📄 Again on the ‘Yemenite Connection’ of Andalusi Arabic and Other Western Arabic Dialects

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{corriente2026again,
  title = {{Again on the ‘Yemenite Connection’ of Andalusi Arabic and Other Western Arabic Dialects}},
  author = {Corriente, Federico},
  booktitle = {Folia Orientalia 51},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/6851}
}

References

4 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Certain similarities between the Yemenite and Western dialects of Neo-Arabic have been noticed and reported since E. Wagner’s pioneering article in the past sixties, 1 and again mentioned with particular attention to the case of Andalusi Arabic 2 in some paragraphs of our articles and books on this subject, in a successive series of allusions, as follows in chronological order: 1977 (A grammatical sketch of the Spanish-Arabic dialect bundle, Madrid, Instituto Hispano-Árabe de Cultura), p. 28, fn. 15: “The possibility of identifying tafxīm-dialects in the Western areas of the Iberian Peninsula should be further investigated in the light of those peculiarities of Portuguese place names and loanwords”, concerning cases in which the allophones of /u/ in velar contours “Der Jemen als Vermittler äthiopischen Sprachgutes nach Nordwestafrika”, in Die Sprache 12 (1966) 252/279. 2 Henceforth AA. could sometimes penetrate the realm of /a/, … like >qarašiyya< “quality of belonging to Quryš”, Old Portuguese alcanavy “made out of hemp” < /al-qunnabí/, Spanish rabazuz < /rúbb al-sús/; p. 46, fn. 58 (about lateral / ḍ /): “This was most likely a South Arabian feature”; p. 50: “The Yemenites brought along their characteristic … gīm. 1989 (“South Arabian features in Andalusi Arabic”, in Studia linguistica et orientalia memoriae Haim Blanc dedicata (Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1989), 94-103, esp. p. 94, fn. 1: reference to the massive presence of Yemenites amidst the Muslim conquerors of North Africa in J. Abu Nasr, A History of the Maghrib; p. 101: “geminated imperfectives metanalyzed as Form II verbs … this is also the most likely origin of such AA anomalous forms as ... nihammí … çayáht .. nixehéd …, etc.”. 1992 (Árabe andalusí y lenguas romances, Madrid, MAPFRE, 1992), p. 27: “ El aprendizaje del nordarábigo por los qaḥṭāníes … no pudo operarse sin un cierto grado de interferencia …”; p. 31: “dialectos … utilizados por árabes de procedencia siria o yemení”; p. 33: “interferencia sudarábiga … ingredientes yemeníes … sólo superficialmente nordarabizados en sus hablas … yemenismos del andalusí”; p. 22: “dialectos prehilalianos … sin perjuicio de ciertas afinidades con todos los dialectos de interferencia sudarábiga; p. 50 (about lateral /ḍ/): “parece lógico conectar este hecho con grupos de estirpe sudarábiga”; p. 53: /j/ debió ser pronunciada por todos los yemeníes como /g/.” 1994 (“Newest data on Andalusi Arabic”, in Actas del Congreso Internacional sobre interferencias lingüísticas arabo-romances y paralelos extra-iberos (Zaragoza 1994) 41-46, esp. p. 42: “… the acceptance in AA of the diphthong /iw/ ... an aberrant dissimilatory sequence /yw/ in diminutives … I am inclined to attribute these two symmetrical phenomena to a South-Arabian substract.” 1996 (Introducción a la gramática comparada del semítico meridional, Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), p. 22, fn. 4 (from p. 21): “Algunos dialectos del neoárabe bajo influencia sudarábiga mantienen /g/”; p. 56, fn. 2 (dealing with {nv-} as mark of the 1st.sg. persons of imperfectives: “analogía criolla, probablemente de origen sudarábigo, desarrollada en Egipto y desde allí propagada a Occidente, pero luego eliminada de su zona norte por influencia oriental”; p. 55, fn. 5 (again on geminate imperfectives): “buen número de dobletes de verbos con tema sencillo o geminado en neoárabe sin real diferencia de significado podría ser el resultado de una distinción modal del tipo etiópico … quizás por sustrato sudarábigo, v.gr., /mu῾aqqibāt/ ‘ángeles guardianes’”. 2004 (“Geminate imperfectives in Arabic masked as intensive stems of the verb”, in Estudios de dialectología norteafricana y andalusí 8 (2004) [2006, Homenaje a P. Behnstedt] 33-57), pp. 33/34: “As part of an overall theory of the impact of South Arabian on North Arabian as a whole, and most particularly on Western Arabic … it is reasonable to surmise that … geminated imperfectives were metanalyzed as form II verbs.” 2005 (“On the degree of kinship between Andalusi Arabic and Maltese”, in Folia Orientalia (Cracow) 41 (2005) 1-14), p. 36: “the Iberian Peninsula, where tribesmen of Yemenite descent were a majority among the initial settlers …”. 2008 (“Árabe andalusí”, in Manual de dialectología neoárabe, ed. F. Corriente & Ángeles Vicente, Zaragoza, Instituto de Estudios Islámicos y del Oriente Próximo, 353-378), p. 355, fn. 5: “elementos de origen sudarábigo que se incorporaron al mundo islámico y fueron gradualmente sustituyendo sus antiguos dialectos por el nordarábigo, en soluciones más o menos eclécticas e interferidas por su sustrato, que tuvieron importantes consecuencias en la génesis del neo-árabe occidental particularmente”; p. 357, fn. 8: “sustrato ‘yemení’ de los dialectos occidentales”. 2010 (“Arabic dialects before and after Classical Arabic”, 3 in The Arabic language across the ages, ed. by J.P. Monferrer-Sala & Nader Al Jallad, Wiesbaden, Reichert), p. 17-18: “a bundle of isoglosses pointing to linguistic consequences of that proven South Arabian ancestry … preservation of lateral phonemes, occlusive gīm, frequency of the broken plural template {a12ā3}, imperfective geminated without a visible semantic reason and final use of the conjunction kamā…”. 2010 (“Imālah and other phonemic and morphological features of subdialectal Andalusi Arabic”, in Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 37 (2010) 265-273), p. 268: “Those of South Arabian stock appear to have been predominant in the entire realm of the Islamicized West …”; p 269: “The dialects spoken by the Yemenites, who appear to have been a majority in that first wave”; pp. 270-72, survey of Yemenite phonemic and morphological features, 2011 (“The Emergence of Western Arabic: a Likely Consequence of Creolization”, in Modern Trends in Arabic dialectology, ed. by M. Embarki and M. Ennaji, Trenton, The Red Sea Press), p. 41-42: “In the course of our research on Andalusi and other Western Arabic dialects, we have come across some features, like stress patterns, unusual realization of some phonemes (e.g., lateral /ḍ/, perhaps also /s l /, obstruent gīm, vocalization with /a/ of every prosthetic alif, including hat of the definite article, etc.), morphological oddities (e.g., the proliferation that {a12ā3} 4 at the expense of other broken plural patterns, strong conjugation of some weak verbs, peculiar array of modifying prefixes in the imperfective, etc.), and lexical items, which were characteristic of Yemenite Henceforth Cl.Ar. We herewith correct the frequent pesky printing mistakes affecting several important diacritics in that publication, to the point of making its reading a difficult task. dialects and Epigraphic or Modern South Arabian, even Ethiopic, the notorious offshoot of South Arabian”, and 2013 (A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Andalusi Arabic, Leiden – Boston, 2013), p. x: “the diverse backgrounds of the tribesmen integrated in the Arab armies and settlements… some of Southern, some of Northern Arabian stock”; p. 3, fn. 20: “the initially prevailing majority of ‘Yemenites’ … gradually faded away” ; p. 8: “the aforementioned partial South Arabian ancestry of this dialect bundle”; p. 11: “On account of its partially ‘Yemenite’ ancestry, AA shared the trend to interchange /b/ and /m/, characteristic of Epigraphic South Arabian and still common in Modern Yemenite dialects”; p. 23: “the so-called ‘Yemenites’ … still had in their idiolects the old /ḍ/ …, a lateralized velarized voiced alveolar stop”; p. 27: “some ‘Yemenite’ invaders had also preserved a lateral /s/ … brought along their characteristic non/affricate realization of ǧīm”. Summing up, by putting together certain historical demographical evidence, like the rate of Yemenite vs. non-Yemenite Arabs, which has been several times favorable to the former ones since old and down to our days, with widespread and numerically significant linguistic witnesses of survival of South Arabian features in Western Neo-Arabic, we have reached the conclusion that this multifarious but rather compact bundle of dialects originated, first, in situ, as a consequence of strong creolization of North Arabian dialects. 5 Nothing else could be expected, when Yemenites transferred their linguistic allegiance to them from the South Arabian languages they had formerly spoken, as a consequence of the ruin of their states some decades before Islam which, besides, did away with any separating boundaries between the two branches of the Arabian race. Thereafter, that process could only continue when the strong and densely populated early Islamic settlement of their tribes in Egypt had a chance to standardize and de-creolize those creolized North Arabian dialects, which allowed them relatively easy communication with other Arabs of purer North Arabian stock, while keeping a sufficient number of peculiar features, whether preserved from their former Qaḥṭānian languages or innovated along the creolization process, to make them feel at home with their new speech forms. Having surveyed those linguistic witnesses of surviving South Arabian features in diverse Western Neo-Arabic dialects, especially in AA, with the support of a certain number of sources of Epigraphic South Arabian and occasionally Ethiopic, as well as Modern Yemenite dialects, we have deemed it appropriate to increase the number of traits shared with the latter by gleaning Among which, we are not including the Himyarite language, very aptly described by Anna. G. Belova, Xim’jaritskij jazyk, Moscow, Vostočnaja Literatura, 1996, because this appears to have rather been a Mischsprache, although also answering to the same need of communication between both branches of Arabs. Or, as the author puts it (p. 175), “a mediator in the transmission of the oldest South Arabian substract to North Arabian dialects and Cl.Ar.”. further information in P. Behnstedt’s excellent Die nordjemenitischen Dialekte. Teil 2: Glossar, Wiesbaden, Reichert, 1992-2006, concerning a) Phonemics: 1) Initial prosthetic /a/ instead of /i/: aban “Sohn” (p. 5), a/ist “Arsch” (p. 19, quite common in AA, with a velarized variant ásṭ), aṯnīn “zwei” (p. 155), aṯnatēn ”zwei” (p. 156); cf. Corriente 1977:59, fn. 84: “As the result of the decay of initial hamz in open juncture, phonemically truncated words were produced (with the shape /#KKv/) and immediately mended with prosthetic or epenthetic vowels … SpAr vocalized with /a/ in most such cases, as in the imperatives and perfectives of the derived measures, in words like aban “son”, and the article …”. 6 2) Loss of the coda in the diphthongs /aw/ and /ay/: bā῾ w-šireh “Handel” (lit. “selling and buying”, p. 126), 7 and aḥīn “wann” (p. 12, < ay ḥīn ”what time?”); cf. las < laysa “there is not” and zaǧ < zawǧ “two” in AA, see Corriente 1977:30, fn. 23 and Corriente 2013:43. 8 3) Spontaneous diphthongization of /ū/ in /aw/, e.g., ṯūmah and ṯawmah “Knoblauch” (p. 159); cf. Corriente 1977:29, which reports that same one and other items. 4) Lability of /w/ and /y/, e.g., ῾awš “Brot” (p. 878), vs. ῾ayš (p. 884); cf. Corriente 2013:14. 5) Substitution of /b/ for /m/: bismak? “Wie heißt du?” (lit. “what is your name”, for Cl.Ar. mā smuk?, p. 23), bitna? “wann?” (for Cl.Ar. matà, 6 It stands to reason that this /a/ vocalization, being characteristic of Ethiopic, must have been the rule in Epigraphic South Arabian too, although its strictly consonantal script does not allow us to confirm it. Concerning a/uḫt “sister” in these Yemenite materials, the optional extension of that rule to an item beginning with /u/ in Old Arabic is remarkable, but this word is known to have been peculiar within Semitic, where it usually does not exhibit any vocalic alternation with regard to its masculine aḫ, but for Ethiopic ǝḫǝt and its Neo-Ethiopic cognates, possibly reflecting a Pan-South Semitic *uḫut, with vocalic harmonization and traces of preservation of the radical /w/. On the other hand, and for the masculine, Mehri ġā and Soqotri ’a῾ha match the Old Arabic dialects exhibiting a standardized aḫā, as mentioned below (morphological isoglosses, nº 4); incidentally, that decay of the first syllable is again an isogloss connecting the Yemenite pl. ḫawāt with AA (a) ḫawát and Moroccan ḫwātāt or ḫtōt, even the sg. of “brother” ḫo/a, with an expectable feminine oḥt, again admitting the variants ḫǝ/ot. 7 There is one similar instance in Classical Arabic tārīḫ “history” for expectable *tawrīḫ, an obvious South-Arabianism, which many prefer to pronounce as ta’rīḫ, without an artificial, but rather convenient semantic differentiation from “dating”. It is noteworthy, on the other hand, and possibly attributable to the diverse geographical context, that Behnstedt does not register the similar cases of ῾ān “eye”, zān ”beautiful” and kât “such and such”, which were mentioned by S.D.F. Goitein in Jemenica. Sprichwörter und Redensarten aus Zentral-Jemen mit zahlreichen Sach- und Worterläuterungen, Leipzig, 1934, xvii. 8 The ultimate reason for both phonetic evolutions seems to have been a reaction against the development of a five-vowel phonemic system including /ē/ and /ō/ as a result of the phenomena of imālah and tafḫīm (see Corriente 1977:22-26). Other Semitic languages did accept that trend, strongly rejected by most old and new Arabic dialects, as was apparently also the case of AA. p. 59), bardaq/gūš “Majoran” (p. 73), baq/gdanūs “Petersilie” (p. 97), bakān “Platz” (p. 103), bumbar “großes Bett” (< Cl.Ar. minbar, p. 112); cf. Corriente 1977:33-34. 6) Assimilation of /n/ to a following /t/: ǝttáh “du m.”, ǝttīy “du f.” ǝttūw “ihr pl.m.” ǝttinneh “ihr pl.f.” (for Cl.Ar. anta, anti, antum, antunna, p. 6), bitt “Mädchen; Töchter” (p. 57). In other instances, the inherent articulatory weakness of this phoneme may cause its spontaneous decay: muxṛah “Nase” (for Cl.Ar. munxur, p. 1147), cf. Corriente 1977:41. 7) Occasional cases of loss of the interdental feature of /ṯ/: lat/ṯam “jmdm. die Sicht versperren” (p. 1104), altag “lispeln” (< Cl.Ar. {lṯġ}): cf. Corriente 1977:44. As for /ḏ/ > /l/ in ’ilā “wenn”, exactly like in Mor., this is not the case in AA most of the time, but in an instance like >ilà lam< “if not” in the Vocabulista in arabico, and there are other cases of /d/ > /l/ in some examples reported in Corriente 2013:16. 9 8) Occasional substitution of /s/ for /š/: fasil “schlecht” (p. 942, < Cl.Ar. {fšl}), comparable to cases in AA like the hesitations mentioned in Corriente 2013:25-26, possibly triggered by the slightly palatalized articulation of Northern Hispanic /ś/, apparently reaching most of the country in older days, as well as to cases in which a likely still lateral rather than palatalized Arabic /š/ has been reflected as a simple sibilant in old Romance loanwords, like Old Portuguese serife and alvíçara (< AA šaríf “nobleman” and bíšra “good news” respectively): cf. Corriente 2013:27. 9) An abnormal reflex /ḥ/ of /ḫ/, e.g., ḥuṣmah “Prozeßfall” (p. 261, < Cl.Ar. {ḫṣm}), ḥaṭīb (p. 265, < Cl.Ar. {ḫṭb}), and ḥāṭam “Mund” (p. 265, < Cl.Ar. {ḫṭm}), which is, however, reverted in cases like ḫāḫām “Rabbier” (p. 314, < Cl.Ar. {ḥḫm}), ḫālyah “schönes Mädchen” (p. 342, < Cl.Ar. {ḥlw}), and ḫasīr “Bast” (p. 1372, < Cl.Ar. {ḥṣr}): cf. Corriente 1977:57 and 2013:33 about some substandard cases, not all of them sure, of /ḥ/ > /ḫ/, comparable to similar instances in Epigraphic South Arabian. 10 10) An abnormal reflex /É/ of /῾/, e.g., siṭī yisṭā “können” (p. 557, < Cl.Ar. {ṭw῾}): cf. Corriente 1977:56. 11) Abnormal reflexes of /ġ/, like /É/, e.g., buġā yabā “wollen” (p. 6, < Cl.Ar. {bġy}), /’/, e.g., ’arbiyah “West-“ and ma’rib “Westen” (p. 16, < Cl.Ar. 9 However, the case of >maylaq< ¨touchstone¨ mentioned in our works, down to Corriente 2013:22, as a reflex of Cl.Ar. mīḏaq, has turned out to be a misapprehension, as its true etymon appears to be Pahlavi mālag. 10 After G. Bauer, Jazyk južnoaravijskoj pis’mennosti, Moscow 1968:37, without actual examples, which we mentioned in Corriente 1989:98. An additional and rather complex case would be that of suxbī, pl. sixbn “Nisse”, from Cl.Ar. ṣu’āb pl. ṣi’bān, with de-velarization of /ṣ/, substitution of /ḥ/ for /’/, and finally of /ḫ/ for /ḥ/; however, on semantic grounds, this derivation seems preferable to that suggested by our very knowledgeable colleague Behnstedt in p. 542. {ġrb}), ’arraz “einsinken” (p. 19, < Cl.Ar. {ġrz}), ’assal “waschen” (p. 23, < Cl.Ar. {ġsl}), ’anam “Ziegen” (p. 44, < Cl.Ar {ġnm}), la’wah “Dialekt” (p. 1100, < Cl.Ar. {lġw}), and ‘āb “abwesend sein” (p. 50, < Cl.Ar. {ġyb}). This phenomenon appears to be the aftermath of cases in which /ġ/ > /῾/, characteristic of Epigraphic South Arabian, as well as of AA: cf. Corriente 1977:55-56. 12) Hesitation between /’/ and /῾/, e.g., bada῾ “beginnen” (p. 66, < Cl.Ar. {bd’}), but ’abad “anbeten” (p. 4, < Cl.Ar. {῾bd}), ‘ijam “stumm” (p. 11, < Cl.Ar. {῾ǧm}), ‘ajan “Teig kneten” (p. 11, < Cl.Ar. {῾ǧn}), ta’ābal “sich gegenseitig helfen” (p. 4, < Cl.Ar. {῾ml}, with additional /m/ > /b/), t’addam “verschwinden” (p. 15, < Cl.Ar. {῾dm}), mit’iddi “aussergewöhnlich” (p. 16, < Cl.Ar. {῾dw}): cf. Corriente 1977:56 and 60. 13) Abnormal reflexes as /’/ of /h/, e.g. ’āḏa “dieser” (p. 16, < Cl.Ar. hāḏā), 11 ’irri “große Wildkatze” (p. 18, < Cl.Ar. {hrr}), aštī yištī “wollen” (p. 620, < Cl.Ar. {šhw}): cf. Corriente 1977:57-58. 14) Abnormal or spontaneous cases of de-velarization or de-uvularization, like /ṣ/ > /s/, e.g., ’absar “sehen” (p. 134, < Cl.Ar. {bṣr}), siḥābī “Gespenst” (p. 540, < Cl.Ar. {ṣḥb}), sadīrah “Leitkamel” (p. 546, < Cl.Ar. {ṣdr}), /ṭ/ > /t/, e.g., ratn “Kauderwelsch” (p. 430, < Cl.Ar. {rṭn}), and /q/ > /k/, e.g. ṭarēku “Weg” (p. 773, < Cl.Ar. {ṭrq}): cf. Corriente 1977:50, 40 and 54. 15) Some rather abnormal assimilations, like /ṣ’/ > /ṣṣ/, in ḥaṣ’ah pl. ḥuṣūṣ “Steinchen” (p. 260, which gives away a sg. *ḥaṣṣah, < Cl.Ar. {ḥṣw}), and {ǧls} >{ǧss}, e.g., yijiss “he sits” and ǧiss “sit dwn”, curiously reminiscent of the rule /C’v > CCv/ in AA (cf. Corriente 1977:58) and the peculiar shape of the imperfective of the same verb in this dialect, namely, /nallás/ (ibid. 68, fn. 97). find
2. As for morphological oddities shared by AA and the Yemenite dialects described by Behnstedt, we must point to the following: 1) The 1 st . person independent pronouns can exhibit the shapes ’anī for the sg. with strong imālah (p. 38) and ’aḥna and close variants for the pl. (p. 12), with a characteristic initial /a/, instead of /i/, both features in contrast respectively with Cl.Ar. and most Neo-Arabic dialects: cf. Corriente 1977:97. The latter feature is also characteristic of the definite article /al+/ (p. 30, cf. Corriente 1977:85), even at times when preceded by the prepositions /bi+/ and / li+/, e.g., balbayt “im Haus” (p. 55) and bal-῾ašī “abends”, lam-ḥimreh “für die Esel” (p. 1099), but not regularly as in AA. As expectable, the relative ‘alī or allī, ‘aḏī, etc. (pp. 18 and 30) often follows the vocalization of the article it contains, like its AA counterpart, after Corriente 1997:98. 2) The demonstrative pronoun for the near deixis exhibits in Neo-Arabic dialects a clear isogloss opposing those merely using de Old Pan-Semitic 11 Whence aḏuwwah “da ist er!” < Cl.Ar. hāḏā huwa hū, also present in AA awwaḏá + pronominal suffixes, with a different word-order. deictic element /ḏā~ī/ (masc. fem., closely coinciding with the situation in Epigraphic South-Arabian and Ethiopic, allowed but infrequent in Cl.Ar.), in contrast with others in which that element requires an additional prefix {hā+} : as can be seen in Fischer & Jastrow 1980:82-83, the first type is characteristic of Yemenite-influenced areas, such as Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, to which we could add AA (optionally) and Maltese, while proper Eastern dialects, including those of Iraq and Anatolia (ibid., p. 150, also Central Asia, according to Zaborski’s contribution in Corriente & Vicente, 2008:418) only know the extended form, with not too many and easily explainable exceptions such as the first form in Mecca, half-way between Yemen and Egypt, and the second one in Tunisia, where other occasional Eastern features are known, exactly like in neighbouring Malta. It is remarkable that the picture offered for Yemenite dialects by Jastrow in his contribution to Fischer & Jastrow 1980:115-116, giving the impression of generalized prefixed forms, is not confirmed by Behnstedt’s more detailed data in pp. 1996:401-408 and 1244-1250, with a rather even distribution of both kinds of forms in the diverse dialects under consideration. 12 3) The demonstrative pronoun for the far deixis not only is obtained from its closest counterpart by mere analogical addition of {+k} in the sg. of both genders, i.e. ’āḏa ’āḏak and ’āḏi ’āḏik (p. 16), which is also characteristic of North African Neo-Arabic, but has carried this analogy over to the pl., coupled with the inclusion of a nasal, reminiscent of the matching personal pronouns, e.g., ’āḏum/n “diese pl.m.”, ’āḏum/nk “jene pl.m.”, ’āḏin “diese pl.f.”, ’āḏank “jene pl.m.”, ’āḏink “jene pl.f. cf. AA hawlínk, háwlak in Corriente 1977:98. 4) The generalization of the old accusative morph to every case for the “six nouns” of Cl.Ar. grammar, 13 which we pointed to in Corriente 1976:92 for some Old Arabic dialects, offers some witnesses in these Yemenite materials, e.g., fa’ From a comparative viewpoint, it appears that the most characteristic Proto-Semitic demonstrative mark without a specific deixis was sg. *ḏū alternating with pl.*-vl, as still shown by Hebrew and Phoenician; however, a reinforcing interjection *han ”lo” was often suffixed to it in order to overtly express the near deixis, as in Old Aramaic, Epigraphic South Arabian and Ethiopic, optionally prefixed in Old Arabic, or even replaced it more or less completely, as in Akkadian and Syriac, it being also reflected in the article of North West Semitic and Arabic, and even in Arabic han “thing; genitals”. Each particular Semitic branch seems to have adopted its own preferred arrangement: nevertheless, their choices coincide with genetic isoglosses, as is the case of Arabic dialects adopting one of the two types of deictic marking. The suffixation of {+k}, connectable with the 2nd. person personal suffix, provided the mark for the far deixis everywhere, except in the case of Akkadian, in which the innovation of ann+ for the near deixis, allowed the reassignment of ull+ to both numbers of the far deixis, as can be observed in Moscati et al., An Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1964, pp. 11-112-13 I.e., ab “father”, aḫ “brother”, ḥam “father-in-law”, fū “mouth”, ḏū “owner of” and han “genitals”, the last one, etymologically a euphemistic demonstrative pronoun, being often prudishly eliminated from the list. find
3. “Mund” and šumm fa’ak “halt den Mund!” (p. 922); cf. Corriente 1977:86 for the treatment of the same item in AA. 5) The characteristically creole feature of substituting regular for irregular inflexions, e.g., ’awwal f. ’awwala “erste(r)” (p. 47) in these Yemenite materials has a match in AA awwal awwalah, 14 confirmed by aḥáda as fem. of aḥád in Alcalá 15 . 6) The preference for the broken pl. pattern {a12ā3}, already signaled for AA in Corriente 1977:91 as characteristic of South Arabian, together with Ethiopic, and again in 1989:100-101 and other works of ours down to 2013:70, is also witnessed in Behnstedt’s materials, even in recent loanwords, like bakit abkāt (p. 101) < English “packet”, and tanak atnāk “Blechkanister” < Turkish teneke. A similar case of marked preference of a given broken pl. pattern appears to be that of {1ī3ān} for sg. nouns of hollow roots in which the weak w/y has turned into /ā/, e.g., bāb bībān “Tür” (p. 117), and kās kīsān “Glas” (p. 1049), matched by Moroccan Arabic, 16 though not by AA. 17 7) Former geminate imperfectives which have been metanalyzed as II measure derivate verbs do exist in practically every branch of Neo-Arabic and in Old Arabic, and we first spotted them in Corriente 1977:102, fn. 159. 18 Some examples of this kind are also present in these Yemenite materials, e.g. akkal 14 Reported by Ibn Hišām Allaḫmī in his Almadḫalu ilà taqwīmi llisān wata῾līmi lbayān (ed. J. Pérez Lázaro, Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas – Instituto de Cooperación con el Mundo Árabe, 1990, II 261. 15 After P. Lagarde (ed.), De lingua Arabica libri duo, Göttingen, 1883 (reed. find
4. Osnabrück, O. Zeller, 1971), 46.22. 16 Henceforth Mor. 17 See Corriente 2013:75, fn. 174 about more such cases and the South Arabian preference for the pl. suffix {+ān}. 18 A whole survey of this phenomenon was the subject of our contribution “Geminate imperfectives in Arabic masked as intensive stems of the verb”, in Estudios de dialectología norteafricana y andalusí 8 (2004) [2006, Homenaje a P. Behnstedt] 33-57, within a series of articles demonstrating the fallacies of the “Central Semitic” hypothesis, including “On the degree of kinship between Arabic and Northwest Semitic”, in AIDA 5th Conference Proceedings, Cádiz 2003, 187-194, “The phonemic system of Semitic from the advantage point of Arabic and its dialectology”, in Aula Orientalis. Proceedings of the Barcelona Symposium on Comparative Semitics 23 (2005) 169-173, “Lexicostatistics and the Central Semitic theory”, in Ŝapal tibnim mâ illak. Studies Presented to Joaquín Sanmartín on the occasion of his 65 th birthday, in Aula Orientalis-Supplementa 22 (2006) 139-144, “Ethiopic halläwä “to be” and its Arabic cognates: Some thoughts on the close ties between rhetorical interrogation, emphatic affirmation and negation”, in Dialectology of the Semitic Languages (Proceedings of the IV meeting on comparative Semitics, Zaragoza, 9–11/6/2010, ed. by F. Corriente, G. del Olmo, Angeles Vicente and J.-P. Vita), Sabadell, 2012, 1-4, « Final ka(-mā), a shared innovation of (traditional) South Semitic », in Folia Orientalia 49, 141-145, “Again on the classification of South Semitic”, in Archaism and Innovation in the Semitic Languages. Selected Papers (Proceedings of the 5th meeting of IACS (Córdoba 2012, ed. J.P. Monferrer & W.G.E. Watson, CNERU - DTR), Córdoba, 2013, 33-44). The undeserved success and vogue of such a flimsy hypothesis is the only explanation for our insistence on refuting it. find our card

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/corriente-2026-again-yemenite-connection-andalusi-arabic/