Talk:Old South Arabian

South Arabic

The term South Arabic seems to be the most widely used when referring to the languages of ancient Yemen, see Bitannica and Encarta. But I think South Arabian is the proper term to decribe the script. --Inahet 16:10, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

All sources I've seen say "South Arabian", not "South Arabic". i can't view the encarta article, but the britannica article is full of errors so i wouldn't trust it.

Benwing 07:49, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

The established set of terms include Epigraphic Sout Arabian, Ancient South Arabian, Old South Arabian and Sayhadic. These are all used interchangeably today. There is a important difference between arabic and arabian in this respect: arabic is the branch of central semitic that eventually became Classical arabic as well as the North arabian dialects, arabian is used for some non-classical arabic semitic languages with varying relations to classical arabic: old south arabian (sayhadic), modern south arabian (not to be confused with either arabic nor OSA), and ancient north arabian.

A. F. L. Beeston proposed Sayhadic as a convenient term after the medieval name for the desert Ramlat al-Sab´atayn wheremany inscriptions have been found. Since relationship between Sayhadic/OSA, arabic and modern south arabian is not regarded as direct by today's scholarship I think that Beestons' term Sayhadic may be the best as to avoid confusion. Amilah (talk) 21:13, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

I agree; in fact, I wish MSA and ANA (Ancient North Arabian) were renamed as well because all of these terms are confusing as hell. While older scholarship thought they were closely related to (Classical) Arabic and each other, it is now thought that Sayhadic and MSA are not particularly closely related to Arabic, and lately I've wondered if ANA might not be more closely related to Northwest Semitic than to Arabic, either, and if it might not be the conservative look of ANA (apart from terminological, geographical and cultural aspects) that fools us into thinking these dialects are close to Arabic.

I would like to point out that the term "(South) Arabian" refers to the geographical designation (South) Arabia, and does not in itself imply any close association with the Classical Arabic language. I'm not even at all sure if the South Arabians ever called themselves Arabs before they were Arabicised and became Muslim; in fact, I would rather doubt it. (There is no doubt that Arabic is similar to the other Arabian languages, though, and it must have appeared quite familiar, perhaps even almost intelligible, to North and South Arabians alike, which likely helped their Arabicisation.)

Ultimately, Arabian is just a geographical designation (referring to the Arabian pensinsula), and is entirely separate from the ethnolinguistic terms Arabic and Arabs. This distinction, subtle appearing as it may be, is actually not made in other languages, such as German, where Arabisch is used in both senses; still, it is highly important to be aware of it. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:42, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

We have the same lack of distinction in swedish. How do we proceed to rename this article? I'm completely new to wikipedia and don't know how to deal with this.Amilah (talk) 23:08, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

@Florian: Exactly, ancient south Arabians used Arab to refer to Bedouins, not themselves. ANA definitely shares some features with Northwest Semitic, but its nominal morphology looks more like that of Arabic, in particular it has broken plurals. (de:Frühnordarabische_Sprache#Substantive_und_Adjektive) I think this is not very surprising, probably Central Semitic used to be a large dialect continuum.--Schreiber91 (talk) 21:56, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Schreiber: But merely having broken plurals does not ally ANA closely with Arabic, as that is another archaic trait that Arabic has simply preserved – although the formation might have become more productive in Arabic (or perhaps it simply stayed productive there?), while it ceased to be productive (or might have never been very frequent to begin with) in other Semitic languages. Unless broken plurals could be shown to be really much more frequent in ANA than elsewhere, comparable to Arabic, there is no reason to treat them as a common innovation, because they are merely yet another retention, and same for other aspects of the nominal morphology. Like I said, ANA could simply be a conservative form of Northwest Semitic, or something closer to it than to Arabic in any case, which superficially resembles Arabic more because Northwest Semitic proper has undergone further innovations (either common innovations going back to the Northwest Semitic protostage already, or later convergences) that are found in neither ANA nor Arabic (or OSA, for that matter). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 12:20, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Schreiber: What do you think about the suggestion to rename the article to "Sayhadic"? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 12:23, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Of course, I didn't want to imply that the inner plural should be used for genetic classification (Arabic shares it with OSA, Ethiosemitic and MSA). Renaming the article would really make sense (to show just how inappropriate the name "OSA" is, there was also a non-OSA Himyarite language spoken by the people of the Old South Arabian state of Himyar), but I'm not sure whether the term "Sayhadic" is common enough to justify preferring it over "OSA" here...--Schreiber91 (talk) 17:34, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

(outdent) Very interesting; I have never heard about Himyarite as a distinct non-Sabaean, non-Sayhadic language before. As I have just pointed out in Talk:Himyarite Kingdom#Himyarite language, a separate article on this language is needed in English, too, to spare readers of Himyarite Kingdom confusion.

That reminds me that the en-WP does not yet mention the new classification of Sayhadic found in the de-WP. In a new version of Hetzron's tree, modified to account for the alternative placement of Sayhadic as well as to incorporate Himyarite and ANA, I presume that all these branches would go along Arabic within the Central Semitic branch. Something like this:

• Central Semitic
  • (unnamed node)
    • Northwest Semitic
    • ?Arabic (sensu lato)
      • Ancient North Arabian (several independent branches?)
      • Classical Arabic
  • ?Himyarite
  • Sayhadic
• South Semitic
  • Modern South Arabian
  • Ethiosemitic

Argh, the terminology is pretty screwed up ... --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:06, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

I think NWS and Arabic would not form a genetic unit, there seem to be no clear features separating them from OSA. Himyaritic should probably not be mentioned, we don't even know whether it was Central Semitic. I'll try to add Hetzron's classification and its revision to the article on Semitic soon.--Schreiber91 (talk) 17:35, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Epigraphic and Modern South Arabian do not form a clade? really?

The claim is being made consistently throughout various articles (Yemeni Arabic, Modern South Arabian, South Semitic languages, Old South Arabian) that Old and Modern South Arabian don't form a genetic clade, but rather Ethiopian Semitic and OSA form a clade against MSA. Is this really the consensus? Or is this just one researcher's view? (Alice Faber?) We have to be really careful with these claims. AFAIK the whole genetic tree of the various Semitic languages is quite unclear -- probably in fact, the languages don't really form a tree at all, because of extensive interborrowing at multiple time periods. Or at least, to the extent that they did branch off at certain points and genetic clades are formed from these branch-off points, there are few if any features that distinguish the clades so formed from any other languages, which would suggest that the cladal divisions are essentially useless. Hetzron meanwhile groups Ethiopian Semitic with MSA against OSA, and his recent classification doesn't even put OSA in South Semitic at all. This suggests to me that we should trash the whole "Eastern" vs. "Western" division that seems to be Faber's own work and no one else's, and just follow the consensus of putting MSA, OSA and Ethiopian Semitic as three nodes in South Semitic without further grouping. This is similar to what's done in Indo-European -- certainly there are proposals with good evidence for e.g. grouping Greek, Armenian and Indo-Iryan as a clade, but we don't use that as the consensus in WP because it isn't the consensus (an alternative view among many groups the Satem languages, i.e. Armenian, Indo-Iryan and Balto-Slavic). It all depends on which changes you view as areal and which as inherited. In reality, most "inherited" traits are actually areal. A good example is with Greek, where increasing evidence indicates that early dialects didn't have many of the features we commonly associate as Greek innovations. Nonetheless, those areal features eventually spread to all extant dialects, hence we treat them as inherited. Benwing (talk) 23:30, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes, the consensus is that Old and Modern South Arabian do not form a clade, they just happen to have similar names (they are not even spoken in the same area). The Eastern-Western distinction is also generally accepted.--Schreiber91 (talk) 08:54, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

don't rename yet to Sayhadic

WP guidelines call for using the most common term unless there is really good reason to do otherwise. "Really good reason" might include having a common term that is ambiguous in that it means different things to different researchers. But the claim that "Old South Arabian" might be "confusing" isn't good enough. Some form of "South Arabian" is still the predominantly used term AFAIK, and I don't think most linguists will find the usage excessively confusing -- the word "Arabian" is used precisely to avoid the confusion of "Arabic". IMO "Sayhadic" is more confusing at this point because it's less recognized. There are parallels elsewhere -- Ancient Macedonian and Modern Macedonian are totally different languages, and both distinct from Macedonian Greek. "Tigre" and "Tigrinya" refer to different languages as well, ala "Arabic" vs. "Arabian". Likewise "Turkish" vs. "Turkic", "Latin" vs. "Ladin" vs. "Ladino", etc. etc. Benwing (talk) 23:39, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

I agree that Old South Arabian is more widely understandable than Sayhadic, although the latter does have some advantages (Himyaritic for instance did not belong to Sayhadic; and the modern South Arabian languages are not descended from Sayhadic). What is confusing is the endings we are giving to the language names; we need more consistence: one place talks about Sabaic and another, even in the same article calls it Sabaean; similarly with Qatabanic, Minaic and Hadramitic. Ducky59 (talk) 22:14, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Classification

I am confused whether to place Old South Arabian in the Central Semitic group as this is the more modern convention; but in that case this will also have to be changed in the little table, and in the articles on the individual languages. If you look at the section on Semitic languages it already classes these languages as Central Semitic on the one hand placing Ethiopic and Modern South Arabic in the South Semitic group.Ducky59 (talk) 23:52, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

In fact, the paragraph

"The four main Old South Arabian languages were Sabaean, Minaeic (or Madhabic), Qatabanic, and Hadramitic. According to Alice Faber (based on Hetzron's work),[4] together with Ethiopian Semitic languages (such as the contemporary Ge'ez language) and the Modern South Arabian languages (not descended from Old South Arabian but from a sister language), they formed the western branch of the SOUTH Semitic languages."

is outdated and needs re-writing: they belong to the CENTRAL Semitic languages.

And what "western branch"? There is none eastern; East of Mehri is the Ocean! - The SOUTH Semitic branch comprises but Ethiopic ("western") and MSA ("eastern").

Nuremberg - Ángel.García 131.188.2.11 (talk) 15:34, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

some corrections about the statements above

1. 1- (( ancient south Arabians used Arab to refer to Bedouins ))

Response:

this is a wide spread misunderstanding for the Yemeni inscriptions and Arabic language

when South Arabian kingdoms referred to Bedouins, they didn't use the term (( Arab : عرب )) but they used the term (( A'raab : أعراب ))

there's a difference between "Arab" and "A'raab" in Arabic

"Arab : عرب" is the plural form of the word "Arabi : عربي" which means "an Arab person"

while they term "A'raab : أعراب" means the "Bedouin or Nomadic branch of a speciefic group of Arabs

so the the "Arab" is a normal Arab person who lives in a city, while "A'raab" are the nomadic branch of some tribe that lives in the wilderness near that tribe

the idea that some people missed is that there can never be "A'raab" without "Arabs", the "A'raab" are a part of a speciefic group of Arabs, not a distinct or an independent group

so when an Arab tribe says "our A'raab", this means they are saying "our Nomadic branch"

for further help in understanding the dilemma above, please read and understand the following terms:

an Arab person is pronounced in Arabic as "Arabi = عربي" >>>> singular

a group of Arabs or Arabs in general in Arabic are pronounced "Arab = عرب" >>>> plural

a Bedouin Arab in Arabic is pronounced "A'raabi = أعرابي" >>>> singular

a group of Arab Bedouins in Arabic are pronounced "A'raab = أعراب" >>>> plural

1. 2- ((I'm not even at all sure if the South Arabians ever called themselves Arabs before they were Arabicised and became Muslim; in fact, I would rather doubt it ))

Response:

Himyarite & Qatbanian inscriptions talked about the people who lived in that area, so they mentioned South Arabian kingdoms and tribes, and then mentioned their "A'raab" which means "Bedouins branch of a group of Arabs", so from the South Arabian inscriptions we can see that South Arabians said that those "A'raab" belonged to them, which means that those South Arabians thought of themselves as Arabs and lived with their Nomadic branch down in Yemen

this South Arabian inscriptions says: (( أعربهم طودم و تهامة )), which means (( their "A'raab" in mountains and lower lands" ))

they said those "A'raab" belonged to them, so this means they thought of themselves as Arabs with a Nomadic branch that lives in the mountains and valleys. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Omar amross (talk • contribs) 14:07, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

References

Phonetic table correction

I think the phonetic symbols for the "emphatic" consonants need double-checking. The diacritic for emphasis, using the IPA, should be a superscript [ˤ] not [ˀ]. (9abdullah). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.178.133.14 (talk) 17:13, 1 December 2013 (UTC)