Reflections on the linguistic map of pre-Islamic Arabia - Khalili ...

contain elements which can be attributed
to Old Arabic.
[Sabaeo-Arabic]
At present, there are no clear examples of
texts in the Sabaic script and language
which contain elements clearly attributable
to Old Arabic rather than ANA (173).
However, when all the inscriptions from
Qaryat al-Faw are published it is very
probable that some will be found to fall
into this category.
Safaeo-Arabic
There are a handful of Safaitic inscriptions
which appear to contain the definite article
$ l-. The clearest of these is C 2446 which is
known only from a hand-copy (Dn 68c).
This reads
lS 1c dbnMr $ bn Nr w-wgm c [l] $ h-h Nr
qtl∞.±-h $ 1 (N)btw y mb c yn c m c wd w-dw f f-hlt
m c mn w- $ lt dtn w-gd-[ c ](w)d w-gd-dw ft $ r
m-d $ s 1 lf w-wlh kbr s 1 hw r c l $ h-h hw bb-h l- $ bd
(174).
‘By S 1c d son of Mr $ son of Nr and he
mourned for his brother Nr (whom) the Nabataean
killed during the attack (175) on the
flocks of c wd and Dw f (176). And so, O Lt
m c mn (177) and goddess of Dtn (178) and
Gd- c wd and Gd-Dw f (179) [grant the opportunity
of] revenge on him who did this thing
(180). And he mourned greatly s 1 hw r (181) for
his brother, his beloved, for ever’.
On Dunand’s copy, the first letter of (n)btw y
is the same length as the previous l, asopposed
to the very short ns in the rest of the
text, so the reading is not entirely secure.
However, regardless of whether the nisba is
Nbtw y or Lbtw y, it seems probable that the letters
$ l represent the Arabic article, rather
than the word $ l (cf. Ar. $ āl) meaning ‘social
group’, since in Safaitic this is always followed
by the name itself ( $ lrm‘the people
THE LINGUISTIC MAP OF PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIA
of Rome, the Romans’, $ l dw f ‘the tribe of
Dw aif’, etc.) and never by the nisba (rmy, dw fy).
Moreover, in Safaitic, ‘the Nabataeans’ are
always called simply nbtw, rather than * $ l nbtw.
If therefore, as seems likely, $ l in this context
is the Arabic article, this text contains
a record of what I have called the ‘northern
Old Arabic isogloss’ (182) in which the /l/
of the article is not assimilated, even before
the sounds called by the grammarians
of Classical Arabic al-hw urūf al-sˇamsiyya or
‘sun letters’.
However, other features of the text are
characteristic of Safaitic, such as the vocative
particle h- and the assimilation of the
n in the preposition mn. I would therefore
place C 2446 among the ‘mixed texts’ as an
example of ‘Safaeo-Arabic’.
Another possible text of this type is WH
589 which contains the statement $ s 2 r∞.±q
l-l-mdbr ‘and he migrated to the inner desert’.
The two ls are clear on the photograph,
but it is quite possible that they are
the result of dittography on the part of the
author, who had just written, and then
crossed out, a second s 2 between the r and
the q of $ s 2 rq. In Safaitic, the word mdbr is
never used with the article (183), but it is
possible that it was referred to as * $ l-mdbr
in Old Arabic, cf. the place-name Rhw bt
which also does not take the article in
Safaitic, but appears as al-Ruhw bah in later
Arabic (184).
There are also several Safaitic inscriptions
in which the definite article appears
as $ - rather than h-. Given that in the
Safaitic script the two letters are distinguished
only by a short side-stroke (see
Fig. 3), I restrict myself to those for which
photographs are available and where it is
difficult to suggest another explanation
(other than an error by the author). Thus
SIJ 37 has s 1 lm w-fsw yt m-b $ s 1 $ -s 1 snt ‘security
and deliverance from misfortune this year’
(185), and KRS 125, an unpublished inscription
from northeastern Jordan, has c wr
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