Books by Phillip W . Stokes
Link for Download: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0517
This volume offe... more Link for Download: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0517
This volume offers the most comprehensive linguistic analysis to date of Vatican Arabic MS 13, a late 9th/early 10th-century Arabic Gospel manuscript. Combining meticulous quantitative study with wide-ranging comparative evidence, this book provides an in-depth examination of the manuscript's orthography, phonology, morphology, morpho-syntax, and syntax. Through extensive charts, tables, and multiple interpretive frameworks, the author illuminates how linguistic features pattern across every dimension relevant to accurate analysis.
Crucially, the study does not treat MS 13 in isolation. Its features are systematically compared with those of other Christian Arabic manuscripts, Quranic traditions, medieval Arabic registers, early poetry, and modern dialects. This contextualised approach situates the manuscript within the rich linguistic diversity of medieval Arabic and challenges long-standing assumptions about 'Middle Arabic' and 'Classical Arabic'. By demonstrating that many features of MS 13 align with broader scribal and linguistic practices of the period, the book makes a compelling case against the notion that scribes worked towards a single, unified register or variety. Rather, they drew creatively and pragmatically from a diverse repertoire of features and linguistic traditions, revealing a far more dynamic and multifaceted approach to written composition than previously recognised.
Papers by Phillip W . Stokes
Folia Orientalia, 2024
The topic of gender and number agreement in Arabic has garnered significant interest in recent ye... more The topic of gender and number agreement in Arabic has garnered significant interest in recent years, culminating in the recent monograph by Bettega and D'Anna (2023). The picture that has emerged from these studies is of a system, shared by ancient and modern corpora, in which plural heads can trigger either feminine singular or plural agreement, depending on a variety of pragmatic and semantic factors (such as, e.g., animacy and individuation). Further, the Classical/Modern Standard Arabic rule of obligatory feminine singular agreement with inanimate plural heads represents a departure from this system. Unlike the significant coverage that corpora like the Quran and modern Arabic dialects have attracted, gender and number agreement in Middle Arabic corpora have received virtually no thorough study. In this paper, I investigate gender and number agreement in five early Christian Arabic manuscripts – four gospel translations and one original composition – showing that, contrary to previous discussions, the distribution attests the same ancient system found elsewhere. I also consider whether Greek, the source language of three of the four translations, had a significant effect on the realization of this feature in Arabic. I argue that it did not. I conclude that this system likely reflects a productive one in the speech communities from which the scribes originated, although with evidence of interaction with another register or registers.
ZDMG, 2024
Virtually all scholars have assumed that the co-existence of short and long spellings of the impe... more Virtually all scholars have assumed that the co-existence of short and long spellings of the imperfect and imperative in early Christian Arabic texts was due to the loss of the jussive as a category. This loss is reflected in most, though not all, modern dialects, and was assumed to be complete already by the time Christian scribes began to write and translate their texts. At the root of this paradigm was the assumption that Classical Arabic constituted the target of Christian scribes, and thus short forms were interpreted as classicisms whereas long forms purportedly reflected dialectal intrusions. However, despite the frequent comments on this feature, no detailed description of the distribution of these by-forms has been attempted. In this paper, I undertake two tasks. First, I study the distribution of short and long imperfects in six of the earliest Christian Arabic manuscripts, which are Gospel translations. I document every form in jussive/imperative contexts, and analyze them based on morphology (II-Y/W vs. III-Y/W roots), as well as syntax. I contextualize the Christian data within the evidence of early Islamic corpora such as the Quranic Consonantal Text, and argue based on the distribution of the short vs. long spellings that they represent a change-in-process, from the modal inflection reconstructible for Proto-Arabic to the one ancestral to many modern dialects. In this way, the feature is historically "middle." I conclude that quantitative description of such Middle Arabic texts, coupled with historically nuanced and sensitive analysis, can yield fresh and important insights into the evolution of Arabic in the early Islamic period.
Journal of Semitic Studies, 2024
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The study of the Bible in Arabic has become a ... more (Download File for Correct Arabic Font Display)
The study of the Bible in Arabic has become a topic of increasing interest among scholars of the intellectual history of the Islamic world, as well as Christianity in areas under Islamic rule. Nevertheless, most Arabic Bible manuscripts remain largely, or even totally, unstudied. While the textual and theological dimensions of these translations are attracting increasing scholarly attention, their linguistic analysis remains dominated by a traditionalist approach now completely outdated. This paper has two goals, one descriptive and one methodological. First, we aim to fully describe the Arabic Gospel manuscript Sinai Arabic MS 68, traditionally dated to the 14th century CE but which we date to the 16th century CE, perhaps in the aftermath of the fall of the Mamluk empire. Our description focuses on the linguistic nature of the manuscript, but includes discussions of its history and materiality as well. Second, we propose a methodological approach to studying the language of the text that takes seriously non-Classical components and contextualizes these features within what is known from other such non-Classical compositions, including especially Christian manuscripts. We conclude that the manuscript was produced by artisans and a scribe with significant courtly experience, and shows evidence of multiple normative linguistic registers, which argues strongly for the importance of broadening the framework within which scholars interpret such 'Middle Arabic' texts.
Journal of Semitic Studies, 2024
Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik, 77:2, 2023
It is axiomatic among scholars that Middle Arabic texts, including especially Judaeo-Arabic and C... more It is axiomatic among scholars that Middle Arabic texts, including especially Judaeo-Arabic and Christian Arabic corpora, attest non-Classical manifestations of numerous features, including especially nominal case inflection. However, very little work has been done exploring the nature of the distribution of the various manifestations of nominal case in Middle Arabic corpora. This paper studies several manifestations of nominal case, including the ‘five nouns’, as well as nouns that end in *-āʾ, in Arabic Gospel manuscripts from the 9th – 15th centuries CE. Contrary to previous grammatical treatments of the feature, the paper shows that in almost every category the case system as reconstructible to Proto-Arabic, and attested in the ʿArabiyyah, is attested in this Middle Arabic corpus. Those aspects of its distribution that differ from the Classical model are patterned and explained here by appealing to well-known processes of linguistic change, often paralleled by other Semitic and Arabic corpora.
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2023
This paper undertakes a close linguistic study of a unique translation of the gospels into Arabic... more This paper undertakes a close linguistic study of a unique translation of the gospels into Arabic as attested in three manuscript witnesses. The translation is unique insofar as it imitates the Quran, especially in lexicon and rhyme. Linguistically it mixes numerous features specific to the Quran with features from both the Classical Arabic (ClAr) tradition, including poetic archaisms not typical of standard ClAr, as well as from Christian Middle Arabic. I argue that the regnant framework for Middle Arabicthat it exists on a spectrum from dialects to standard Classical Arabicis insufficient for understanding this text. Instead, we need to conceptualize the high register for at least some communities as encompassing distinctively Christian features, which originated as living features and had achieved prestige, along with ones from Classical Arabic and Quranic recitation traditions, and even Old Hijazi.
Arabica, 2023
Middle Arabic is conventionally defined as existing on a spectrum between colloquial Arabic on th... more Middle Arabic is conventionally defined as existing on a spectrum between colloquial Arabic on the low end and Classical Arabic on the high end. Differences between Middle Arabic and Classical Arabic that are not attested in a modern dialect are typically treated, historically at least, as due to pseudo-correction. This is especially true of non-Classical manifestations of nominal case. In this paper, I tag all instances of alif al-tanwīn-which in Qurʾānic and Classical Arabic marks the accusative on triptotic nouns that do not end in tāʾ marbūṭa-from representative portions of the manuscripts, both vocalized and unvocalized, of 15 Christian translations of the gospels into Arabic dating from the 9th to 15th centuries CE. The data demonstrate, contrary to previous descriptions, that the majority of case inflection is written in line with Classical Arabic norms. Further, the syntactic contexts in which non-Classical case markings occur follow regular patterns, which recur with remarkable consistency across time and manuscript. Instead of originating in pseudo-corrections, I propose the differences from Classical Arabic originated in attempts by Christian scribes to represent a variety of Arabic in which a vowel merger before tanwīn resulting in a single morpheme erased the vocalic distinctions between case vowels. These syntactic contexts include nominative, genitive, and accusative ones. Since Christian Arabic differed from the varieties for which the Arabic script and subsequent vocalizations were developed to write, scribes originally varied in the degree to which they adhered to the writing conventions, with some closely adhering and others taking greater liberties in order to represent the underlying variety with greater nuance. Over time, this led to several scribal traditions for writing tanwīn in Christian manuscripts, each of which is attested among the vocalized manuscripts included in this study and discussed in detail. Stokes
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2023
This article attempts a foray into the linguistic study of vocalization traditions in Christian A... more This article attempts a foray into the linguistic study of vocalization traditions in Christian Arabic by examining the patters of 3rd person pronominal suffix harmonization in some vocalized Christian Arabic gospel manuscripts. In normative Classical Arabic, the 3rd person suffixes harmonized with a preceding -i, -ī, or -ay. However, early grammarians documented a much greater diversity of patterns. I document the patterns of nine vocalized Christian Gospel manuscripts, and show that several patterns are attested, including the normative Classical Arabic pattern, that parallel those attested in the early grammarian and Quran reading traditions. I argue that Christians were clearly aware of, and participants in, a range of performative linguistic traditions, and retain them when elsewhere they were marginalized or lost. I conclude by pushing both for more vigorous study of this vocalized layer of Christian Arabic tradition and a reframing of the context within which the study of Christian Arabic is undertaken.
Al–ʿUṣūr Al-Wusṭā, 2023
This paper takes a fresh approach to the study of the Arabic Gospel manuscripts. Although conside... more This paper takes a fresh approach to the study of the Arabic Gospel manuscripts. Although considerable success has been achieved at mapping out macro-families, there are still large lacunae in our knowledge of the Arabic Gospels as well as of the linguistic and scribal cultures that produced them. Arabic Gospel manuscripts notoriously vary at every level, and much of the variation is idiosyncratic. In previous work, this variation has by and large been considered background noise to be filtered out. In this paper, I study variation in the lexical, grammatical, and orthographic domains in the Gospel of Matthew as attested in twenty-two manuscripts belonging to multiple manuscript families. I use a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to detect possible patterns in the variation. At each level, the variation is patterned in ways that contribute to our understanding of the manuscripts and their production. Most significantly, I argue that grammatical variation is not random, as previously assumed, and that several distinct grammatical traditions are detectable. I thus show that far from being an obstacle to the study of the Arabic Gospels, variation is in fact key to fully understanding them. NOTE: GitHub link doesn't work in academia version; see this link: https://github.com/pwstokes/Key-to-the-Kingdom
Collectanea Christiana Orientalia (19), 2022
Pre-modern vocalized Arabic manuscripts can reveal a great deal about a variety of linguistic fea... more Pre-modern vocalized Arabic manuscripts can reveal a great deal about a variety of linguistic features represented in each text. Recent work has demonstrated the potential that vocalized manuscripts have, specifically for revealing aspects of the phonology of the corpora including the Quran, Judaeo-Arabic, and later ‘Middle Arabic’ texts. Christian Arabic texts, however, have been less frequently studied in this manner. Blau’s grammar of the Christian Arabic of south Palestine in the 9th/10th centuries CE4 draws primarily on unvocalized manuscripts, and therefore the phonological details he provides are inferred primarily from consonantal orthographic patterns. While a few others have focused on Christian Arabic manuscripts from the medieval period,6 there has been little work that undertakes a phonological description of vocalized Christian manuscripts in a thorough and systematic way.
Journal of Semitic Studies, 2022
Aramaic was the lingua franca in the Levant in the millennium prior to the Muslim conquests. The ... more Aramaic was the lingua franca in the Levant in the millennium prior to the Muslim conquests. The exact nature of the spread of Arabic and the specifics of language shift in the Middle East are not yet well understood. Many scholars assume that Arabic primarily spread in the immediate aftermath of the Muslim conquest. The common opinion is that in the new empire, Arabic was learnt imperfectly by speakers of other languages, and the resulting dialects bear the marks of those underlying languages (Versteegh 2012). Specifically, in the Levant and parts of Mesopotamia that language was Aramaic. Several features of the colloquial dialects of the Levant and Mesopotamia were argued to be a result of an Aramaic substrate. In this paper we concentrate on the alleged Aramaic substrate in the modern Arabic dialects of the Levant, where information about the Arabic dialects is more complete, and draw attention to a number of methodological flaws in the scholarly work supporting this hypothesis. We show that some core 'Aramaic' features in Levantine Arabic are unlikely to originate from Aramaic. We further argue that the evidence is not consistent with a rapid and imperfect language shift, which resulted in substrate influence, but rather with a prolonged period of contact between bilingual populations, which resulted in the expected transference of specialized lexical items, but almost no grammatical features.
Journal of Semitic Studies 66(2), 2021
While recent scholarship on Middle Arabic recognizes a spectrum of varieties from which authors m... more While recent scholarship on Middle Arabic recognizes a spectrum of varieties from which authors might draw in their compositions, there is still a tendency to place the ends of the spectrum of linguistic features which any Middle Arabic author might employ as dialectal on the one hand and a homogeneous Classical Arabic on the other. In this paper, I challenge the contours of this spectrum by contextualizing the language of a thirteenth-century Judaeo-Arabic text from Egypt-the 'Commentary on the Sayings of the Fathers'-within previously and contemporarily attested literary and performative traditions, drawing especially on Quranic reading traditions, as well as vocalized Judaeo-Arabic and Christian texts. I highlight important parallels between these traditions and features attested in this text. I conclude that to properly understand the linguistic choices that authors made, we must avoid anachronisms about the range of linguistic variation available to composers, and assumptions about the prestige associated with those variants.
Languages 6(3), 147, 2021
The morphology of the pronominal suffixes in dialectal Arabic are of particular interest for scho... more The morphology of the pronominal suffixes in dialectal Arabic are of particular interest for scholars of the history of Arabic for two main reasons. First, multiple dialects attest suffixes that, from a comparative perspective, apparently retain final short vowels. The second and more complicated issue concerns the vowels which precede the suffixes in the dialects, which are thought to either have been case inflecting or epenthetic. In this paper, I take up Jean Cantineau’s “embarrassing question” of how to account for the development of the vowels of the pronominal suffixes. Based on data from dialectal tanwīn in modern dialects, and attestations from pre-modern texts as well, I will argue that the pre-suffix vowels did originate in case inflecting vowels, but that no historical model heretofore proposed can satisfactorily account for how the various dialectal forms might have arisen. I identify two major historical developments and propose models for each. First, I suggest that dialects in which the pre-suffixal vowels harmonized with the suffix vowels developed via a process of harmonization across morpheme boundaries before the loss of final short vowels. For dialects in which one vowel is generalized, I argue that a post-stress neutralization took place, which led to a single vowel both before suffixes and tanwīn as well. Finally, I rely on evidence from the behavior of the suffixes to argue that the final vowel of the 3fs suffix was originally long, but that those of the 3ms, 2ms, and 2fs were most likely short.
Landscapes of Survival: The Archaeology and Epigraphy of Jordan's North-Eastern Desert and Beyond, 2020
This article presents two inscriptions discovered in north-east Jordan, published here for the fi... more This article presents two inscriptions discovered in north-east Jordan, published here for the first time. These two inscriptions provide the first unambiguous attestations of a plural demonstrative pronoun ʾly in the pre-Islamic epigraphic corpora. Following a discussion of the inscriptions themselves, as well as the morphology and syntax of the forms as attested, I will situate the forms in the context of attested ones in other Arabic corpora. The ultimate goal is to provide a reconstruction of the proto-Arabic plural demonstrative base, which I reconstruct as *ʾulay.
Journal of the American Oriental Society , 2020
Scholars of Arabic dialects have long noted the occurrence of a morpheme in a widespread number o... more Scholars of Arabic dialects have long noted the occurrence of a morpheme in a widespread number of dialects, realized-ən or-an, frequently suffixed to morphologically indefinite nouns, especially when followed by an adjective. Separately, another morpheme, realized-un or-u, is attested with a slightly different distribution in the dialects of western Yemen. Traditionally, scholars have interpreted both morphemes as reflexes of an etymological case vowel + tanwīn (Blau 1981), traditionally labeled "dialectal tanwīn." In this paper, I offer a new reconstruction of the origin and diachronic development of this morpheme. Throughout I integrate data and insights from comparative Semitics, as well as recently studied pre-Islamic epigraphic and textual materials, in order to break the familiar Classical Arabic / dialectal Arabic dichotomy and reframe the way in which historiography of features in the dialects is conducted.
BSOAS, 2020
Multiple varieties of Arabic attest a definite noun + adjective syntagm in which only the adjecti... more Multiple varieties of Arabic attest a definite noun + adjective syntagm in which only the adjective is marked morphologically with the article, e.g., Lebanese bēt iz-zġīr "the small house". The feminine ending *-ah is everywhere realized-(v)t, e.g., Baghdadi sint il-māḍye "last year". Most have assumed that it was originally appositional, and re-analysed as a construct, prompted perhaps by the loss of case (Hopkins 1984; Pat-El 2017). A few scholars (Reckendorf 1921; Retsö 2009) have argued that this syntagm was originally construct. In this article I draw on relevant Arabic data, including parallels with dialectal tanwīn, as well as comparative Semitic evidence, to argue that this syntagm is, diachronically and synchronically, one of apposition and not annexation. I propose that the feminine-at here represents a retention of proto-Arabic *-at, which was protected by the close relationship between a noun and following attribute. I conclude with a discussion of historical and comparative implications.
Re-engaging comparative Semitic and Arabic Studies, Edited by Daniel Birnstiel and Na'ama Pat-El, 2018
Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 2018
The nature of the language underlying the Qurˀānic Consonantal Text (QCT) has been a topic of sch... more The nature of the language underlying the Qurˀānic Consonantal Text (QCT) has been a topic of scholarly discussion for well over a hundred years. The traditional position is that this language was essentially identical to that of the pre-Islamic poetry. The mismatch between the language of the reading traditions and the orthography has normally been explained as the result of orthographic conventions such as ‘pausal spelling’. A minority of scholars have challenged this view, suggesting instead that the Qurˀān was originally delivered in a local dialect and only subsequently brought in line with Classical Arabic. Neither permutation of these two positions has been based on the one part of the Qurˀānic text that can, with certainty, be dated back to the early Islamic period, the Qurˀānic Consonantal Text. This paper examines the nominal case system of Qurˀānic Arabic. Instead of relying on traditions that developed a century or more after the original composition of the Qurˀān, we rely primarily on the QCT itself, paying special attention to implications of internal rhyme schemata, as well as patterns in the orthography. We will show, based
on internal data supported by, but not dependent upon, the orthography that the language behind the QCT possessed a functional but reduced case system, in which cases marked by long vowels were retained, whereas those marked by short vowels were mostly lost. A place where the short case vowel appear to have been retained is in construct. An examination of early Qurˀānic manuscripts suggests that even in this position case distinction was already in the process of breaking down.
This article is an edition of an inscription in a variety of Thamudic that contains several glyp... more This article is an edition of an inscription in a variety of Thamudic that contains several glyph shapes that have not been found together in the same inscription, and are typical of inscriptions from central and southern Arabia. Interesting glyph shapes include the glyph shapes for ', w, and g. A personal name formed on a morphological H-Causative verb, familiar from the South Arabian, as well as Dadanitic inscriptions, is attested in this inscription. The formula found in the inscription is paralleled most closely by those typical of Thamudic C inscriptions. Finally, the article discusses the implications of the combination of these features, typically associated with different scripts and geographic distribution, for the field of ANA epigraphy.
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Books by Phillip W . Stokes
This volume offers the most comprehensive linguistic analysis to date of Vatican Arabic MS 13, a late 9th/early 10th-century Arabic Gospel manuscript. Combining meticulous quantitative study with wide-ranging comparative evidence, this book provides an in-depth examination of the manuscript's orthography, phonology, morphology, morpho-syntax, and syntax. Through extensive charts, tables, and multiple interpretive frameworks, the author illuminates how linguistic features pattern across every dimension relevant to accurate analysis.
Crucially, the study does not treat MS 13 in isolation. Its features are systematically compared with those of other Christian Arabic manuscripts, Quranic traditions, medieval Arabic registers, early poetry, and modern dialects. This contextualised approach situates the manuscript within the rich linguistic diversity of medieval Arabic and challenges long-standing assumptions about 'Middle Arabic' and 'Classical Arabic'. By demonstrating that many features of MS 13 align with broader scribal and linguistic practices of the period, the book makes a compelling case against the notion that scribes worked towards a single, unified register or variety. Rather, they drew creatively and pragmatically from a diverse repertoire of features and linguistic traditions, revealing a far more dynamic and multifaceted approach to written composition than previously recognised.
Papers by Phillip W . Stokes
The study of the Bible in Arabic has become a topic of increasing interest among scholars of the intellectual history of the Islamic world, as well as Christianity in areas under Islamic rule. Nevertheless, most Arabic Bible manuscripts remain largely, or even totally, unstudied. While the textual and theological dimensions of these translations are attracting increasing scholarly attention, their linguistic analysis remains dominated by a traditionalist approach now completely outdated. This paper has two goals, one descriptive and one methodological. First, we aim to fully describe the Arabic Gospel manuscript Sinai Arabic MS 68, traditionally dated to the 14th century CE but which we date to the 16th century CE, perhaps in the aftermath of the fall of the Mamluk empire. Our description focuses on the linguistic nature of the manuscript, but includes discussions of its history and materiality as well. Second, we propose a methodological approach to studying the language of the text that takes seriously non-Classical components and contextualizes these features within what is known from other such non-Classical compositions, including especially Christian manuscripts. We conclude that the manuscript was produced by artisans and a scribe with significant courtly experience, and shows evidence of multiple normative linguistic registers, which argues strongly for the importance of broadening the framework within which scholars interpret such 'Middle Arabic' texts.
on internal data supported by, but not dependent upon, the orthography that the language behind the QCT possessed a functional but reduced case system, in which cases marked by long vowels were retained, whereas those marked by short vowels were mostly lost. A place where the short case vowel appear to have been retained is in construct. An examination of early Qurˀānic manuscripts suggests that even in this position case distinction was already in the process of breaking down.