Thread by @PhDniX

I was asked a while ago to explain what historical linguists of Arabic mean when we told about 'Old Hijazi' and 'Nabataean Arabic' and how these relate to one another and where the language of the Quran fits in. So this thread will address these questions!

Nabataean Arabic is the language researchers suppose many of the inhabitants of the Nabataean Kingdom spoke. The Nabataeans, as a rule, used Aramaic as their administrative language. The script they used was a form of the Imperial Aramaic script. This script evolved over time.

Eventually this script evolves all the way to what we know as the modern Arabic script. This is a gradual development, and it is not possible to pinpoint where the 'Nabataean Aramaic' script ends and the 'Arabic script' begins.

While Aramaic was their administrative language, the names we find in Nabataean inscriptions are transparently Arabic, and in their Aramaic we find certain uses of syntax, but also loanwords, which seem to suggest their primarily language was a dialect of Arabic.

Occasionally we find inscriptions which are actually completely, or mostly composed in Arabic. The Arabic we find in those inscriptions is quite markedly different from Classical Arabic. But the data that we have of this language is very fragmentary.

This is because: 1. We don't have all that many Nabataean inscriptions with a lot of content.
2. Most of those inscriptions that do have content tend to be composed in Aramaic.

The Nabataean writing tradition continues well after the Nabataean Kingdom. The script continues to evolve, and it comes to be adapted for different varieties of Arabic. The script even reaches the Hijaz, and comes to be adapted to write Old Hijazi.

The main linguistic source of 'Old Hijazi' is the writing tradition that appears at the beginning of the Islamic century, both in administrative papyri and the Quran's consonantal text. Though some pre-islamic inscriptions already rarely display some of its linguistic features.

This thread is already getting a little bit long, but works as a nice set-up for what is to come. In the next thread, I will compare some features that distinguish Nabataean from Old Hijazi, and will examine how some of these features are discussed by the medieval grammarians.

If you can't wait for this upcoming thread, make sure to check out @Safaitic's excellent book on the Damascus Psalm Fragment which has a nice chapter on this topic.

academia.edu/43189829/Al_Ja…