The Arabic Language

-u
/
-na
, retained only in Arabic. This verbal form is 
usually called ‘imperfect’; it has non-past time reference. The original past time 
reference of the perfect is still visible in the use of the Hebrew imperfect with the 
so-called 
wāw
consecutivum, which indicates a past tense. In Arabic, too, when 
the imperfect is used with the conditional particle 
ʾin
or the negation 
lam
, it refers 
to the past. The net result of these developments was a verbal system that groups 
Arabic together typologically with the North-west Semitic languages and sets it 
apart from the other languages of the South Semitic group.
These are not the only features linking Arabic with the North-west Semitic 
languages. They are the only languages in which a definite article has developed, 
in North Arabian (
(h)n-
; cf. below, p. 29), in Arabic (
ʾl-
) and in Phoenician/Hebrew 
(
h-
). In all these languages, the article developed out of a demonstrative element 
that had lost its deictic force; at the same time, new demonstratives were devel
-
oped from combinations of deictic elements (e.g., Phoenician 
z
, pl. 
ʾl
‘this’; 
hʾ
, 
pl. 
hmt
‘that’; Hebrew 
hazze
, 
hallāze
; Arabic 
hāḏā
, 
ḏālika
). An important morpho
-
lexical innovation is the presence of a third-person pronoun with the element 
h
in Arabic (
huwa
/
hiya
) and the North-west Semitic languages, for example, Hebrew 
(
hū
/
hī
), instead of 
s
as in the South Arabian personal suffixes 
s
, 
sw
/
s
(except in 
Sabaean 
hw
, 
h
/
h
). Probably this innovation took place, as predicted by Garbini’s 
account, from north to south, since it reached Sabaean but not the other South 
Arabian languages. Finally, it may be mentioned that in Arabic and in the North-
west Semitic languages the feminine ending 
-at
developed a new form without 
the 
t
: in Arabic the pausal form is 
-ah
, in Hebrew most feminine words end in 
-ā
.
The common features shared by Arabic and the North-west Semitic languages 
prompted Hetzron (1974, 1976) to propose his new subgrouping of Central Semitic, 
in which Arabic was to go with Canaanite and Aramaic instead of South Arabian 
and Ethiopic (cf. above, p. 15). Since the new classification adequately explains the 
common features between Arabic and North-west Semitic, the question remains 

---

Arabic as a Semitic Language 
21
of how the common features between Arabic and the South Semitic languages 
are to be explained. One hypothesis regards the internal plurals in Arabic and 
South Semitic as an independent development (see above, p. 18); alternatively, 
the further development of internal plurals may be regarded as a phenomenon 
that affected some of the languages in the West Semitic group, later to become 
the South Semitic languages. This innovation did not spread to all the languages 
of the West Semitic group. When the group split, some of them went south, later 
to become the South-west Semitic languages, while Arabic remained behind and 
came into closer contact with the other West Semitic languages, Canaanite and 
Aramaic, together with which it developed a new verbal system, a definite article, 
a feminine ending and other features.
A further subgrouping within the Central Semitic languages is set up by 
Hetzron on the basis of another feature, the suffix