The Arabic Language

9.4 Christian Middle Arabic
Just as was the case for Judaeo-Arabic, texts in Arabic written by Christians were 
much less influenced by the Classical standard than those written by Muslim 
writers. The majority of the texts stem from the southern Palestinian area, 
including the Sinai. Many of the texts are preserved nowadays in the Monastery 
of Saint Catherine in the Sinai. A special characteristic of Christian Arabic litera
-
ture is the fact that most of the texts are translations from either Greek or Syriac, 
and only a very few were written originally in Arabic. This adds, of course, to the 
peculiar quality of the language of these texts and at times makes it difficult to 
distinguish between regular phenomena of interference by the vernacular of the 
writer, on the one hand, and interference due to the translation, on the other. The 
translations were often rather literal, using loan constructions from the Greek 
or Syriac original. Such constructions no doubt sounded awkward in Arabic, but 
they could become productive in the idiom of Christian Arabic writers in the 
same way that the Bible translations in European languages to a large extent 
influenced the stylistic and idiomatic development of these languages in spite 
of the fact that they contained calques from the original Greek or Hebrew text.
Christian Arabic documents go back to an earlier date than the Jewish Arabic 
documents, sometimes even to the eighth century. In this period, Aramaic was still 
a living language, and many of the Christian writers were bilingual in Aramaic/
Syriac and Arabic, so that their use of Arabic may even reflect direct interfer-
ence from their first language. Some of the texts are written in Syriac characters, 
known as Ḫaršūnī texts, and there is one in Greek characters, the famous psalm 
fragment mentioned above (p. 156). There are even a few texts that have been 
preserved in Coptic characters (cf. below).

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164
The Arabic Language
Among the Christian Middle Arabic texts, translations of hagiographic texts, 
for instance, 
vitae
of Christian saints, homilies and sermons, and patristic texts 
constitute the most important category. A considerable number of Bible trans
-
lations existed, both of the Old and the New Testament, but it is doubtful that 
these go back to pre-Islamic times, as has sometimes been maintained, since 
they contain the type of pseudo-corrections that belong to the period in which 
there was a codified linguistic norm. A number of texts were originally written 
in Arabic and are not translations of a Greek or Syriac original; most of these 
concern Christological treatises by Arab Christians, for instance, the treatises by 
Theodore ʾAbū Qurra (d. ± 820). Non-literary texts by Christians include historical 
texts, for instance, the chronicle of Agapius (tenth century) and the 
Taʾrīḫ al-ʾābāʾ 
al-baṭārika
by Mawhūb ibn Manṣūr (eleventh century).
In the South Palestinian texts from the eighth century onwards that were 
used by Blau in his grammar of Christian Arabic, some features are conspicuously 
absent. Blau specifically mentions the near-absence of the genitive exponent in 
these texts. In these older texts, the norm of the standard language was still more 
or less adhered to, and some features do not make their appearance until much 
later, when the norm had been eroded. In a Christian Arabic text written in Coptic 
script and dating from the thirteenth century, we find clear traces of colloquial 
pronunciation, but in spite of the fact that it was written in a foreign orthog
-
raphy the syntax and part of the morphology are still Classical, and the presence 
of several pseudo-corrections shows the inclination of the author towards the 
standard language.
Although this Coptic text, possibly a 
vita
of Saint Pachomius, does not 
exhibit many deviations from Classical Arabic, it is a fascinating document of 
thirteenth-century Arabic because of the spelling of the vowels. The 
ʾimāla
is very 
pronounced, 
a
/
ā
are consistently transliterated as 
e
, except after an emphatic 
or guttural consonant, for example, 
wekefeh
(
wāqifa
‘standing’), 
seha
(
sāʿa
‘hour’), 
bemexafet
(
bi-maḫāfa
‘in fear’). Since the article is written with 
e
even before 
emphatic consonants, as in 
essora
(
aṣ-ṣūra
‘the picture’), we may assume that it 
transliterates colloquial 
il-
rather than Classical 
al-
with 
ʾimāla
. The vowel 
e
is also 
used for unstressed 
i
/
u
, which were probably elided and reduced as in the modern 
dialects, for example, 
eššeyoux
(
aš-šuyūḫ
‘the old men’). A striking feature of the 
text is the use of a suffix 
-en
, sometimes written as an independent word, which is 
used after indefinite nouns, regardless of their syntactic function in the sentence, 
to indicate that they are connected with an attribute, as in 
k
h
en mehellemen 
ǵarib
(
kāna muʿallim ġarīb
‘there was a strange teacher’), 
be mesk
h
enet
h
en hazimeh
(
bi-maskana ʿaḏ̣īma
‘in awful poverty’), 
rojol en kaddis ebsar
(
rajul qaddīs ʾabṣara
‘a 
holy man saw’). This suffix is probably derived from the Classical nunation, but it 
has become a new marker that serves as the connection between indefinite noun 
and attribute. In this function, it resembles the 
tanwīn
markers in modern Arabic 
Bedouin dialects in the Arabian peninsula (cf. below, Chapter 11, p. 193).

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Middle Arabic 
165
As we go to later Christian texts, we find phenomena that demonstrate a 
clear neglect of the Classical norm. For an example of an analytic genitive in a 
manuscript, we may refer to a 
vita
of Saint Menas dating from the eighteenth 
century: 
bi-l-ḥaqīqa lā budd hādihi l-ʾaʿḍā min aš-šuhadāʾ bitāʿinā
‘indeed, these 
bones must belong to our martyrs’ (Jaritz 1993: 452.6). The 
vita
of Saint Menas 
is preserved in many versions, most of which contain an abundance of pseudo-
corrections, for example: 
fa-lammā mašayat fī l-barriyya waḥdahā wa-hiya bi-l-qurb min bayʿat al-qiddīsa Tikla 
naḥwa mayl wa-lam yakūn ʾaḥadan min an-nās yamšī maʿahā wa-ʾidā bi-jundī min ḥurrās 
aṭ-ṭarīq qad daḫala fīhi š-šayṭān jamīʿ ʾaʿṭāhu fa-masakahā wa-qāla lahā: ʾilā ʾayna māḍiya? 
fa-ḍannat ʾannahu yaḥmil alladī ʾaḫadathu maʿahā fa-qālat lahu: ʾanā māḍiya yā sayyidī 
ʾilā bayʿat aš-šahīd al-ʿaḏ̣īm ʾAbū Mīnā
‘When she was going in the desert all alone and 
came near the church of Saint Thecla, approximately one mile, and nobody was 
walking with her, and lo, there was a soldier from the guardians of the road, in all 
whose limbs the devil had gone, and he grabbed her and said to her: “Where are 
you going?” She thought that he was going to carry away the things she had taken 
with her and said to him: “I am going to the church of the great martyr ʾAbū Mīnā”.’ 
(Jaritz 1993: 416)
In this text, we find several instances of pseudo-correct accusatives, incorrect 
verbal forms (
mašayat
, 
lam yakūn
), use of 
ʾanna
instead of 
ʾan
, colloquial construc
-
tion of the participle without subject (
māḍiya
), and a real jumble in the orthog
-
raphy (sometimes 
ḍ
for 
ḏ̣
, sometimes 
ṭ
: 
ḍannat
, 
ʾaʿṭāhu
= 
ʾaʿḍāʾihi
, and a fairly 
consistent replacement of all 
tāʾ marbūṭa
s with 
tāʾ
(on the other hand, 
ḍannat
is 
spelled with 
tāʾ marbūṭa
!). 
These examples show, on the one hand, that Christian writers did feel restricted 
by the Classical standard (otherwise they would not have been tempted to use 
pseudo-corrections), and, on the other hand, that in some respects the standard 
had become more lenient than before (otherwise no analytical genitives would 
occur in these texts). In the explanatory texts on Coptic icons from the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries, although these belong to the religious domain, one 
finds elements that are conspicuously absent from contemporaneous Muslim 
Arabic texts, for instance, the use of the 
bi-
imperfect.