1st millennium BCE, long before the development of spirantization. In a masterful study, P.Stein (2018) suggested that the Achaemenids and Babylonians introduced Aramaic tocenters of commerce and power in East and North Arabia, where it then took root as anadministrative language. Arabian Aramaic pronunciation was therefore based on theAramaic of the mid-first millennium BCE and acted as filter through which later Aramaic vocabulary passed.
Like Indian English, Arabian Aramaic reflects certain fixed grammatical constructions as well, such as the optative use of the suffix conjugation andparticiple (Gzella 2015, 243). The latter half of the first millennium BCE probably witnessed the earliest layer of Aramaicloans into North Arabian languages, which included vocabulary like ktb ‘to write’. Indeed, as I have already mentioned, the verb is present in Dadanitic (pre-1st c. BCE). A loanfrom Aramaic is clear; the Liḥyānite kings used Aramaic as an administrative language abroad and Aramaic documents have been found at the oasis of Dadan as well (Stein2018). Indeed, a certain masʿūdu, king of Liḥyān carved an Aramaic graffito in his own hand employing this verb:JSNab 334/1-2 mšʿwdw mlk lḥ
yn | ktb dnh Masʿūdu, king of Liḥyān, wrote this.
Unlike other parts of the Near East in this period, there is no evidence that Aramaic whatsoever a vernacular in Arabia - foreign powers introduced it for the purpose of administration and it survived thereafter as a chancellery language. Since the spoken languages of the peninsula were entirely different from the written register, ‘Arabian’ Aramaic was able to preserve certain archaic features, apparently like the absence of spirantization. Steingoes on to make a crucial suggestion in his 2018 paper:The fact that the language of the Nabataean inscriptions is considered more‘conservative’, that is, more closely related to Imperial Aramaic than the other contemporary variants of so-called ‘Middle Aramaic’, could easily be explained by assuming a continuity in a traditional chancellery language eventually to be traced back to the Babylonian/Persian administration in the sixth-fifth century BC (p. 46).
It is now clear that the large parts of the Nabataean kingdom were Arabic speaking, and Arabic likely served as a liturgical and oral legal language.
While it seems entirelypossible that parts of the kingdom, especially its northern frontier and areas in the Jordan plateau were Aramaic speaking as well, people from these areas would have spoken dialects of western Aramaic. As the written register of Nabataean is based on the administrative dialect of the Babylonians and Persians (eastern), it would not have reflected the vernacular of Arabic or Aramaic speakers of the kingdom. Following Stein, Nabataean Aramaic seems to be a archaising variety of Arabian “Official” Aramaic going back to the mid-first millenium BCE.
In this light, the Aramaic vocabulary and toponyms in Safaitic may reflect borrowings from Nabataean Aramaic - a variety of Arabian Aramaic without spirantization - rather than the living pronunciation of Western Aramaic speakers.In the same way, we can explain the spelling tdmr in the Jabal Riyām inscription versus the contemporary tḏmr spelling of the Shabwa inscriptions - the former reflects an ancient loan from Arabian Aramaic pronunciation, which simply became the name of the town in Sabaic, versus the local Palmyrene Aramaic pronunciation reflected in an inscription commissioned or written by men from that town. Likewise,yhd/yahūd/ ‘Judaea’ would reflect an Arabian Aramaic pronunciation, regardless of whether or not the inhabitants of Judaea pronounced it with spirantization in the 4th c. CE.
https://www.academia.edu/40235915/Al...rabian_Aramaic
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