Bump for a couple upcoming talk summaries that Al Jallad just posted. The first is especially interesting because it goes right into the central Qur'anic studies issue of what language the base Qur'anic rasm reflects and how closely related/influenced by Aramaic it was -- all within a disciplined linguistic framework that considers the pre-Islamic evidence across the region. Key phrase: "the dialect upon which Arabic orthography is based."
https://www.academia.edu/10359714/2015_Arabic-Aramaic_language_contact_in_the_pre-Islamic_period_a_view_from_documentary_sources"The Petra Papryi stand as one of the most important witnesses to the vernacular Arabic of the pre-Islamic period. These documents attest over 100 Arabic personal names, toponyms, and oikonyms in Greek transcription. In addition to the Arabic, one also finds several Aramaic, both western and eastern, lexical items and a few isolated relics from an older Canaanite substratum. The final volume of the series is now being prepared, and one of its key documents, Inv. 98, contains a wealth of new evidence on the linguistic situation in Petra and its surrounding areas.
The primary concern of this talk is not the Arabic of these documents in isolation, but rather its interaction with Aramaic. The interchange between the two languages in the papyri points towards a situation of bilingualism. Taking the Petra Papyri as a starting point, we will examine the extensive interaction between Arabic and Aramaic in the pre-Islamic period based on documentary materials - monumental inscriptions, graffiti, and papyri - from the northern Hijaz and the southern Levant. Our conclusions show that Arabic-Aramaic contact stretched back centuries before the spread of Christianity in Arabia, and can explain several characteristic features of early sedentary forms of Arabic, such as the dialect upon which Arabic orthography is based. Conversely, contact with Arabic may also explain some characteristic features of western Aramaic."
https://www.academia.edu/10359682/2015_Tracing_the_history_of_the_Arabic_definite_articles_a_new_perspective_from_Old_pre-Islamic_Arabic"The goal of this talk is to demonstrate how pre-Islamic documentary sources can change our view of the history and development of Arabic. I focus on one of the most iconic features of the language, the definite article /ʾal/-. This form of the article—with its various patterns of assimilation—is found in nearly all the modern dialects of Arabic, Classical Arabic, and the language of the Qur’an. While the Arab Grammarians documented other forms of the definite article, namely, /am/ and /an/, both of which are encountered in some Yemeni dialects today, the comparative method would suggest that such marginal forms are secondary. Consequently, the reconstruction of /ʾal/ to Proto-Arabic would seem uncontroversial. The increase in the availability of epigraphic sources from the pre-Islamic period, and advances in their interpretation, however, challenges this view. I will present various pieces of Old Arabic evidence from Syria and North Arabia which suggests that the earliest stages of Arabic did not have a definite article at all. I hypothesize that the pattern of overtly marking definiteness spread to Arabic through contact with Northwest Semitic languages. This scenario will explain not only the variety of definite article forms that we encounter in the epigraphic record, but also the unique distribution of the article vis-à-vis nunation—the article does not occur with nunation in the singular and broken plurals but does in the dual and sound plurals. I conclude with a discussion on how the addition of documentary sources to the study of Arabic’s early linguistic history constitutes a paradigm shift in the way we conceive of Old Arabic and the developmental trajectories of later forms of the language. "
Topic: Pre-Islamic Levantine Arabic and the Qur'an