The past century or so has witnessed what one might call a “documentary turn” in the study of Arabic’s history. The full range of modern Arabic’s dialectal diversity came into focus as linguists began to produce descriptions of peripheral dialects, spanning from Central Asia to the Yemeni highlands and from Cypress to Chad.Footnote ¹Sociolinguistic approaches to the dialects have advanced our understanding of language change and dialect formation in real time.Footnote ²The epigraphic exploration of Arabia revealed a “Jāhiliyyah” with stunning linguistic diversity, even when compared to the rich materials compiled by the Arabic Grammarians. Contrary to the commonly held belief, Arabic was not alone in Arabia, but was rather a part of a rich linguistic landscape, lost to history until recently.Footnote ³The discovery and study of papyri from the early Islamic period afford a unique view into the written register of Arabic before the rise of the grammatical tradition, and both pre-modern Christian and Jewish Arabic materials attest to writing traditions that existed parallel to normative Classical Arabic, and shed valuable light on the pre-modern dialectal landscape.Footnote ⁴The combination of these new sources of data and approaches have rendered the traditional view of Arabic’s past obsolete,Footnote ⁵and so the time is ripe to synthesize this material into the writing of new linguistic histories of Arabic.Footnote ⁶

The work under review is the latest monograph by Professor Jonathan Owens, a renowned authority on the Arabic dialects of Nigeria, Libya, and Chad, who has made significant contributions to the field of Arabic sociolinguistics and dialectology at large. Owens should be congratulated for the great effort put into this work, which spans over 500 pages. In this book, he builds on the case made in Owens (Reference Owens2006/9) that the field of Arabic historical linguistics has been fundamentally misguided, giving undue weight to older attested stages of the language when it comes to reconstruction. Here, he attempts to build a new, “non-linear” paradigm with a focus on the history of the modern Arabic vernaculars, but draws also on other sources such as epigraphy and papyri. The title appears to be a reply to Al-Jallad and Van Putten (Reference Al-Jallad and van Putten2017), which Owens seems to have misunderstood as developing a “linear” model for understanding the evolution of Arabic. Owens claims that Semiticists and Arabists have incorrectly conceived of language history as progressing linearly from ancient stages of a language to modern vernaculars. He illustrates this folly with a diagram on page 2 of the book (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Linearity in Semitic linguistics

This model, however, is not necessarily wrong. Proto-Semitic, as any other Proto-language, is the hypothetical, reconstructed ancestor of all attested members of the Semitic language family.Footnote ⁷Every Semitic language must descend, by definition, from Proto-Semitic; Old Arabic is no exception. Yes, there are intervening stages, splits and sub-groupings – no Semiticist, to my knowledge, has ever claimed that Arabic was an independent branch of Proto-Semitic – but as a simplistic model, this illustrates an uncontroversial fact, not only in comparative Semitics but in the field of historical/diachronic linguistics in general. Now, his next issue seems to be with understanding Neo-Arabic, a concise way of saying modern vernacular Arabic, as a descendant of Old Arabic. It is hard to understand what the problem here is either. Old Arabic, at least the definition used by Van Putten and me, is not a single attested variety, but rather a chronological term that refers to all varieties of Arabic spoken/written prior to the rise of the Medinan state – we sometimes have evidence for these varieties in writing but the vast majority of the linguistic diversity of this period has been lost to history. Since Old Arabic encompasses all Arabics prior to, say, the mid-seventh century ce, it is obvious that the modern vernaculars are later, changed forms, in other words, descendants, of these varieties, whether attested or otherwise. To my knowledge, nobody has ever claimed that the modern Arabic dialects descend linearly from any attested Old Arabic epigraphic variety. If Old Arabic here is meant to substitute for Classical Arabic, it is safe to say that such an assumption has been long abandoned, and most recent work in Arabic historical linguistics does not operate within such a model.Footnote ⁸A final way to interpret this model would be that older attested forms of a language are by default more linguistically archaic than later attested ones. But even this is not a position any professional linguists hold. No Semiticist, for example, has ever argued that Akkadian phonology is more archaic than Modern South Arabian because it is attested over four-thousand years earlier. Indeed, it has been long recognized that Arabic is more conservative than Hebrew and Aramaic in terms of nominal morphology despite its being attested later. Indeed, there is interesting work being done on how modern vernacular Arabic can be in some respects more archaic than normative Classical Arabic.Footnote ⁹As such, the objections here do not seem to be directed at any real positions held by contemporary Semiticists or Arabists. The rest of the introduction flows in the same way as Owens Reference Owens2006/9, where Prof. Owens airs his grievances about how Arabists and Semiticists are supposedly misguided through a series of maxims.

There is no overarching narrative guiding the book’s argument. Instead, the subsequent parts consist of a series of correctives and case studies, of varying detail, some of which are new and others previously published, on pre-modern forms of Arabic and the modern dialects. These studies are meant to show how Arabic is a “composite”, “non-linear” language. Owens understands this and is “unapologetic” for not developing a history of Arabic, which he seems to consider to be impossible because, according to him, “Arabic language history is inherently contradictory of classic comparative historical linguistic concepts” (p. 432). I would maintain that Arabic is, in fact, a normal human language and there is nothing inherently exceptional about its development, but rather it is the present methodological approach to its history that is responsible in large part for this apparent conundrum, as we shall see throughout the course of this review article. Since the monograph lacks a unified structure and does not argue the thesis presented in its introduction in a coherent way throughout the work, the only way to engage with it is to scrutinize the case studies, their data and argumentation. While some of these studies offer some interesting insights regarding the development of individual Arabic dialectal features, those that go beyond this are often highly problematic, both in terms of facts and method. The remainder of this review will focus on a number of these critical issues, ultimately demonstrating that Owens’ attempt at re-imagining Arabic linguistic history is based on a faulty foundation and is ultimately unsuccessful.

Owens begins part one (§2) with a critique of Arabic’s phylogenetic position in the Semitic linguistic family, namely, its classification as a Central Semitic language, focusing on the treatment by Huehnergard and Rubin.Footnote ¹⁰Arabic’s position as a Central Semitic language is based on the classificatory principle of shared morphological innovations. Owens seems to take issue with this, but the problem is not clearly articulated. Instead, he argues for a number of new features that supposedly problematize Arabic’s position in the family, causing it to be understood as “bifurcated” between Northwest Semitic and the defunct “South Semitic” sub-grouping. For him, Arabic is a “composite West Semitic language”. Every language is in contact with other languages and so every language is to some degree a “composite”, but that is not what genetic classification is after. The point of linguistic phylogeny is to distinguish between features inherited from a common ancestor and similarities that arise through contact, areal diffusion, and parallel development; of course, that common ancestor may exhibit contact features and this can only be determined by looking more broadly at the language family and giving attention to historical context. The focus on morphological features, which are comparatively, but not totally, resistant to the aforementioned forces is what allows us to determine that English is a Germanic language rather than a Romance one, despite the great similarities between it and French that have arisen due to contact. While Owens puts forth the term “composite language”, he never clearly defines what this is supposed to mean in terms of descent. Is Arabic the result of contact between “South Semitic” and “Northwest Semitic”? A hybrid of some sort? Or is it a continuum between these two poles and, if so, what binds all the languages we call Arabic together as a single linguistic complex? How does this square with the reconstruction of a Proto-Arabic? Whatever the case, it is clear that Owens wishes to minimize the role of areal diffusion and parallel development in his understanding of language history in favour of interpreting any similarity, regardless of its triviality, as an indicator of common descent. This is based on his “fundamental alternative” to current methods of linguistic phylogeny, namely, his “P3a Corollary to Lass’ principle”, which states that “[c]omplex systems identical in their main features are most likely due to inheritance/innovation + diffusion…” (p. 133). But this is not new; this is the exact reason why historical linguists focus on complex systems (innovations in morphology) to determine sub-grouping, as they are less likely to be the result of parallel development and contact. All Owens has done is to include into the definition of “complex systems” simple changes that demonstrably occur hundreds of times in parallel across the world’s languages and within Semitic itself, such as the p > f change, palatalization of k to č, vowel deletions, etc. Owens also includes the preservation of archaic features into his calculus of sub-grouping, but archaisms cannot inform splits in a language family. To help illustrate this, let us consider a biological parallel. Reptiles and mammals have dense bones while birds have hollow bones. Birds have innovated in this respect for flight. As such, the presence of dense bones in mammals and reptiles does not imply that they form a sub-grouping to the exclusion of birds – on the contrary, both continue a feature inherited from an even more distant common ancestor independently. Despite sharing solid bones with mammals, reptiles are more closely related to birds. This understanding, for example, should bear on Owens’ interpretation of the invariable realization of the feminine ending as -(a)t in all environments as indicative of relatedness.Footnote ¹¹It is an archaism and does not inform sub-classification.

The analysis of the supposedly “bifurcating” features of Arabic sometimes suffers from a less-than-sufficient knowledge of other Semitic languages, their histories, and indeed the history of Arabic itself. Let us discuss one representative example in detail: the consonantal onsets of the pronominal elements of the suffix conjugation (p. 32). Hetzron argues that the pronominal endings with a -t are characteristic of Central Semitic, so Classical Arabic -tu, -ta, -ti vs. Gəʕəz -ku, kä, ki (similarly Modern South Arabian and Ancient South Arabian).Footnote ¹²Owens provides us with the background for this variation, namely, the “Akkadian stative”, for which he gives the following paradigm:

These examples are not Akkadian or any other Semitic language. The stative in Akkadian should be qabir. The addition of suffixes, in this case the predicative ending ā, deletes the high vowel and produces qabrā-ku, qabrā-ta, etc. Moreover, the translation of the Akkadian would be “I am buried”, etc.; Akkadian does not know a perfect suffix conjugation. In any case, Hetzron and others have understood the West Semitic suffix conjugation as having resolved the asymmetry attested in the Akkadian paradigm. The “southern Semitic” languages levelled the k onset to all members of the paradigm while the “northern Semitic” languages levelled the t onset. Owens claims that because some modern Yemeni varieties of Arabic have -k endings on the suffix conjugation that Arabic is “bifurcated”, as these endings look like “South Semitic”.Footnote ¹³This seems meant to imply that Proto-Arabic somehow had both a -t and a -k paradigm, and that these were a genetic inheritance, not the result of contact. The claim is both phylogenetically and historically problematic. The only Arabic dialects today or at any point in history that exhibit -k endings are those found in Yemen, in precisely the places where there is a clear pre-Arabic substrate that exhibited -k endings on the suffix conjugation as well.Footnote ¹⁴Arabic was in fact a comparatively late arrival to these areas, where Ancient South Arabian previously held sway.Footnote ¹⁵What is more, we have an epigraphic record that extends back at least a millennium before Islam and fortunately the 1^st person singular suffix conjugation is attested. No matter where we look across the Peninsula, the ending is always -t, even in the Araboid inscriptions of the Haram region of the Yemeni Jawf, dating perhaps to the turn of the Christian era.Footnote ¹⁶Thus, the combination of the historical record and the geographic distribution of these -k endings compel us to interpret them as (relatively) late substrate influence on Yemeni Arabic and, as such, they tell us nothing about Arabic’s phylogenetic position at large.Footnote ¹⁷

The second corrective of this Part addresses the use of ancient epigraphic and papyrological evidence for the understanding of Arabic’s linguistic history. The unfamiliarity with the primary source material, the relevant languages, its historical context, and the bibliography severely undermines the book’s analyses. Just a few examples will suffice to illustrate these recurring problems. But before we address linguistic matters, a remark on Owens’ short excursus on the historical problem of “The Arabs” and Arab identity (§3, pp. 49–53) is in order, since most readers coming from a linguistic background will encounter this topic for the first time here. This discussion seems entirely unnecessary as it has little relevance to the subject matter at hand and does not really help to contextualize or define what should be understood as Arabic in pre-Islamic times.Footnote ¹⁸The treatment relies primarily on Retsö (Reference Retsö2003) and Hoyland (Reference Hoyland2001), both of which are in many ways outdated. The discussion is not abreast of the latest developments in the field, which is rapidly advancing in light of new discoveries. Readers interested in this subject should begin with the collected volume Arabs and Empires before Islam (ed. Greg Fisher, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), and the bibliography there, along with the masterful article by M.C.A. Macdonald on the matter of Arabs and Arab identity in antiquity (2009).

The section divides itself between ancient evidence that comes from epigraphic sources, on the one hand, and papyri, on the other (beginning on p. 77). The main point is to demonstrate how documentary evidence is ambiguous and difficult to treat, and therefore of limited use to our understanding of how Arabic developed. At the same time, as we shall see, when this evidence is of use to an argument the author wishes to make, it is taken at face value. While no one would contest the first point, Owens’ treatment of the material falls victim to some critical misinterpretations and ultimately exaggerates the limits of our knowledge. For example, Owens wishes to convey that the epigraphic evidence is “fragmentary”, and therefore of limited use, by describing the Ḥasaitic corpus, a small body of texts from ancient East Arabia, as consisting only of three verbs and one pronominal suffix (-h ‘his) (Appendix 4.1). This is simply incorrect. While all epigraphic languages are by definition fragmentary, we have much more for Ḥasaitic than Owens purports: a full relative pronoun paradigm, demonstratives, the conjugation of III-y verbs, the causative stem, the definite article, details about its phonology, and more, enough to disqualify Ḥasaitic as an ancestor of any forms of Arabic spoken in the region today.Footnote ¹⁹An entire section is devoted to Safaitic. Owens correctly highlights that the Safaitic data are not as clear to interpret as modern recordings, but the situation isn’t as dire as he presents. For example, Owens (p. 83) states that since the feminine ending in Safaitic is written only as t in its consonantal alphabet, we do not know if it was pronounced as -at, -t, or -it. Well, while it is impossible to know how it was pronounced in every idiolect, we do have copious Greek transcriptions of the feminine ending and it is consistently written as αθ [at^h]; no other variants are attested.Footnote ²⁰We can, therefore, be relatively certain that the feminine ending was widely pronounced as /at/. In some cases, Owens misrepresents the historical interpretation of the Safaitic evidence. On the n-morpheme that sometimes precedes pronominal suffixes in Safaitic, he cites the comparison with the energic endings in Arabic and Ugaritic (p. 86), but then suggests an alternative explanation, a comparison with the “intrusive” n on participles. But this exact form is cited in the discussion (Al-Jallad Reference Al-Jallad2015: 97).

Further issues are encountered in Owens’ attempt to interpret the phonetic value of the Safaitic s² glyph, traditionally [ɬ], which corresponds to Proto-Semitic [ɬ], modern Arabic ش [ʃ], Hebrew שׂ. Owens argues that Safaitic s² should be understood as [ʃ] because it is realized that way in the totality of modern Arabic.Footnote ²¹But the present cannot dictate the past.Footnote ²²It is a fact that Safaitic never uses s² to transcribe Aramaic š [ʃ]. That is significant. Owens tries to get around this by implying that the Safaitic nomads – who had no writing schools, who learned the script in an informal way, and who clearly wrote phonetically – were historical linguists able to discover if a word or personal name had an Aramaic etymology and then approximate š [ʃ] not with its phonetic equivalent but rather with its etymological cognate, s¹.Footnote ²³While this explanation strains credulity (and I will show it is completely untenable), Owens’ analysis illustrates the need to understand the historical context of ancient documents before drawing on them for linguistic purposes. He appeals to arguments made by Diem and Wansbrough about the possibility of cognate spellings in Arabic (p. 91), but the conditions they describe are completely alien to the Safaitic context; they refer to sophisticated writing schools and bilingual scribal traditions. And even as such, the arguments advanced by Diem and Wansbrough fail to convince – what both do not address is that once Arabic clearly acquires a [ʃ], post-seventh century, Aramaic loans with š are no longer imported with sīn but rather, as expected, with šīn.Footnote ²⁴We are given no explanation as to why etymological spellings just happen to fall into disuse at this exact moment. Moreover, on what basis does Owens assume widespread Safaitic–Aramaic bilingualism to support the theory of etymological matching? The number of Aramaic loanwords in Safaitic is quite small,Footnote ²⁵and may have been filtered through Nabataean Arabic after all. Indeed, Greek–Safaitic bilingual inscriptions dwarf the number of Aramaic ones. Finally, Owens fails to appreciate that Safaitic (and North Arabian) writers use their s² to transcribe laterals: Chaldaea = ks²d Footnote ²⁶and, in addition to that, late Babylonian transcriptions of Arabic names from the north sometimes explicitly record a lateral reflex of s² as well: iltameš-nūri “the (divine) Sun (śames) is my light” and also the Arabic name bal-ta₅-mu-ˀ /baɬāmu/ < √bs²m.Footnote ²⁷The combination of these facts requires us to reject Owens’ attempt to reinterpret Safaitic phonology.

Owens then moves on to early Islamic papyri, where the analyses are on equally shaky grounds. For example, among the features he lists that distinguish the language of the Qurrah papyri (90–96/709–714) from “Classical Arabic” is the absence of the Hamza (App. 1, p. 20). But the Hamza sign had not yet been invented; there was no way to explicitly mark this phoneme, and so these spellings tell us nothing about its pronunciation.Footnote ²⁸In general, the treatment of this material is impressionistic, largely repeating the conclusions of the classic – but now outdated – work of Hopkins (Reference Hopkins1984), and does not engage with more recent, quantitative studies which show that points of disagreement between these early documents and Classical Arabic are not binary.Footnote ²⁹

The most critical issues, however, reveal themselves in the treatment of the Graeco-Arabica, Arabic in Greek transcription. Here, Owens bases his analysis exclusively on Kaplony’s Reference Kaplony2015 word list. Kaplony’s article, however, compiles data from widely disparate sources and time periods and is not sensitive to this issue in its analyses. Owens inherits this flaw, and it has significant consequences for his argumentation. For example, he rightly notes that the word “father” ʔabū is written as αβι /ʔabī/ in the expected genitive position in Greek transcriptions, but then he provides one example of ʔabū that contradicts this pattern. It occurs in the genitive position and is not part of a lineage chain; Owens states the following: “‘by the hand of Abu Zunayn’ (written in Greek αβoυ {abou}, not as expected in CA with genitive αβι)” (p. 108), with no citation. He uses this example to argue that the case system was non-functional in this context. This datum was imperfectly extracted from P.Ness.3.19 (548 ce), which actually reads: χειρὶ Φλ(αουίου) Αβουζονα̣ινου Σαιδαιν[ου] “by the hand of Flavius Abuzonainou Saidain[ou]”. All of the Arabic names here have been hellenized, that is, inflected as Greek nouns. Thus, Abuzonain (= ʔAbū Ẓonayn), was conceived of a single string and inflected with the Greek second declension masculine genitive ending, ου. This tells us nothing about whether ʔabū inflected in this variety at the time, any more than the uninflected Latin word “circus” in English can tell us about Latin morphology. But another critical matter deserves attention. These names are hellenized because they come from a pre-Islamic corpus from Nessana, and reflect the local Arabic dialect and scribal practices. The inflecting ʔabū/ʔabī examples, however, are from the Islamic period and reflect the dialect of the Arab conquerors, attested in both Nessana and Egypt. During the Islamic period, the names of the conquerors were never hellenized, which as a result yields more information about the morphology of the language.Footnote ³⁰Owens seems unaware that he is comparing two very different varieties of Arabic, separated by great distances in time and space, and drawing on data filtered through different scribal practices. These facts neutralize the argument; there is simply no reason to assume that the Arabic dialect of sixth-century Nessana should reflect the same grammar or imply anything about the late seventh-century Arabic of the conquerors who came from the Ḥijāz (and beyond). In fact, we know they are quite different in many other respects.Footnote ³¹

Owens questions the usefulness of Greek transcriptions for understanding Arabic phonology by pointing to aspects of underspecification and randomness in Arabic to Greek equivalencies. That is, he argues a single Greek letter may randomly represent a number of Arabic phonemes, and so phonological precision is impossible. This supposedly chaotic situation is, too, a consequence of not keeping one’s data in order, and mixing up corpora from different times and places. For example, he states: “[g]iven the alternative spellings for ‘lastingness’ {θαβαθ/θεβετ} (2015: 24) toggling through all combinations of aspirated/fricative interpretations yields [t^habat^h], [θabaθ], [θabat], or even [t^habaθ]” (p. 111). This is simply not true. These phonetic interpretations, which seem to derive from Kaplony (Reference Kaplony2015), are again not sensitive to historical Greek phonology or regionality, much less to variation in the Arabic of this period. The name *ṯabāt is not spelled randomly at all. In the pre-Islamic period and in the Levant, Theta was pronounced still as an aspirated stop [t^h], and as such, was used to transcribe Arabic ṯ and t.Footnote ³²The spelling Θαβ̣αθας then predictably occurs at Nessana (P.Ness 79.61, 600–625 ce). The word θεβετ, on the other hand, is mistranscribed; it actually reads θεβεδ <t^hebed>, and comes from Islamic-period Aphrodito, Egypt (P.Lond. 1435.122, 716 ce).Footnote ³³This word is not a personal name but a noun. Its origin is unclear; it has been suggested that it transcribes the Arabic word for “list”, “voucher”, ṯabat, but this is far from certain.Footnote ³⁴If this identification is correct, then the transcription of the final t with Delta does not tell us anything about the pronunciation of the sound. In Coptic, all obstruents were voiceless, and since these scribes were likely Coptic speakers, their pronunciation may have impacted the realization of word-final Delta, realizing it as [t], and thus rendering it a suitable transcription of Arabic /t/ at the end of a word.Footnote ³⁵Understanding these different contexts is a pre-requisite for utilizing this material for historical linguistic purposes. While Owens is quick to problematize this interpretive process, he readily draws on the supposed transcription of the name ṯābit as σαβιτο(ς) /sabito(s)/ (CPR XXX 16.14; 643–644 ce),Footnote ³⁶to supply further evidence in support of his idea that the sound change *ṯ > s occurred in the early Islamic period, and was thus inherited into both Central Asian Arabic and Lake Chad Arabic from a common early Islamic ancestor rather than being the result of parallel development (pp. 111, 422). This is impossible. First of all, the text has been misunderstood and mistranscribed. The document actually records Σαβῆτο(ς) /sabḗtos/, and this is not the name of an Arab man, but refers rather to a harbour in Egypt. The line in the papyrus reads: ἀπὸ ὅρμου Σαβῆτο(ς) “from the harbour of Sabḗtos”!Footnote ³⁷The site is today known as ṣafṭ al-laban, the first element of which is no doubt an Arabic rendition of Σαβῆτος. These types of mistakes riddle the treatment of this material; the book would have benefitted from the omission of this part.

Part II consists of a series of reconstructive case studies focusing on dialectal Arabic. Several of these will be familiar to the reader as they have been previously published in other places. Owens attempts some preliminary reconstructions, not of Proto-Arabic as such, but of the developmental trajectory of contemporary dialectal forms. Some of the topics he takes up include: the raising of ā (so-called imālah), sound changes such as k > č, ṯ > s, ġ > q, the development of the b-imperfect marker, the intrusive -n- on participles, and deflected agreement. While many of Owens’ unconventional assumptions are certainly open to debate, the data he presents are of much interest and will be a good starting point for future discussion and elaboration. It is important to emphasize that none of these case studies undermine Arabic’s classification as a Central Semitic language, nor do they challenge a conventional understanding of language development. The final part of this section addresses the issue of speech community and its relevance to historical reconstruction, with a lengthy and interesting case study on the varieties of Arabic spoken in Nigeria and the Lake Chad area.

Part III deals with language contact. Like the previous section, much of this material has been previously published. Some aspects of this section draw heavily on historical sources and the historical grammar of other Semitic languages, which constitute its main weakness. We have space only to discuss one study: Arabic–Aramaic contact (pp. 215–35). Owens argues for long-term contact between Arabic and Aramaic and this is meant to explain some commonalities between the languages. He rightly argues that there is a historical context for such contact in pre-Islamic times, but his attempt to sketch out this history is problematic. For example, he states: “[m]ost striking in this respect is the somewhat enigmatic Nabataean culture which began emerging in the Horan (northern Jordan, southern Syria) in 312 BC” (p. 231). While he does not provide any references, no specialist of Nabataean would accept this claim (and there is indeed no evidence that I know of which could support such an assertion). Indeed, the origins of Nabataean culture must be sought much further south in the land of Edom.Footnote ³⁸Nevertheless, the Nabataean kingdom does provide an important context for Arabic–Aramaic contact, but does this explain the features Owens discusses? One major feature that Owens believes must be explained by ancient contact is a common syllable structure between Aramaic and modern Arabic, namely, the deletion of a short vowel in an unstressed open syllable, the ensuing cluster of which must then be “repaired” (p. 222).Footnote ³⁹The problem is, Owens is assuming that Classical Syriac phonology and syllable structure holds true for all forms of Aramaic at all times. In the pre-Islamic period, especially in the Nabataean context, Arabic would not have been in contact with Classical Syriac, but rather Nabataean Aramaic or other forms of Arabian Aramaic.Footnote ⁴⁰And there is no evidence that this delete-repair rule – if we even accept Owens’ interpretation – was operative in these forms of the language. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary. Aramaic loans into Quranic Arabic, for example, show the preservation of the short vowel in unstressed open syllables: consider Arabic malakūt “kingdom”, which is ultimately loaned from Aramaic but clearly not a variety with vowel deletion. Compare this to Syriac malkūṯā < *malakūtā, on which Owens bases his syllable structure of Aramaic. If this word were the source of the Arabic, it would have been loaned as malkūṯ, which is clearly not the source of the Arabic loan.Footnote ⁴¹This, among many other things, indicates that the Aramaic that Arabic was in contact with in pre-Islamic times did not exhibit the same phonetic developments characteristic of Classical Syriac, and so Owens’ model collapses. If Aramaic is at all responsible for the developments in Arabic, and of course it doesn’t have to be, then it must date to contact in the Islamic period. Considering how widespread the phenomenon is, parallel development appears to be a much more reasonable explanation.

The final substantive part of the book is dedicated to “stability”, focusing on ways in which Arabic has not changed. While language evolution is not constant, and different parts of a grammar can change at different rates, some of the features Owens perceives to be stable or “old” are illusions, and have to do with an inaccurate understanding of the linguistic past. This problem actually begins in Part I, where Owens argues that Arabic (= Classical Arabic) phonology/phonetics are “close” to Proto-Semitic (p. 26). First, it should be pointed out that Table 2.1 of consonantal segmental phonemes is extremely outdated, based on Moscati et al. (Reference Moscati, Spitaler, Ullendorff and von Soden1980), and lacks phonetic detail, thus obscuring the developments from Proto-Semitic to Arabic.Footnote ⁴²Owens suggests that there are only a couple of changes that characterize Arabic, the shift of *p to f, the shift of *š to s, and the shift of *ɬ to š. His table, however, does not include the plain affricates, [dz] (=*z) and [ts] (*s³), both of which deaffricated in Arabic producing [z] and [s], respectively. As a consequence, the reflex of *s³, likewise not found in the table, merges with *s¹, which was most likely not realized as [ʃ] in Proto-Semitic but rather as an apical sibilant, [s̺]. In addition to this, the emphatics, which are not specified for realization by Owens, are reconstructed as unvoiced and as ejectives for Proto-Semitic. Glottalization is lost in Arabic, and most of the series develops a retracted tongue root realization, surfacing either as velarized, uvularized, or pharyngealized consonants, with the exception being the emphatic counterpart of k, g, which is realized as a voiceless uvular stop, [q]. Finally, the emphatic non-sibilant fricatives become voiced. The changes are even more drastic when it comes to vowels and triphthongs.

A more interesting example appears on p. 334. Owens states that the Classical Arabic jussive, without the -u/-na terminations, continues the West Semitic “imperfect”, and since the modern dialects do not show these inflectional endings, or at least the final -u, they must continue the original West Semitic inherited forms. This claim implies that the modern dialects have bypassed the important Central Semitic innovation of the imperfect indicative yaqtulu. The argument is not based on the accepted understanding of the Proto-Semitic and Proto-West-Semitic verbal system. The Proto-West-Semitic imperfect has nothing to do with the Classical Arabic jussive; it is reconstructed as *yVqattVl, cognate with Gəʕəz yəqattəl and Modern South Arabian yəkōtəb, cf. Akkadian iparras, a form lost altogether in Arabic (and Central Semitic).Footnote ⁴³It is the Proto-Semitic/West Semitic preterite yaqtul that continues into Classical Arabic as the jussive, with the preterite function still maintained in negative constructions and conditionals.Footnote ⁴⁴Now do the modern dialects continue the Classical Arabic jussive, even formally? No. This much can be seen by the presence of the -n termination on forms ending in a vowel in many dialects, e.g. yiktibūn “they (mp) write”, which is part of the innovative Central Semitic indicative paradigm, -u/-na. But even those dialects that lack the final -n can be shown to derive from the Central Semitic yaqtulu paradigm; the n-less plural terminations were levelled to the indicative from the modal forms.Footnote ⁴⁵While the modern Arabic prefix conjugation appears to be identical to the Classical Arabic jussive in tri-radical roots, e.g. modern yiqtil v.s. Classical yaqtulu, because it lacks a final vowel, this is due to a fact that Owens refuses to admit: original final short vowels were largely lost in modern Arabic. And the paradigm of weak verbs can demonstrate this. Let us consider the Najdi forms (see Table 1).

Table 1. Evolution of the Modern Najdi prefix conjugation

As we can see, if modern Najdi truly continued the West Semitic/Central Semitic preterite/jussive, it should have yielded the form yimš, similar to the imperative, imš. Instead, the presence of a final i must go back to an original *ī (contrastive length is lost in unstressed word-final position and original long vowels are synchronically realized as short, while original short vowels are lost). In other words, Najdi yimši can only descend from a proto-form *yVmšī and not the jussive *yVmši. And *yVmšī itself must originally contain a triphthong ending in a high vowel, thus *yamśiyu.Footnote ⁴⁶Therefore, the modern dialects require the reconstruction of an original verb form that terminates in a final vowel.Footnote ⁴⁷The same argument holds true for medial weak verbs, where Classical Arabic (and Proto-Central-Semitic) contrast an indicative yaqūlu with a preterite/jussive yaqul. Najdi, and indeed all forms of Arabic, exhibit a form with a medial long vowel, yrūḥ, ygūl, and not ones with reflexes of the short vowel yriḥ or ygil. These forms as well must go back to a verb terminating in a final vowel, yaqūlu or perhaps yaqūla.

Sometimes the disregard for historical phonology of Arabic, and indeed the comparative Semitic evidence, leads to the positing of unnecessary sound rules. For example, Owens argues that the final vowel of the suppletive singular imperative of “to give” hāti is secondary, arising from a “linear epenthesis rule” to resolve a superheavy syllable CvvC or CvCC (p. 401), while permissible syllables, such as CvC, do not require any epenthesis, hence kam “how much” and qad perf lack any final vowel. This explanation is part of a larger programme to argue that final vowels are secondary (see below). But the i in hāti is etymological. This verb is a frozen C-stem (form IV in Arabic grammar), retaining the ha-causative morpheme that has otherwise shifted to ʔa in Arabic.Footnote ⁴⁸This is the imperative of the C-stem of the root ʔtw “to come”, thus, “to cause to come”, i.e. “bring”.Footnote ⁴⁹The antecedent paradigm to which this form belongs is as follows, with pre-Proto-Arabic reconstructions: perfect: *haʔtaya, imperfect: *yuhaʔtiyu, jussive: *yuhaʔti, and imperative: *haʔti. The form hāti results from the loss of the glottal stop in the imperative and subsequent compensatory lengthening. The Classical Arabic pausal form, and modern dialectal form, hāt, therefore arises from the loss of an original etymological final i, and not the addition of one. Likewise, Owens wishes to explain the final a of the interrogative kayfa as secondary, along the same lines as it is missing in the modern dialects, but he neglects to mention that Faifī, which retains final -a, also attests the form čīfa < *kayfa, but does not resolve other clusters in this way, im-liʕb “the play” and liʕb-ča.Footnote ⁵⁰Moreover, Owens’ rule would predict that the preposition “with” should have the form maʕ in Classical Arabic, cf. kam and qad, but it does not. It is maʕa.Footnote ⁵¹The final a is thus lexical and not the result of some secondary epenthesis.

This foregone discussion is part of a larger effort in §12.3.3 (beginning on p. 396) to argue against the existence of a historical rule in Arabic deleting final short vowels. Owens does this by focusing on the supposed (partial) survival of final-short vowels in the pronominal system of most modern dialects. Once again, one might understand Owens as misrepresenting historical linguistic methodology. A sound rule v > ∅/_# is not incompatible with the existence of final vowels altogether especially in the pronominal system. In each case that Owens summons, there are analogical reasons for why the dialects attest final vowels corresponding to Classical Arabic short vowels. This is especially significant since the majority of these are in the pronominal system, which cross-linguistically is heavily susceptible to this force of language change. A key example is the final *i on the 2nd person feminine singular forms, katabti “you wrote” and in some dialects the 2fs clitic pronoun -ki. Owens insists that the direct antecedent of this form must be a final short vowel, but this is only based on the Classical Arabic form and the assumption of linear descent. While this vowel should be reconstructed as short for Proto-Arabic, and indeed, for Proto-Semitic, the dialectal form, which should go back to a long vowel, is best explained as a result of levelling from the 2nd person feminine singular of the prefix conjugation, -ī. This first spreads to the suffix conjugation and the independent pronoun, and then finally, in some dialects, to the clitic. The levelling of verbal gender/number morphology across paradigms is also witnessed in the plural: the masculine plural verbal ending -ū of the prefix conjugation or third person suffix conjugation was transferred to the second person suffix conjugation, producing katabtu, replacing earlier *katabtum(u), and to the pronoun, producing intu, replacing earlier ʔantum. Analogy does not negate the operation of the rule i > ∅/_#; it simply explains why, on the surface, the rule does not seem to apply in this case. Analogy and levelling are essential parts of language change and interact with regular sound changes to produce attested forms. The other final pronominal vowels are part of a complex history that has to be worked out using the entire toolkit of historical linguistics; they do not “disprove” the loss of final short vowels, they simply require us to discover the original scope of this rule and other forces of language change responsible for the reflexes that reach us.Footnote ⁵²

Owens concludes with a methodological remark that requires comment: “[t]o be clear, whereas the traditional Semiticist/Arabicist approach to studying final short vowels has been to ask, ‘where did they go?’, the historical linguistic perspective is, ‘why do we need to postulate short case vowels in the history of the dialects in the first place?’” (p. 406). Worded in this way, the statement appears to misrepresent the work of Semiticists and historical linguistic methodology. Semiticists are not positing final short vowels out of thin air; internal reconstruction from the modern dialects is not the only way to know about Arabic’s past, given the extensive historical attestation of both Arabic and related languages extending back to the third millennium bce. I agree with Owens that there are “multiple pathways” to Arabic’s past, but we seem to disagree in that I think historical linguistic methodology requires that they ultimately converge on a single object, that is, the proto-language. Historical linguistics must account for all data and use all data, not simply reconstruct backwards internally from modern attested varieties. The phylogeny of the Semitic language family requires the reconstruction of final short vowels on nouns, that inflect to express case roles, to Proto-Semitic because this feature is fully attested across the Semitic family: East Semitic (Akkadian and Eblaite); West Semitic ≫ Central Semitic ≫ (Arabic); ≫ Northwest Semitic (Ugaritic; AmoriteFootnote ⁵³ ) ≫ Canaanite (Amarna Canaanite). Moreover, the system is partially present in other branches, where its reflexes are explained as the results of sound changes or defective writing: Ethiopic (Gəʕəz) and Ancient South Arabian. Finally, relics occur across the family.Footnote ⁵⁴But what is most important: where the case system and final vowels are absent, there are good historical linguistic accounts to explain that, despite Owens’ objections. This is why Semiticists reconstruct these vowels and the case system to Proto-Semitic. And since the Arabic dialects are descendants of Proto-Semitic, any feature that is reconstructed to Proto-Semitic that is absent in the Arabic dialects must have been lost along the way, hence the question: how were (most of) the final short vowels in modern Arabic lost? This misunderstanding has been repeated in several works now despite multiple attempts at explaining the problem in linguistic terms, so let us try to approach the situation using another biological parallel. Mammals evolved from therapsids and are distinguished by several innovations: these include being warm blooded, having a neocortex, mammary glands, and fur/hair. All animals that are classified as mammals descend from a common ancestor with these features, the proto-mammal. But consider dolphins. It is uncontroversial that dolphins are mammals, but they are hairless, with the exception of some species that have a bit of fuzz as infants (we can compare this to Faifī’s preservation of final *-a). The absence of hair in dolphins does not motivate us to doubt the existence of hair altogether in their proto-mammalian ancestor. No, we look at this in terms of phylogeny: where did the hair on dolphins go? For that, there is a good answer, as there is for the general loss of final short vowels in modern Arabic and the subsequent collapse of the Proto-Semitic, and Proto-Arabic, case system.Footnote ⁵⁵

There are naturally many other interesting topics brought up in this book that deserve a detailed treatment, but we must end here.Footnote ⁵⁶Owens has offered us an interesting tome that asks some important questions and is rich in data. I especially appreciate Owens’ call to a holistic model of language history, taking into account the sociolinguistic dimension as well (pp. 10–11). Despite these merits, the work suffers from many critical factual errors, weak philology, and its historical linguistic methodology leaves much to be desired. These issues severely undermine many of the analyses and render the book potentially misleading for uninitiated readers, especially those coming from other fields. While in some ways the work is a missed opportunity, it may be useful to conclude with some promising future directions of research: 1) Owens highlights the issue of pronominal vowels in Arabic; a comprehensive treatment of this problem, in dialogue with the comparative Semitic evidence and deploying the full repertoire of historical linguistic solutions, is a desideratum. Indeed there is no reason to assume that one set of ordered rules and analogies will explain all attested reflexes in Arabic, both ancient and modern. 2) We have witnessed considerable advances in our knowledge of the pre-Arabic languages of the Peninsula. A comprehensive examination of the toponymy (including microtoponyms) of Arabia, especially Central Arabia and the Ḥijāz, has great potential to illuminate the linguistic pre-history of the region. 3) The availability of Arabic papyrological databasesFootnote ⁵⁷now enables scholars to investigate the language of this corpus using advanced quantitative methods. A new grammar of this material is needed, written on its own terms and not assuming that normative Classical Arabic was always the point of reference. 4) While not a linguistic enterprise as such, a proper historical investigation into pre-modern population movements that does not take literary accounts at face value is a prerequisite for interfacing dialectal data with historical information. For example, do we really know when Central Asian Arabic was cut off from the remainder of the Arabic-speaking world? Or when speakers of the variety arrived in the region? As far as I am aware, claims in this regard are based on oral histories, which are notoriously unreliable.Footnote ⁵⁸And of course, continued fieldwork in documenting and describing modern vernacular Arabic and ancient epigraphic varieties is a must, as the more data made available the higher the resolution of our image of Proto-Arabic and its evolutionary trajectory will be.