The Arabic Language



Yüklə 2,37 Mb.
Pdf görüntüsü
səhifə29/261
tarix24.11.2023
ölçüsü2,37 Mb.
#133592
1   ...   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   ...   261
Kees Versteegh & C. H. M. Versteegh - The Arabic language (2014, Edinburgh University Press) - libgen.li

š-šuʿūbi wa-wakkalahum fa-raʾasū li-Rūma fa-lam yablaġ malikun mablaġahu
5. 
ʿakkaḏā halaka sanata 223 yawma 7 bi-kaslūl yā la-saʿdi ḏū wālawhu
1. This is the funerary monument of Imruʾu l-Qays, son of ʿAmr, king of the 
Arabs; and [?] his title of honour was Master of ʾAsad and Maḏḥij
2. And he subdued the ʾAsadīs, and they were overwhelmed together with 
their kings, and he put to flight Ma<ḏ>ḥij thereafter, and came
3. driving them into the gates of Najrān, the city of Šammar, and he subdued 
Maʿadd, and he dealt gently with the nobles
4. of the tribes, and appointed them viceroys, and they became the phylarchs 
for the Romans. And no king has equalled his achievements.
5. Thereafter he died in the year 223 on the 7th day of Kaslūl. Oh, the good 
fortune of those who were his friends!
Part of the interpretation of this text is clear, but some of the crucial passages 
are still controversial, in particular the phrase 
wa-laqabuhu
in line 1, which in 
the older literature was read 
kullihā
, making Imruʾu l-Qays king of all the Arabs. 
Concerning the text of line 4, long debates have been dedicated to the part that 


36
The Arabic Language
Bellamy reads as 
fa-raʾasū
: most older interpreters read here 
fārisī
in the sense of 
either ‘cavalry’ or ‘Persians’. Whatever the interpretation of details, the text is 
written in recognisably Classical Arabic, with only a few singularities. The female 
demonstrative 

is not unknown in Classical poetry, and the relative 
ḏī
is reported 
by the grammarians as a pre-Islamic dialecticism (cf. below, p. 51). The word 
ʿkḏy
(
ʿakkaḏā
?) is not attested in Classical Arabic; it is translated by Bellamy as ‘there
-
after’ or ‘until then’. Lexically, we note the occurrence of the Nabataean loanword 
nfs
in the sense of ‘funerary monument’.
Rather more difficult to interpret is an even older text, dating from the first 
century 
ce and discovered in 1986 in ʿĒn ʿAvdat, 60 km south of Be’er Sheva in the 
Negev Desert, which possibly represents the oldest example of a text in Arabic. 
The three lines in Arabic are part of an Aramaic inscription in Nabataean script 
to the God Obodas, erected by Garmʾalahi, son of Taymʾalahi. Transliteration and 
translation are given here after Bellamy (1990):
1. 
fyfʿl lʾ fidʾ wlʾ ʾṯrʾ
2. 
fkn hnʾ ybġnʾ ʾlmwtw lʾ ʾbġh
3. 
fkn hnʾ ʾrd jrḥw lʾ yrdnʾ
1.
fa-yafʿalu lā fidan wa-lā ʾaṯara
2.
fa-kāna hunā yabġīnā l-mawtu lā ʾabġāhū
3.
fa-kāna hunā ʾarāda jurḥun lā yurdīnā
1. For [Obodas] works without reward or favour
2. and he, when death tried to claim us, did not let it claim [us]
3. for when a wound [of ours] festered, he did not let us perish.
Almost no element of this interpretation is uncontested. It seems that in this 
text the common nouns 
ʾlmwtw
and 
jrḥw
contain the Nabataean 
-w
, which was 
later to be used almost only in proper names (as in the an-Namāra inscription). 
But others deny this and connect the 
w
with the next word. The element 
kn
is 
interpreted as a verb 
kāna
, or as a conjunction ‘if ’, or as a positive counterpart to 
Classical 
lākin
, that is, 
kin
‘thus’. Sharon (
CIAP
,
 
I, 193) reads the third line 
wa-kun/
ken hunā ʾarid, jarḥū lā yaridnā 
‘and if I come to the water in this place, let no 
calamity come upon me’, deriving the verb from the root 
warada 
‘to go down to 
the water’. Whatever the correct interpretation, there can be no doubt that the 
inscription is in Arabic because of the use of the article 
ʾl-
; and, pending further 
interpretation, the inscription stands as a fascinating testimony of the oldest 
form of Arabic.
The most important conclusion to be drawn from the an-Namāra inscription 
is that the ending 
-w
is no longer used for common nouns, as in the inscrip
-
tions from ʾUmm al-Jimāl and al-Ḥijr, and not even in all proper names. This 
would seem to indicate that the pausal ending had become zero, as in Classical 
Arabic, except in the accusative in 

; the spelling of the proper names would 


The Earliest Stages of Arabic 
37
then be a relic of Nabataean/Aramaic spelling that was retained for some time 
for historical reasons and eventually disappeared in the orthographic system of 
Classical Arabic, except in the name 
ʿamr
. The pre-Islamic inscriptions do not 
provide any conclusive evidence for or against the existence of declensional 
endings in the Arabic of this period. They follow the conventions of Nabataean 
spelling, among other things in the accusative pausal ending. One way or the 
other, the inscriptions cannot answer the question of whether the distinction of 
case endings was reintroduced from some kind of poetic language (cf. Chapter 4) 
or had been retained. The only example that has been adduced of a dual ending, 
in the an-Namāra inscription, 

Yüklə 2,37 Mb.

Dostları ilə paylaş:
1   ...   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   ...   261




Verilənlər bazası müəlliflik hüququ ilə müdafiə olunur ©muhaz.org 2024
rəhbərliyinə müraciət

gir | qeydiyyatdan keç
    Ana səhifə


yükləyin