Reflections on the linguistic map of pre‐Islamic Arabia

Abstract

At a workshop on ‘Civilisations de l’Arabie préislamique' in Aix‐en‐Provence in February 1996, I was asked by the organizers to give a survey of the state of our knowledge of the languages and scripts of pre‐Islamic Arabia and to propose a coherent set of definitions and terms for them, in an attempt to clarify the numerous misapprehensions and the somewhat chaotic nomenclature in the field. I purposely concentrated on the languages and scripts of the Arabian Peninsula north of Yemen, and only mentioned in passing those of Ancient South Arabia, since these were to be the subject of another paper. Unfortunately, four years after it took place, the proceedings of this workshop remain unpublished. In the meantime, the contents of my paper have circulated widely and I, and others, are finding it increasingly frustrating having to refer to it as ‘forthcoming’. I am therefore most grateful to the editor of AAE for allowing a considerably revised version of my paper to be published here. It should be seen as an essential preliminary ground‐clearing for my detailed discussion of the Ancient North Arabian languages and scripts which will appear early in 2001 in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages (ed. R.D. Woodard, Cambridge University Press) and my book Old Arabic and its legacy in the later language. Texts, linguistic features, scripts and letter‐orders, which is in preparation.

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