Journal of Semitic Studies LXII/2 Autumn 2017 doi: 10.

1093/jss/fgx026
© The author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of Manchester.
All rights reserved.

The archaic feminine ending -at

in Shammari Arabic

Marijn van Putten

Leiden University

Abstract

This paper discusses the feminine nominal suffixes -at and plural -āt
in the Shammari Arabic dialect. It will show that its pausal allo-
morphs are best understood as the result of a pausal rule *t > y. The
Shammari dialect must therefore go back to a dialect that had *-at in
all environments and not -ah word-finally and -at in construct, as is
often taken to be the original situation in all modern Arabic dialects.
After this discussion, several other dialects that appear to point to
feminine ending systems which deviate from the general modern
­Arabic trend will be discussed. A tentative suggestion is given that the
Dōsiri dialect of Kuwait goes back to a dialect with a Classical Arabic
distribution for the feminine singular ending: -a in pause, -at every-
where else.

Introduction

The Shammar tribe is one of the largest Bedouin Arab tribes. The
members of this tribe are found in three different countries: first
there are the Najd Shammar in Saudi Arabia, around Hail, secondly
there is an Iraqi group known as the Shammar Jarba or the Shammar
of the Jazira, which occupies an area in the far north of Iraq between
the Euphrates and the Tigris (Ingham 1982: 63), finally, there is a
group of Shammari in Northeastern Syria, who live around Tall ʽalu
(Behnstedt 2000: 472).
The Arabic dialects spoken by the different branches of the Sham-
mar have ‘more features distinguishing these [Shammari of the Jazira
and Najd Shammari] from the various neighbouring dialects than
there are distinguishing neighbouring dialects from each other’ (Ing-
ham 1982: 63). There is available linguistic material for all the
branches of the Shammari dialect. The Najd Shammar dialect has
been described in the most detail in a study by Ingham (1982) and
earlier by Cantineau (1937), also the text transcribed and translated

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 the archaic feminine ending -at in shammari arabic

by Sowayan (1981) is of this dialect. Montagne (1935) is a large col-

lection of texts of the Shammar Jarba dialect. Finally, Behnstedt
(2000) has a short description of the Shammar dialect of Syria and a
small collection of texts.
It is the Najd Shammari dialect that we will focus on in this paper.
The Najd Shammari dialect described by Ingham (1982) is similar to
the other Shammari dialects but he describes a specific allomorphy of
some feminine markers (Ingham 1982: 70), which seem to differ
from the other Shammari dialects, other Najdi dialects and from all
other Arabic dialects. The allomorphy of these feminine markers has
important implications for the historical development of this dialect,
which has gone unrecognized by Ingham and Arabists at large.
The morphemes in question are the feminine singular ending,
feminine plural ending and the 3rd person singular feminine ending
of the suffix conjugation (an attributive adjective ending in Proto-
Semitic). In Proto-Semitic these three morphemes can be recon-
structed as *-at-, *-āt- and *-at respectively.
First we will discuss how these phonemes have developed from
Proto-Semitic into Proto-Arabic, and we will examine how these
morphemes are represented in Old Arabic1 and the modern
dialects.
After that we will show that the Shammari2 reflexes of these forms
cannot be understood as the result of the system found in most mod-
ern dialects. Instead, the situation must be understood as an offshoot
of the Old Arabic situation.

From Proto-Semitic to Arabic

The three endings found as *-at, *-āt and *-at have undergone certain
changes going from Proto-Semitic to Arabic. The nominal feminine
singular ending *-at, is retained as -at (followed by case endings), in
Classical Arabic, except in pausal position, where the case endings
were lost and the *-at shifted to -ah. In most modern dialects,
this shift of *-at to -ah has happened for all nominal sequences in
word-final position. Only in the construct state does this shift not

1 Ifollow the definition of Al-Jallad (forthcoming) of Old Arabic. It denotes the

documentary evidence of Arabic in the pre-Islamic period. This material is repre-
sented in a large part by Arabic inscriptions written in the Safaitic Ancient North
Arabian script.
2 Henceforth Shammari shall be taken to mean the Najd Shammari dialect

unless specified differently.

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 the archaic feminine ending -at in shammari arabic

take place. Al-Jallad (course notes) suggests that the development of

these forms can be understood as a general shift from a sentential
stress, where only the final word of a sentence bore a stress and pausal
forms only applied to this stressed form, to a per-word stress, where
subsequently these pausal forms came to be applied to all stressed
nouns. In this system, only words that are in construct would not
receive word-stress and therefore the general rule *-at > -ah for
stressed words came to apply to all non-construct words in a sentence,
rather than just the final word of a sentence.
In the Old Arabic material found in the Safaitic inscriptions, the
feminine ending is almost always marked with <-t>, which seems to
point to -at in all environments. There is one case where nʽmt ‘ostrich’
is written as nʽmh at the end of an inscription, which Al-Jallad (2015:
56) suggests might indicate that the variety of Old Arabic used here
had pausal forms with -ah similar to the Classical Arabic situation.
The Arabic 3sg. f. perfective ending *-at originally derives from the
predicative adjective ending in Proto-Semitic. This predicative adjec-
tive ending, which is still found as such in Akkadian, was reinter-
preted as a new perfective formation in the West Semitic languages.
In Classical Arabic, as well as the vast majority of Arabic dialects this
morpheme is retained as -at.3 In Safaitic (Al-Jallad 2015: 56) this
form is <-t>, in the majority of the cases, which points to -at as well.
The shift *-at > -ah would be expected to have applied to the 3sg.f.
suffix conjugation ending *-at of the verb. However, if we assume
that the Arabic dialects started from a Classical Arabic-like formation
where only the last word of the utterance underwent *-at > -ah, we
can explain the general absence of -ah in the suffix conjugation. Ara-
bic is a VSO language, and therefore, in basically any sentence that
is not just a single perfective verb, the verb would never be in final
position, as such the occurrence of *-at > -ah in the verb would be
rare. This would explain why the -at was generalized in Classical
Arabic as well as most modern dialects.
The nominal feminine plural ending *-āt- remains -āt- in Classical
Arabic (with case endings) and -āt in most modern Arabic dialects as
well as in Safaitic where it is written <-t> (Al-Jallad 2015: 66).
While the *-at > -ah shift is very widespread in the varieties of Ara-
bic, it is unlikely that it was already present in Proto-Arabic, because
of the sparse evidence that we find for it in Old Arabic attestations. As

3 Note, however, that in many Yemeni dialects this morpheme undergoes the
same word final -at > -ah shift which is found for the nominal feminine ending
(Behnstedt 1985: map 71).

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 the archaic feminine ending -at in shammari arabic

such it is not considered to be a defining innovation of Proto-Arabic

by Al-Jallad (forthcoming) and Huehnergard (2017).

The Shammari Arabic Dialect

The Shammari dialect has multiple allomorphs for the feminine end-
ings under discussion, which are conditioned by whether they occur in
pausal position or in non-pausal position (Ingham 1982: 69–70). Fol-
lowing Ingham’s transcription the three feminine morphemes and their
pausal allomorphs are represented schematically in the table below.
Pausal Non-pausal
f.sg. -eih, - ih -at
f.pl. -āy -āt
3sg.f. verbal -eih -at

Ingham (1982: 70) cites several examples to illustrate this distribution:

yōm waṣlat ittalʽat u tiʽaṭṭilat issayyāreih
yōm waṣlat ittalʽat w assayyārat tiʽaṭṭileih
‘When it reached the pass, the car broke down.’
ʽabdat u sinjāreih
Abdah and Sinjāra (tribal names)
ʽitēbat u ḥarb
ʽUtaiba and Ḥarb (tribal names)
halfēḏat hāḏi
‘this hollow’
lighawt aṣṣaḥīḥeih
‘the correct coffee’
The examples provided by Ingham only show the variation between
-at and -eih and do not address the feminine plural ending. An exam-
ple of the variation between -āy and -āt can be found in the text
samples (Ingham 1872: 131):
haḏōḷa ṭāl ʽumrak iššilgān faḏōḷa ġazwin ʽala [ḥ]wēṭāy,4
‘There were, God give you long life, the Shilgān […] and they were a
raiding party against the Ḥuwaiṭāt.’
u baʽad ma xaḏaw albil nhajaw il[ḥ]wēṭāṭ ʽala xeil u xaḏoham.
‘And after they had captured the camels, the Ḥuwaiṭāt attacked them
on horses and captured them’

4 Ingham’s original transcription of this tribal name was written with an initial

h. This is surely a typographic error for ḥ.

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 the archaic feminine ending -at in shammari arabic

A Historical Account of the Shammari Situation

It is striking that the Shammari dialect has a default feminine ending
-at, even when it is not in construct. This challenges the widely held
belief, formulated explicitly for example by Jastrow and Fischer
(1980: 41–2) and Corriente (2013: 14), that the -ah ~ -at variation
in Free and Construct state in dialectal Arabic is a feature found in
the whole dialect continuum of the modern dialects. There is still a
variation between -at and -eih/-ih in Shammari, but this variation
cannot be understood as having developed from the common pattern
found in the modern Arabic dialects.
There are several scenarios which may have given rise to the Sham-
mari system which we will discuss individually.
A first possibility is to consider the Shammari system to come from
a situation similar to Classical Arabic. At first sight, the Shammari
system appears to have many similarities to the Classical Arabic
­situation. Like Classical Arabic the feminine ending *-at has an allo-
morph that only occurs in utterance final position and never in utter-
ance internal position. This would suggest that the general dialectal
development with a shift of sentential stress to word stress, causing
the *-at > ah to apply to all non-construct word-final positions in the
modern dialects, did not take place in Shammari.
This explanation has several problems. First of all, the distribution
of -at ~ -eih is not completely identical to Classical Arabic, as Sham-
mari also has this variation for the 3sg.f. suffix conjugation ending,
something which never occurs in Classical Arabic. Moreover, the
phonetic shape of the Shammari pausal form is -eih/-ih and not -ah
as found in Classical Arabic and the dialects. Another difference is
that Shammari has a variation in the feminine plural ending as well,
an allomorphy that Classical Arabic lacks.
Because of these differences, it seems better to consider these devel-
opments in Shammari as parallel developments to the Classical Arabic
situation. This would mean that Shammari did not take part in the
development *-at > -ah which took place in Classical Arabic and most
— if not all — other modern dialects.
As the feminine singular and plural endings have the exact same
distribution it seems attractive to consider both of these reflexes to
have come from a single development, which eventually led to two
different forms.
This is the interpretation that Ingham (1982: 69) implicitly seems
to endorse. He says: ‘fronting has taken place with certain feminine
suffixes and /-y/ replaces an original /-t/ in pausal position, giving

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 the archaic feminine ending -at in shammari arabic

/eih/ or /-ih/ for the feminine singular nominal suffix, /-āy/ for the
feminine plural nominal suffix, and /eih/ for the feminine singular
verbal suffix in place of the more usual /-ah, -āt, -at/.’
He thus considers the diphthongal quality of the feminine singular
and feminine plural suffix to be related. However, this development
cannot be formulated as *t > y /_[Pause] when we follow Ingham’s
transcription of these morphemes as the feminine singular form has
a final voiceless glottal fricative. To account for this, we may imagine
that, for example, the *t developed into a palatalized voiceless glottal
fricative *hʸ, which later became a biphonemic *yh.
1. *t > hʸ /__[Pause] 2. *hʸ > yh
This would yield *-ayh (= /eih/) for the feminine singular and *-āyh
for the feminine plural. *-āyh is an over-superheavy syllable followed
by another consonant. This final cluster may have been simplified to
-āy to avoid this over-superheavy syllable.
An alternative approach would be to assume that *a and *ā in
word-final syllables diphthongized to ay and āy respectively. Subse-
quently *t shifted to h in pause, and once again the sequence *-āyh
was simplified to -āy. However, other instances of a and ā in word-
final syllables are never diphthongized in Shammari, e.g. CAr. samā’-
‘sky’, Shammari sö́ma ‘id.’; CAr. ʽašā’ ‘evening meal’, Shammari ɛáša
‘id.’; CAr. lisān- ‘tongue’; Shammari lsân ‘id.’; CAr. baqar ‘cattle’,
Shammari bö́gaṛ ‘id.’ (all examples from Cantineau 1937).
While the above assumed development of *t > hʸ /_[Pause] can be
used to explain the scenario, it is rather ad hoc and assumes an exotic
sound which would only appear in word-final position. If we examine
transcriptions of the feminine endings of Shammari by other authors,
we find that they do not generally transcribe the final h that Ingham
has for this dialect.
Sowayan (1981: 52) says that the verbal ending -at surfaces as
-ay (citing jay ‘she came’) whereas the feminine nominal suffix is
either -ay or -e (and -at, citing zōje, zōjay, zōjat ‘wife’).5 Within his
transcription there is then no evidence for a glottal fricative in the
feminine endings.
Cantineau (1937: 149–50) lists several examples of feminine end-
ings, consistently written with -e or –ö (and variants -ȩ, -ẹ, ọ̈ , ö̧): šɛáṛe̦
‘hair’, nâge ‘camel’, rö́kḅʷö, rö́kḅʷȩ ̦ ‘knee’, mɛarûf̣ọ̈, mɛarûfẹ ‘known’,

5 No specific mention is made of the feminine plural ending -āy. No clear cases

of the feminine plural in pause are attested in the text presented in the article.

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 the archaic feminine ending -at in shammari arabic

pṣólȩ ̦ ‘onion’ etc. He lists only one example with a final weak -ʰ:
gháwö̧ʰ ‘coffee’.
Likewise the verbal ending is either transcribed as -e or -ai (Can-
tineau 1937: 132–3): ktö́bʷai ‘she wrote’, šérbe ‘she drank’.
The feminine plural ending is written with the same weak -i: ḵams
öpsölâi ‘five onions’, ḵams öbgaṛâi ‘five cows’ (Cantinueau 1937: 133).

Combining these two other accounts of the Najdi Shammar dia-

lect, it appears likelier that the feminine singular ending and verbal
ending were rather -ay and -e in their pausal form without the final
glottal fricative.
If this is correct, then the development can be described in a much
more concise way. Starting from a phase of the language where the
morphemes were still *-at, *-at and *-āt, Shammari underwent a
development that can be formulated as follows:
*t > y / __ [Pause].
It is worth noting that for the position of stress, Ingham’s -eih
behaves as a light CVC syllable and not as a CVCC syllable as one
might expect (Ingham 1982: xxiii, fn. 1). This may be interpreted as
an indication that this morpheme is in fact phonemically /ay/ and not
/ayh/.6

The Feminine Endings in Syrian Shammari

and Shammari of the Jazira
As the Shammari dialects outside of the Najd are linguistically close
to the Najdi variant, one might expect similar distributions of the
feminine endings.
Behnstedt does not report on the allomorphy in the singular noun
or verb (Behnstedt 2000: 432, 440–1). He discusses the feminine
plural form -āy mentioned by Cantineau and shows that it is not
attested in Syrian Shammari (Behnstedt 2000: 452–3).
In Montagne’s texts of Shammari of the Jazira, I have found no
examples of allomorphy in the noun, only finding the feminine

6 An alternative suggested by a JSS editor is that [ei] functions phonologically

as a simple vowel. This is technically possible, but there seems to be little reason to
assume such an explanation. Ingham (1982: 80) cites /ligeit/ ‘I found’ and /kaleit/
‘I ate’, and makes no mention of the special status of this /ei/ for the stress system
on pg. xxiii, combining this with the paradigm of such verbs in Cantineau (1936:
91–2) (‘Umūr dialect, but said to be identical to Shammari in Cantineau 1937:
196), which show stress on the final syllable, it seems that /eiC/ normally receives
the stress and that what Ingham described as /eih/ is the exception to the rule.

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 the archaic feminine ending -at in shammari arabic

ending with -e, e.g. nāgȩ ‘camel’, meṣlǭḫȩ ‘undressed’ (Montagne

1936: 77). The verbal ending appears to have the allomorphy, clearly
present in the sentence: reḥalet Edge͡iš, rȩćebet wašāle̦ ‘Edgeiš broke
camp, mounted (her animal) and took (her luggage)’ (Montagne
1936: 97). The feminine plural ending only occurs a few times in
pausal position, but in all these cases it is found as -āt: ya lgerābāt! ‘o
close relatives’, elāfāt ‘thousands’, elgʸemālāt ‘good deeds’ (Montagne
1936: 86).
The allomorphy as found in the Najd Shammari dialect does not
seem to be (completely) intact in the other two Shammari dialects.

Feminine -at in other Arabic Varieties

In this paper it is shown that the development of the feminine sin-

gular ending -at and the feminine plural ending -āt in the Shammari
dialect is a unique development in Shammari not paralleled by any
other Arabic dialect that the author is aware of. It thus seems that
Shammari was not part of the dialect continuum that underwent the
widespread development *-at > -ah.
There appear to be several other modern dialects which may have
come from a variety that retained the Old Arabic suffix -at.

Other Northern Najdi Dialects:

ʽUmūr, Ṣlūt and Bani Ṣaxar
The dialects most likely to have a similar distribution to that of
Shammari are the dialects of the ʽUmūr, Ṣlūt and Bani Ṣaxar. Can-
tineau (1936: 20–1; 1937: 133) reports that these dialects have a
feminine plural -âʰ in the absolute state, while the construct state has
-āt.7 Cantineau does not identify the distribution as pausal versus
non-pausal forms for these dialects. However, the pausal distribution
can easily be mistaken for the common dialectal distribution if only
single words and construct phrases are elicited. It may very well be
that on closer inspection, these dialects have a distribution similar to
Shammari, undergoing a general shift of *t > h /__[Pause] which may
also apply to the feminine singular nouns. These dialects do not have
this distribution for the perfective feminine ending -at, as Cantineau
(1937: 132–3) elaborates on this explicitly for Shammari and

7 Behnstedt (2000: 452) establishes the presence of the plural ending -āh in free
variation -āt for the Rwala dialect. This is not reported by Cantineau for the Rwala
dialect.

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 the archaic feminine ending -at in shammari arabic

identifies -ai as a pausal allomorph. He does not mention similar

distributions in these other dialects.

Yemeni
One of the dialect groups that appear to retain a final Old Arabic -at
are the dialects around Ṣaʽdah in Yemen which have a feminine end-
ing -it/-at in the definite and construct form, e.g. ib-bagarit ‘the cow’,
and as-sayyārat ‘the car’. However, in the indefinite form they have
the suffix -ah: bagarah ‘a cow’, sayyārah ‘a car’ (Behnstedt 1985: 16;
Behnstedt 1987: 54–5).
In contrast to the Shammari situation, it seems possible to explain
the Yemeni situation from the general modern dialectal distribution
where the indefinite goes back to *bagarah and the construct to
*bagarit or *bagarat. Yemeni may then have taken the construct stem
rather than the indefinite stem for the definite forms.8
Arguing from a Classical Arabic situation or the Proto-Arabic situ-
ation makes it very difficult to explain why it would only be the verb
and the indefinite noun which underwent *-at > -ah.
Watson et al. (2006: 38) provide an alternative solution. They
argue that, at least for the Rāziḥī dialect,9 definiteness is marked not
only with the definite article, but also by aspiration of the final
consonant,10 whereas the indefinite is marked by the glottalization of
the final consonant. They suggest that this final aspiration comes
from the phonological and semantic bleaching of a suffixed third
masculine singular pronoun -ōh. While this would explain the

8 The exact motivations for such a development are unclear. A parallel might be
found in Classical Arabic. The Proto-Semitic mimation (which I assume here is the
ancestor to Arabic nunation) probably originally marked that the noun was not in
construct. Yet, in Classical Arabic its absence marks both construct and definite
nouns.
9 Watson et al. (2006) question whether the Rāziḥī dialect is a form of Arabic

or a different language altogether. However, it has several clear Arabic isoglosses as

defined by Huehnergard (2017) and Al-Jallad (forthcoming), e.g. 1. Merger of *s¹
and *s³, samāʼ ‘sky’, mismār ‘nail’ (Behnstedt 1987: 264-5), cf. Hebr. šåmayim ‘sky’,
masmer ‘nail’; 2. Feminine singular demonstrative element t-: tīyā ‘this (f.)’, tāk ‘that
(f.)’ (op. cit.:165); 3. Leveling *-at and *-t feminine endings to *-at (op. cit.:
passim); 4. 3pl f. perfect -na ending: sarḥin < *saraḥna (op. cit.: 142); 5. mafʼūl
passive participles: maḏrī < *maḏrūy (op. cit.: 151); 6. Perfective morpheme qad:
gid (op. cit.: 289); 7. Negative mā: mā (op. cit.: 301); 8. *ḥattay ‘until’: ḥattē (op.
cit.: 243). Considering this evidence, it seems best to consider it a form of Arabic,
albeit one influenced (especially in the prepositions) by an unknown language.
10 ‘Aspiration is meant here to denote both aspiration, and breathy voice, thus

explaining transcriptions such as b-bābh and ij-jahhālh (Janet Watson, p.c.).’.

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 the archaic feminine ending -at in shammari arabic

distribution, the solution is rather ad hoc. It is not clear why the

pronominal suffix would become part of the definite syntagm, nor is
there an explanation why the definite article would combine with the
possessive suffix, something which does not happen in other Arabic
varieties.

Dōsiri
The Dōsiri dialect of Kuwait, described in some detail by Johnstone
(1961; 1964), is another dialect which has a feminine ending -at
where others have -a(h). Johnstone (1961: 263) describes the Dōsiri
dialect as having free variation between the marker -a and -at. He
cites examples of both definite and indefinite forms appearing with
both -at and ­-a:
il-marrat il-marra ‘the time’
il-ġārat il-ġāra ‘the raid’
il-jmāʽat il-jmāʽa ‘the group, the company’
’asnimat ’asnima ‘camel-humps’
ghawat ghawa ‘coffee’
He makes no mention of the feminine ending in construct, but,
based on the data presented in these papers, it seems that it is always
-at.
This situation can be understood as a development from the gen-
eral dialectal Arabic distribution with analogical spreading of the con-
struct form to the definite and indefinite. Examining the texts pro-
vided by Johnstone, it seems that the situation is more complex than
free variation. From an examination of these texts, it seems that the
two allomorphs -a and -at follow a distribution very similar to that
of Classical Arabic, where -a generally occurs in pause (with a few
exceptions), and -at always occurs in non-pausal position.
Some examples of -a in pause are listed below:
gā́l-u l-gēʽā́n wallāh́ zḗna.
say:P-3pm art-lands by God good:F
‘They said: the lands, really, are good’ (Johnstone 1961: 290)
w=ána b-a-gʽád máʽ ij-jmāʽa.
and=I fut-1s-stay:impf with art-people.
‘And I’ll stay with the people of our camp.’ (Johnstone 1961: 290)
In a few cases we find -a where it is certainly not in pausal position,
e.g.:

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 the archaic feminine ending -at in shammari arabic

šóf iš-šúgga tḗk lí=m=yamīn ́ =na janūb́ -in min-nā́

look:imp:2sm art-ravine that:f rel=from=right=1p south-indef from-1p
‘Look at that ravine that is to the right of us south of here.’ (Johnstone
1961: 290)
lmá ji-t íntĕ ḥassén f=šéddid-u
when come:P-2sm you:2sm Ḥassan so.that=load.up:I-2p
l-jmā́ʽa ṣṓb=na
art-people place-1p
‘When you get to Ḥasan, get the people of (your) camp loaded up (to come)
to us.’ (Johnstone 1961: 290)
The feminine ending -at never seems to occur in pause, and as such
appears to be a specifically context form, that is not allowed in pause,
e.g.
ʽā́d=ny á-bġei hadíyyat mínn-ik
still=1s 1s-want:impf present from-2sm.
‘I still want a present from you’ (Johnstone 1961: 293)
w=ā́l fahhā́d-in gabī́lt min gubā́yl yā́m
and=Tribe Fahhad=indef tribe from tribes ʽAjmān
‘Āl Fahhād is one of the tribes of the ʽAjmān (= Yām)’ (Johnstone 1964:
line 55–6)
As mentioned, this distribution is very close to the Classical Arabic
situation where the pausal form is -ah and the context forms is -at-.
This suggests that the ancestor of the Dōsiri dialect had a distribution
like Classical Arabic, as such a distribution is difficult to explain as a
development from the modern dialectal situation. The free variation
that now appears to be present in the context forms is probably the
result of the influence of surrounding dialects, which have the typical
modern dialectal distribution.
It should be noted that although the examination of Johnstone’s
texts suggest this distribution, using text as evidence for pausal effects
is of course far from perfect. One often has to infer from context, or
punctuation where pauses may have occurred. An ambiguous exam-
ple is the following sentence:
lammá-hnā ’inšállah ráḥ-t u=štaġál-t
some.day God.willing go:pf-1s and=work:pf-1s
fi š-šárikat u=jī́-t=ik
in def-company and=bring:pf-1s=2sm
b=il-filū́s u=kúl=šayy u=xáyr.
with=art-money and=all=thing and=good
‘Sometime, God willing, I’ll go and work in the company and bring you
money and everything will be well.’ (Johnstone 1961: 293)

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 the archaic feminine ending -at in shammari arabic

Here š-šárikat is found on the junction of two phrases, and we

might expect a pausal form with -a instead. However, the two phrases
are clearly part of a single larger sentence, and Johnstone provides no
punctuation between the two phrases, and therefore a non-pausal
form is certainly possible.
There is a clear example of a near minimal pair of pausal versus
non-pausal forms in Johnstone’s second article on the Dōsiri
dialect:
īlḗn jḗ-na l-jmā́ʽa.
then come:pf-1p def-group.
‘Then we came up to the group.’ (Johnstone 1964: line 246)
jḗ-na l-jamā́ʽat u gaʽád-na ʽindi-hum.
come:pf-1p def-group and sit:pf-1p at-3pm
‘we came up to the group and we sat with them’ (Johnstone 1964: line 248)
Another illustrative example is a list of different grass types, of which
all but the one in pause have the feminine ending -at:
w=ĩ-xálli=ha ʽawā́ši fi tḗk ir-rúgʽa
and=1p-let:impf=3fs pasturing in that:f def-place
b-la ḥlímat ĕw=zhárat ĕw=saʽdā́na.
with-not ḥalama and=Zahra and=saʽdāna.
‘and let them pasture in that place of fresh grass where there was no ḥalama
or Zahra or saʽdān grass.’ (Johnstone 1964: lines 210–11)
Future research using recordings and modern sound analysis tech-
nologies may confirm or disprove the suggested distribution above.

Conclusion

Contrary to what is often claimed, not all modern dialects of Arabic

have -at in construct and -ah everywhere else. It has been shown that
the Najdi dialect of the Shammar tribe has -at as a non-pausal form
for both the verb and the noun. I have argued that this distribution
is best understood as having developed from the Old Arabic situation
where -at and -āt are found in all contexts, followed by a develop-
ment *t > y /__[Pause]. Further study may show that other Bedouin
dialects, like those of the ‘umūr and Ṣlūt tribes, have a similar
distribution.
The Dōsiri dialect of Kuwait is another dialect that has -at in
places that are unexpected from the perspective of the modern dia-
lects. It is argued that its distribution of the -at and -a allomorphs
developed from a distribution similar to that of Classical Arabic.

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 the archaic feminine ending -at in shammari arabic

This article has shown that specific modern dialects of Arabic may
have archaic features which have been almost completely lost in the
convergent tendencies of the modern dialect continuum. A careful
study of such dialects — without the assumption that they behave
like other modern dialects — may bring to light other such archaic
features, which will give us a more nuanced insight into the linguistic
history of the modern dialects.
Address for correspondence: m.van.putten@hum.leidenuniv.nl

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