The Arabic Language

2.2 The position of Arabic
Within the group of the Semitic languages, Arabic and Hebrew have always been 
the two most-studied languages. Although the discovery of Akkadian has consid-
erably modified views on the structure and development of the Semitic languages, 
and in spite of the fact that the Assyrian/Babylonian material antedates the 
oldest Arabic materials by more than two millennia, in many respects Arabic still 
remains the model for the description of the Semitic language type. The reason is 
not only the familiarity of scholars of Semitic languages with the Arabic language 
and the relative wealth of data about its history, but also its apparent conserva
-
tism, in particular its retention of a declensional system.
The genealogical position of Arabic within the group of the Semitic languages 
has long been a vexing problem for Semiticists. We have seen above that it was 
customary to place Arabic in one group with Epigraphic South Arabian, Modern 
South Arabian and the Ethiopian languages, collectively called the South-west (or 
South) Semitic languages. The main criterion for this classification was the forma-
tion of the broken or internal plural, in which the plural of nouns is formed by a 
restructuring of the singular without affixation. Such broken plurals are current 
only in South Semitic. In Geʿez we find, for instance, 
bet/abyat
‘house’, 
rǝʾs/arʾǝst
‘head’, 
ǝd/ǝdäw
‘hand’, 
kokäb/käwakǝbt
‘star’, and many more examples of broken 
plurals that resemble, but are certainly not identical with, Arabic patterns (Gragg 
1997: 248).
The value of the criterion of plural formation has been contested. According to 
some scholars (e.g., Al-Mansour 2011), the development of broken plurals in Arabic 
and South Semitic languages could have occurred independently. Others believe 
that vestiges of broken plurals are also found in North-west Semitic. In Hebrew, 
there are several isolated examples of plurals with a different basis from the corre-
sponding singulars, which look like broken plurals, albeit with a plural affix, for 

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Arabic as a Semitic Language 
19
instance, 
pǝsīlīm
‘idols’, which serves as the plural of 
pesel
‘idol’. Yet such plurals 
may be derived from other singulars, now lost (
*pasīl
); alternatively, they may be 
explained as the result of a stress shift. Some of the alleged examples of broken 
plurals in Hebrew are probably collectives, as in the case of 
rōkēb
/
rekeb
‘rider’.
According to Corriente (1971a), the opposition singular–plural as morpho
-
logical categories is a secondary development in the Semitic languages. Origi
-
nally, these languages distinguished between two classes of words denoting large, 
important objects, on the one hand, and small, insignificant objects, on the other. 
The latter category also included such words as diminutives, abstract nouns and 
collectives; words in this category were marked with suffixes such as 
-t
, 
-ā
,
-ay
, 
-āʾu
, which later became the suffixes for the feminine gender.
When the Semitic languages started to develop the opposition between 
singular and plural, East Semitic and North-west Semitic languages selected one 
single morpheme to denote the plural (e.g., Hebrew 
-īm
), whereas Arabic and the 
South Semitic languages distinguished between various kinds of plurality, most 
of them marked by one of the ‘feminine’ suffixes to denote plurality, as in Arabic