Hismaic () is a variety of the

Ancient North Arabian Languages and scripts in the 1st Century Arabia Ancient North Arabian (ANA) is a collection of scripts and a language or family of languages under the North Arabian languages branch along with Old Arabic that were used in north and central Ara ...

script and the language most commonly expressed in it. The Hismaic script may have been used to write

Safaitic Safaitic ( ''Al-Ṣafāʾiyyah'') is a variety of the South Semitic scripts used by the Arabs in southern Syria and northern Jordan in the Harrat al-Sham, Ḥarrah region, to carve rock inscriptions in various dialects of Old Arabic and Ancient N ...

dialects of

Old Arabic Old Arabic is the name for any Arabic language or dialect continuum before Islam. Various forms of Old Arabic are attested in scripts like Safaitic, Hismaic, Nabataean alphabet, Nabatean, and even Greek alphabet, Greek. Alternatively, the term ha ...

, but the language of most inscriptions differs from Safaitic in a few important respects, meriting its classification as a separate dialect or language. Hismaic inscriptions are attested in the of Northwest

Arabia The Arabian Peninsula (, , or , , ) or Arabia, is a peninsula in West Asia, situated north-east of Africa on the Arabian plate. At , comparable in size to India, the Arabian Peninsula is the largest peninsula in the world. Geographically, the ...

, dating to the centuries around and immediately following the start of the

Common Era Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the ...

. One striking feature of the script is that it lacks a definite article. The Hismaic script is named after Hisma Desert, where it was mainly used, along with the surrounding areas up to central Jordan. It was discovered by F.V. Winnett who named it Thamudic E, and later G. King's work, it was renamed to "Hismaic".

Characteristics

Phonology

Hismaic has undergone the merger of Proto-Semitic s¹ + s³, the same as all Arabic varieties and Dadanitic. There are clear instances of ''d'' being used for /ḏ/ in the variant spellings of the divine name Ḏū l-S²arā as ''ds²r'' or ''ds²ry'' – as against classical ''ḏs²r'' or ''ḏs²ry'', although these are probably Aramaicisms, under Nabataean influence. The spelling ''ʿbdmk'' for ''ʿbdmlk'' suggests an interchange of ''n'' for ''l'' (with unvocalised ''n'' assimilated to the following ''k''), similar to that found in Nabataean where the name of the kings named Malichos occurs as both ''mlkw'' and ''mnkw'' and the compound as both ''ʿbdmlkw'' and ''ʿbdmnkw''.

Grammar

Perhaps the most salient distinction between Safaitic and Hismaic is the attestation of the definite articles ''h''-, ''hn''-, ''ʾ''-, and ''ʾl''- in the former. A prefixed definite article is not attested in Hismaic. Nevertheless, Hismaic seems to attest a suffixed -''ʾ'' on nouns and ''hn'' in personal names. The use of the morpheme ''h''- as a demonstrative is attested.Al-Jallad, A. (2015). ''An Outline of the Grammar of the Safaitic Inscriptions''. Brill.

References

{{Varieties of Arabic Arabic languages Ancient North Arabian Extinct languages of Asia