A Linguistic History of Arabic
by Owens, JonathanFormat: Hardcover
Pub. Date: 2006-07-13
Publisher(s): Oxford University Press
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Summary
A Linguistic History of Arabic challenges the traditional accounts of the progression of classical Arabic to contemporary dialects. It presents a rich and complex picture of early Arabic language history and establishes the basis for a comprehensive, linguistically-based understanding of the history of Arabic. The arguments are set out in a manner accessible to students and scholars of Arabic and Islamic culture, as well as to those studying Arabic and historical linguists.
Author Biography
Jonathan Owens is Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Advanced Study of Language, University of Maryland, where he is on leave from his position as Professor of Arabic Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Starting his linguistics career with a SOAS PhD on Creole Arabic Nubi of East Africa, he has taught and conducted research at universities in Libya (Garyounis), Nigeria (Maiduguri), and Jordan (Yarmouk). His books include A Grammar of Libyan Arabic, Harrassowitz, 1984, A Short Reference Grammar of Nigerian Arabic, Harrassowitz, 1993 and The Foundations of Grammar: an Introduction to Medieval Arabic Grammatical Theory, Benjamins,1988.
Table of Contents
| Abbreviations and Symbols | p. x |
| Maps | p. xi |
| Introduction: A Language and Its Secrets | p. 1 |
| Proto-Arabic, Basic Terms | p. 2 |
| The Early Sources | p. 2 |
| The Role of the Modern Dialects in Interpreting Arabic Language History | p. 8 |
| Scope of Work | p. 13 |
| Language Change and Language Transmission | p. 15 |
| A Critical Look at Some Truisms in Arabic Historical Linguistics | p. 20 |
| Summary of Chapters | p. 30 |
| Old Arabic, Neo-Arabic and Comparative Linguistics | p. 34 |
| A Method vs. a Logical Matrix | p. 34 |
| Stages in Arabic | p. 38 |
| Arabic and the Dialects | p. 43 |
| Neo-Arabic and the Neo-German school | p. 47 |
| The Past is the Present: A Modern Logical Matrix | p. 74 |
| The Arabic Tradition | p. 75 |
| Conclusion | p. 77 |
| Case and Proto-Arabic | p. 79 |
| Introduction | p. 80 |
| Case in the Afroasiatic Phylum | p. 80 |
| Classical Arabic | p. 85 |
| The Modern Dialects | p. 101 |
| Case and Caseless Arabic | p. 114 |
| Al-Idgham al-Kabiyr and Case Endings | p. 119 |
| Sharh Tayyibat al-Nashr: A Fifteenth-Century Treatise on Koranic Variants | p. 123 |
| Linguistic Attributes of 'Major Assimilation' | p. 125 |
| Interpretive Summary | p. 129 |
| Pre-Diasporic Arabic in the Diaspora: A Statistical Approach to Arabic Language History | p. 137 |
| Introduction | p. 137 |
| Dialects, Procedure, Initial Results | p. 142 |
| Statistical Results and their Meaning | p. 151 |
| Interpretations | p. 157 |
| The Interpretation of Arabic Linguistic History | p. 166 |
| Statistics, Reconstruction, Hypothesis Testing | p. 168 |
| Three Caveats | p. 172 |
| Problems in Coding | p. 173 |
| Nigerian Arabic and Reconstruction of the Imperfect Verb | p. 184 |
| The Basic Imperfect Verb | p. 184 |
| Historical Significance | p. 189 |
| Epenthesis | p. 193 |
| The Old Arabic Evidence | p. 194 |
| The Reconstructions and the Classical Arabic Verbal Mode Endings | p. 195 |
| Imala | p. 197 |
| Imala in Old Arabic | p. 197 |
| Imala in the Modern Dialects | p. 212 |
| Reconstruction | p. 220 |
| Suffix Pronouns and Reconstruction | p. 230 |
| Pausal and Context Forms and Case Endings | p. 230 |
| Suffix Pronouns and Case Endings | p. 234 |
| Pronominal Suffixes, Case Endings and Epenthetic Vowels in Dialects | p. 235 |
| Syllable Structure | p. 237 |
| A Data Survey | p. 237 |
| Unproblematic Cases, Some Easy Generalizations | p. 239 |
| More Difficult Cases | p. 245 |
| Case Traces? | p. 255 |
| Harris Birkeland and Old Arabic Object Pronoun Reconstruction | p. 259 |
| Summary and Epilogue | p. 266 |
| Reconstruction and Continuity with Old Arabic | p. 266 |
| Epilogue | p. 267 |
| List and short summary of dialects included in study | p. 271 |
| List of features used in comparison, Chapter 5, with brief exemplification | p. 276 |
| Imala in Zamaxshari | p. 281 |
| Table of suffix pronouns used in reconstructions in Chapter 8 | p. 283 |
| References | p. 285 |
| Index | p. 301 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
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