Jonathan Owens
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199290826
- eISBN:
- 9780191710469
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199290826.001.0001
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
A widespread interpretation of the history of Arabic is that of Old Arabic, roughly Classical Arabic of the 9th and 10th centuries, developing into the contemporary Neo-Arabic dialects. This ...
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A widespread interpretation of the history of Arabic is that of Old Arabic, roughly Classical Arabic of the 9th and 10th centuries, developing into the contemporary Neo-Arabic dialects. This development involved a simplification of grammar and a spread of analytic as opposed to synthetic structures. This idea, first propounded in 1854, constitutes interpretations of Arabic language history until today. This book takes a very different interpretive perspective. Arguing that the historical comparative method has never been systematically applied to explain the development of contemporary spoken Arabic (the dialects), it is shown through a number of case studies that in many respects contemporary spoken Arabic has moved relatively little from a reconstructed ‘proto-Arabic’. This book, providing major methodological innovation as far as Arabic historical linguistics goes, aims to incorporate wide-ranging comparative data from the modern dialects, together with a detailed reading of the classical sources, in particular the works of the grammatical tradition and the Koranic variants. It is shown that many presumed ‘innovations’ in the modern dialects are, in fact, well-attested in detail in the classical descriptions. It is suggested that the results will require a re-thinking of Semitic historical linguistics, and points to the need for a broader Sociolinguistic history of the Arabic language.Less
A widespread interpretation of the history of Arabic is that of Old Arabic, roughly Classical Arabic of the 9th and 10th centuries, developing into the contemporary Neo-Arabic dialects. This development involved a simplification of grammar and a spread of analytic as opposed to synthetic structures. This idea, first propounded in 1854, constitutes interpretations of Arabic language history until today. This book takes a very different interpretive perspective. Arguing that the historical comparative method has never been systematically applied to explain the development of contemporary spoken Arabic (the dialects), it is shown through a number of case studies that in many respects contemporary spoken Arabic has moved relatively little from a reconstructed ‘proto-Arabic’. This book, providing major methodological innovation as far as Arabic historical linguistics goes, aims to incorporate wide-ranging comparative data from the modern dialects, together with a detailed reading of the classical sources, in particular the works of the grammatical tradition and the Koranic variants. It is shown that many presumed ‘innovations’ in the modern dialects are, in fact, well-attested in detail in the classical descriptions. It is suggested that the results will require a re-thinking of Semitic historical linguistics, and points to the need for a broader Sociolinguistic history of the Arabic language.
