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A Linguistic History of Arabic
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.
330 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 20, 2011
A great read for an advanced student of either linguistics or Arabic. This is not by any means a grammar of the Arabic languages, but a historical linguistic approach to The variations of Arabic over time. His discussion of Arabic in the context of the major linguistic schools of thought throughout time is the most universal I have ever seen. From Proto-Arabic to Old and Neo-Arabic, he takes on basic structures which have evolved and discusses them in detail. I believe this is the first time in English I have seen a scholarly text explain and engage pre-diasporic Arabic in a statistical manner. His views on the history of diglossia in the language are very important especially in the field of second language acquisition. I highly recommend this book to anyone who considers themselves a student of linguistics.
April 18, 2018
Owens works hard to free Arabic historical linguistics from the many assumptions that have plagued the field. He does this primarily by establishing a basis for variation within what he terms “pre-diasporic” Arabic based on data from contemporary dialects, especially geographically distant dialects that would not conceivably experience language contact. (Commonalities shared by these dialects but not by Classical Arabic may be reliably reconstructed into Old Arabic.) Owens gathered his own data on Nigerian Arabic and eastern Libyan Arabic especially, but he gains significant contributions from an isolated dialect (a “Sprachinsel”) in Uzbekistan.
Owens makes special use of Sibawaih’s records of synchronic variation to show that features that varied in Old Arabic (such as “imala,” a phonological rule) continued into present-day dialects.
In ch. 5, Owens uses quantitative methods to show a remarkable affinity between Arabic in the western Sudanic area (= Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, and western Sudan) and Uzbekistan. He shows that historically this affinity must be related to migration patterns out of the Arabian Peninsula before Arabic grammar was codified. Some of the features shared between this distant dialects are not shared by Classical Arabic, which is important evidence of poorly documented variation in Old Arabic.
In ch. 8, Owens gives his own reconstructions of Old Arabic object pronouns suffixes. Significantly, there is no trace of a noun case system in these suffixes, and again, there are also discrepancies between the reconstructed paradigm and those typically given as “Classical Arabic.”
Owens makes special use of Sibawaih’s records of synchronic variation to show that features that varied in Old Arabic (such as “imala,” a phonological rule) continued into present-day dialects.
In ch. 5, Owens uses quantitative methods to show a remarkable affinity between Arabic in the western Sudanic area (= Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, and western Sudan) and Uzbekistan. He shows that historically this affinity must be related to migration patterns out of the Arabian Peninsula before Arabic grammar was codified. Some of the features shared between this distant dialects are not shared by Classical Arabic, which is important evidence of poorly documented variation in Old Arabic.
In ch. 8, Owens gives his own reconstructions of Old Arabic object pronouns suffixes. Significantly, there is no trace of a noun case system in these suffixes, and again, there are also discrepancies between the reconstructed paradigm and those typically given as “Classical Arabic.”
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews