lingvoj.org

Linked Languages Resources

Ancient North Arabian

xna

Search languages

Powered by Freebase

Ancient North Arabian is a language known from fragmentary inscriptions in modern day Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia, dating to between roughly the 6th century BC and the 6th century AD, all written in scripts derived from Epigraphic South Arabian. Pre-classical Arabic (or Old Arabic), the predecessor of Classical Arabic, seems to have coexisted with these languages in central and north Arabia. However, it remained spoken until it was first attested in an inscription in Qaryat al-Faw in the 1st century BC. Ancient North Arabian includes a number of closely related extinct dialects of pre-Islamic Arabia, summarized as Ancient or Old North Arabian, including: Safaitic Dedanitic/Lihyanitic (Dedanite/Lihyanite) Thamudic Hasaitic Hismaic Taymanitic Dumaitic The main characteristic differences between Classical Arabic (CA) and Ancient North Arabian: The definite article is h-/hn- (or zero) in Ancient North Arabian and al- in CA. However, the oldest evidence of both articles occurs in the 5th century BC, in the epithet of a goddess which Herodotus quotes in its preclassical Arabic form as ʼal-ʼilat, and which occurs in its Ancient North Arabian form as hn-ʼlt in a number of Aramaic inscriptions. Both mean the goddess. Verb morphology differences regarding weak roots and roots with a doubled consonant. Ancient North Arabian banaya becomes banā in CA, and bayata becomes bāta and ʼaẓlala becomes ʼaẓalla. In Dedanite, verb stem IV can occur in the form hafʻal(a) (perfect) and yuhafʻil(u) (imperfect). Dedanite also uses the Classical form of verb stem IV (ʼafʻala and yufʻilu). As in Classical Arabic, the common word order in Ancient North Arabian is VSO, but most Dedanite inscriptions show SVO order. Most Ancient North Arabian languages have 28 consonantal phonemes (similar to CA). There are, however, some variations in the s sibilants among Ancient North Arabian languages and Classical Arabic. Taymanite has only 27 phonemes (lacks the ẓ phoneme). Nasal assimilation of the vowelless n occurs in some Ancient North Arabian languages: ʼintaẓar wait becomes ʼittaẓar, and bnt daughter becomes bt. (The same happens in Hebrew. ) Safaitic shows considerable alternations in roots between w and y, e.g. wrḫ which becomes yrḫ month. (This change is also characteristic of Northwest Semitic languages). Safaitic and Hismaic show a -y where CA has -ā or -āʼ, such as CA samāʼ (which means heaven or sky) which occurs as smy. This y could also indicate a diphthong (ay). Compound (non-construct) names are more frequent in Ancient North Arabian, and occur in a manner similar to that found in Northwest Semitic names. For example: ʼl-rym (ʼil-riyām): which means high ʼil ʼl-ntn (ʼil-natan) ntn-ʼl (natan-ʼil): which means ʼil has given; equivalent of Nathaniel. ṣlm-nʻmt ṣlm-ntn yhyṯʻ-nʻmt (yuhayṯiʻ-niʻmat): which means the one who assists niʻmat. yuhayṯiʻ being the imperfect aspect of Dedanite verb stem IV (root y-ṯ-ʻ). ḫršt-nʻmt (ḫaršat-niʻmat) mt-nʻmt (this name also occurs in Phoenician inscriptions) ^* ʼil and niʻmat being deity names.
Source : DBpedia

Names (more)

Technical notes

This page is providing structured data for the language Ancient North Arabian.
Following BCP 47 the recommended tag for this language is xna.

This page is marked up using RDFa, schema.org, and other linked open vocabularies. The raw RDF data can be extracted using the W3C RDFa Distiller.

Freebase search uses the Freebase API, based on ISO 639-3 codes shared by Freebase language records.

ISO 639 Codes

Linked Data URIs

Sources