The Arabic Language

Jāhiliyya
contrasted with the so-called ‘poetic koine’ (
Dichter
-
sprache
). In this view, the process of change that the Arabic language underwent 
in the period of the conquests was so radical that some of the changes must have 
been latently present in the pre-Islamic period. One typical argument for this 
view points out that the functional load of the declensional endings in Classical 
Arabic was already low, so that these endings could disappear without the risk 
of ambiguity. This is the view advanced by Corriente (1971b) in a discussion with 
Blau, in which Corriente maintains that Old Arabic did not have the synthetic 
character often attributed to it. He concedes that the daily speech of the Bedouin, 
perhaps even that of some city-dwellers, contained declensional endings, but 
points out that this was of little importance since the functional yield was almost 
zero. In this view, the functional yield of the declensional endings is determined 
by their indispensability. In other words, if it can be shown that in many cases the 
declensional endings can be omitted without the sentence losing its meaning, this 
demonstrates that declension is just an ‘idle tool’ (Corriente 1971b: 39), and that 
the morphemes expressing the declension are redundant.
In his response to this criticism of the traditionally accepted synthetic character 
of Old Arabic, Blau (1972–3) states that redundancy is a normal phenomenon in 
any language. The shift from synthetic to analytic devices in the language involves 
the introduction of a whole new set of morphemes, for instance, the introduction 
of a genitive exponent in New Arabic to denote a possessive relationship between 
words (cf. below, pp. 144f.). There is no indication at all in any Old Arabic text 
that such a device was used. The use of the synthetic genitive in Old Arabic in 
the construct state is, of course, highly redundant because of the fact that the 
head noun of the construction loses its article, thereby marking the construction 
as a possessive one and rendering the genitive ending of the second member 
superfluous. Yet in Old Arabic this did not lead to the use of an analytic posses-
sive device as in modern dialects. Something else must, therefore, have happened 
in the shift from Old to New Arabic, and this new development had nothing to 
do with the functional yield of the declensional endings, although their redun
-
dance may have facilitated their disappearance. It is sometimes thought that the 
function of synthetic case endings is to enable the speakers to utilise a free word 
order. But usually free word order is only a stylistic phenomenon. It is true that in 

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56
The Arabic Language
Old Arabic some things were possible that would lead to ambiguity in New Arabic, 
for instance, the fronting of a direct object, or the right dislocation of a co-subject, 
as in the Qurʾānic verse 
Q
9/3: 
ʾinna llāha barīʾun min al-mušrikīna wa-rasūluhu
(see 
below, p. 57). But this flexibility in word order is a consequence of the presence 
of declensional endings rather than its cause.
A similar reasoning ascribes the loss of the declensional endings to a phonetic 
phenomenon: since there was a tendency to elide word-final short vowels, so the 
argument goes, the declensional endings were dropped, at least in the singular. 
In this line of reasoning, the loss of the declension in the sound plural endings 
is then explained as a case of analogy. But a tendency to drop word-final short 
vowels, if it really existed, is part of an informal (allegro) style of discourse and 
belongs to the normal range of stylistic registers of a language. In a normal 
process of language acquisition, children learn the full range of styles and become 
acquainted with both the informal short and the formal long forms. By itself, a 
tendency to drop final vowels in fluent speech can never lead to their disappear-
ance as case markers. Discourse phenomena, such as the slurring or dropping of 
unstressed vowels, may at best reinforce the development of innovations that 
find their origin elsewhere. A break in the normal transmission process, however, 
could conceivably lead to a structural change, in which an allegro register is 
selected, while the other discourse registers are abandoned 
From another angle, the phonetic explanation has been rejected because of the 
relative chronology. According to Diem (1991), in modern Arabic dialects forms 
with the pronominal suffix such as