Arabic and the case against linearity in historical linguistics

Author / Creator

Owens, Jonathan, author

Available as

Online

Summary

Interpretations of Arabic language history have been dominated by a linear conception beginning with its early transition from Semitic pre-history to pre-Islamic Arabic and then to the Classical la...

Interpretations of Arabic language history have been dominated by a linear conception beginning with its early transition from Semitic pre-history to pre-Islamic Arabic and then to the Classical language. Thereafter comes, "neo-Arabic," in the history of western scholarship usually relegated to the status of dialectology. Expanding on A linguistic history of Arabic (OUP 2006/9), this book advocates a multiple pathways approach. Arabic has multifarious evidential sources: relations to other Semitic languages, epigraphic and papyrological traditions, a linguistically original classical Arabic linguistic tradition, a widely dispersed array of contemporary spoken varieties representing necessary components for reconstructing Arabic language history itself. These diverse sources meld to characterize a holistic but not necessarily linear Arabic language history. From a general linguistic perspective, Arabic in its wide geographical and chronological expanse provides fertile ground for a critical invocation of new perspectives and methodologies in historical linguistics: sociolinguistics, typology and grammaticalization theory, corpus linguistics, and attendant statistical treatment. This is demonstrated via more than 20 individual case studies covering over 1,500 years of documented and reconstructed history. An historical object more complex than traditional accounts emerges. Embedding the study in a wider comparative account, a comparison of the historical morphology of three languages documented over roughly the same period of interval time ca. ad 500-ad 2022, Icelandic, English, and Arabic is undertaken. Arabic contrasts with the linearity of English; it shares aspects of alinearity with Icelandic, but also contains within it elements of multilinearity spread across many individual historical speech communities.

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