The ‘Aramaic Substrate’ Hypothesis in the Levant RevisitedJournal of Semitic StudiesSyriaca.org: The Syriac Reference PortalThe National Endowment for the HumanitiesThe International Balzan Prize FoundationDavid A. Michelsoncbsc_adminRecord added to Zotero bycbsc_adminSyriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portalhttp://syriaca.org/cbss/GTCQ5R8E/tei
Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
2024-08-15-04:00
Born digital.
CREATED: This bibl record was autogenerated from a Zotero record.NaamaPat-ElPhillip W.StokesThe ‘Aramaic Substrate’ Hypothesis in the Levant Revisitedhttp://syriaca.org/cbss/GTCQ5R8Ehttps://www.zotero.org/groups/a_comprehensive_bibliography_on_syriac_studies/items/GTCQ5R8Ehttps://www.zotero.org/groups/4861694/items/GTCQ5R8EJournal of Semitic Studies67:22022563-606Aramaic 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 scholarly work supporting this hypothesis. We show that some core ‘Aramaic’ 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 influence, 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.
Pat-El, Naama, and Phillip W. Stokes. “The ‘Aramaic Substrate’ Hypothesis in the Levant Revisited.” Journal of Semitic Studies 67:2 (2022): 563–606. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/jss/fgac002.
Naama Pat-El and Phillip W. Stokes, The ‘Aramaic Substrate’ Hypothesis in the Levant Revisited,Journal of Semitic Studies 67:2 (2022): 563–606, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/jss/fgac002.Arabic languageMuslim-Christian relationsSyriac influence [Arabs]Syriac languageVII-XVIII CEbilingualismsociolinguistics