25.2256, Review: Sociolinguistics: Holes & De Jong (2013)

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Subject: 25.2256, Review: Sociolinguistics: Holes & De Jong (2013)

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Date: Thu, 22 May 2014 11:14:42
From: David Wilmsen [david.wilmsen at gmail.com]
Subject: Ingham of Arabia

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-3245.html

EDITOR: Clive  Holes
EDITOR: Rudolf  De Jong
TITLE: Ingham of Arabia
SUBTITLE: A Collection of Articles Presented as a Tribute to the Career of Bruce Ingham
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics.
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: David Wilmsen, American University of Beirut

SUMMARY

This is a book of Arabic dialectology by Arabic dialectologists, most of them
having spent their long careers in the study of Arabic dialects, all of them
influenced by and in the debt of the scholar Bruce Ingham, whose career the
book celebrates as he brings the public phase of that career to an end upon
his retirement from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the
University of London. Professor Ingham has likewise devoted his scholarly life
to the study of Arabic dialects, notably, but not exclusively, the dialects of
the Arabian Peninsula, as the title of the book suggests.

With contributions from the most prominent names in the field, all
regularly-cited authors, their contributions building upon Ingham’s and their
own earlier works, this insider’s volume cannot be fully appreciated without
some background knowledge of the immense amount of work that has gone into
bringing the field of Arabic dialectology to its current state of advancement.
The bibliography of each contribution lists the relevant background materials
for its particular dialect(s) and orientation in sufficient depth to provide
anyone who is unfamiliar with the topics of the contributions themselves a
thoroughgoing acquaintance with the issues at stake. This slim volume demands
a much closer reading than its size alone would indicate.

Little concerned for theoretical frameworks, ‘classic dialectology’ gathers
and presents raw linguistic data, generally as vocabulary lists, transcribed
folktales or oral histories and their glosses, or a combination of all of
these, oftentimes accompanied by detailed maps (although only one of the
contributions to this volume includes a map), generally augmented with
commentaries highlighting particular points of interest ensconced within the
masses of data, and sometimes engaging in broad cross-dialectal comparison.
Five of the eleven studies in this volume are of this type (chapters 1, 6, 7,
8, and 10). Far from disdaining theory--such incremental compiling of data
being essential to its construction--dialectology arose as an independent
enterprise within language study as a data-driven response to Neogrammarian
theories about the regularity and exceptionless nature of sound change, such
notions quickly falsified by the sheer variability found residing in the
dialects of European languages (Chambers and Trudgill 2004). Nevertheless, the
notion of variability in Arabic is anathema to traditionalists’ prescriptive
views of the language, and here is where Arabic dialectology serves a grand
purpose by expanding conceptions of what the language is.

When Arabic dialectology does concern itself with theory, it often trains its
attention upon proximal explanations for the presence of the features under
study in the dialects where they occur. Another three of the contributions of
this volume are so oriented (3, 5, and 9), and all of those in the classic
dialectology framework also embrace such an orientation to some degree. Most
of this dimension of Arabic dialectology is set against a background of
theories of dialect origins and their relationship to the Arabic of the
literary canon (a good summary of traditional theories is Miller 1986). In
other areas of Arabic study and in wider Arab discourse, the literary language
is usually taken as the benchmark against which to assess and account for
changes in the dialects. Most, but not all, Arabic dialectologists eschew this
perspective, viewing the many Arabic dialects as descendants of older
peninsular varieties related to literary Arabic as sisters, not daughters.

Most such theorizing is informed by a cognizance of the Semitic background in
which Arabic is embedded. A welcome trend in Arabic dialectology is the
comparative studies between Arabic and its Semitic sisters that some
researchers are undertaking. This work is in the vanguard of enhancing our
understanding of the development of Arabic, into the bargain introducing
deeper dimensions to the study of other Semitic languages, Semiticists usually
being more familiar with Akkadian, Aramaic, or Hebrew. Chapters 2, 6, and 9
offer contributions to such a comparative Semitic effort.

Historical perspectives, thus, inform any work in the field. So, too, does a
sociolinguistic orientation, for if dialectology assesses variability along
its geographical coordinates, sociolinguistics assesses it in the
multidimensionality of social space, along such contours as age, class,
gender, occupation, and also residence. As Chambers and Trudgill comment in
their concluding remarks about the two areas of study, ‘one has been centrally
concerned with rural communities and the other with urban centres, but these
are accidental differences, not essential ones and certainly not axiomatic’
(2004: 187-8). Chapter 4, a study of gender attitudes voiced in Bedouin men’s
narratives, is a sociolinguistic contribution that crosses those boundaries.

Only rarely do Arabic dialectology or sociolinguistics stray into the realm of
pure theory. Nor for that matter does theoretical linguistics often take
notice of Arabic, and when it does, it gets its facts wrong (cf. the errors in
Roberts and Rousseau 2003: 31-32, 155 & 160, elucidated in Wilmsen 2014:
181-184). This is unfortunate, for Arabic dialectology, with its tremendous
wealth of language data amassed over more than a century of applied effort,
has much to offer linguistic theory. A concerted effort is needed to bring the
riches of Arabic into the mainstream currents of the field. Chapter 11 is such
an effort, marshalling much phonological data gleaned from earlier dialect
studies to apply them to pure theory.

The chapters, being few, are not organized by theme, instead being arranged
alphabetically by author’s name (an error appears in the placement of Herin
before Henkin). Those are as follows (chapter numbers, not provided in the
book, are added here for ease of reference):

(1) About Bedouin Tents and other Tents, or “Tent Terminology as an example of
Semantic Shift”, Peter Behnstedt and Manfred Woidich.

A painstaking presentation of lexical data culled from over thirty years of
B&W’s work along with that of other researchers into Bedouin dialects, this is
a treatment of the lexical sources and implications of tent terminology,
including an in-depth excursus on a particular term (qayṭūn), perhaps derived
from the root √qṭn ‘to dwell’, and a possible origin of the word for cotton
(shelters of that type often being made of cotton tenting). Not merely an
indulgence in the diversions of etymologies and lexicography, such
examinations of domestic/livelihood nomenclatures can enhance the tracking of
population movements and are sometimes the sole means of doing so, especially
as such movements are traced backwards in time to attempted reconstructions of
the supposed Semitic and Afroasiatic homelands. A testament to the inclusivity
of B&W’s work, the extensive reference section takes up four and a half pages,
about a fifth of the article’s length.

(2) Tense and Aspect in Semitic: A Case Study Based on the Arabic of the Omani
Šarqiyya and the Mehri of Dhofar, Domenyk Eades and Janet C. E. Watson.

Arabic is often described as possessing only two true tenses, perfect and
imperfect, meaning that those two must bear the burden of all subtleties of
temporality that speakers wish to express. After a brief discussion of the
concept of aspect, in which they note that the issue has been much discussed
in the literature about Arabic, E&W undertake a thoroughgoing examination of
the manner in which various time references are expressed in a largely Bedouin
variety of Omani Arabic (Šarqiyya Arabic or ŠA) and the modern South Arabian
language Mehri of southern Oman and the Yemen.

A workmanlike treatment of tense and aspect in two distinct Semitic language
groups--the modern South Arabian languages (MSA) by some accounts being a
branch of West Semitic and Arabic belonging to Central Semitic which branched
from there (Rubin 2008)--this is a valuable contribution to the ongoing
discussion about aspect in Arabic as well as an advancement of typological
Semitic studies. In this and other work conducted separately, especially
Watson’s comparative studies of Yemeni Arabic and Mehri (e.g., Watson 2011),
E&W set the scene for and contribute to much needed comparisons between Arabic
and its Semitic sisters.

(3) From Phonological Variation to Grammatical Change: Depalatalization of /č/
in Salti, Bruno Herin and Enam Al-Wer.

An analysis of a feature of an urban Jordanian dialect, albeit one dynamically
influenced by Bedouin dialects, this contribution demonstrates the pathways by
which the sound [č], a palatalization of the parent *k, has entered and spread
through the dialect of the Jordanian city of es-Salṭ. A feature of southern
and eastern Arabian dialects, this phone reappears as a de facto theme of the
book in several papers of the volume.

In a phonological and lexical analysis of the feature, H&W demonstrate that
the sound is lexically conditioned and not the product of a systematic sound
change.  They also show that younger speakers of Salṭi, influenced by contact
with the dialect(s) of the capital city Amman, are beginning to replace [č]
with [k]. They then turn in an unexpected direction: younger speakers having
lost the feminine plural agreement /-čin/ of the Salṭi and other Jordanian
Bedouin dialects, appear independently to have also lost that variety’s
feminine plural agreement patterns with non-human plural nouns to replace them
with the feminine singular.

That some Arabic dialects of Jordan continue to exhibit feminine plural
agreement with non-human nouns is a noteworthy observation begging further
investigation.

(4) Representation of Women’s Language in Negev Bedouin Men’s texts, Roni
Henkin.

That this is a study of Negev Bedouin narratives marks this contribution as
dialectology; that it addresses gender attitudes reflected in those narratives
marks it as sociolinguistics, handily demonstrating the compatibility of the
two sub-disciplines. Unusual for the sociolinguistics of gender is that
instead of addressing women’s speech, as most studies of the genre do, it
assesses men’s attitudes toward women as reflected in their narrative
representations of women’s speech. Arabic sociolinguistics needs much more of
this sort of evaluation of the embedded gendering of speech.

(5) An Arabic Text from Ṣūr, Oman, Clive Holes.

This is a piece of classic dialectology, consisting of a transliterated and
glossed text with footnotes and commentary on some salient grammatical
features, including an intrusive [n] ‘obligatorily inserted between the active
participle with verbal force and object pronoun suffixes’ and the thematic
palatalization of [k], here as [š] (elsewhere as [č]), both being “basically
(and historically) south Arabian features” (p. 89). In his introductory
remarks, H raises another recurring theme of the book: that the traditional
binary metric of Arabic dialectology, that between Bedouin dialects and
sedentary (often abbreviated B and S), is too simplistic; that even Bedouin
ways of life include in their kin networks sedentary populations and that
population movements and the vicissitudes of pursuing livelihoods have brought
speakers of the putatively separate dialects into contact throughout their
histories and, by extension, their prehistories, as well.

(6) Grammaticalization of the Verb kāna in Arabic Dialects, Otto Jastrow.

Like the first contribution to the volume, this paper collects data from the
breadth of the Arab world, here to demonstrate not semantic shifts but
grammatical shifts, specifically how the verb ‘to be’ [kān] has developed into
various grammatical markers in the various dialects, all of which, of course,
continue to retain the verb itself. Much of this material is well known (and
has already been adumbrated in this volume, p. 47), but it is good to have it
all collated in one place. A happy consequence is that J is thereby able to
continue a discussion with Müller Kessler (2003), who derives a peculiar
Syro-Mesopotamian existential particle [aku] ‘there is’ from Aramaic. Because
J is intimately familiar with both Arabic and Aramaic, he is able to answer
Müller Kessler’s data, posing a more straightforward reconstruction from fewer
elements, notably the progressive marker [ka/kū], derived transparently from
[kān/yakūn].

(7) Texts in Sinai Bedouin Dialects, Rudolf de Jong.

This is another classic dialectology contribution, with a discussion of
notation--the lexical and grammatical highlights coming largely in extensive
and informative footnotes--and a treatise setting the dialects of the area
into their regional perspective. The accompanying map of tribal ranges of the
Sinai enables researchers to situate the provenance of the linguistic data
that J provides and presents graphic illustration of the complexities of
population movement and dialect contact, for example, placing in the western
Sinai a branch of the Ḥwēṭāt, whose north western dialect the annals of Arabic
dialectology have properly treated as Jordanian Bedouin.

(8) Lexical Notes on the Dialect of Mayadin (Eastern Syria), Jérôme Lentin.

In a doubly-embedded work of classic dialectology, a reworking of the notes of
the great French dialectologist of Arabic Jean Cantineau, L provides
historical and geographical background to the little-studied dialect (or
dialect grouping) Šāwi Bedouin. Continuing with remarks about Cantineau’s
notes, he concludes by reiterating the theme that dialects are notoriously
difficult to classify as purely B or S, in the process drawing attention to a
third taxon: rural dialects, those being spoken by populations sedentary but
not urban, in the countryside but non-nomadic. This is followed by a ten-page
glossary from Cantineau’s heretofore-unpublished notebooks, the bulk of the
contribution.

(9) Chapter 504 and Modern Arabic Dialectology: What are Kaškaša and Kaskasa,
Really?, Jonathan Owens.

This is a full-blown treatment of one of the emergent themes of the book,
palatalization or affrication of [k], here called by the name that medieval
grammarians of Arabic came to use for the phenomenon. Documented in the
earliest complete treatise on Arabic grammar from the eighth century AD, that
of Sibawaih (c. 760--796), this is another robust dialect feature (actually a
set of features), as O argues, essentially unchanged from its earliest
attestations. Through an analysis of chapter 504 of the treatise, including
some sociolinguistic observations about language attitudes of the day as found
in that and later grammatical works, and reasoning from comparative data from
the languages with which pre-diasporic peninsular Arabic varieties are “either
related to genetically and/or in contact with” (p. 187), O demonstrates that
all of the chapter’s various and unsystematically classified proscribed
affricates are present in modern dialects, and that their representation as
[-kiš] or [-kis] is incorrect. Although they are, as O notes, often
overlooked, such historically documented attestations are essential to
reconstructing parent forms of the modern Arabic dialects.

(10) Interesting Facts on Ancient Mounds--Three Texts in the Bedouin Arabic
Dialect of the Harran-Urfa Region, Stephan Procházka.

This paper forms the fifth and final contribution from the classic
dialectology genre, complete with cultural background; commentary on
linguistic items of interest (including the k > č theme and the survival of a
parent form of the verb ‘to give’ [ʾanṭa] found in Mesopotamian dialects); and
annotated, transcribed, and glossed texts.  It is a continuation of the
research that P has been conducting on the dialects of Urfa, the Edessa of
antiquity, significant because these dialects “on the opposite fringe of the
Šāwi continuum” (p. 203)--itself now become a theme of the book--are the
northernmost of Bedouin Arabian dialects. Of note is P’s documentation of an
existential particle [šī], attested from the southernmost extent of the
Peninsula, including analogues in the MSA languages and Yemeni Arabic (Watson
2011: 31), through the Levant (Wilmsen 2014 123-124), and now by P into
Anatolia (pp. 206 & 211, 6).

(11) Antigemination as Morphosemantic Integrity in Arabic Dialects, Kirsty
Rowan.

A purely theoretical contribution ends the book, demonstrating the utility of
culling data from dialect studies, in this case, largely from a grammar of
1960s Baghdadi Arabic, for the formulation of theory, all the while cautioning
that blithely accepting the data presented in published grammars as
representative hinders theory. By including the iconicity--defined as “the
semantic association of phonemes and/or their combination” (p. 227, n. 19)--of
consonant and vowel doubling as indicating plurality of action or effect, R
resolves the unsuccessful attempts of previous formal explanations to pose
unified accounts of antigemination in form II and III verbs, arguing that a
unified account has remained elusive because formal explanations tend to
disregard morphosemantics.

EVALUATION

This volume represents continuing contributions from the authors to their
oeuvres and to the work of the general enterprise of a fully formed Arabic
dialectology. It is a welcome addition to a growing body of increasingly
useable Arabic dialect data and should further augment theorizing about them.


A note of caution: An oft-discernible habit of mind, one towards which even
the best are prone to default, against which Arabists should gird themselves,
is that pre-classical Arabic is of an older pedigree than the dialects. This
may still be seen in (6) which references Old Arabic (OA), meaning that
language preserved in the canons of Arabic writing, represented, especially in
AD 8th-century records of pre-Islamic poetry, the Quran, prophetic literature,
and narratives accounts of the feats of pre-Islamic Arabian heroes, which
became the model for the language of modern writing. Echoed in (11), which
compares dialect data against modern written Arabic, the assumption that
Arabic writing is the measure against which to assess the dialects has
outlived its usefulness. Hopkins has asserted “that the present form of the
texts...is a faithful representation of pre-normative Arabic has very
frequently been assumed; it has, however, never been demonstrated” (1984:
xxxvii).

In (6) and (11), the theoretical consequences are minimal. They are greater in
(2), when E&W label ŠA ‘conservative’ (pp. 23, 26 & 27) in contrast with other
Arabic dialects (pp. 23 & 26). E&W propose (citing Holes 2004: 232) that
(presumably older) written Arabic was primarily aspectual, whereas, in many
modern Arabic dialects, “this system has evolved to varying degrees into tense
systems” (p. 26).  This risks fostering the impression in the uninitiated that
ŠA, along with pre-classical Arabic and its later manifestations as the Arabic
of writing, retains older features lost to other dialects--those by
implication progressive. Yet some of the major urban Arabic vernaculars do
share features of their aspectual systems with ŠA. In a study of largely urban
vernaculars from Morocco to Kuwait, Brustad argues for “the primacy of aspect
to the verbal system of spoken Arabic” (2000: 202), and Holes himself has
actually stated that the system in both modern written Arabic and the dialects
“is evolving into a tense/aspect system but at different speeds in different
varieties of Arabic” (2004: 217 & 246 n. 21). This does not undermine E&W’s
analysis, as they prudently delimit their conclusions to the two local systems
under consideration.

So, too, are H&W (3) too hasty in concluding that “plural feminine agreement
represents the old, native pattern and the appearance of the singular feminine
is an innovation” (p. 71). Called variously ‘deflected’ or ‘impoverished’
agreement and attested widely in Arabic, its most in-depth treatment is not
Brustad, as H&W assert (p. 66), but Belnap in his 1991 dissertation, as
Brustad herself acknowledges (2000: 57). H&W apparently see deflected
agreement as arising in Jordanian dialects through contact with the standard
Arabic of writing, but before they can label one older and another innovative,
they must address the earliest attestations of the phenomenon. Belnap and Gee
(1994) document both deflected and plural agreement in pre-Islamic Arabic
poetry and the Quran. In the latter, feminine singular agreement occurs with
masculine human plurals in verbs (e.g., Q 14: 9—11), as well as plural
agreement with non-human plurals in demonstrative and resumptive pronouns
(e.g., 2:252, 3:108, etc.), subject pronouns (e.g., 3:6), and adjectives
(3:24), along with deflected agreement in otherwise similar contexts (e.g.,
2:80).

Largely suppressed in later writing, the variability in the older texts likely
reflects ancient dialect diversity. Belnap comments: “the robust survival of
such patterns in many, if not most, varieties of spoken Arabic...attests to
the conservative nature of Arabic dialects, which are popularly believed to be
much corrupted descendants of Classical Arabic” (1999: 179-182). This in
itself gives good reason to believe that modern Arabic dialects descend from
pre-diasporic ancestors and is good reason to pay the dialects attention.

REFERENCES

Belnap, R. Kirk. 1999. “A New Perspective on the History of Arabic Variation
in Marking Agreement with Plural Heads,” Folia Linguistica, XXXIII/2, pp.
169-185.

Belnap, R. Kirk and John Gee. 1994. “Classical Arabic in Contact: The
transition to near-categorical agreement patterns,” in Eid, Mushira, Vicente
Cantarino, and Keith Walters (eds.) Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics VI.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 121-149.

Brustad, Kristen. 2000. The Syntax of Spoken Arabic: A comparative study of
Moroccan, Egyptian, Syrian, and Kuwaiti dialects. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
University Press.

Chambers, J. K. and Peter Trudgill. 2004. Dialectology (Second edition).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Holes, Clive. 2004. Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, and Varieties.
Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

Hopkins, Simon. 1984. Studies in the Grammar of Early Arabic: Based upon
papyri datable to before 300 A.H./912 A.D. London Oriental Series, volume 37.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Miller, Ann M. 1986. “The Origins of the Modern Arabic Sedentary Dialects: An
evaluation of several theories.” Al-ʿArabiyya 19, 47-74.

Müller Kessler, Crista. 2003. “Aramaic ʾkʾ,  lykʾ and Iraqi Arabic ʾaku, maku:
The Mesopotamian Particles of Existence,”  Journal of the American Oriental
Society 123/3, 641-646.

Roberts, Ian and Anna Roussou. 2003. Syntactic Change: A minimalist approach
to grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rubin, Aaron. 2008. “The Subgrouping of the Semitic Languages,” Language and
Linguistics Compass 2/1, 61-84.

Watson, Janet. 2011. “South Arabian and Yemeni Dialects,” Salford Working
Papers in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics 1, 27-40.

Wilmsen, David. 2014. Arabic Indefinites, Interrogatives and Negators: A
linguistic history of western dialects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

David Wilmsen is associate professor of Arabic at the American University of
Beirut. He is interested in pre-diasporic Arabic features residing in the
modern spoken vernaculars, especially insofar as they can assist in solving
the question of dialect origins and their relationship to the pre-classical
variety that became the vehicle for most Arabic writing. His recent
publications explore such relationships in the Arabic object marker iyyā- and
analogues in sister languages. He is author of a forthcoming book
demonstrating that the grammatical šī of Arabic and Modern South Arabian
analogues provide more evidence for the antiquity of the Arabic dialects.








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