Arabic language history and the comparative method

Abstract

In the long western tradition of the study of Arabic and Semitic languages the Arabic dialects have, if at all, only recently been taken seriously as entities which can contribute to the understanding of language history. There are three crucial aspects to this reality. For one, the issue of language history from the perspective of the Arabic linguistic tradition is largely irrelevant, subservient for the most part to constructs based on language and culture politics. For the second the jury is still, as it were, out. This is the degree to which Arabic dialectal history will elucidate the history of Semitic in general. For the third, the answer is in, and that is that dialects not only have a history, but from the perspective of general historical linguistics, a linguistic history which offers special insights into not only how languages change, traditionally the key question in historical linguistics, but also how languages remain stable. This is because a relatively transparent reconstructibility within a single language is available which is minimally datable to the seventh century CE, a chronological period comparable to the entire historical linguistic era of West Germanic or Slavic. Thus, regardless of the results relating to the first two issues, the historical study of Arabic dialects is an interesting intellectual enterprise in its own right. In this article I illustrate how the traditional, but for historical linguistics, basic instrument of the comparative method can be applied in the study of an historical linguistics which begins with the contemporary Arabic dialects. I offer an initial four-point typology for the different kinds of results which can be obtained relative to the different sources which are available to us, both from the contemporary era, and from the rich thinking of the Arabic linguistic tradition.