The Arabic Language

-na
in the feminine plural of the 
verbs. In Arabic, we have 
katabū
/
katabna
‘they wrote [masculine/feminine]’ and 
yaktubūna
/
yaktubna
‘they write [masculine/feminine]’ as the third-person plural 
of the perfect and imperfect. This partially matches the endings in the Hebrew 
imperfect (in the perfect, masculine and feminine have merged) 
yiqṭǝlū
/
tiqṭolnāh
(without the generalisation of 
y
that is found in Arabic), but differs from Aramaic, 
which marks the feminine plural with 
-ān
. Accordingly, Hetzron subdivides his 
Central Semitic group into Arabic and Hebrew, on the one hand, and Aramaic, on 
the other. A further refinement was proposed by Voigt (1987), who emphasises the 
difference between the Old and the Modern South Arabian languages. According 
to him, Epigraphic South Arabian should be classified as Central Semitic, whereas 
the Modern South Arabian languages are to be grouped together with the Ethio
-
pian languages in the South Semitic group.
As we have seen above, not all scholars share the view that classificatory models 
of the kind proposed by Hetzron and others are a satisfactory way of representing 
the development of the Semitic languages. An alternative way of looking at the 
distribution of common features between Arabic and the other Semitic languages 
ties in with Garbini’s theory. We have seen above that in Garbini’s view the Arabic 
type of Semitic language originated when groups of speakers detached themselves 
from the Syrian area that bordered on the desert and became isolated from the 
innovative area. The completion of this process of Bedouinisation took place at the 
earliest in the second half of the second millennium 
bce
. The common features 
shared by Arabic and North-west Semitic must, therefore, represent innovations 
that had been introduced in the Syrian area before Bedouinisation took place. 
Indeed, it appears that there are no archaisms in Arabic that do not also occur in 
the North-west Semitic languages of the second millennium bce
.
As Arabic progressively spread southwards, it reached the domain of the South 
Arabian language, which had been brought there at a much earlier time. Some of 
the Arabs settled in the area and established linguistic contacts between the two 
languages (see below, p. 44). In the first millennium bce
sedentarisation took place 

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22
The Arabic Language
in the Syrian region as well, when Arab nomads came from the desert and settled 
in the more fertile areas; this process led to the Arabicisation of the Nabataean 
empire (see below, p. 31). When the power of the South Arabian empires grew 
in the first millennium bce, the influence of the languages of this region on the 
language of the Arab Bedouin also increased. In Garbini’s view, this explains the 
common features between Arabic and the South Semitic languages. Because of 
the contacts with Syria and South Arabia, Arabic cannot be said to belong exclu
-
sively to either the North-west Semitic or the South Semitic languages. In the 
course of its history, it was affected by innovations in both groups.
In the past, the tendency to approach the comparative study of the Semitic 
languages from the perspective of Arabic led to a reconstruction of proto-
Semitic that was remarkably close to the structure of Arabic, which was there
-
fore regarded as archaic compared with the other Semitic languages. Arabic, for 
instance, has the interdentals /ṯ/ and /ḏ/, which correspond to dentals in Syriac 
and to sibilants in Akkadian, Hebrew and Ethiopic (cf., for instance, the numeral 
‘three’ in Arabic,