The case for Old Hijazi case
Amateur here so apologies if my terminology and reasoning is not up to academic standards.
I would like to ask about the possibility of the Old Hijazi Arabic dialect having a fully functioning case system and tanwin, just like the al-ʿarabiyyah described by the grammarians. Based on the following data:
- Tanwin is attested to this day in Arabian (including some Hijazi) dialects.
- Tanwin and fully functioning case is attested in pre-Islamic and early Islamic (including Hijazi) poetry. There is no record of non-tanwined and reduced-case poetry from Hijazi poets. Tanwin and fully functioning case is also attested in the dialectal speech of the grammarians' (admittedly probably non-Hijazi) informants, as a native and not an artificial or literary/high-register feature. The argument could be made that tanwin and fully functioning case was an everyday feature of Najdi/Bedouin speech and a high-register feature of Old Hijazi but, see next point:
- The grammarians faithfully listed dialectal differences of Hijazi and other dialects, such as the reduction of the glottal stop, imalah, etc. But they did not mention a supposedly reduced case system for Hijazi. If the argument is that they could not tell that Old Hijazi had a reduced case system, then how could they tell that Old Hijazi was not hamzated? Reports from the proto-grammarians should have mentioned then that Old Hijazi had a reduced case system just like they mentioned that Old Hijazi did not pronounce hamza.
- The indefinite accusative case written with alif in the Nabataean script is attested in the ʿEn ʿAvdat inscription.
- Tanwin is not written with nun in the Nabataean script inscriptions. This is regardless of whether the Nabataean Arabic language had tanwin or not.
- Arabic documents in the Greek script of Hijazi Arabic are (as far as I know) only after the very early Islamic era. Case (and tanwin in the urban dialect) can be said to have broken down at that point. Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions in the Greek script are not of Old Hijazi, but of other Arabic varieties (correct me if I am wrong) where case and tanwin may very well have broken down earlier.
For the Arabic script, the path to arriving at the orthography where tanwin is pronounced but not written is:
When the Arabic script developed from the Nabataean script, the Arabic script scribal school simply continued some of the conventions of the Nabataean scribal school and standardized them.
So the indefinite accusative is written with alif. And because tanwin was not written in the Nabataean script, even though this may be because the Nabataean Arabic variety did not have tanwin, they continued that convention as well.
In a similar manner, they would write the definite article with al, regardless of whether it preceded a sun letter or a moon letter, following the Nabataean convention, regardless of whether the Nabataean language had sun letters or not.
The convention of wawation, peculiarly, only survived in the name عمرو. But this name was not pronounced as ʿamrū/ʿamru. Waw here is clearly only an orthographic convention. This shows that orthographic conventions and pronunciation could be different, from the very beginnings of the Arabic script.
By the way, the title is just an homage to Profs. Al-Jallad and Van Putten's paper.