Qatrāyīṯ is a Syriac term that refers to the vernacular of east Arabia in the Early Islamic period. This linguistic variety is known from a small collection of lexical glosses in Syriac sources. Recently, Mario Kozah (2021, 2022) collected and examined about 40 Qatrāyīṯ lexical items, based on which he declared Qatrāyīṯ to be a dialect of Arabic. The purpose of this study is to re-assess the evidence, using a sounder linguistic methodology, to better determine the etymological origin of the Qatrāyīṯ vocabulary and, as much as possible, its phylogenetic position in Semitic. The results of this study increase the resolution of our image of east Arabia’s early linguistic history.

  • PanArab@lemm.eeOPM
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    1 month ago

    Qaṭrāyīṯ is etymologically related to Qatar. It is interesting that during the early Islamic period, East Arabia still spoke a Semitic language distinct from Arabic with many Akkadian and Aramaic sourced words. Probably why dialects spoken in Eastern Arabia, specially Bahrani, can sometimes be unintelligible to me.

    Indeed, a language like Qaṭrāyīṯ may be the medium through which the modern Arabic dialects of the Gulf acquired their Aramaic and Akkadian vocabulary. But what to make of the Arabic component? Should we consider it the result of contact and borrowing from the migrations of central and western Arabians in the late pre-Islamic period? In other words, should it be understood in the same way as the Aramaic and Persian components? The largest group of Qaṭrāyīṯ vocabulary is not clearly Arabic, but words derived from cognate, shared Semitic roots. This fact may support the interpretation of one-to-one Arabic correspondences as the result of borrowing. But most intriguing of all, perhaps, is the substantial lexical component of unknown origin. It is impossible to say if this material reflects the native lexicon of Qaṭrāyīṯ , which would then be quite distinct from all other known Semitic languages, or if these words were borrowed from another unattested ancient source. While we are unable, with this kind of evidence, to define in precise terms Qaṭrāyīṯ ’s place among the Semitic languages, it is clearly a discrete linguistic variety, distinct from all known varieties of Arabic.