Thread by @PhDniX

A view that comes up surprisingly often about Classical Arabic, is that it was based on (or mainly based on) the Eastern Arabian dialects, especially that of the Tamīm.
This statement shows up in Carter's book on Sībawayhi, but is more generally brought up. A little thread.

Once we actually look at cases where Sībawayh contrasts Tamīmī with Ḥijāzī, though, we quickly find that if Sībawayh had in mind to standardize the dialect of the Tamīm, he did an extremely poor job, as in almost every case Ḥijāzī forms win out.

Let's look at the section where Sībawayh supposedly patronizingly calls Ḥijāzī "good old Arabic". Here Sībawayh tells us that the Ḥijāzīs say urdud and lā tardud, while Tamīmīs say rudda and lā tarudda. Both are accepted, but rudda wins out in Modern Standard Arabic

My sense is that in medieval writing forms like lā tardud are significantly more common, so it's rather strange to see this as a patronizing statement of "Good Old Arabic". That phrase is also simply mistranslated: Carter takes al-luġah to mean "language".

Wa-hiya al-luġatu al-ʿarabiyyatu al-qadīmatu al-jayyidah translates as "And it is the good, old, Arabic linguistic practice." luġah doesn't translates to "language" or "dialect", it's a specific aspect of language, a linguistic practice. (kalām al-ʿarab being 'Arabic language').

This meaning of luġah is nicely illustrated here: "And in [the pattern] faʿīl there are two linguistic practices (luġatān): When the second (root consonant) is part of one of the "six letters" (ʾ, h, ʿ, ḥ, ġ, ḫ) so the Tamīm say: liʾīm, šihīd, siʿīd, niḥīf, ziġīf, bixīl.

This even works for faʿil nouns/verbs/adjectives: šihid, liʿib, ḍiḥik, niġil, wixim.
This linguistic practice is in fact in Yemeni Arabic, I was told the other day by Julien Dufour. It's surprisingly the opposite of what you find in Egyptian Arabic where kabīr > kibīr but saʿīd

But one this that is for sure: this clearly isn't what we normally associate with "Classical Arabic", but here it is explicitly mentioned as the form the Tamīm use. And that is a general theme in what is associated with the Tamīm.

The Tamīm say:
baytu-ši for baytu-ki
kutb for kutub
ʿalma for ʿalima
maḥḥum for maʿa-hum
ʿēbid for ʿābid
hāḏī for hāḏihī
lā ʾilāhun for lā ʾilāha
bi-l-ʾamsu for bi-l-ʾamsi

The dialect that *does* have all these forms the way Classical Arabic has it today: Ḥijāzī.

If you actually look at the hundreds of linguistic details listed by Sībawayh, al-Farrāʾ and other early grammarians, an enormous amount of what has become the Classical Standard is based on what they considered to be the dialect of the Ḥijāz.

So where does this idea come from, and why is it so pervasive? There are two salient features of Ḥijāzī Arabic that are absent in the Classical standard as we know it today: 1. the loss of hamzah and 2. the lack of harmony on the pronouns -hū and -humū.

A Ḥijāzī would say: yākulu for yaʾkulu, rās for raʾs, yasalu for yasʾalu.
Likewise he would say: bi-dāri-hū for bi-dāri-hī, fī-hū for fī-hi, and ʿalayhumū for ʿalayhim.

These are features no longer in the Classical language, and show up often, but they are only two features.

If we simply make a count of all the features in which standard Classical Arabic as it is taught in our textbooks today agrees or differs with Ḥijāzī and Tamīmī, we find that Classical Arabic sides with the Ḥijāzī dialects vastly more often than with the eastern Tamīmī ones.

This is just a little preview of something that I've been working on for my forthcoming book. It is also the topic that I'll be discussing in a paper at two conferences in September.

Bookwriting is also the reason why I've been rather silent on Twitter lately.