestic setting as one is growing up; the mosttypical variety one speaks when not monitoring speech and not otherwise attemptingto adapt to others’ (Campbell and Mixco 2007: 218). This should after all be the typeof language with which linguists concern themselves most. At the same time, thegeneral meaning of the word also applies nicely, derived from the Latin root meaning‘native’, indicating the use of a language or dialect indigenous to a region or countryrather than a literary, cultured, or foreign language. So too do its other denotationshaving to do with non-standard varieties and relating to the normal spoken forms ofa language. Its meanings can apply to written forms as well, all the way fromvernacular influence on writing, as in, say, the representation of dialogue in novelsand screenplays; to the use of colloquialisms in more formal writing; to the influenceof vernacular norms on formal writing, in such things as word choice or sentencestructure; to the full-blown accommodation of a vernacular language to formalsettings, less seen in the Arab world than, say, in the adoption by the Roman Churchof vernacular European languages in the celebration of the Mass, but, in the contextof Arabic linguistics and dialectology, certainly to be seen in Malta, where a variety ofvernacular Arabic has become the official language of the country, possessing astandard and dialects, and has been used as a literary language since at least the15th century (Owens 2010), including translations of the Bible.

Nevertheless, the term ‘dialect’ also applies to writing in its broadest meaning of aregional variety of language distinguished by features of vocabulary, grammar, andpronunciation from other regional varieties, all of which constitute a language—as inthe literary dialects of ancient Greek, such as certain types of poetry in the Doricdialect, philosophy and drama in Attic, or historical prose in Ionic. Arabic writing,even or perhaps especially that of the modern day, exhibits regionalisms in vocabulary,grammar, and pronunciation; more subtly, it can reflect influences of the vernacularsubstrate over which it is superposed (Wilmsen 2010a and references). In that regard, amore explicitly linguistic definition also holds, as ‘any regional or social variety of asingle language that is mutually intelligible with other dialects of the same language andthat differs in some definable features from other varieties of that language’ (CampbellandMixco 2007: 42). Such a broad definition can accommodate the spoken vernaculars


18 Introduction

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of Arabic and the regional varieties of the Arabic of writing, which do exist and arecertainly mutually intelligible, even while they can be shown to differ in definablefeatures. Finally, in historical context, the term can be applied to different varieties of alanguage or a proto-language before they became identifiable languages in their ownrights. Researchers do indeed speak of the dialects of Semitic (Weninger et al. 2011), andthe concept is worth preserving, as it is likely that proto-languages exhibited variabilityamongst their dialects as well (Zaborski 1991). At one point in time, the separatelanguages within the Semitic family were probably more closely related to each othersuch that they must have originated as dialects.

No happy solution to this terminological conundrum has won consensus, any morethan has an acceptable equivalent for the native conception of al-luġa al-ʿ arabiyyaal-fus

˙h˙ā, or simply al-fus

˙h˙ā.13 Accordingly, with the exception of the word ‘colloquial’,

I shall be using all these terms with reference to natively spoken varieties of Arabic,generally relegating the term ‘dialect’ to discussions of and references to broad regionswherein certain clusters of related traits justify reference to dialect areas and localvarieties within those areas, to historical varieties known or thought to have prevailedin certain geographical regions, or to posited sub-varieties of early Semitic languages orArabic itself. It is hoped that readers will usually be able to decipher the implications ofthese terms from context, and their indulgence and forgiveness for the inevitableoverlap in the meaning of terms is apologetically solicited.

1.5 A repayment of debts

As a final word before we begin, I am obliged by pleasant duty to express my thanksto several colleagues who have contributed their insights and encouragement duringvarious stages of this work, lending their expertise where mine had been lacking.First and foremost is Manfred Woidich, late of the University of Amsterdam, whoearly provided me with his perspectives on negation in Arabic, much of it arising outof his researching, teaching, and thinking about Arabic negation for decades, begin-ning with his seminal dissertation on the subject in Egyptian Arabic, and who steeredme towards relevant writings on the subject, many quite rightly being of his ownauthorship. I much appreciate Janet Watson of the University of Leeds for hersporadic replies to some of my queries about Yemeni Arabic and the ModernSouth Arabian language Mehri while she was conducting fieldwork in Oman, takingthe time to answer her mail whenever she was able to access it; I have not attendedany of her Mehri workshops, but I hope to be able to do henceforward. AdamUssishkin, of the University of Arizona, lent me his knowledge and experiencewith Maltese language, linguistics, and linguists at a critical point in my own struggle

13 See Owens’ (2005: 272–5) discussion of the term ‘dialect’, where he outlines four separate meanings asthey apply to Arabic.


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to understand some of the trends in the language. For insights into the closely relatedTunisian Arabic, I am especially appreciative and enormously grateful to KarenMcNeil, an Arabic-English reviewer on a new bilingual dictionary from OxfordUniversity Press, for the work she and her husband, Miled Faiza of Brown University,have put into what she calls a ‘strange hobby’, constructing a searchable corpus ofwritten representations of spoken Tunisian Arabic, drawn mostly from dramaticscripts and screenplays and web fora in which Tunisian commentators dominate;utilizing both the corpus itself and engaging in an ongoing correspondence with herhas helped to clarify my thinking about the place of Tunisian Arabic in the operationof /š/ as a grammatical marker in the history of the Arabic dialects. I owe anenormous debt to Na’ama Pat-El of the University of Texas at Austin, while shetoo was in the middle of research leave, for sharing with me some of her most recentthoughts about the development of the Arabic dialects, and especially for reading thechapter on comparative Semitics and correcting some of my grosser errors inreasoning and reconstruction. To Professor Federico Corriente of Zaragoza Univer-sity, whose work has always informed my own, and whom I often cite, I owe both adebt of gratitude and an apology. My gratitude is for his prodigious work in the fieldof Andalusi Arabic studies, practically inventing it single-handedly as a discipline; forhis equally influential work in Arabic linguistics and dialectology as a whole; and forhis corresponding with me about a particular point of interpretation of negation andinterrogation in Andalusi Arabic. My apology to him is for continuing to disagreewith him on that particular point alone. So, too, do I greatly appreciate ErnestMcCarus, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, a friend and a mentor,for the long hours he spent sitting with me as the work of constructing the argumentsin this book was drawing to a close, questioning closely all its aspects and implica-tions, and, not for the first time, pronouncing himself pleased with my work. I amlikewise indebted to Najma Al Zidjaly of the Department of English Language andLiterature at Sultan Qaboos University for her words of encouragement throughoutthe work of producing the book, while she too was on research leave in thedepartment of linguistics at Georgetown University; for providing me her insightsinto the functioning of aspects of grammatical šī in the spoken Arabic of Muscat; andfor coaching me through the process of approaching the Sultan Qaboos CulturalCenter for support in a new phase of my work in Arabic dialectology. Finally I mustacknowledge my debt to the reviewers of this work in manuscript; in the true spirit ofthe tradition of peer review, their comments have made this a much better work.

Altogether, the work has benefited immensely from the insights that all of thesefriends and colleagues have offered as well as from a reliance upon their work andthat of innumerable others labouring in the field of Arabic dialectology. In repayingmy debt to them, I in no way lade any of them with the responsibility for theconclusions I have reached or for any frailties in argument or analysis; any lapsesin judgement or interpretation are very much my own.


20 Introduction

Arabic Indefinites, Interrogatives, and Negators: A Linguistic History of Western Dialects

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