The Aramaic Substrate' Hypothesis in The Levant Revisited

Journal of Semitic Studies LXVII/2 Autumn 2022 doi: 10.
1093/jss/fgac002
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THE ‘ARAMAIC SUBSTRATE’ HYPOTHESIS
IN THE LEVANT REVISITED1
NAʾAMA PAT-EL
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AUSTIN, USA
AND
PHILLIP W. STOKES
UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE, KNOXVILLE, USA
Abstract
Aramaic was the lingua franca in the Levant in the millennium prior
to the Muslim conquests. The exact nature of the spread of Arabic
and the specifics of language shift in the Middle East are not yet well
understood. Many scholars assume that Arabic primarily spread in the
immediate aftermath of the Muslim conquest. The common opinion
is that in the new empire, Arabic was learnt imperfectly by speakers
of other languages, and the resulting dialects bear the marks of those
underlying languages (Versteegh 2012). Specifically, in the Levant and
parts of Mesopotamia that language was Aramaic. Several features of
the colloquial dialects of the Levant and Mesopotamia were argued to
be a result of an Aramaic substrate. In this paper we concentrate on
the alleged Aramaic substrate in the modern Arabic dialects of the
Levant, where information about the Arabic dialects is more complete,
and draw attention to a number of methodological flaws in the schol-
arly work supporting this hypothesis. We show that some core ‘Ara-
maic’ features in Levantine Arabic are unlikely to originate from
Aramaic. We further argue that the evidence is not consistent with
a rapid and imperfect language shift, which resulted in substrate influ-
ence, but rather with a prolonged period of contact between bilingual
populations, which resulted in the expected transference of specialized
lexical items, but almost no grammatical features.
1 Versions of this paper were presented at the International Conference of His-
torical Linguistics (San Antonio, TX) in August 2017, at the Timelines of Arabic
conference at Ohio State University in September 2019, in Tel Aviv and Haifa
Universities in May 2020, and in the eLecture series Ancient Near Eastern Languages
in Contact hosted by University College London and King’s College London in
August 2020. Many participants provided valuable comments and additional biblio-
graphical items. We also wish to thank Steven Fassberg and Hezy Mutzafi for refer-
ences and Øyvind Bjøru for comments on an earlier draft. Two anonymous review-
ers for the journal also provided valuable feedback, for which we are grateful.
Needless to say, we alone are responsible for the content of this paper.
1
THE ‘ARAMAIC SUBSTRATE’ HYPOTHESIS IN THE LEVANT REVISITED
1. Introduction

Aramaic was the most commonly spoken language in the Middle
East, in particular the fertile crescent, in the second half of the first
millennium BCE and the first half of the first millennium CE (Gzella
2015, ch. 5). This role was assumed in the early Middle Ages by
Arabic, which since then became the dominant language of the
region. This shift has always begged the question: how and when did
Arabic replace Aramaic? Traditionally, scholars have contended that
the influx of Arabic speakers, which swept the area in the seventh
century as part of the Muslim conquests, radically changed the lin-
guistic map of the Middle East and North Africa, causing the local
population to quickly adopt the new language and to a large extent
abandon their own original language (e.g. Blau 1981: 17; Versteegh
2013: 2; 2014: 140–1, 149, inter al.).2 The socio-political change
which accompanied the Muslim conquests of the Middle East and
North Africa led to a shift in much of the newly-conquered territories
from Aramaic to Arabic. These scholars were unanimous that the
shift from Aramaic to Arabic happened quite quickly in the immediate
aftermath of the Arabic conquest (e.g. Blau 1977: 16–18; Wasserstein
2003: 261).3 The shift is assumed to have resulted in significant
structural changes in the Arabic dialects in Syria and Mesopotamia,
as speakers learnt Arabic imperfectly, transferring linguistic material
from their original Aramaic dialect into their new language. We will
refer to this scholarly position as the ‘Aramaic substrate hypothesis’.
Arabic-speaking populations, however, were in the region long
before the seventh century CE. Although direct evidence for Arabic
before the common era is scant, based on non-Arabic sources, it is
clear that Arabic had a presence in the region in Antiquity.4 Evidence
2 Owens (2018) takes the extreme opposite position, that Aramaic-Arabic con-
tact was very early and its impact settled long before the Arabic conquest, which
primarily facilitated the spread of Aramaic features outside Syria, all the way to
North Africa. While we agree that Aramaic-Arabic contact is much older than often
assumed, we nevertheless find many problems with the specific arguments Owens
makes. We will comment on them further below, where relevant.
3 The different impact on rural and urban areas is widely recognized today; for exam-
ple, Hopkins (1995: 37) notes that although in urban areas the shift must have been
quite rapid, ‘small rural pockets of Aramaic’ persisted.
4 Livingstone (1997) points to an Arabic word, fANŠE.a-na-qa-a-te anāqāte ‘she
camels’ in a royal Akkadian inscription from Calah dated to Tiglath-pileser III

(744–727 BCE) which seems to include the Arabic definite article (<han-nāqātu;
On han as an Arabic article, see, e.g. Al-Jallad 2015: 76). If correct, this piece of
evidence predates the attestation of the Arabic definite article in Herodotus (fifth
2
for Arabic in the first millennium CE, before the rise of Islam, is more
abundant.5 Indeed, although the first major written Arabic sources

are dated to a much later period, recent scholarship, especially in the
epigraphy of the Levant and western Arabia shows that Arabic was
quite widespread in the centuries before the Islamic era. Nevertheless,
the import of developments in the history of late antiquity, as well as
the epigraphic and linguistic ones, has still not been felt in the study
of Aramaic-Arabic contact. Consequently, many scholars still tend to
dismiss the impact of Arabic speakers on the region and the possibil-
ity of wide-spread contact with speakers of other languages before the
Arab conquest of the Levant.6
Furthermore, Aramaic was not replaced immediately after the
Islamization of the Levant, as supporters of the ‘Aramaic substrate
hypothesis’ assume. There is mounting evidence for the robust and
wide-spread existence of Aramaic speakers in the Fertile Crescent,
particularly in the Levant, long after the conquests as well. Indeed,
Aramaic continued to be used well after the Muslim conquest (Butts
forthcoming). The literature in Aramaic in the centuries following
the conquest is vast, and includes not only religious compositions,
but also grammars, historiography, and even more mundane genres,
like catalogues. The translation movement, during which major
works in Greek and Syriac were translated into Arabic, assumes strong
bilingualism in the cities, and the modern dialectal diversity of Ara-
maic reflects likely continued monolingualism or bilingualism in the
rural areas. Thus, while Greek was replaced by Arabic fairly quickly
and completely as the language of high culture and administration,7
in the periphery, where the reach of the empire is weak, change was
century BCE). Reference to individuals with the ethnonym ‘Arab’ appear earlier in
cuneiform and post-exilic biblical Hebrew (e.g. Neh. 2:19), but that could be
a reference to their place of origin or residence, rather than to their language.
5 Butts (forthcoming) provides indirect evidence for the existence of Arabic
speakers in Mesopotamia and northern and southern Arabia. Much of the evidence
is reference to Arabs in Syriac literature. In the context of the discussion in this
paper such evidence is somewhat problematic, because it does not prove that Arabic
was widely spoken in the area where western Aramaic was spoken.
6 For example, Wasserstein (2003: 261) notes that Arabic ‘was not, at the time
of the conquest by the Muslim Arabs, deeply implanted or widespread’, while

Hoyland (2004: 184) comments that Arabic ‘remained primarily a vernacular,
employed by non-literate peoples and by those who, for whatever reason, preferred
to write in other languages’. Hoyland argues that Arabic was spoken primarily in
the Negev, Sinai and Northwest Arabia, south of the main Aramaic speaking areas
in Moab and Hawran (ibid. 186).
7 Hoyland (2004: 190–1).
3
slow to arrive. The evidence is indicative that Arabic-speakers were

not peripheral in the centuries prior to the Arab conquest, and that

Aramaic continued to be spoken widely after the conquest (Butts
forthcoming).8 The survival of Aramaic in rural areas of the Middle
East up to the modern period led to more cautious statements in
recent studies about the use of Aramaic alongside Arabic, as well as
the degree to which purported Aramaisms in Arabic are legitimate
(Retsö 2011; Gzella 2015: 333). Nevertheless, it is still common for
scholars to appeal to Aramaic influence to explain various features,
especially modern dialectal ones (e.g. Wasserstein 2003; Río-Sanchez
2013; Zuʾbi 2019). There is, then, still a disconnect between what
the data suggests of the historical interactions between Arabic and
Aramaic speakers on the one hand, and the linguistic explanations
commonly invoked to explain modern dialectal Arabic features.
These facts require a renewed investigation of the linguistic land-
scape of the Middle East and questioning whether we should expect
the kind of influence from Aramaic on Arabic dialects that is fre-
quently proposed.
Collections of features assumed to be a result of Aramaic influence
on Arabic vary from work to work, but the major features typically
thought to be a result of Aramaic substrate are the following (e.g.
Feghali 1918; Diem 1979; Contini 1999; Arnold and Behnstedt
1993; Weninger 2011; Versteegh 2012):
1. *ā > ō (e.g. CA lisān ~ Qalamūn lsōn ‘tongue’)
2. short pretonic vowel syncope (e.g. CA zaġīr ~ LevA zġer ‘small’)
3. 3fs pf. Suffix geminates when vocalic object suffixes are attached
(e.g. katabittu <* katabit + u ‘she wrote it’).9
4. Pronominal system (e.g. Aleppo 3p hinnen ~ Syr. hennōn).10
5. ‘Double clitic constructions’, namely periphrastic direct object
and genitive (e.g. LevA ktēb-o la-sāmi ‘Sami’s book’).11
6. lexicon12
8 There is evidence that the new culture did not replace the existing ones quickly
in the periphery, although it is unclear how that affected language use. In some
areas, for example, the Negev, Muslims were not dominant in the Late Antique
period, and in general the archaeological evidence, at least in Palestine, reflects
continuity (Taxel 2018). For example, Peers (2011) points to the coexistence of
a mosque and a church in eight- ninth-century Shivta (Negev).
9 Arnold and Behnstedt (1993: 75) argue that it may be an Arabic influence on
Aramaic, but conclude it is unlikely.

10 Brockelmann (1908: 310); Weninger (2011: 749).
11 Hopkins (1997); Contini (1999: 107).
12 Fraenkel (1886); Feghali (1918); Retsö (2011); Zuʾbi (2019).
4
In this paper, we aim to re-examine the ‘Aramaic substrate hypoth-

esis’ and its suitability to explain the linguistic profile of Levantine

Arabic. We will argue that the problem with the analysis of alleged
Aramaic substrate features in Arabic is both methodological and evi-
dential.13 We concentrate on features that represent the most affected
areas in language shift: phonology and syntax. These are the shift
*ā > ō and the double clitic constructions. We have chosen these
features, in part, due to the near-ubiquitous acceptance that they are
obvious substrate features among scholars working on this topic. We
will demonstrate how the widespread ‘Aramaic Substrate Hypothesis’
fails upon close examination of these two central features in the pho-
nology and syntax of Levantine Arabic. We conclude that the evi-
dence does not support the hypothesis of a rapid language shift, but
rather indicates a long period of contact which left very few traces in
Arabic dialects. In this paper we will show how methodological flaws
lead to a misguided reliance on Aramaic as a go-to explanation, rather
than to efforts to form well-informed historical linguistic models to
explain dialectal features internally. We suggest that a more careful
examination of the material will substantially change our evaluation
of the Aramaic-Arabic relationship in the Levant.
In section 2 below we review a number of lingering methodologi-
cal flaws in the scholarly literature supporting the ‘Aramaic Substrate
Hypothesis’, including misuse of the linguistic term substrate.
The effects of Aramaic on the phonology of Arabic is covered in
section 3, concentrating on the shift *ā > ō. Syntax is covered in sec-
tion 4, with a detailed examination of the marking of direct objects
and nominal dependents. We conclude and discuss the implications
of our findings in section 5.
2. Methodology and its Failings
The methodological problems in the study of the Aramaic substrate

pertain both to the concept of substrate and its application in the case
of Levantine Arabic, and to the analysis of specific features in both
Arabic and Aramaic. We first briefly review the definition of substrate
and how it is identified (§2.1). We then continue to explore the
specifics of the Arabic case, and whether the methodology used to
identify Aramaic features in Levantine Arabic is appropriate (§2.2).
13 Some of these problems have already been noted in Retsö (2011).
5
2.1 Substrate 14
Substrate interference, or shift-induced change, is a type of contact

interference that involves imperfect learning of a target language fol-
lowed by a rapid language shift (Thomason 2001: 66).15 This process
has implications for the type of change we can expect to see as
a result, in particular compared to other cases of contact situations.
Contact-induced change typically starts with lexical borrowing, while
structural borrowing is typically detected only in cases of intense and
long-lasting contact situations (Thomason 2001); in shift-induced
change, however, the dominant influence is seen in structural fea-
tures, primarily phonology and syntax, while lexicon is typically not
affected (LaPolla 2009: 249; Thomason 2009: 320; Epps 2014:
589). Heavy lexical interference is expected in adult speakers’ L1 dur-
ing shifting, but not in the target language. System stabilization may
follow a period of unstable mixed language, which typically happens
after bilingualism has ceased to be an operative factor in the speech
community.16
Language shift associated with substrate is a result of a number of
processes, especially, failure of speakers to learn some highly marked
features of the target language, as well as carryover of features from
their original language into the new target language (Thomason
2009: 320). A case for shift-induced change can be made when
a number of requisites are met. First, a language shows the effect of
contact in a variety of categories in relatively large numbers. Second,
the shared features must be shown to positively be a result of contact
rather than an internal innovation; for example, if the feature in ques-
tion is attested in related languages or if there is a plausible internal
source for the change, then the case for shift becomes less distinct and
14 In this paper we use ‘substrate’ to refer to a specific type of linguistic change
(see explanation in this section), which is, by and large, the use of the term by the
scholars with whose work we engage in this paper.
15 Some shifts took centuries (for example, Irish to English; Hickey 2020); these
shifts involve bilingual speakers and typically do not involve imperfect learning.
Since at least some scholars (e.g. Blau, Arnold and Behnstedt) assume imperfect
learning or acquisition, a relatively rapid shift must be assumed.
16 This is, however, not always attested. Sankoff (2002: 645–6) reports on
a number of rapid language shifts, where stability is likely already in the second
generation. Her examples, however, are of minority speakers within a large majority
speakers community, not of an entire speaker population switching to another lan-
guage. Nevertheless, a large number of studies have shown that substrate influence
persists even in such situations; for example, Purnell et al. (2005) report on devoic-
ing effects in Wisconsin, as a result of German substrate.
6
much weaker.17 Finally, the feature in question must be shown to be

present in the L1 before it is attested in the target language. Language

shift with significant structural alteration has been known to happen
quite rapidly, within a generation or so, where indeed speakers acquire
the language imperfectly. Conversely, in cases of long-term language
change, speakers become proficient bilinguals and there is no imper-
fect learning. As a result, there is almost no interference in the target
language (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 41). The most extreme
cases of rapid language shift and shift-induced change are creoles
(Siegel 2003), but many other cases show a variety of effects, which
are responsible for a variety of changes in the structure of the target
language.
The amount of specialized terms found in Levantine Arabic dia-
lects and the almost complete lack of structural influence, especially
in the phonology, are more indicative of long contact and slow lan-
guage change than rapid shift.18 Nevertheless, many scholars studying
this linguistic area do not make the distinction between different
types of contact, a distinction which is crucial to the analysis of lin-
guistic features in Levantine Arabic, as well as for the understanding
of the history of Arabic in the region. As we will argue below, the
linguistic profile of Levantine Arabic does not reflect structural
changes indicative of language shift. Based on our analysis of a sample
of features, we will therefore suggest that Aramaic features in Levan-
tine Arabic are likely a result of low-grade but long-term contact,
rather than language shift.
17 Such is the case of Irish English, for example, where much of its distinctive
TAM system may be traced to earlier phases of English or be very similar to changes
in other dialects of English, and therefore some scholars argue that an Irish substrate
explanation is less preferable (Siemund 2004). In our case, some features argued to
be shared between Aramaic and Arabic (Owens 2018), are attested in other Semitic
languages, for example fs *at > a(h) (attested in Soqotri and Canaanite), introduc-
tion of the active participle into the verbal system (attested in Canaanite), the use
of T forms for passive (attested in many Semitic languages), among other features.
18 Surprisingly, even scholars who accept that the shift from Aramaic to Arabic
was not rapid, still maintain that there is a substantial Aramaic substrate effect; for
example, in a paper with the title ‘The Aramaic Substrate of Palestinian Arabic’,
Neishtadt (2015: 281) comments that ‘[l]ike other cases of language shift, the shift
from Aramaic to Arabic in Palestine must not be understood as a sharp replacement
of one spoken language by another accomplished within a generation or two, but
rather as a gradual and lengthy process, probably with a significant phase of Aramaic-
Arabic bilingualism’. Other scholars argue that contact influence in this region is
a result of Aramaic learners of Arabic, rather than contact between speaker popula-
tions (e.g. Procházka 2020: 88).
7
2.2 Methodological Problems

with ‘The Aramaic Substrate Hypothesis’

Contact between speakers of Arabic and Aramaic has been taking
place likely since before the common era, although the majority
of direct evidence is attested primarily in Late Antiquity; the type of
contact in different locales and different periods was varied, and con-
sequently we should expect different types of traces in the languages
involved. As reviewed above, substrate influence occurs in a specific
social situation which results in rapid language shift and, crucially, in
structural changes in the target language. Scholars of the Arabic dia-
lects of the Levant often treat any similarity between Arabic and Ara-
maic as a sign of ‘substrate’ influence,19 without considering other
types of transfer scenarios, or even other types of change which may
account for the Arabic feature.20 In many cases, the probability of an
internal development in Arabic is quite high, even if the construction
is not attested in pre-modern sources. Unfortunately, many scholars
of Arabic refrain from relying on a diachronic model and almost
reflexively appeal to ‘Aramaic’ as a source of explanation.21 This trend
has now become a crutch, and a need for more careful and detailed
work on the diachronic development of the Arabic dialects is long
overdue. In order to start forming a path forward, we would like to
draw scholarly attention to a number of methodological pitfalls which
plague much of the work on Aramaic-Arabic contact.
First, contact should be considered the preferred explanation when
other explanations are less likely (Thomason 2001: 94). Contact is
established not just when a source is identified, but when a strong
case can be made on a number of factors to support this scenario. In
other words, if there are reasonable internal sources for the features
shared by the L1 and the target language, the case for substrate is
19 For example, Zuʾbi (2019) notes in her discussion of Aramaic words in Clas-
sical Arabic that ‘[w]ords without Arabic roots probably are of Aramaic origin, i.e.
substrate’ (p. 252). She defines substrate as ‘borrowing directly from Aramaic’, while
loanwords are lexical items which were borrowed into Classical Arabic in the Middle
Ages and inherited by Palestinian Arabic (p. 256). Similarly, Neishtadt (2015), who
notes that contact between speakers of Arabic and Aramaic was likely lengthy,
defines older lexical borrowing as a result of substrate while modern lexical borrow-
ing is called ‘loanword’.
20 This practice was rightly critiqued by Diem (1979: 41–9), who nevertheless
relied upon several problematic assumptions with which we do not agree.

21 A notable pushback is Jastrow (2018) who argues against seeking an Aramaic
origin for the Iraqi existential particle aku and in favour of an internal development
(contra Müller-Kessler 2003).
8
weakened.22 Of course, if evidence for contact is diverse, rich and spans

several categories, the case for substrate is much stronger. As we argue

in this paper, and as other scholars have conceded, the evidence for
substrate is found primarily in the lexicon, not where we would expect
it, in syntax and phonology.23 Furthermore, the existence of Aramaic
structural features, as we will show immediately below, has been exag-
gerated by flawed methodology, and should be re-evaluated.
In addition to identifying any similarity with Aramaic as ‘substrate’
influence, scholars conflate different types of contact between Ara-
maic and Arabic and include all of them under the term ‘substrate’.
For example, Borg (2004) treats Aramaic influence on Cypriote
Maronite Arabic as a type of substrate. Speakers of Christian dialects
use Aramaic as a prestigious and culturally salient liturgical language,
and some features may be transferred to the spoken language.24 There
is no language shift involved in such a scenario, since Aramaic is not
a spoken language for these speakers and it is used in different con-
texts than Arabic. Aramaic influence in Cypriote Maronite Arabic is
thus more comparable to contact between Modern Hebrew and Bib-
lical Hebrew than it is to cases of substrate influence.25
Second, while there is no argument that there was contact between
Arabic and Aramaic speakers, the salient question is whether there is
a strong case for a rapid language-shift from Aramaic to Arabic in the
22 The difficulty of evaluating contact and internal change has been taken up by
many scholars. Many argue that when possible internal sources are available, they
should be preferred as an explanation over contact. For example, Lass (1997: 209)
discusses how to evaluate internal change versus contact change and concludes that
‘[i]f the (informal) probability weightings of both source-types converge for a given
character, then the choice goes to endogeny’. Similar claims are found elsewhere,
for example, ‘[i]f there are plausible internal sources for all the features shared by
A and B, then the case for interference may be weakened’ (Thomason 2009: 324);
‘if there are plausible internal sources for all the shared features, then either the case
for interference is weakened or we’re looking at an instance of multiple causation
(which is common)’ (Thomason 2016).
23 For example, Hopkins (1995: 39), who states ‘that there is present an Ara-
maic substratum in the dialects of Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia is a fact agreed
upon by all, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the lexicon’; Procházka
(2018: 283) notes the same for Anatolia, where contact and bilingualism have left
their imprint primarily on the lexicon, especially in semantic fields related to rural
life and agriculture.
24 Similarly, Bassal (2012: 91) notes the use of the preposition la as a direct
object maker in Arabic as a substrate feature, a result of Biblical translations from

Syriac into Arabic.
25 Perhaps a more suitable comparison would be the influence of the King James
Bible on modern English (Crystal 2010).
9
seventh century CE, which left significant footsteps on the structure

of colloquial Arabic. As many scholars have pointed out, Arabic had

a presence in the Fertile Crescent before the Arab conquest. By the
Achaemenid period (sixth–fourth centuries BCE), much of the popu-
lation of Syria and Mesopotamia had likely become Aramaic speak-
ing. The presence of groups with linguistically Arabic names in cen-
tral and southern Mesopotamia is already attested in, e.g. the Kurkh
monolith from 853 BCE (Retsö 2003: 124–8).26 The earliest example
of Arabic is apparently attested in an inscription from Bāyir in Jor-
dan, which contains a prayer to the Canaanite deities Milkom, Qaws
and Chemōš, associated with ancient Ammon, Edom and Moab.
While undated, the reference to these Canaanite deities from Trans-
jordan, which disappear from the historical record not long after the
demise of the respective political entities, suggests a date during their
existence (eighth–sixth centuries BCE) (Hayajneh, Ababneh and
Khraysheh 2015; on the language, see Al-Jallad 2018: 315).
Most of our direct evidence for Arabic, and thus for Arabic-
Aramaic contact, begins in the late first millennium BCE, and the use of
the language undoubtedly increased and intensified over time, espe-
cially in the southern Levant (Hoyland 2004: 183–90). The strongest
evidence for contact comes from the period and territory of the
Nabataeans. The Nabataean Kingdom enjoyed regional prominence,
at its height stretching from Boṣrā in southern Syria, running the
length of Jordan into northwest Arabia at Ḥegrā (Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ), and
west across the Negev to the port of Gaza, between the third century
BCE through the first century CE. The Nabataeans had significant
contact with local Aramaic-speaking populations (Knauf 2009).
There is growing evidence that most, if not all, of the population of
the Nabataean realm (third century BCE–first century CE) was Arabic
speaking, based on Arabic syntax and vocabulary in, e.g. the Naḥal
Ḥever papyri (Yadin et al 2002: 170ff.), as well as the Arabic written
in the Nabataean script (Macdonald 2010: 19–20). Notable in this
regard are the ʿĒn ʿAvdat and Namarah inscriptions. At ʿĒn ʿAvdat
(~ first–second century CE), located in the Negev desert of southern
Palestine, a six-line inscription was discovered, which contains two
26 The study of Arabic in the pre-Islamic period is complicated greatly by the
near-absence of Arabic-language data securely dated to the Babylonian and Achae-

menid Persian periods on the one hand, and the debate about the cultural and
linguistic identity of those referred to as ‘Arab’ in the disparate sources (on which,
see Ephʿal 1982; Graf 2003; Retsö 2003; Macdonald 2009; Webb 2016). We
remain neutral as to whether any specific group referred to by the ethnonym Arab
would have spoken a dialect of what we would define as Arabic linguistically.
10
lines of rhyming Arabic embedded in four lines of Nabataean Ara-

maic inscription (O’Connor 1986). The Namarah inscription, dated

to the fourth century CE, is a monumental inscription, an epitaph of
the king mar al-qays from southern Syria, which contains five lines of
Arabic written in the Nabataean script (Kropp 2017).
The Nabataean script and writing tradition continued to be used
after the Romans under Trajan crushed the Nabataean kingdom in
106 CE. During the period between the creation of the new Roman
province of Arabia in 107 CE, and the emergence of Islam in the
mid-sixth century CE, the legacy of the Nabataean writing system
spread, as evidenced by the growing number of inscriptions docu-
mented during recent surveys in, e.g. northwest Arabia, southern
Arabia, Sinai, the Negev, Jordan and southern Syria. Inscriptions
from west Arabia and the Levant attest the evolution of the Nabataean
script in its classical form to what became the Arabic script, a stage
of the script that Laïla Nehmé refers to as Nabataeo-Arabic, or ‘tran-
sitional’ (Nehmé 2010; 2017). In these transitional inscriptions, the
presence of Arabic vocabulary, morphology, and syntax is evident,
with the Aramaic component becoming increasingly relegated to
genre-specific, formulaic terms, such as dkyr ‘(may he be) remem-
bered’, and šlm ‘(let him be) well’ (Nehmé 2017a: 93).27 Further
survey work as far south as the region of Naǧrān (Bīr Ḥima), south-
ern Saudi Arabia, has documented inscriptions with Arabic anthropo-
nyms written in this transitional, Nabataeo-Arabic script in the fifth
century CE (Robin, Al-Ghabbān and Al-Saʿīd 2014: 1087–92). Thus
from southern Syria, southern Palestine, Transjordan and W. Arabia,
Arabic was spoken—and written—for centuries before the rise of
Islam.
Additional evidence for pre-Islamic Arabic in the Levant is attested
in the large corpora of inscriptions from Southern Syria, Jordan and
North-West Arabia written in the Safaitic and Ḥismaic scripts, both
varieties of North Arabian scripts. Al-Jallad (2015a; 2018) has argued
on linguistic grounds that the language attested in these corpora is
Arabic, providing a glimpse of the Arabic used in the region perhaps
as much as a millennium before the rise of Islam (idem 2018: 323).
27 A notable example of this transition is JSNab 17, which commemorates the
construction of a tomb by Kaʿbō for his mother, Raqōš. The inscription, carved on
a rock face on the famous mountain Qaṣr al-Bint at the Nabataean city Ḥegrā
(modern Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ) in 267 CE, is written in a mix of Aramaic and Arabic:
Aramaic is used for the genre-specific formulae, while the rest is in Arabic (Fiema,
Al-Jallad, Macdonald and Nehmé 2017: 402–3).
11
While these inscriptions are generally formulaic, with a fairly predict-

able set of topics (Al-Jallad 2015a: 201–20), non-formulaic texts are

increasingly being discovered and published. The corpus of Safaitic
inscriptions also includes poetry (Al-Jallad 2015b; 2017a), a mixed
Safaito-Ḥismaic inscription (Al-Jallad 2015b), Safaitic-Greek
bilingual inscriptions (Al-Jallad and Al-Manaser 2016), and even
an inscription transliterated in the Greek script (Al-Jallad and Al-
Manaser 2015).
The geographic distribution of the Ḥismaic corpus is largely coter-
minous with that of the Nabataeans’ political and cultural hegemony
(G. King 1990; Macdonald 2000: 44–5), and bilingual Ḥismaic-
Nabataean Aramaic inscriptions are also attested (e.g. Hayajneh
2009). While the Ḥismaic corpus is largely comprised of graffiti,
there are two longer monumental-type inscriptions from the Madaba
area in north-central Jordan (Zwettler and Graf 2004). Finally, as
Al-Jallad (2017b) has shown, Greek transliteration of, e.g. onomas-
tica, as well as legal and agricultural terminology, provides still more
evidence of the presence of Arabic, not simply among the nomads of
the desert, but also in sedentary and urban areas such as Petra, Ḥegrā
(Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ) and Dūmah (Nehmé 2017b).
Ultimately, while it is difficult at present to determine where the
boundaries between Arabic speakers and Aramaic speakers were in,
e.g. the Levant, due to the extent and nature of our sources, we can
nevertheless say with certainty that contact, and likely some degree of
bilingualism, were widespread for well over a millennium before the
rise of Islam (Al-Jallad 2020: 39–45).28 Importantly, the assumption
that Arabic was rarely written, and of little cultural significance, in
the pre-islamic period must now be significantly altered, if not aban-
doned.29 Various writing cultures and traditions in several different
28 Al-Jallad has commented (p.c.) that we in fact have little evidence that urban
populations even in the northernmost area of the former Nabataean territory (e.g.
northern Jordan and the Ḥawrān) were Aramaic speakers. That Aramaic was the
language in which writing was carried out in a particular area cannot be taken as
evidence that it is the language, or at least the only language, that the local popula-
tion spoke, as the example of Nabataean Aramaic demonstrates. Such a claim seems
to us unwarranted, unless paired with other, more explicit evidence, given the wide-
spread use of Aramaic as an administrative language as well as its use in private
correspondence, from the Achaemenid period until the advent of Islam.
29 See, e.g. Versteegh (2014: 39), who, it should be emphasized, does not accept,
e.g. the Safaitic and Ḥismaic corpora as attesting varieties of Arabic. To be fair,
Versteegh’s comments predate some other recent discoveries, such as the Nabataeo-
Arabic inscriptions, as well as Al-Jallad’s thorough study of the Graeco-Arabica
material (Al-Jallad 2017b).
12
scripts provide attestation of varieties of Arabic in antiquity, with

Nabataean becoming predominant in the late antique period.

In addition to the evidence for Aramaic-Arabic contact for over
a millennium before the Muslim conquest, the data from the con-
quest and thereafter suggest a rather slow adoption of Arabic by non-
Arabic speaking populations, beginning with early converts and cen-
tred in newly-founded urban areas (Hoyland 2004: 190–1). Aramaic
remained entrenched in less-populated areas for centuries, and indeed
was until recently the primary spoken language of three villages in
Central Syria (Maʿlūla, Baxʿa and Jubb ʿaddīn). This shift from Ara-
maic to Arabic, where it occurred, took place over centuries, and not
in a rushed, haphazard manner that would lead to imperfect acquisi-
tion and heavy substrate influence that would result in the kinds of
influence often assumed to explain purported Aramaisms in the dia-
lects of the Levant.
Third, ‘Aramaic’ is regularly used as an umbrella term, without
considering the dialectal variety of Aramaic in the Middle East.30
Even the dialects to which we have access show incredible diversity,
certainly between Mesopotamian (Eastern) and Syro-Palestinian
(Western) dialects. The correct identification of the source of a fea-
ture is crucial for our ability to prove transfer; some features are only
attested in Eastern Aramaic dialects, and therefore their existence in
Western Arabic dialects is less likely to be a result of substrate. Nev-
ertheless, scholars repeatedly compare features to ‘Aramaic’, and fail
to distinguish between dialects.31 A simple example of this is found
in many studies of the Arabic lexicon. Most often, scholars turn to
the Syriac lexicon to account for words in the Galilee and Jerusalem,
30 E.g. Holes (2002: 277), who, citing Feghali (1928) for Lebanese, attributes
the root š-g-l, which occurs in Bḥārna Arabic with the meaning ‘to lift and carry’,
to Syriac, without considering other dialects or options for its presence. Neishtadt
(2015: 295), however, is cautious to note that attention to Western Aramaic is
particularly important when considering Palestinian Arabic.
31 While the majority of scholars use Syriac for any comparison with Arabic,
regardless of region, Owens (2018) uses Biblical Aramaic and Samaritan Aramaic
almost exclusively. This is problematic on a number of levels. First, Biblical Aramaic
is not a single dialect (the books of Ezra and Daniel reflect two distinct dialects).
Second, Samaritan Aramaic is a western Late Antique Aramaic dialect, while the
dialects labelled Biblical Aramaic are eastern and earlier. While Owens prudently
acknowledges the geographical and diachronic complexity of contact with Aramaic
(ibid. 398), he does not factor the structure of specific Aramaic dialects in his discus-
sion and treats all of them as having essentially the same grammatical features.
13
where Syriac was never spoken.32 For example, Zuʾbi (2019: 260)
argues that the word sirwāl/širwāl ‘pants’ in Levantine Arabic is

a substrate word from Aramaic. Several facts work against this hypoth-
esis. First and foremost, the word is only attested in Eastern Aramaic
dialects (Mandaic, Syriac and JBA), and even there the spelling dif-
fers: Mandaic shows šrwl, while JBA has srbl; the different spelling is
difficult to explain if these words come from a shared source. Second,
the word is already attested in a number of Medieval Arabic texts,
and, before colonialism, in a number of Arabic dialects which were
not in contact with Aramaic, like Egyptian and pre-colonial Moroc-
can Arabic (Dozi 1845: 203–9). Third, the word is also attested in
a number of non-Semitic regional languages, like Greek (σαραβαλλα),
Latin (sarabala), Ottoman Turkish (şalvār), and others, all of which
are traced to an Iranian lexeme, šalwār ‘pants’, which has a solid
Indo-European etymology.33 Given the distribution of the Arabic
word for ‘pants’ and the lack of evidence for its existence in pre-modern
Western Aramaic as well as its attestation in a number of other
regional languages, it is likely that this word is a Wanderwort, a cul-
tural word, which spread regionally, with a new item of clothing.34
Fourth, dating the development of features within Aramaic is nec-
essary before it can be compared to a feature in modern dialects of
Arabic. Some features attested in both Neo-Aramaic dialects and their
Arabic-speaking neighbours are not known in their pre-modern Ara-
maic predecessors. For example, the unconditioned sound change *ā
> o found in some Levantine dialects is not known in pre-modern
Aramaic, and as we will show below, has a different distribution in
Modern Western Aramaic dialects, where it is conditioned. Unless we
can positively identify that the source of the sound change is an Ara-
maic predecessor of Neo-West-Aramaic, it is at least possible that the
sound change started with Arabic and transferred into Aramaic long
after the Islamization of the Levant. An opposite example is the
semantic restriction on the type of nouns that can be used in clitic
doubling in Levantine Arabic. In the Arabic constructions only
animate nouns are permitted as possessors. Such a restriction no
longer applies in Aramaic after the Persian period. During the period
32 See also Diem (1979) for a similar point. Syriac cannot be related to Western
Neo-Aramaic since the latter does not share in a number of innovations attested in
Syriac, such as 3ms prefix conjugation Western y- vs. Eastern Aramaic n~l-, plural
Western *-ayyā vs. Eastern *-ē, etc. (Kim 2008).
33 IE *skelo- ‘thigh’ + IE *wero- ‘cover’.
34 For more examples of possible regional cultural words in the Middle East
(including Anatolia) in Antiquity, see Rendsburg (2013).
14
of alleged shift from Aramaic to Arabic, Aramaic speakers had already

completely generalized clitic doubling in the nominal phrase; yet the

construction in Arabic reflects the restrictions operative in fifth cen-
tury BCE Aramaic. Before embarking on comparing Aramaic and Ara-
bic, scholars must date features in the relevant Aramaic dialect to
determine whether they are in fact earlier than, or contemporary
with, contact between Arabic and Aramaic. Scholars should keep in
mind the possibility that more recent features are a result of internal
processes in Arabic, especially in areas where Aramaic speakers con-
stitute a minority group with very little social and cultural impact.
Fifth, concentration on the lexical component of the alleged Ara-
maic substratum completely misses the point. Given favourable social
conditions, speaker populations will borrow lexical items from neigh-
bouring groups. Thus the existence of lexical loan words does not
prove language shift; it rather suggests long-term contact. Further-
more, the lexical evidence for an Aramaic substrate consists mostly of
words and terms related to local agricultural customs, which are typi-
cally not attested in Classical Arabic texts.35 The absence of these
vocabs from Classical Arabic should not be taken to mean that they
never existed in pre-modern Arabic.36 The Classical record does not
typically cover these semantic domains and cultural categories, and
so related vocabulary items are unlikely to be attested in Medieval
literature.37 A similar distribution is found in Hebrew: the vocabulary
of Mishnaic Hebrew is much richer than Biblical Hebrew in craft,
house-hold items, and daily life related vocabulary, as a result of the
different foci of these works (Bendavid 1971: 882; Sáenz-Badillos
1996: 200).38 In some cases, agricultural vocabulary is attested only
in Mishnaic Hebrew, but may have existed earlier; for example, the
root msq ‘to gather olives’. Additionally, scholars working on the lexi-
cal component of Arabic frequently ignore the possibility that words
may change their semantic scope in the language internally even
35 For example, baʕʕar ‘to glean the grain after the harvesters’ (Bassal 2012: 96).
36 Contra Bassal (2012: 87). A more nuanced approach is taken in Neishtadt
(2015: 290), although even there, the unlikelihood of finding rural vocabulary in
CA is not addressed.
37 Potential examples of such vocabs are discussed in Holes (2002), who rightly
acknowledges these limitations (p. 272).

38 For example, yāṣul ‘wagon shaft’ (~Arab. waṣle), and various other parts of the
plough (Kutscher 1961: 14–15), etc.
15
without external impetus. The possibility that some words are regional
Wanderwörter is rarely entertained.39

The tendency alluded to above to compare colloquial dialects to
Classical Arabic in order to mine contact features is itself problematic.
There is growing evidence that some dialects contain archaic features
which are not attested in Classical Arabic. In other words, Classical
Arabic may be more innovative in some respects than modern dialects
of Arabic. For example, in Levantine Arabic definite N-Adj combina-
tion can be marked as definite only on the adjective, e.g. sūʔ əl-ʕatīʔ
‘the old marketplace’, baṭṭīh əl-ʔahḍar ‘the green watermelon’
(Grotzfeld 2000). This construction is found in most areas, except
North Africa (Pat-El 2017: 445–8), as well as in Middle Arabic, e.g.
wa-yawm t-tānī ‘the second day’ (Hopkins 1984: 203). Blau (2000)
lists this feature as one of the hallmarks of Middle Arabic, assuming
it is an innovative colloquial feature. This pattern, however, is known
also from the Qurʾān, where it is vocalized as a construct, e.g. dāru
l-ʾahirati ‘the other world’ (Q 12:109). A recent pre-islamic, sixth
century, Graeco-Arabic text from Petra contained this pattern, βαιτ
αλαχβαρ /bayt al-akbar/ ‘the large house’ (Al-Jallad, Daniel and al-
Ghul 2013: 32–3).40 The same pattern is attested in several Central
Semitic languages, including Hebrew, Phoenician and Aramaic (Pat-
El 2017: 449). This fact, combined with the geographical and dia-
chronic distributions of the pattern, should lead to the conclusion
that it is in fact an original Arabic feature, not innovative, and its
absence in Classical Arabic is a sign of loss.41 Such examples are
39 See Haynie, Bowern et al. (2014) for definitions and discussion of this con-
cept and its relevance for Historical Linguistics.
40 Another example is the distinction between 3rd and 2nd plural pronouns/
pronominal suffixes. Based on comparative Semitic data, gender distinction in the

pronominal system is distinguished by both vowel (masculine -u vs. feminine -i)
and nasal (masculine -m vs. feminine -n) (Huehnergard 2019: 53–4). In Classical
Arabic, the distinction between genders is based solely on the nasal, with the histori-
cally masculine -u generalized to both genders: 3mp hum/3fp hunna and suffixes
-hum/-hunna; 2mp ʾantum/2fp ʾantunna and suffixes -kum/kunna. In many dialects,
the dual distinction—based on vowel quality and nasal—is retained, e.g. Salti (Jor-
danian) Arabic: hummu/hinne and suffixes -hum/-hin; 2mp into/2fp intin and suf-
fixes 2mp -ku/2fp -čin (Herin 2014: §3.1).
41 We do not consider the Qurʾān to be Classical Arabic. It is important to
distinguish between the language of the Quranic Consonantal Text (QCT; Arabic
rasm) on the one hand, and the recitation traditions (Arabic qirāʾāt). There is
a growing body of evidence that the language of the QCT itself was in many ways
different from the reading traditions, and the system described by the grammarians
(see, e.g. Van Putten and Stokes 2018; Van Putten 2018, 2019). For that reason,
16
indicative that the classical variant cannot be assumed to be more

archaic than the dialects simply because it is attested earlier. The

dialects are genealogically related to this variant, but are not necessar-
ily derivative of it. Under this assumption, non-classical features in
the dialects should not be reflexively assumed to be innovative or
a possible result of contact.
The linguistic study of modern Arabic dialects in the Levant is thus
methodologically wanting. It ignores practices and established models
and subsequently makes arguments regarding the nature of Levantine
Arabic precarious and unconvincing. As we will show below, a more
careful approach and analysis of the evidence leads to different but,
we argue, more secure results.
3. Phonology
In general, Arabic phonology was hardly affected by Aramaic

(Weninger 2011: 748).42 Some of the most marked phonological
features of Western Aramaic are found nowhere in Arabic; the weak-
ening of the pharyngeals and pharyngealized consonants, and the
fricativization of stops, which are the hallmark of Western Aramaic
phonology and have clear reflexes in NWA,43 have had no effect on
the language of the Qurʾān, defined as the language of the QCT, should not, in our
view, be subsumed under Classical Arabic.
42 Owens (2018; §3.1.1), however, provides a long list of potential shared pho-
nological features; however, we find his discussion to be lacking. For example, the
argument regarding the guttural pronunciation of /r/ and the merger of /r/ and /ɣ/
in some Iraqi dialects and Biblical Aramaic relies heavily on the absence of /ɣ/ in
Aramaic. But while the historical Proto-Semitic sound /ɣ/ is largely absent, the
sound does exist in the language, as the post-vocalic allophone of /g/. Note addition-
ally that in NENA dialects of Mesopotamia, /r/ is pronounced as a trill, not a gut-
tural, and many NENA dialects have a /ɣ/ morpheme as well, likely a borrowing
from local Arabic dialects (the original Aramaic allophone merged with the voiced
pharyngeal ʕ; Khan 2005: 90). In addition, many of the features Owens lists as
shared between (some!) dialects of Aramaic and (some!) dialects of Arabic are found
in other Semitic languages (e.g. monophthongization happens in Ethiopic, Akka-
dian and Hebrew; pharyngeal raising is attested in East Semitic; pharyngeal lower-
ing is attested in Hebrew, etc.). These are therefore clearly not unique to Aramaic
and Arabic, as Owens claims.
43 For example, PS *g was realized in Aramaic as /g/ in initial position or when
geminate, but in post-vocalic position and non-geminate, it was rather realized as ġ

(/ɣ/). Eventually, this split became phonemic (Arnold 2011: 686). In Western Neo-
Aramaic, Aramaic *g is realized as /k/ in Maʿlūla and Baxʿa, but in Jubbʿadīn it is
realized as /č/: Maʿlūla ṯelka ~ Jubbʿadīn ṯelča ‘snow’ (common Aramaic talgā).
However, Aramaic *ġ is realized as a voiced uvular trill /ʀ/. In most of the Arabic
17
the Arabic of the region.44 For comparison, post-Biblical Hebrew

shows signs of both features as a result of a shorter period of contact

with Western Aramaic (Steiner 2007).
Western Aramaic dialects share distinct phonological features
which are decidedly absent from Arabic dialects of the same area. The
Galilean Aramaic dialect reflects some weakening of its pharyngeal
consonants (Gzella 2015: 289);45 weakening and subsequent elision
are also attested, in more southern Palestinian Aramaic dialects, such
as Christian Palestinian Aramaic and Samaritan Aramaic, in both of
which the phonological process predates the Islamization of Palestine
by several centuries (Bar-Asher 2012: 314–19).46 Loss of pharyngeal
consonants was such a marked feature of these dialects that one finds
an amusing discussion of the Galilean pronunciation in the Babylo-
nian Talmud, describing the merger of pharyngeals (b. Er. 53b).47
dialects of Syria, including those nearest the Aramaic speaking villages, PS *g is

realized as either palato-alveolar fricative /ʒ/ or affricate /dʒ/ (Behnstedt 1997: 6–7),
with no evidence of the historical processes that produced the current distribution
in Aramaic.
44 There are a few examples of loan words, which are assumed to reflect Aramaic
fricativization, e.g. ġaddef ‘blaspheme’ from Aramaic gaddep ‫ܦ‬ (e.g. Retsö
2011). Note, however, that /ġ/ is a post vocalic allophone in Aramaic and would
not, in fact, occur in initial position in a word like gaddep. Borrowing the root from
a different conjugation like the imperfect is possible, but a native speaker of pre-
modern western Aramaic would not have judged ġ to be phonemic. We should also
note that WNA does not have /ġ/ in its phonological system, and if this sound
occurs at all it is in borrowed words from Arabic.
45 The Hebrew of the Palestinian Talmud shows a more advanced reduction of
gutturals (Mastey 2018).

46 Similarly, there are some indications that in Hebrew around Jerusalem, phar-
yngeals and laryngeals have weakened considerably, at early as the first century BCE
(Kutscher 1959: 42–3).
47 For example, ‫ אמרו‬.‫ההוא בר גלילא דהוה קאזיל ואמר להו אמר למאן אמר למאן‬
‫‘ ליה גלילאה שוטה חמר למירכב או חמר למישתי עמר למילבש או אימר לאיתכסאה‬that
Galilean, who was walking and calling: ʔemar to whom, ʔemar to whom [=ʔemar
for sale]. They told him: silly Galilean, a donkey (‫ )חמר‬to ride or wine (‫ )חמר‬to
drink, wool (‫ )עמר‬to wear or sheep (‫ )אמר‬to slaughter?’. Namely, the Galilean in
the story does not distinguish between /ʔ/, /ħ/ and /ʕ/. A reviewer for this paper
suggested that Babylonian Jews were not familiar with the Galilean dialect; other
scholars disagree and believe that there was continuous contact between the Palestin-
ian and Babylonian communities (Gzella 2015: 304). See Sharvit (2016: 20–7) for
additional examples and discussion of both Aramaic and Hebrew of that region and
period. Sharvit refers to Kutscher’s proposal that the change is a result of contact
with Greek, dating it to the Hellenistic period (see also Halpern 2002: 161).
A similar phenomenon is attested in JBA a bit later, though still before the islamiza-
tion of Mesopotamia (Morgenstern 2011: 71). Consequently, these consonants are
missing in many NENA and Neo-Mandaic dialects.
18
Although the state of gutturals in pre-modern western Aramaic is

complicated and geographically divergent, nonetheless western Ara-

maic of Late Antique had less gutturals than the Arabic dialects of the
Levant.48 Despite the different phonological system in Aramaic and
Aramaic, scholars typically ignore the differences, most notably in
discussions of loan words, where fricative pharyngeals are assumed to
be possible in the Aramaic of the entire Levant, and scholars fre-
quently suggest that some lexemes with these consonants in Arabic
reflect Aramaic substrate.49
The main, possibly only, sound change widely thought to be
a result of an Aramaic substrate in Levantine Arabic is *ā > ō, a fea-
ture that is mentioned in almost every study of contact with Aramaic.
Some Arabic dialects in Syria, especially those around the Western
Neo-Aramaic pockets, and Lebanon show a conditioned *ā > ō or ē:
sayyōṛa ‘car’ (vs. Damascus sayyāra), ṛōs ‘head’ (vs. rās), etc. This shift
is largely dependent on the nature of the adjacent consonants, though
there are some dialect-dependent differences (Arnold and Behnstedt
1993: 23–6). This state of affairs prompted Fleisch (1963) to reject
the possibility of an Aramaic influence. However, Behnstedt (1992)
shows that there are dialects where after the raising of ā in the envi-
ronment of high vowels (imāla: ā > ē), all remaining *ā shifted to ō
unconditionally.50 In such dialects the ā > ō shift is assumed to reflect
an Aramaic influence (Weninger 2011: 748; Procházka 2020: 90–1).
The change ā > ō is a very common sound change cross-
linguistically,51 and is also attested in other languages in the Middle
48 These consonants were preserved in the Aramaic of the Palestinian Talmud
more than in other pre-modern western dialects (Bunis 2018: 4).

49 For example, ʕalawwā ‘I wish’, šalaʕ ‘he tore’, ʕazaqa ‘ring’, etc. (Bassal 2012,
Zu’bi 2019). Other sources for these loan words, if that is what they are, should be
considered. It seems likely that in the Hebrew of the Galilee ʕ remained in use
longer than in Aramaic, unlike /ħ/, /h/ and /ʔ/ (Mastey 2018: 92–4), though it,
too, was eventually merged with /ʔ/. The existence of pharyngeals and laryngeals in
some Aramaic dialects is not necessarily a sign of archaism. Jastrow (2015: 243)
suggests that the pharyngeal were retained in Ṭuroyo under the ‘considerable influ-
ence’ of Arabic. He argues that the large number of Arabic loan words helped
preserve these consonants even in native words. Arnold and Behnstedt (1993: 52–5)
note a number of other consonants in NWA, which are probably transference from
Arabic.
50 The distribution of the shift in an-Nakb is not quite unconditional. The
vowel ō is still conditioned by velar, uvular, glottal and velarized consonants, which
is similar (though not identical) to other Lebanese dialects, but not, as we shall see
below, to Aramaic. For example, lǟbes ‘dressing’, nǟyem ‘sleeping’ vs. ṭōleb ‘student’,
ṛōyeḥ ‘going’ (Gralla 2006: 20).
51 Pat-El and Wilson-Wright (2016: 42, n. 3).
19
East, like Coptic and some dialects of Arabic. In fact, two north
Lebanon dialects, Sheikh Taba and B’arzla, show a conditioned *ā >

ō. In these dialects, the shift takes place around guttural or pharyngeal
consonants, while around other consonants, we find imāla: ʕām >
ʕōm ‘general’ but nās > nēs ‘people’.52 In both dialects, the shift is
also triggered by secondary pharyngealization which is a more recent
development: Sheikh Taba nɔ̄ṛ ‘fire’ (<nār), B’arzla bṛōzīl ‘Brazil’
(< brāzīl).53 These two dialects otherwise show no sign of Aramaic
features. The evidence is, therefore, indicative that a shift ā > ō hap-
pened multiple times in this area in rather random places.54 The
sound change is otherwise not generally typical of modern Arabic
dialects and is not attested in most neighbouring Levantine dialects,
for example Jordan, and takes place only rarely in Israel and
Palestine,55 where a substantial Western Aramaic speaking population
had existed before the islamization of the Levant.
The proposal that contact with Aramaic is responsible for the Syr-
ian Arabic sound change dates back to Brockelmann, who argues that
this feature is a result of lexical borrowing, not only in the religious
domain, but also the agricultural one.56 Most scholars, however,
opted to explain the shift as a result of Aramaic substrate interfer-
ence.57 Arnold and Behnstedt (1993: 68) suggest that as Aramaic
52 Ağbaht (2017, 2019). The rounding is further along in B’arzla than in Sheikh
Taba, where it is ɔ̄.

53 This phenomenon was already described in Fleisch (1974: 48) for a number
of other Lebanese dialects.

54 Abubaker (2016) adduces a number of other sporadic examples, mostly single
lexical items. See also in Maltese, in the dialect of Rabat dār > dōr ‘house’.
55 This feature is attested both in pre-modern (Hopkins 2011) and modern
Palestinian Arabic dialects from the region (see Alhih 2012: 76 on Surif near
Hebron, and Shachmon 2013 on Bet Fajjar near Bethlehem). In these Palestinian
dialects, unstressed *ā is shortened while every other long *ā is realized as ō, regard-
less of syllable type (e.g. ḥammṓla ‘saddle bag’ but ḥammalṓt ‘id. pl’) (Shachmon
2013: 324).
56 ‘Erwähnt ist schon, dass die westaramäische Trübung des ā zu ō auch in den
Dialekt des Antilibanon eingedrungen ist. Weit verbreitet sind aramäische Wörter
nicht nur aus der syrischen Kirchensprache der Maroniten, die aber schon vor dem
Arabischen zurückweicht, sondern auch solche aus dem Gebiet der Landwirtschaft,
die auf die ausgestorbenen aramäischen Lokaldialekte zurückgehn’ (Brockelmann
1964: 232).
57 Even the generally skeptical Diem (1979: 45–9) accepts that *ā > ō was pos-
sible, and the double clitic construction—likely, to be substrate features. To explain

the double clitic construction in North African dialects, Diem suggests that it was
brought to the region by immigrants from Syria and Iraq (if, that is, it was not sepa-
rately introduced into the dialects of the area via contact with Berber) (ibid., 49).
20
speakers acquired an Arabic dialect, they equated Arabic ā with Ara-

maic ō and through imperfect learning introduced the change into

the dialect. In order to evaluate this claim we need to ascertain which
Aramaic dialect is the source of this feature, and what is the date of
this development in Aramaic.
The sound change *ā > ō is historically typical of Canaanite lan-
guages (‘the Canaanite Shift’), but is it attested in Aramaic? None of
the western dialects shows such a change. Some late dialects of eastern
Aramaic show a similar, though not identical, sound change. There
is evidence for a general unconditioned rounding of *ā to ɔ, in both
West and East Syriac. Certainly the reading tradition of Syriac sug-
gests a rounded pronunciation (e.g. /alɔhɔ/ ‘god’). Nevertheless, Greek
rendering of Syriac words and names uses alpha to represent Syriac ā
(/ɔ/), rather than omicron or omega, e.g. ταλιθα (Mark 5:41) for ṭalītā
and Ουχαμα for ʔukkāmā.58 On the basis of the Greek evidence,
Knudsen (2015: 116) suggests that the partial rounding should be
dated between the fifth and seventh century, namely just before the
Islamic conquest of this area. Whether this process has culminated in
ō in Late Antique Syria is a different question.
In the east, the evidence seems to rather support the opposite
change *ā > a. In JBA the quantitative distinction between the long
and short open front vowel, with rounding of the long vowel, was
neutralized in the Geonic period (sixth century CE ~ tenth century
CE) and there is good evidence for merger, producing a short vowel
/a/ (Boyarin 1978: 145, 153–4). Strong support for the merger of a/ā
comes from Neo-Aramaic dialects in the region. The North-Eastern
Neo-Aramaic (NENA) dialects, reflexes of some Late Eastern Ara-
maic dialect, show no trace of *ā > ɔ, but rather an unconditioned *ā
> a. For example, Christian Urmi *pātḥā > patxa ‘she opens’, *sahrā
> sara ‘moon’ (Khan 206: 188); similarly, in Jewish Urmi *pāleẖ >
palə́x ‘he opens’, *ʔilānā > ilana ‘tree’ (Khan 2008: 22–3). An outlier
is the Neo-Aramaic of Bohtan, where *ā > ō took place in open
penultimate syllables, e.g. *liššānā > ləššona, while it shortened in
other environments (Fox 2009: 20). In the Jewish dialect of Salmas,
*ā > ō happened in the environment of formerly pharyngealized con-
sonants, including late secondary pharyngealization, e.g. roba ‘many’,
cf. Jewish Urmi ṛaba (Mutzafi 2015: 294). Late rounding is also
found in Jewish Urmi, in the dialect of women, where final stressed
58 Apud Knudsen (2015: 116, n. 178).
21
/a/ is rounded.59 In other words, there is no evidence for uncondi-

tioned rounding in the East and conditioned rounding is rare and

relatively late.
Central Neo-Aramaic is genetically part of the NENA dialect
group and is geographically much closer to that cluster than to West-
ern Neo-Aramaic (Hoberman 1988; Kim 2008; Jastrow 2015). Based
on evidence from Ṭuroyo (Central Neo-Aramaic), it seems that *ā in
closed syllables was shortened (*ā > a / _C, while in all other posi-
tions it was rounded (*ā > ō / C_; Kim 2010: 230–1): e.g. *ʕrāytā >
ʕrayto ‘breakfast’, *hārkā > harke ‘here’, *kalbā ʔukkāmā > kalbo
komo ‘a black dog’. This is especially clear in the present tense con-
jugation, where 3ms shows *ā > ō in the first syllable (soyem ‘he does’,
šoməʕ ‘he hears’), but wherever the first syllable is closed, for example
in the 2ms, the vowel is short: *ā > a (saymət ‘you do’) or shows
further reduction (šəmʕət ‘you hear’). In this dialect, only syllabic
structure, but not syllabic position, seem to have played a role.
In WNA, the modern Aramaic dialects in the area where Arabic
dialects are most affected, the sound change is more complicated and
happens only in stressed open syllables; for example, *lḗlyā ‘night’ >
lēlya but *lēlwātā > lilyōta ‘nights’. Thus, both syllabic structure and
syllabic stress are operative. But this gets more complicated, because
not all /o:/ vowels in this dialect are reflexes of the same original
vowel. The most conspicuous ō in WNA, the masculine plural ending
(fallṓḥa ‘farmer’ ~ fallaḥṓ ‘id. pl.’), is likely a reflex of short *a. Already
in several pre-modern Western dialects final ay > ō(y); for example,
in some Palestinian targums the 1sg possessive suffix is written with
waw, reflecting /o:y/, rather than /ay/; for example, ‫ ידוי‬yadōy ‘my
hands’, ‫ בלחודוי‬balḥudōy ‘by myself’. This change took place probably
in the Middle Ages (Ben Hayyim 1989). The plural suffix -ō in WNA
may, therefore, reflect a simplification of ayyā > aya > ōya > ōy > ō,60
and not an unconditional *ā > ō.
In summary, in the East, pre-modern and modern dialects show
an unconditioned shortening, *ā > a, with the exception of Bohtan,
where there is a conditioned rounding in some contexts. In Central
Neo-Aramaic, rounding is conditioned on syllable structure: *CāC >
CaC but Cā > Co. In NWA, however, both syllable structure and
59 Hezy Mutzafi (p.c.) notes that in the speech of Jewish Women from Urmi
final stressed /a/ > ō, which doesn’t occur in the speech of Jewish men from the
same area. Garbell (1988: 26) described a less rounded variant, /ɔ/, for the same
community.
60 In fact, the plural is indeed -ōya in Ǧubbʕadīn.
22
stress pattern are the conditioning environment: generally *ā > a, as

in the East, except for open stressed syllables: Cā́ > Có.

The following table exemplifies the differences between the dialects
in the present tense, which is based on the old participle (represented
here with Syriac):
Syriac Maʕlūla Ṭuroyo C. Urmi Bohtan gloss
(WNA) (CNA) (NENA) (NENA)
CāCeC CóCeC CóCəC CáCəC CóCəC 3ms pres.
but CaCéC-le
CāCCā CóCCa *CaCCó CaCCá CáCCa 3fs pres.
A few preliminary conclusions can be drawn: the rounding of *ā

is a conditioned sound change in the Aramaic dialects where it occurs.
Since the conditioning environment is different in each of these dia-
lects, the process likely happened in each dialect cluster indepen-
dently, and not in their shared ancestor. Furthermore, given the
heavier restrictions in NWA, it seems more likely that the sound shift
in Central Neo-Aramaic is older than the one in WNA.61 More
importantly, NWA and Central Neo-Aramaic cannot reflect a devel-
opment from a Syriac-like rounding, because even if we assume *ā >
ɔ > ō, unlike NWA the rounding in Syriac is unconditional. In other
words, the change in NWA and Central Neo-Aramaic must have
happened at the earliest later than the seventh century, most likely
much later than the seventh century.
How can a conditioned sound change in Aramaic explain the
unconditioned sound change in Arabic? Let us recall that in a sub-
strate scenario, second language learners fail to acquire certain fea-
tures in the target language and instead transfer features of their own
language. Such a transfer is unlikely in this case, because the syn-
chronic vocalic systems of these languages are not similar; if Aramaic
speakers transferred their conditioned /ō/ to Arabic, we would expect
a similarly conditioned expression.62 Arnold and Behnstedt (1993:
67) claim that there are sporadic examples of unconditioned ā > ō in
61 This is also true for other sound changes in these dialect clusters. Compare.
for example, degemination, which is widespread in Ṭuroyo but is attested in WNA

only in Ǧub. and even there only in final position.
62 For comparison, we might point to an application of the Russian vocalic
system to Modern Hebrew by second-language learners of Hebrew. In Russian,

there is a marked shift /o/ > /a/ in unstressed position. Second language learners,
who immigrated from Russian speaking areas, consistently apply this rule to Hebrew
words; for example, G participles which are stressed on the penultimate are
23
NWA, which, they argue, prove an Aramaic substrate influence

underlying this feature. Even if their claim that the sound change is

becoming more unconditional were correct, this points to a later
development. Furthermore, the reverse direction of influence, from
Arabic to NWA, is more plausible. Given that the pre-modern dia-
lects do not reflect a sound shift similar to either Levantine Arabic or
NWA, it is more likely that the change in NWA is fairly recent and
became more regular as a result of contact with Arabic, rather than
the current hypothesis that the sound change in Arabic is a result of
an Aramaic substrate. Supporting evidence for the proposal that the
sound change in NWA is relatively modern comes from the occur-
rence of Aramaic loan words in the Arabic dialects in the Qalamūn,
where *ā is clearly present, for example maššān ‘extension of plough
handle’, but in the Aramaic dialects of the region such words reflect
the shift *ā > ō, in this case, maššōn in Maʕlūla (Retsö 2011).63 In
Lebanon, Aramaic place names do not reflect *ā > ō,64 indicating that
the Aramaic dialect which originated them likely did not have this
feature. Such examples are indicative that the sound shift in Aramaic
was later than the transference of lexical material from Aramaic to
Arabic in this area.
As we have shown above, the sound change *ā > ō in Levantine
Arabic is unlikely to originate from Aramaic, since the Aramaic dia-
lects, both modern and pre-modern, reflect a much more complicated
system than the Arabic of Qalamūn. We, therefore, conclude that the
sound change *ā > ō is unlikely to be a result of Aramaic influence.
Given that this sound change is attested elsewhere in the region, it is
possible that it developed independently of Aramaic. Furthermore,
the absence of distinctive West Aramaic phonological features in
Levantine Arabic, such as reduction of pharyngeals and laryngeals, as
well as fricativization, is problematic for the substrate hypothesis,
as these are highly distinct features of West Aramaic that have been
shown to have influenced the phonological system of post Biblical
Hebrew, for instance. In sum, it seems that the phonology of Arabic
has not changed much, or at all, due to contact with Aramaic.
pronounced CaCéC, rather than CoCéC. In other words, the conditioning environ-
ments are identical.
63 Several nouns denoting professions with the pattern CāCūC in Syrian Arabic
are assumed to be of Aramaic origin and preserve *ā, e.g. nāṭūr ‘guardian’ (del Rio
Sanchez 2013: 132, n 14).
64 Wardini (2002, 2012).
24
4. Syntax

In Levantine Arabic and other dialects, certain direct objects are
marked with the preposition l- preceded by a suffixed object pronoun
coreferential with the nominal object; this construction is widely con-
sidered to be modelled on Aramaic syntax (e.g. Feghali 1918: 85;
Blanc 1964: 130; Diem 1979: 47–9; Blau 1981: 81–2, 1983: 141–
2; Contini 1999; Weninger 2011: 750; Río Sánchez 2013: 135–6;
Coghill 2014: 360; Owens 2018: 421; Zuʾbi 2019: 259; Procházka
2020: 98–9).65 For example:
Baghdadi Arabic:
hezz-u l-rās-ak ‘shake your head’ (Blanc 1964: 129).
Syrian Arabic:
šift-u la-Mḥammad il-yōm? ‘did you see Muhammad today?’ (Brustad
2000: 354)
Galilean Arabic:
(to kids on a tree:) inzalu, kassartū-ha l-aš-šažara ‘get down, you broke
the tree!’ (Levin 1987: 38).
In both the Levant and Mesopotamia, the pattern is used with
direct and indirect objects, the latter primarily with the verb ḥaḳā ‘to
speak, say’, although these are occasionally not distinguished in the
literature (e.g. in Brustad 2000). In both constructions, the NP is
marked twice: once as a coreferential pronominal clitic, either directly
on the verb in the case of direct objects, or on the preposition l- in
the case of indirect objects, and as a full NP, typically following the
pronominal clitic and marked with l-. Double clitic constructions are
not obligatory in Arabic and their distribution is pragmatically con-
ditioned. The object in such constructions is always definite, repre-
sents ‘given, rather than new information’ (Brustad 2000: 354. See
also Blanc 1964; Levin 1987) and is almost exclusively animate.
These constructions are used to express focus, primarily in contexts
where a need is felt to specify an emotional attitude towards an event
(Levin 1987; Brustad 2000). A similar pattern is used for genitive
constructions, where a pronoun on the head noun (the possessum) is
coreferential with the following noun (the possessor). The nominal
pattern will be treated separately below.
65 Rendsburg (1991) notes the similarity between Levantine Arabic and Ara-
maic, but does not draw any historical conclusions from it.
25
These patterns are attested in a large number of dialects across the

Arabic speaking world, primarily in Iraq, the Maghreb, Lebanon,

Israel, Malta and Cyprus, not all of which can be a result of contact
with Aramaic.66 In the Levant, these patterns exhibit a number of
peculiarities, which are not typical of pre-modern Arabic: the use
of l- to mark the direct object, the use of a co-referential pronoun
before the introduction of the noun, and the semantic restrictions on
the types of nouns used. In a thorough and well-rounded paper,
Souag (2017) has argued that various dialects exhibit differences in
the syntactic and pragmatic attributes of the pattern. This led Souag
to conclude that clitic doubling arose independently at least four
times in the Arabic speaking world, in each case due to contact with
another language in the same geographical area. Souag’s conclusions
regarding the Levantine and Iraqi examples accept the communis
opinio that the construction in these dialects is a result of contact with
Aramaic (ibid. 51).
In Aramaic, the use of the double clitic construction is widespread,
with some local differences. In the Eastern Late Aramaic dialects
(Syriac, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and Mandaic), double clitic with
direct objects is, of course, the norm.67 For example:
Syriac:
ʕbadtā-y(hy) la-kyān(y) bet maqdšā d-kasyutāk (Isaac of Nineveh V:6,
Brock 1995)
‘You have made my nature a temple of your concealment.’
Jewish Babylonian Aramaic:
ʔašpašt-eh lə-tōraʔ-i ‘you placed my ox’ (BQ 45a)
In these Aramaic dialects, direct objects in such constructions are
always definite, but there are otherwise no pragmatic restrictions on
the type of nouns that can be used. To the extent that speaker atti-
tude can be gleaned from a purely written language, this does not
appear to be a relevant feature of this construction in Aramaic.
The modern eastern Aramaic dialects, NENA, use a similar con-
struction, with both the anticipatory pronoun and l- with the nomi-
nal object to mark definite direct objects, although the exact distribu-
tion is dialect-dependent (Coghill 2014). In some dialects the pattern
66 For Iraqi Arabic, see Blanc (1964), for Galilean Arabic, see Levin (1987), for
Lebanese Arabic, see Contini (1999), for Algerian Arabic, see Souag (2005: 164).
For more references and discussion, see Souag (2017).
67 Kutscher (1970: 362) lists the use of prolepsis with zī/dī as a characteristic
feature of Eastern Aramaic.
26
was integrated into the verbal morphology and is virtually obligatory

with definite objects. Here too, like in the pre-modern Aramaic dia-

lects, other than definiteness, there is no pragmatic or semantic restric-
tion on the type of nouns that can be used in the construction:
Urmi (NENA, Christian)
šulanə zarəz-lun
things fix.3ms-them
‘he fixes things’ (Khan 2016: II 256, ex. 31).
Arbel (NENA, Jewish)
lu-hulaʔe lā-qaṭli-lu
DO-Jews TAM-kill.3p-DO.3p
‘they will kill the Jews’ (Khan 1999, Y:167)
Thus, in the East, the construction is attested in pre-modern and
modern Aramaic dialects with similar syntax and semantics. The
assumption that the Iraqi Arabic construction reflects an Aramaic
influence is at least historically plausible.
Pre-modern western Aramaic dialects, however, rarely exhibit
a similar construction (Pat-El 2012: 114). In many of these dialects,
the preposition l- can be used to mark direct objects, but there is no
anticipatory referential pronoun attached to the verbal base.68
Samaritan Aramaic
ḥakkem l-māran
‘he knew our lord’ (TM 2.282)
Christian Palestinian Aramaic
ʔapes sābā l-hālen da-b-alpā
‘the old man convinced those in the boat’ (Schulthess 1924, Tx 14: 2)
In some Western Late Aramaic dialects, the preposition l- is not
restricted to definite direct objects and can also be found with generic
indefinite direct objects, such as ḥad ‘one’ or nāš ‘man’ (Schulthess
1924: 88). A more typical object marker in Western dialects, how-
ever, is yāt (e.g. Gzella 2015: 288). Folmer (2008) suggested that
increase in use of yāt at the expense of l- in Western Late dialects is
a result of the need to disambiguate the direct object marker l- from
other functions of l-, such as the marking indirect objects. The par-
ticle yāt, however, completely disappeared in the ancestor of NWA.
In the language of the Palestinian Talmud there are some examples
of this construction. In this dialect, the nominal object following the
68 For Samaritan Aramaic, see Stadel (2012: 36–7); for Christian Palestinian
Aramaic, see Schulthess (1924: 88).
27
suffixed object pronoun, which is always human, is marked with the

preposition l-.

xad goy šʔel-êh l-rabbī Meʔīr ‘a gentile asked R. Meir’ (Bunis 2018:
237, ex. 3b)
Bunis (2018: 240) describes this construction as highly definite.
There are a few reasons to doubt that this construction is associated
with highly definite objects. First, the definite article is productive
and functional in this dialect; second, the preposition l- does not
necessarily mark highly definite objects. Since the indefinite xad can
occur as the marked object in this construction,69 it is unlikely that
‘high definiteness’ is a factor.
The syntax of the direct object in WNA similarly reflects a con-
struction with l- marking nominal or pronominal direct objects, but
without an anticipatory pronoun. The main difference between the
pre-modern dialects and the modern ones is that the direct object
marker in WNA was reanalysed as a verbal clitic and is suffixed
directly to the verbal base, rather than prefixed to the nominal object:
w-əmšawiril-l bisnīθa
‘they request the bride’ (Arnold 1990: M l. 1)
w-anaḥ ʕa-nnaql-il ġarð̣ōye m-paityōte
‘we took the things from the houses’ (Spitaler 1957: 306, l. 12)
mayθyil-lun
‘they bring them’ (Arnold 1990: M l. 7)
maʕzmil-l rappō
‘they invite the old people’ (Arnold 1990: M l. 27)
The distribution of this construction in Aramaic is perhaps best
reflected in non-standard medieval dialects, ‘Middle’ Arabic, where
Judaeo-Arabic written in Iraq mirrors the eastern Aramaic construc-
tion with anticipatory pronoun, while the few examples in Christian
Arabic, written in Palestine, mirror the western construction, which
lacks an anticipatory pronoun.70
69 Bunis (2018: 237, ex. 2).

70 Interestingly, Blau attributes the occurrence of li- marking direct objects, not
to translation calquing, but rather to the influence of living (spoken) Aramaic due
to its usage in translations of Greek texts, and not just in Aramaic ones (Blau 1967:
413, n. 1). This hypothesis assumes that Aramaic was still spoken in cities in this
period.
28
Iraqi Judaeo Arabic (Blau 1995: 172):

‫يتبعه الناس لالتايب‬

ytbʿ-h ʾl-nʾs lʾl-tʾyb
‘the people followed the repentant man’
Christian Arabic (Blau 1967: 414):
‫نريد ليسوع‬
nryd l-yswʿ
‘We want Jesus’
We should note, however, that Christian Arabic attests very few
examples of the construction with the proleptic pronoun, but in these
cases it is typically marking indirect objects, and usually occurs in
cases where li with the pronominal suffix precedes li with the nominal
indirect object:71
Christian Arabic (Blau 1967: 395)
‫فقالوا له الابهات لذلك العلماني‬
f-qʾlwʾ l-h ʾl-ʾbhʾt l-ḏlk ʾl-ʿlmʾny
‘The Fathers said to that layman’
The western Aramaic dialects, therefore, consistently use the prep-

osition l- to mark direct objects, but typically do not use anticipatory
pronouns on the verbal base, unlike the pattern in the eastern Ara-
maic dialects, and unlike the Levantine Arabic patterns that presum-
ably developed under their influence. The Palestinian Talmud con-
struction with the anticipatory pronoun includes human, but not
necessarily definite, objects. The Levantine Arabic construction is,
therefore, unlikely to be a result of Aramaic substrate, because the
syntax and semantics of this construction in either pre-modern and
modern western Aramaic dialects are quite different from the con-
structions in the Arabic dialects of the same area: the western Aramaic
constructions either lack the anticipatory pronoun and do not exhibit
the same semantic restrictions that is found in Levantine Arabic.72
The function of the preposition l- as a marker of direct objects is
not an exclusive innovation of Aramaic; it is also used to mark objects
71 Blau (ibid.) attributes this to Aramaic influence, citing especially ṭūbā ‘blessed’
constructions in which a pronominal suffix is attached followed by an explicit
object, e.g. ‫‘ طوباهم المساكين‬blessed are the poor’.
72 We should also add that it would be quite unlikely for such a marked con-
struction to stay immutable for over a millennium, which is what the current con-
sensus requires us to accept.
29
in other Semitic languages. It is found in Hebrew,73 Modern South

Arabian,74 Geʿez,75 Tigre76 as well as Classical Arabic.77 Given these

two factors, namely, that Western Aramaic dialects use a different
construction than the Levantine Arabic pattern and that the use of
l- for direct object marking is well attested in Arabic (and Semitic in
general), this development is less likely to be a result of an Aramaic
substrate, and could very well be an internal Arabic development.78
A similar construction involving a proleptic pronominal suffix
attached to a possessed noun, followed by the preposition li- and the
possessor noun (e.g. bint-o li-mḥammad ‘Muḥammad’s daughter’) is
also attested in the dialects of the Levant and Mesopotamia. Semanti-
cally, the head noun, the possessed, is restricted to kinship terms in
most dialects where it is attested (Naïm 2009: 674).79
In Aramaic, nominal constructions with prolepsis are common
from an earlier period. Prolepsis is attested as early as the sixth cen-
tury BCE in Achaemenid Aramaic. Initially, as in Modern Levantine
Arabic, this pattern was limited to expressions of inalienable posses-
sion, both with family members and property (examples taken from
Pat-El 2012: 106–8). See the following from Official Aramaic:
byt-h zy ʔpwly
‘the house of Apoli’. (K 3:4/B3.4:4)
73 Waltke and O’Connor (1990: 184).

74 Rubin (2014: 251); e.g. fḳe l- ‘cover s.o’, lḥak l- ‘help s.o’ etc.
75 Dillmann (1907: 445–6).
76 Tigre has two directional prepositions, ʔəl and ʔəgəl. The first marks indirect
and the second direct objects (Raz 1983: 83).

77 Wright (1967: II §69C–D). For example ʔaftū-ni fī ruʕyā-ya ʔin kuntum
li-r-ruʕyā taʕburūna (Qurʾān 12:43) ‘explain to me my vision, if you can interpret

the vision’. In the Qurʾān, the use of the preposition li- prefixed to the direct object
is common in OV sentences. Elsewhere in early Classical Arabic texts, the use of
li- to mark direct objects, while rare, is attested in VO sentences (examples from
Reckendorf 1921: 248–9): ẓalla ḍayyafa ʾaḫū-kum li-ʾaḫī-nā ‘Your brother invited
our brother’; laysa yufšī li-sirr-in ‘it does not reveal a secret’. According to Reckendorf,
this use of li- is also quite common with participles, especially in cases where the
object precedes the participle: mā kunnā lil-ġaybi ḥāfiẓīna ‘we did not protect
the secret’ (Reckendorf 1921: 249).
78 Rubin (2005: 114–15) argues that the use of l- to mark direct objects in
Semitic is a result of universal tendencies. It is unclear, however, if Rubin assumes

this happened early in the history of Semitic, or individually in each of the languages
in which it is attested.
79 Aoun (1993) reports for his Lebanese dialect a wider range of possible heads,
e.g. ktēb-o la-sāmī ‘Sami’s book’. Sami Jiries (p.c) informs us that in his Palestinian
dialects such constructions are grammatical; however, as is the case with Aoun’s
evidence, the possessor, the object of la-, must be human.
30
ʿbdy-h zy Mbṭḥyh ʾm-n

‘The slaves of Mibṭaḥya, our mother’ (C 28:3/B2.11:3)

By the Middle Aramaic period (~200 BCE–200 CE), the use of such
nominal constructions has been widened to include definite inani-
mate nouns and expressions of nominal relations beyond pure
possession:80
Biblical Aramaic:
wə-rēw-ēh dī rəbīʕāyā
‘the form of the fourth [beast]’ (Dan. 3.25)
Old Syriac:
ʔgrt-h d-zryʕ-h w-ʕʔly-h
‘the charge over its sown land and produce’. (Drijvers and Healey
1999, P3:v)
NWA has genitive construction with the preposition l-, which
many have argued is a reflex of an early Aramaic proleptic construc-
tion with l- (Correll 1978: 6; Hopkins 1995: 30; a.o). In NWA,
there is no semantic restriction on the nouns used in this construc-
tion, and the marker of nominal relations is the preposition l-, not
the relative marker dy/zy which is used in pre-modern dialects. The
marker l-, however, is interpreted as a clitic on the head, rather than
on the possessor, as is the case with direct objects (see above).
Maʕlūla
ʕakkōr-l klēsya ti mar Lawandīyus
‘the roof of the Church of St Leontius’ (Arnold 1989–91, vol. III, 168: 5)
dōrč-l Merhež
‘Merhež’ house’ (Spitaler 1957: 306, l. 9)
In order to explain the differences between the pre-modern and
modern constructions, Correll (1978: 6) suggests that final -h was
elided and left the suffixed pronoun with only a vowel (*-e). The
vowel was then fused with the following preposition, yielding il
(before VC) or -li (before CC). The problem with this explanation is
that even without the assumption of an original proleptic pronoun,
the vowel-less preposition l in final position would have been con-
solidated with a high short vowel after (or before) -CC- anyways,81
80 Owens’s claim (2018: 423) that the distribution and pragmatics of the Bibli-
cal Aramaic analytic genitive is identical to the Arabic analytic genitive is erroneous,
as a perusal of the evidence shows.
81 For example, 2nd person preterit (formerly, the suffix conjugation) is ms -ič
and fs -iš because the verbal base is CvCC- (e.g. Ǧub. ṭaʕn-ič ‘you carried’).
31
so the existence of this vowel does not prove that Proto-WNA used
prolepsis. But even if one accepts that Western Neo-Aramaic dialects

reflect *-eh l-, we are nevertheless confronted with two additional
inconsistencies between Arabic and Aramaic: the use of li- in Arabic
vs. dī in pre-Modern Aramaic, and the restricted semantics of the
nouns in this construction in Arabic vs. the lack of such restrictions
in Aramaic.
Hopkins (1997: 32) suggests that the construction with l- was not
in fact rare in Western Aramaic, but rather restricted to the colloquial
language and thus hidden from scholars’ awareness. He, and others,
have pointed to a few rare occurrences of proleptic genitive with l- in
some Aramaic dialects (Goldenberg 1979: 324; Hopkins 1997: 29):
Christian Palestinian Aramaic
rwḥ-h l-hdn d-ʔqym l-ysws msyḥʔ
‘the spirit of the one who resurrected Jesus Christ’ (Romans 8:11, apud
Hopkins 1997: 29)
Hopkins argues that this construction arose in analogy to the object
construction with anticipatory pronoun: qaṭl-eh l-malkā > bayt-eh
l-malkā. From a colloquial form of Aramaic, Hopkins suggests, the
construction found its way into the local Arabic dialects.82 There are
a few problems with this scenario. First, pre-modern Western Ara-
maic does not use prolepsis with direct objects of the type that is so
common in Eastern dialects, so an analogical transfer like qaṭl-eh
l-malkā > bayt-eh l-malkā is not likely. Second, the semantics of the
nouns involved and pragmatics of the whole construction in Arabic
(with l-) and Aramaic (with zy-/dy-) are very different. In Arabic, with
few, likely later, exceptions, prolepsis is limited to kinship terms,
while in both pre-modern and modern western Aramaic the distribu-
tion of this construction is not pragmatically limited. By the time of
the alleged shift from Aramaic to Arabic, speakers of Aramaic used
the proleptic genitive with dy construction with any definite noun,
and it did not exhibit the pragmatic restrictions attested in Arabic.
Both these issues make the hypothesis of an Aramaic origin for this
construction in Arabic questionable.
We suggest that there is an alternative scenario which is not less
likely and is perhaps better supported by the evidence. Given the
pragmatic restrictions on the Arabic direct object construction, dis-
cussed above, it is more likely that Arabic speakers extended the use
of l- from that construction, along with its pragmatic restrictions,
82 See also Contini (1999: 107–8) for a similar argument.
32
for service in nominal dependency constructions. Hopkins (1997),

in fact, postulates a similar scenario for the comparable Ethiopic con-

struction (see more below). It may be the case that the Arabic
construction is responsible for the NWA construction with l- as well.
Are any of the Arabic patterns a result of substrate influence? From
its earliest attestations, Classical Arabic, like other Semitic languages,
used anticipatory pronouns and the preposition l- to mark direct
objects, although not typically together (e.g. Brockelmann 1913:
316; Pat-El 2012: 130–1). Thus, the employment of either of these
features is not exceptional. Additionally, the construction appears in
a large number of other Modern Arabic dialects, and while Souag
(2017) argues that all attestations in Arabic are due to contact with
other languages, it is also possible that in some of these cases, the use
of the constructions in Arabic predates its use in the neighbouring
language.83 In fact, the genitive pattern with prolepsis developed
independently in other Semitic languages (Khan 1984), such as Akka-
dian and Ethiopic, the former a language which also had a very early
contact with Arabic speakers in the Peninsula. In Akkadian, the con-
struction is fairly restricted both in its geographical distribution
(Barton 1927) and in the type of nouns used, which are mostly kin-
ship terms (von Soden 1995: 239).
Old Babylonian Akkadian:
ahātī-šu ša awīlim Ilšu
‘the sister of the gentleman Ilšu’ (AbB ix 38:14)
Classical Ethiopic:
ʔəgari-hu la-ʔiyasus
‘the feet of Jesus’ (Luke 8:35)
Amharic:
yä-Ityopya mäṭfo əddəl-wa
‘Ethiopia’s ill fortune’ (apud Khan 1984: 478)
Given that the Aramaic construction in the Levant differs from
the Arabic construction syntactically and pragmatically, and that the
same construction is attested in other Arabic dialects, as well as other
Semitic languages, there is no compelling reason to tie the develop-
ment of the Levantine construction to an Aramaic substrate. It is
83 Establishing the order of transfer can be ascertained by establishing the exist-
ence of the feature before contact with Arabic. Unfortunately, Souag does not pro-
vide information about the earliest date of the construction in the alleged source
language (Sicilian, Greek, Berber etc.) so it is hard to evaluate his claim that all
Arabic proleptic constructions are a result of transference.
33
equally or more plausible that the Arabic dialects of the Levant devel-
oped the construction independently rather than acquiring it as

a result of language shift from Aramaic.
5. Discussion and Conclusions
In this paper we highlighted a number of methodological flaws in the

underlying assumptions of the Aramaic substrate of Levantine Arabic
(which applies to a large extent in Mesopotamia as well), as well as
some of the work to unearth it. We have noted that since Aramaic is
a heterogeneous entity, any attempt to attribute a feature attested in
Arabic to Aramaic influence, of whatever kind, must therefore first
demonstrate attestation of that feature in the dialect(s) with which
those dialects had contact, before the shift to Arabic. Unfortunately,
in the scholarly literature dealing with Arabic-Aramaic contact, there
is rarely engagement with the history of Aramaic and the dialectal
distribution of its features. We pointed out cases where the indiffer-
ence to dialectal variation and diachrony hamper work on the linguis-
tic history of Arabic and create a false narrative whereby Arabic fea-
tures are assumed to be Aramaic, with very little evidence.
We further noted that scholars do not distinguish different types
of contact between Arabic and Aramaic. The linguistic evidence, we
suggest, is not consistent with a substrate hypothesis, since Aramaic
influence on Arabic has been largely restricted to the lexicon. Possible
Aramaic words in Levantine Arabic have been confined primarily to
semantic fields related to traditional forms of life, home making, agri-
culture, and animal husbandry in rural areas.84 In contrast, the gram-
mar of the Arabic dialects was hardly affected, as at least some schol-
ars are ready to admit.85 Such a state of affairs is typical of contact
between speaker populations, but not typical of language shift. As we
have reviewed in §1.2.1, language shift is a relatively quick process.
In such a case, imperfect learning results in changes primarily to pho-
nology and syntax, and far less, or not at all, to the lexicon. Arabic,
we argue, does not show evidence of structural change, which would
indicate language shift, but rather the impact of a prolonged contact
between bilingual populations. While it seems that many scholars
84 Pre-modern lexical loans from Aramaic are primarily theological, although

some refer to material culture (Carter 2006: 131)
85 Bassal (2012: 91); Zuʾbi (2019: 255).
34
would agree that this is what likely happened,86 they continue to use
terminology that implies otherwise. The linguistic analysis we offered

here is in line with the hypothesis that Arabic speakers and Aramaic
speakers lived side by side for an extended length of time, long before
the Islamization of the Levant, and that language shift happened very
slowly.
We suggest that the instinct to assume that any non-Classical Ara-
bic feature in the dialects of the region is ‘Aramaic’ is unwarranted.
As we have argued, some dialects contain archaic features which are
not attested in Classical Arabic. Such features are indicative that Clas-
sical Arabic is more innovative in some respects than some dialects
(Pat-El 2017).
Could similar features in Arabic and Aramaic have an explanation
other than substrate? We think the answer is positive. First, as we
have pointed out, not even the current body of evidence supports
a substrate scenario. Second, transference from Arabic to other
Semitic languages in the region is also quite possible and well attested;
indeed, given the social contexts in which Aramaic-Arabic contact has
occurred, it seems a priori likely, certainly in peripheral, non-urban
areas.87 After all, Arabic loan words have been identified already in
documents in Late Antiquity (Cotton 1999: 226; Yadin et. al. 2002:
405–10). Furthermore, early signs of Arabic influence on Aramaic
have been identified by a number of scholars. Correll (1978: 153)
suggests that the preservation of the Western Aramaic binary verbal
system (i.e., perfect ~ imperfect) is a result of contact with Arabic.
Arnold and Behnstedt (1993: ch. 4) adduce a number of morphologi-
cal features in Aramaic which they argue were transferred from Ara-
bic, such as the verbal stems VIII and X with /s/ (e.g. sčaḳbel ‘he
accepted’), N-stem (e.g. inǝftaḥ ‘it was opened’), nominal patterns, as
well as lexical items.88 Arnold (2007) details even more examples of
Arabic interference in the Neo-Aramaic dialects of the Levant, cover-
ing all aspects of the grammar, including complex syntactic construc-
tions, such as the borrowing of the Arabic asyndetic relative clauses
without an overt relative marker. Yet the possibility that it is Arabic
86 See also Neishtadt (2015: 281): ‘… the shift from Aramaic to Arabic in Pal-
estine must not be understood as a sharp replacement of one spoke language by

another accomplished within a generation or two, but rather as a gradual and lengthy
process, probably with a significant phase of Aramaic-Arabic bilingualism’.
87 For example, Samaritan Aramaic shows clear evidence of Arabic influence
(e.g. Stadel 2013: 200, 203).

88 For Ṭuroyo (Central Neo-Aramaic), see Herin and Malki (2013) and Jastrow
(2015), who focuses on phonology.
35
that is the source for some shared Aramaic-Arabic features is rarely if

ever entertained.

Another obstacle to the substrate hypothesis is the constant popu-
lation movement in the region. In the beginning of the first millen-
nium, much of the area was Aramaic speaking, and therefore the
search for possible Aramaic substrate features is not altogether unrea-
sonable. But a great deal of linguistic change and development has
occurred in the intervening centuries, including further contact
between different dialects of Arabic, with subsequent convergence,
levelling, and dialect merger. It is, therefore, important to keep in
mind that dialects spoken today in regions in which Aramaic was
spoken centuries earlier cannot be assumed automatically to be speak-
ers of dialects that were spoken in, for instance, the early Islamic
period in the same area. Migration and population diffusion have
brought new groups in while old ones have left, making it likely that
the current dialectal distribution is often (though not always) of a rela-
tively shallow time depth. For example, we find evidence for a shift
of *q > ʔ in pre-Islamic Arabic nomadic varieties attested in southern
Syria and Jordan through evidence from Safaitic, whereas today the
dialects of the nomads regularly attest the shift of *q > g.89 Clearly
most locales have seen population changes for various reasons over
the past millennium or more and it is therefore not necessary to assume
the continuation of dialectal traditions simply because of a shared
geography.
Finally, the methodological problems we have noted throughout
the paper serve, we hope, to reiterate the need for more care and
precision when investigating potential instances of contact-induced
change. The goal here has not been to discourage such attempts;
rather, we intend to help clarify precisely what kinds of methodologi-
cal steps are necessary to make a convincing case for such externally-
motivated changes. We also hope to have encouraged scholars work-
ing on the diachrony of the modern Arabic dialects to think more
intentionally about internal pathways of development to explain dia-
lectal features, especially those that lie outside of the Classical Arabic
traditions.
Addresses for correspondence: npatel@austin.utexas.edu; pstokes2@utk.edu
89 For example, *qayẓ ‘dry season’ spelled ʔyḍ in a Safaitic inscription (MU 113;
Al-Jallad 2015: 53), while in contemporary dialects in this area it is pronounced
gayẓ (Cleveland 1963).
36
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The Aramaic Substrate' Hypothesis in The Levant Revisited

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Journal of Semitic Studies LXVII/2 Autumn 2022 doi: 10.

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1 Versions of this paper were presented at the International Conference of His-

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camels’ in a royal Akkadian inscription from Calah dated to Tiglath-pileser III

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of the conquest by the Muslim Arabs, deeply implanted or widespread’, while

slow to arrive. The evidence is indicative that Arabic-speakers were

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Aramaic, but conclude it is unlikely.

In this paper, we aim to re-examine the ‘Aramaic substrate hypoth-

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2. Methodology and its Failings

The methodological problems in the study of the Aramaic substrate

13 Some of these problems have already been noted in Retsö (2011).

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much weaker.17 Finally, the feature in question must be shown to be

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2.2 Methodological Problems

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relied upon several problematic assumptions with which we do not agree.

weakened.22 Of course, if evidence for contact is diverse, rich and spans

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object maker in Arabic as a substrate feature, a result of Biblical translations from

Bible on modern English (Crystal 2010).

seventh century CE, which left significant footsteps on the structure

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near-absence of Arabic-language data securely dated to the Babylonian and Achae-

lines of rhyming Arabic embedded in four lines of Nabataean Ara-

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While these inscriptions are generally formulaic, with a fairly predict-

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scripts provide attestation of varieties of Arabic in antiquity, with

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(including Anatolia) in Antiquity, see Rendsburg (2013).

of alleged shift from Aramaic to Arabic, Aramaic speakers had already

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acknowledges these limitations (p. 272).

plough (Kutscher 1961: 14–15), etc.

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pronominal suffixes. Based on comparative Semitic data, gender distinction in the

indicative that the classical variant cannot be assumed to be more

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In general, Arabic phonology was hardly affected by Aramaic

geminate, but in post-vocalic position and non-geminate, it was rather realized as ġ

the Arabic of the region.44 For comparison, post-Biblical Hebrew

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dialects of Syria, including those nearest the Aramaic speaking villages, PS *g is

gutturals (Mastey 2018).

Although the state of gutturals in pre-modern western Aramaic is

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more than in other pre-modern western dialects (Bunis 2018: 4).

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Taba, where it is ɔ̄.

of other Lebanese dialects.

sible, and the double clitic construction—likely, to be substrate features. To explain

speakers acquired an Arabic dialect, they equated Arabic ā with Ara-

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58 Apud Knudsen (2015: 116, n. 178).

/a/ is rounded.59 In other words, there is no evidence for uncondi-

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stress pattern are the conditioning environment: generally *ā > a, as