The Arabic Language

w
was formed 
differently in the East (
qūla
) and the West (
qīla
). Possibly, both forms are a devel
-
opment from an original /ü/ [y], which has disappeared from the phonemic 
inventory of all Arabic dialects; the Classical passive of these verbs is 
qīla
.
Sixth, the 
qāf
was probably a voiceless [q] in the East, and a voiced [ɡ] in the 
West; the latter pronunciation became standard practice in early recitation 
manuals, and is the one described by Sībawayhi (Chapter 7, p. 120). We have seen 
above (Chapter 2, p. 24) that the Arabic phoneme /q/ possibly evolved from 
*ḳ
, 
which was neutral with regard to voicing; the Eastern and the Western dialects 
developed this phoneme in different ways. The Modern Standard Arabic pronun-
ciation of /q/ is voiceless, but in the modern Bedouin dialects it is still realised as 
a voiced [ɡ] (see below, p. 187).
Seventh, the most remarkable feature of the Ḥijāzī dialect has already been 
mentioned above: the absence of the glottal stop (
hamza
), which was retained in 
the Eastern dialects (cf. Map 4.2 for the distribution of this feature). In the Western 
dialects, the loss of the 
hamza
was sometimes compensated by the lengthening 
of a preceding vowel (e.g., 
biʾr
‘well’ > 
bīr
, 
raʾs
‘head’ > 
rās
, 
luʾluʾ
‘pearls’ > 
lūlū
), or 
it resulted in contraction of vowels (
saʾala
‘to ask’ > 
sāla
) or a change into a corre
-
sponding glide (e.g., 
sāʾirun
‘walking’ > 
sāyirun
; 
yaqraʾu
‘he reads’ > 
yaqrawu
). Since 
Ḥijāzī orthography did not have a glottal stop, these words were spelled with 
w
, 
y
and 
ʾalif
, corresponding to the way they were pronounced in Ḥijāzī Arabic. The 
sign for 
hamza
is a later addition (cf. below, p. 64).
Eighth, in the Ḥijāzī dialect, the prefix of the imperfect contained the vowel 
-a-
; 
all other dialects formed this prefix with 
-i-
. This phenomenon is called 
taltala
and 
it is one of the pre-Islamic features that have been preserved in the contemporary 
dialects, which usually have 
-i-
. Both vowels probably represent a generalisation, 
since it is usually assumed that in earlier forms of Semitic the prefix-vowels were 
distributed in such a way that 
i
was used for the third-person singular masculine 

---

50
The Arabic Language
Map 4.2 Disappearance of the 
hamza
in the pre-
Islamic dialects (after Rabin 1951: 132)
and the first-person plural, and 
a
for the first-person singular, the second-person, 
and the third-person singular feminine (cf. Hetzron 1976; and see above, Chapter 
2, p. 14). In this case, Classical Arabic has ‘followed’ the Western pattern, since all 
prefixes in Classical Arabic have 
-a-
.
Ninth, the dialect of Tamīm was characterised by a phenomenon called 
kaškaša
, which consisted in the palatalisation of the 
kāf 
in the second-person 
singular feminine suffix 
-ki
, for example, 
ʾinnaši ḏāhiba 
‘you [sg. fem.] are leaving’, 
instead of 
ʾinnaki ḏāhiba 
(Sībawayhi, 
Kitāb
, II, ed. Bulaq, n.d., pp. 295–6). A 
related phenomenon was called