Proto-Arabic is the name given to the hypothetical reconstructed ancestor of all the varieties of Arabic attested since the 9th century BC. There are two lines of evidence to reconstruct Proto-Arabic: *Evidence of Arabic becomes more frequent in the 2nd century BC, with the documentation of Arabic names in the

Nabataean script The Nabataean script is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) that was used to write Nabataean Aramaic and Nabataean Arabic from the second century BC onwards.substratum in the Nabataean language. *The Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions were composed between the 1st century BC and the 4th century AD, in the basalt desert of the northwest Arabian Peninsula and the

Southern Levant The Southern Levant is a geographical region encompassing the southern half of the Levant. It corresponds approximately to modern-day Israel, Palestine, and Jordan; some definitions also include southern Lebanon, southern Syria and/or the Sinai P ...

. They are also crucial to the reconstruction of Proto-Arabic, since they show many features that are shared by epigraphic

Old South Arabian Old South Arabian (or Ṣayhadic or Yemenite) is a group of four closely related extinct languages spoken in the far southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula. They were written in the Ancient South Arabian script. There were a number of othe ...

and Classical Arabic. The common features set them apart from languages that are documented further south, such as

Dadanitic Dadanitic is the script and possibly the language of the oasis of Dadān (modern Al-'Ula) and the kingdom of Liḥyān in northwestern Arabia, spoken probably some time during the second half of the first millennium BCE. Nomenclature Dadanitic ...

and

Taymanitic Taymanitic was the language and script of the oasis of Tayma, Taymāʾ in northwestern Arabia, dated to the second half of the 6th century BCE. Classification Taymanitic does not participate in the key innovations of Proto-Arabic, precluding i ...

(see Characteristics below). Old Arabic in the Nabataean script is first attested in the Negev desert in the 1st century BC, but it becomes more frequent in the region after the decline of Safaitic and Hismaic. From the 4th century AD, Old Arabic inscriptions are attested from Northern Syria to the Hejaz, in a script that is intermediate between cursive

Nabataean The Nabataeans or Nabateans (; Nabataean Aramaic: , , vocalized as ; Arabic: , , singular , ; compare grc, Ναβαταῖος, translit=Nabataîos; la, Nabataeus) were an ancient Arab people who inhabited northern Arabia and the southern L ...

and the

Kufic Kufic script () is a style of Arabic script that gained prominence early on as a preferred script for Quran transcription and architectural decoration, and it has since become a reference and an archetype for a number of other Arabic scripts. It ...

script of Islamic times. The

urheimat In historical linguistics, the homeland or ''Urheimat'' (, from German '' ur-'' "original" and ''Heimat'', home) of a proto-language is the region in which it was spoken before splitting into different daughter languages. A proto-language is the r ...

of Proto-Arabic can thus be regarded as the frontier between northwest Arabia and the southern Levant.

Characteristics

There are several features shared by Classical Arabic, the varieties of Modern Arabic and the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions that are unattested in any other Semitic language variety, including the

and

languages of the northern Hejaz. They are evidence of common descent from a hypothetical ancestor, Proto-Arabic. The following features can be reconstructed with confidence for Proto-Arabic:Al-Jallad, A. (2015). ''An Outline of the Grammar of the Safaitic Inscriptions''. Brill. # negative particles ''m'' */mā/; ''lʾn'' */lā-ʾan/ > CAr ''lan'' # ''mafʿūl'' G-passive participle #

prepositions Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...

and adverbs ''f'', ''ʿn'', ''ʿnd'', ''ḥt'', ''ʿkdy'' # a subjunctive in -''a'' # ''t''- demonstratives # leveling of the -''at''

allomorph In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant phonetic form of a morpheme, or, a unit of meaning that varies in sound and spelling without changing the meaning. The term ''allomorph'' describes the realization of phonological variations for a specif ...

of the feminine ending # ''ʾn''

complementizer In linguistics (especially generative grammar), complementizer or complementiser (glossing abbreviation: ) is a functional category (part of speech) that includes those words that can be used to turn a clause into the subject or object of a se ...

and subordinator # the use of ''f''- to introduce modal clauses # independent object pronoun in (''ʾ'')''y'' # vestiges of ''

nunation Nunation ( ar, تَنوِين, ' ), in some Semitic languages such as Literary Arabic, is the addition of one of three vowel diacritics (''ḥarakāt'') to a noun or adjective. This is used to indicate the word ends in an alveolar nasal without ...

References

Arabic language Arabic {{arabic-lang-stub