Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia, Volume 1 Glossary (Handbook of Oriental Studies: Section 1; The Near and Middle East) (English and Arabic Edition) [Annotated] 9004464530, 9789004464537

Citation preview

DIALECT, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY IN EASTERN ARABIA VOLUME I : GLOSSARY

DIALECT, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY IN EASTERN ARABIA BY

CLIVE HOLES

volume one GLOSSARY

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON • KÖLN 2001

This paperback was originally published in hardback as Volume 51 in the series Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1: The Near and Middle East. Cover illustration: https://www.shutterstock.com/nl/image-vector/ calligraphy-arabic-seamless-pattern-blue-yellow-1375961714

Die Deutsche Bibliothek – CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Holes, Clive: Dialect, culture, and society in Eastern Arabia / by Clive Holes. – Leiden ;Boston ; Köln : Brill (Handbook of Oriental studies : Abt. 1, The Near and Middle East ; Bd. 51 Vol. 1. Glossary. -2001 ISBN 978-90-04-46453-7

Librar y of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is also available

ISSN 0169-9423 ISBN 978-90-04-46453-7 (paperback, 2021) ISBN 978-90-04-46456-8 (e-book, 2021) ISBN 978-90-04-10763-2 (hardback) © Copyright 2001 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands This work is published by Koninklijke Brill NV. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

v

CONTENTS General Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii xi

Volume I: Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii The Vocabulary of Eastern Arabia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv Guidance Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xliii Map 1 and Key . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . liv Map 2 and Key . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lv Abbreviations and Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lvii References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lix Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

vi

vii

GENERAL INTRODUCTION The primary objective of Dialect, Culture and Society in Eastern Arabia is to give a detailed description of the pre-oil era Arabic dialects and culture of the island state of Bahrain, as spoken by uneducated Bahrainis aged forty or over in the mid-1970s. The linguistic description contained in Volume I (Glossary) and Volume III (Dialect Description) is based on an extensive archive of taperecorded material, gathered for its ethnographic as well as its purely linguistic interest. Topics covered include local Bahraini history, marriage customs, family life, traditional beliefs and practices, popular culture, children’s games, building techniques, agriculture, fishing, pearling-diving and employment in the pre-oil era more generally. A transcribed, translated and fully annotated representative selection of this material forms Volume II (Ethnographic Texts). The original project out of which the present study grew was a sociolinguistic enquiry into generational language change in Bahrain, the results of which were extensively reported in the 1980s in book- and article-length publications. The present study is devoted exclusively to the language and culture of the leastwell educated half of the original population sample: a linguistic and cultural patrimony which, with the death of many of the generation which I recorded, has, almost overnight, been wiped from the collective memory and literally consigned to the museum as a curiosity. Apart from its intrinsic interest, the preservation of this culture for posterity, not as a wax-work but vividly described by those who actually lived it, is one of the main reasons for publishing this study. Approximately 90% of the textual material on which it is based has not been published before. Evidence, if it were needed, of the rapidity of social change in the Gulf is that the way of life described in my material is now, at the beginning of the 21st century, a favourite subject—albeit with the dialect suitably bowdlerised and modernised to make it intelligible to the younger generation— for television docu-soaps with nostalgic titles like FirGAn L-Awwal (‘The Neighbourhoods of the Old Days’) and il-BEt il-POd (‘The Big (i.e. extendedfamily) House’). Despite all the material progress, somehow there seems to be a feeling in Bahrain that, as one of my illiterate informants aptly and directly put it thirty years ago, zAd il-xEr u qallat il-anAsa—‘we’re better off these days, but life’s not so much fun’. The speaker sample for this study consists of approximately one hundred uneducated native speakers, divided approximately equally by sex and sectarian allegiance into {Arab (= indigenous Bahraini Sunnºs) and Ba¥¸rna (= indigenous Bahraini Shº{a), and drawn from virtually every village and neighbourhood in Bahrain. Interviews lasting between fifteen minutes and an hour were recorded with each speaker. The vast majority of the interviews were conducted by other

viii

general introduction

Bahrainis known to the interlocutors—usually better-educated relatives (often children or grandchildren), friends, or work colleagues, and in many cases the speakers were unaware they were being recorded (though this fact was subsequently revealed to them). All the tape-recordings were transcribed in situ with the help of native speakers, and extensive field-notes made on detailed points of linguistic structure and local practices. The women in the sample were exclusively housewives (often recorded in specially arranged sessions at illiteracy eradication centres by their teachers), and the men either still active or retired fishermen, pearl-divers, stone-cutters, potters, allotment farmers, odd-job men, cleaners, messengers, small shop-keepers and market traders, usually interviewed at their places of work. As I have already mentioned, most of the conversations revolved around the customs, culture and society of the pre-oil Bahrain in which the speakers had grown up, personal experiences, technical descriptions of crafts and activities which were disappearing or had disappeared, and quite a lot of local gossip. Some elderly women spontaneously produced examples of xurAfAt (‘old wives’ stories’) and HazAwi (‘folk tales’), and some of the {Arab men told jokes, riddles, and anecdotes which they claimed had some historical basis and which were often studded with verses of dialect poetry whose connection with the story, on prompting, they explained. In addition, two other types of material were included in the data base: late 1970s recordings provided by Bahrain radio, and selections from two well-known collections of Bahraini dialect poetry. The radio material consists of four fifteen minute radio plays in the {Arab dialect in the series TamTIliyyat il-QUsbUP (‘the Weekly Play’), and two half-hour comedies in the Man¸ma Ba¥¸rna dialect performed by well-known Shº{º comedians J¸sim Khalaf and Õ¸li¥ al-Madanº in the series AHmad ibn AHmad ibn AHmad wa lÝajjI ibn il-ÝajjI ibn il-ÝajjI (‘Ahmad son of Ahmad son of Ahmad, and the Pilgrim son of the Pilgrim son of the Pilgim’), plus two interviews of personal reminiscences, one with the comedian J¸sim Khalaf, and the other with an illiterate Sunnº former stone-cutter and singer on a pearling boat. Both of these interviews were in the series PAlA Þarºq al-Fann (‘In the Way of Art’), dedicated to local forms of popular culture. The plays and comedies, though fully- or (in the case of Khalaf and Madanº) semi-scripted, provided excellent examples of certain types of data—particularly arguments between family members and friends, albeit fictitious ones—which occurred relatively rarely in the main data bank, and which it would have been difficult to obtain by any other means. The same was true of the interviews. In my judgement, these plays and interviews tapped into the same levels of ‘core’ dialect found in the natural conversational material. The poetry also consisted of material drawn from both sides of the Bahrain sectarian divide: some dozen short comical and satirical poems composed in the 1960s by the Sunnº Bahraini dialect poet {Abdurra¥m¸n Rafº{, originally published in written form under the title QaRAQid ShaPbiyya (‘Popular Odes’), and subsequently recorded by him on tape, with some additional material, as ilPArab MA Khallaw Shay (‘There’s Nothing the Arabs Haven’t Done’), and half-

general introduction

ix

a-dozen long poems of the munAFara (‘debate’) genre by various well-known Ba¥¸rna poets from Bahrain (all now dead) which from part of a Gulf-wide collection of Shº{º verse first published in Bahrain in 1955 and entitled TanfIh il-KhawAVir fI Salwat al-QAVin wi l-MusAfir (‘Mental Diversions to Amuse the Stay-at-Home and the Traveller’). The poetry in these collections is well known to ordinary Bahrainis of the older generation, and is often quoted in ordinary speech. Although, particularly in the case of the Shº{º material, it sometimes uses a ‘poetic’ register of the dialect, I have included examples of it because it undoubtedly forms part of the dialectal patrimony of the generations I was investigating. In the text of the Glossary, I have been careful to mark examples taken from poetry ([poet]) to distinguish them from extempore speech. Although the present work is based on field-work conducted in Bahrain in 1977-78, subsequent periods of residence and field-work in the Gulf, especially in Oman, 1985-7, and frequent short visits to Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Yemen and Iraq over the last twenty-five years have provided me with a regional context for my dialect researches. This will be particularly evident in Volume III, in which, as well as giving a synchronic description, I attempt to relate the Bahraini dialects historically and geographically to those of central and southern Arabia and Iraq. I hope that Dialect, Culture and Society in Eastern Arabia will be of interest in the first place to fellow synchronic Arabic dialectologists and social historians of the 20th century Gulf. But I hope it will also be of interest to a wider audience. The more I have studied the speech patterns and vocabulary of illiterate speakers from Arabia, the more convinced I have become that their speech, relatively unaffected by the prescriptive grammar and standardised vocabulary of modern literary Arabic, provides a direct link with the ancient Arabic dialects, as recorded by the mediaeval philologists and lexicographers. Furthermore—and this is perhaps the most fascinating direction for future research—a study of the vocabulary of the material culture, and of certain popular beliefs and customs common in the area, points to the survival of ancient substrate links with the pre-Islamic cultures of eastern Arabia, Mesopotamia and even further afield (now, of course, Islamicised, or given a popular Islamic patina). Given the historical record, and the archaeological remains which continue to be uncovered, this should really come as no surprise, and suggests that dialectological ‘digging’ can provide evidence for the continuity of cultural practices which is complementary to that of archaeology and the written record.

x

xi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A long-running project like the one on which this study is based has acquired many friends and acquaintances along the way, and this is an opportunity to say a general ‘thank you’ to all who have helped me in one way or another in executing it. First and foremost, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the literally hundreds of ordinary Bahrainis who co-operated with me in carrying out my field work, whether as subjects or interviewers by proxy. On farms, in shops, in literacy centres, at road-sides and in their own homes, they spoke at length, often humorously, and sometimes with startling frankness about their lives, communities and memories. Field-work in Bahrain was not just an education, it was fun too. In particular, I should like to offer my thanks to two individuals without whom I should never have got access to much of my best data, or understood it properly once I had: {Alº Ibr¸hºm H¸r¢n of Banº Jamra village, then one of the agricultural advisers to village farmers at the Agricultural Experimental Research Station, Budayya{, and {µs¸ al-{Ar¸dº of {Ar¸d village, then an employee of the Ministry of Information. {Alº grasped the point of my research immediately. Innumerable visits on which I accompanied him to allotment farmers all over Bahrain to deliver radish seed, bags of sand, tomato seedlings, or agricultural advice were skilfully transformed by him, once business was done, into relaxed occasions for coffee, dates and sawAlif during which I could take advantage of the warmth of his relations with the farmers who were also his co-religionists, and let the tape-recorder run, usually to the accompaniment of a braying donkey and a diesel-powered irrigation pump puttering away in the background (a cacophony which encapsulated the technological revolution which farming was going through at that time). Apart from the dialectological and sociolinguistic value of such natural and purposeful conversation, these visits were a real education for me in the pragmatics of social interaction and the dynamics of village life. {Alº was also a tireless helper in the ceaseless grind of transforming the tape-recorded words of old men with no teeth and no education (who even he on occasion had difficulty in understanding) into the clean, carefully annotated transcriptions on which much of this study is based. Equal in importance in the successful execution of my work was {µs¸ al-{Ar¸dº, who not only introduced me to his elderly relatives in the dialectologically fascinating village of {Ar¸d, but was no less of a help than {Alº in transcribing recordings of speakers, especially the illiterate women, from both sides of the sectarian divide. This was a Herculean task on which we laboured together for hundreds of hours. {µs¸, who is himself a graduate in, and lifetime student of the Arabic language, has an immense curiosity about the dialects of eastern Arabia and their history, and provided me with a great deal of detail and insight on aspects of the morphology of the Bahraini dialects which

xii

acknowledgements

were inevitably only partially revealed by the linguistically unstructured nature of a tape-recorded corpus. To both these two friends and teachers, who taught me most of what I know about Bahrain and its dialects, all I can say in thanks and humility is mA gaRRartu yA SabAb! allAh yaPVI-kum il-PAfya u yiVawwil Pumurkum inSAllah! I am also most grateful to the then Director of the Bahrain Illiteracy Eradication Programme (whose name unfortunately now escapes me) for allowing me access to the female adult learners in his charge at more than a dozen centres; to the many Bahraini teachers who conducted interviews in them on my behalf; and to the Heads of the then Bahrain Men’s and Women’s Teacher Training Colleges for allowing me to train their students in how to conduct sociolinguistic interviews with their elderly relatives. Other friends in Bahrain who provided a helping hand were Ýasan al-Mehrº, at that time Director General of Education, and his ministerial colleague Sa{ºd Þabb¸ra; Graham Ness, then British Council Representative and his wife Jenny; and Ýusayn |ayf and the late Aubrey Jum{a both then teachers at the British Council. Thanks also to the late J¸sim Sharºda of Bahrain Radio who gave me copies of radio plays and other broadcast materials, and to the present Director of Bahrain Television, Kh¸lid al-Dhaw¸dº, for generously providing me with copies of recent video docusoaps on ‘the old days’ which, though no material has been included from them in my data bank, provided a useful point of comparison with the broadcast materials of thirty years ago. Above all, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my friend Shawqº al-Zay¸nº for very kindly providing me with a base in Man¸ma in which to live and share his company for the whole period of my field-work. Shawqº was always interested in and supportive of my aims, unfailingly good-humoured, and I only hope the constant stream of visitors did not get on his nerves too much. In Britain, I should like to thank the then Social Science Research Council for granting me a post-Experience Research Fellowship, 1976-9, which gave me the time and funding to carry out the research on which this and many other previous studies are based, and the British Academy for subsequent small research grants. The Linguistics Department of the University of Cambridge provided a highly stimulating environment in which to do research, as has, much later, my present academic home at the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford and Magdalen College, where most of this study has been written. Last but not least, I should like to acknowledge here an intellectual debt to the late Professor Tom Johnstone of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, who in some sense was the godfather to this whole project. Tom was always happy to sacrifice his time and share his thoughts with one who was, when all’s said and done, was not a student of his nor even a member of his university. It is to Tom, the pioneer of Arabian Gulf dialectology, and still, seventeen years after his death, its leading figure, that I dedicate this work.

acknowledgements

VOLUME I: GLOSSARY

xiii

xiv

xv

THE VOCABULARY OF EASTERN ARABIA Introduction Two geographical features are shared by all the Gulf States: desert hinterlands stretching away into central Arabia, from which they are separated by no natural border, and long, shallow-shelved coastlines which afford easy marine access. It would be hard to underestimate the formative significance of these two factors on the culture and language of the Gulf littoral. For millennia, the absence of natural barriers has facilitated easy movement into and out of eastern Arabia, and the cultural, linguistic and political history of the city-states of the Gulf littoral is the synergistic result of population and trade movements along these two vectors. On the one hand, the land vector has for centuries (most recently in the 18th) carried new infusions of tribal blood from the centre of Arabia to the periphery, providing the bedrock of Gulf Arabic vocabulary, which gradually evolved to reflect the different material conditions and life-style of the sedentary life of the coast. On the other hand, the sea has brought a succession of shortlived and long-term foreign cultural and linguistic influences, beginning with the Sumerians five millennia ago, and continuing virtually unbroken with the Babylonians, Persians, Indians, Portuguese, up to the arrival of the British in the 19th century. A glance at the list of languages which have contributed to the present-day vocabulary of the Bahrain dialects (see ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS) illustrates both the impressive time-depth and geographical diversity of these influences. Even if it were feasible, it would be beyond the scope of this introductory essay (and the abilities of the present writer) to attempt an exact periodisation of the development of Arabic dialects of Bahrain, let alone the region as a whole. However, by comparing the Gulf dialects with those of neighbouring regions which have had a different history, it is possible to get some idea of their special characteristics, and the varied nature of the cultural contacts which their speakers have had with speakers of other languages. This is what I will attempt to do in the present essay for the vocabulary of the area. Volume I of Dialect, Culture and Society in Eastern Arabia is a glossary of the vocabulary which was being used in the 1970s by elderly Bahrainis with little or no education (i.e. the generation born and brought up just before or at the time of the discovery of oil in the mid 1930s), and this preliminary essay provides some background notes on the structure and history of this dialectal vocabulary. However, a good deal of what I have to say is also applicable to the dialects of Kuwait, the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Of course, each of these regions has its particular speech quirks and differences, and Oman in particular is a special case because the dialects of the mountainous core of the country are different enough to justify it

xvi

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

being put in a separate sub-group, reflecting its separate cultural and political history (although, as I note below, it has some historical links with the Ba¥¸rna dialects of Bahrain). But it is undeniable that the Gulf states as defined here are much more united than they are divided by their dialects. Until very recently, the whole of eastern Arabia from southern Iraq to the mountains of Oman—a distance of perhaps seven hundred miles—was a place where people moved around, settled and married unconcerned by national borders. The population shared a culture based on the sea and the exploitation of what few natural resources the land provided. For ten centuries until the dawn of the modern age, the whole of the coastal strip from Basra to the Qatar peninsula, as well as the present-day eponymous islands, was simply known to the Arabs as ‘al-Ba¥rayn’; further south was simply ‘{Um¸n’. But cultural homogeneity existed here long before the Arabs became the dominant political force. The archaeologist Dan Potts, describing the situation in the three centuries before Islam, comments ‘as an integrating force, it was Nestorian Christianity that eventually brought the inhabitants of eastern Arabia, Mesopotamia, and south-western Iran into what were arguably the closest relations they had ever experienced. Administered by the catholicos in Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, the Christian populations of Beth Qa«r¸ye [= north eastern Arabia in the Syriac ecclesiastical sources] and Beth Maz¢n¸ye [= south eastern Arabia and Oman] were large, perhaps even dominant in this region until the Islamic conquest…To the extent that it exerted a unifying influence on the region’s population, Nestorian Christianity may have unwittingly helped to lay the groundwork for the conversion of the area to Islam, which, although beset by a certain amount of divisive sectarianism, has unquestionably helped to maintain the unity of the area.’1 The Arabic dialects of the Gulf: shared ‘core’ vocabulary The explosion in education, communications, and literacy in all of the Gulf States over the last thirty years, as well as their coming together to form new co-operative educational, economic, and political entities, with all the interstate contacts these developments entail, has had the effect of accelerating a tendency towards the formation of a Gulf-wide educated spoken koiné2 which is used on those increasingly frequent occasions when speakers from different Gulf states have to talk to each other—often at work, or in other public situations where they have to transact business. Typologically, this Gulf koiné resembles those spoken in other parts of the Arab world in its use of a (compared to CLA/ MSA) simpler, more analytical syntax, and reduced set of morphological categories, 1 Potts D. T. The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. Vol II: From Alexander the Great to the Coming of Islam, Oxford, 1990, pp. 353-4. 2 This educated koiné is what is described in my Colloquial Arabic of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia (1984), and Gulf Arabic (1990).

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

xvii

whilst retaining certain salient local characteristics in its phonology and lexicon. Typically, for example, g is retained as the reflex of historical q in items which are not neologisms associated with MSA, as are the interdental fricatives T, D, F, being the commonest dialectal reflexes of historical T, D, and B/F—a phenomenon which can give someone familiar with dialects from outside the Gulf which have replaced the fricatives with stops a superficial impression of ‘classicism’. Other Gulf-wide phonological features, however, such as y as a reflex of G, C as a reflex of k, and G as a reflex of q (via the affrication of g) seem to be avoided in more formal contexts, though they are still commonly heard in relaxed educated speech, especially where the context is purely domestic. As one might expect, the koiné contains many MSA neologisms in its vocabulary and phraseology, but nonetheless retains many local ‘core’ items covering basic concepts. The generations which grew up in the Gulf of the 1930s and 40s and before had less contact with each other than do the generations of today, but several factors conspired to knit together the Gulf of that period socially and linguistically. At the lower social levels, there were common patterns of employment, and, in the era before the introduction of passports, free movement of labour among practitioners of cottage industries such as weaving, pottery, palmcultivation, cash-crop agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing and pearl-diving. In the 19th and 20th centuries, for example, colonies of Ba¥¸rna boat-builders migrated from Bahrain north to Kuwait and south to the Trucial Coast, where their descendants still live to this day. The sea-faring culture based on boat-building and pearl-fishing developed its own specialised vocabularies which became common throughout the area.3 In the sphere of agriculture, itinerant Omani labourers worked in all the Gulf states for many decades before the political changes which brought the present Sultan to power in 1970 encouraged them to return home4. Marriage also brought about a lot of geographical mixing. Until recently, among the village Ba¥¸rna of Bahrain, the taking in marriage of Ba¥¸rna women from the towns of the eastern province of Saudi Arabia such as al-Qa«ºf and Huf¢f was not uncommon, nor from the towns of southern Iraq such as Najaf and Karbal¸}, for centuries regional Shº{º religious and cultural centres, nor from the predominantly Arabic-speaking city of Khorramshahr (known in Arabic as al-Mu¥ammara) in the south-western Iranian province of Kh¢zist¸n. At more elevated social levels, tribal history and family ties also underpinned the 3 See for example Johnstone T.M. and Muir J. ‘Some nautical terms in the Kuwaiti dialect of Arabic’, BSOAS XXVII (1964), pp. 299-330 and Grosset-Grange H. Glossaire Nautique, Paris, 1993. As well as having a specialised technical terminology, these artisans also had a shared secret jargon known only to themselves which was the same in Kuwait as in Bahrain—see al-Zay§ni R. Al-GhawR wa l-ÞawASa (‘Pearling and the Pearl-Trading’), Bahrain, 1998, pp. 34-5. 4 Omanis are still the most mobile work-force in the Gulf region. In the mid-1980s when I was doing field work in the interior of Oman, a large proportion of the male labour force of the interior villages spent the working week in the United Arab Emirates, many of them employed in the UAE armed forces.

xviii

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

regional social fabric. The ruling families of Kuwait and Bahrain share the same Najdi ancestry, and there are many more humble extended Sunnº Bahraini families which, as it were, cross the narrow straits which separate Bahrain from the mainland. It is in no way odd that the present Saudi ambassador to the UK, Gh¸zº al-Quªaybº, was actually born a Bahraini national. Nationality as we think of it in the west is a relatively recent concept in the Gulf, and at the time this research was done, many Gulf Arabs still often thought of their prime affiliations in terms of the tribal, family or sectarian ties rather than in terms of the type of passport they held. There is no clearer evidence of this than the Gulf categories of {Arab, Ba¥¸rna, Ýwala and {Ajam none of which designate any national group, but refer rather to ethnic origin and genealogy. Thus in Bahrain, the term Ba¥r¸nº (pl Ba¥¸rna), which denotes an Arabic-speaking Ja{farº Shº{º of local village descent, is categorically different from the etymologically related Ba¥r¹nº (pl Ba¥r¹niyyºn) which merely refers to anyone, of whatever sect, origin, or first language, who carries a Bahraini passport. Despite the often sharp fault lines which cross-cut Gulf society, and social cleavages within individual nation states, there is unquestionably a ‘bundle’ of dialectal features which characterise Gulf Arabic, although, as already noted, educated speakers now often replace them with equivalents which are less local in flavour. Many of these features also occur in neighbouring areas of Iraq, Najd, Yemen, and Oman, as well as further afield, but it is their unique cooccurrence as a group in all parts of the Gulf which justifies the label ‘Gulf Arabic’. The general impression which the Arabic linguist is left with after examining thousands of words and expressions routinely used by the least educated Gulf speakers is of how archaic their usage is—how closely it resembles the large amount of mediaeval and indeed pre-mediaeval vocabulary recorded in the Classical dictionaries (the LisAn al-PArab, the TAj al-PArUs, Lane, Hava) which did not pass into the vocabulary of modern literary Arabic. The lay belief that the Arabic dialects are the consequence of the foreign ‘corruption’ of the Classical language is shown by such an exercise to be false, at least from the lexical point of view. Foreign words do of course exist in profusion in Gulf Arabic as they do in all Arabic dialects (and for that matter in virtually all known languages at all periods of their history), but the bedrock of everyday, ‘domestic’ Gulf vocabulary, especially of speakers least affected by the modern literary language or the dialectal koiné, reaches back (pace minor phonological and morphological differences) to the oldest strata of the language. A few examples will make the point. The verb bAg, used throughout the Gulf to mean ‘rob, steal’ is simply the Classical bAqa ‘cheat, swindle’ (Lane) with a slight shift in phonology and meaning; the Ba¥¸rna term haGGal ‘to throw out, expel’ has the CLA cognate haGala ‘to throw’ (Hava); sammar means ‘to mix a solid with water’, cf CLA sammara ‘to dilute milk with water’ (Hava); Bahraini JAfaR ‘to play dirty tricks, play practical jokes’ has the exact CLA equivalent JAfaRa, which Lane translates as ‘he took someone unawares, did an evil action to him’;

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

xix

SamVUV (pl SamAVIV) which in Kuwait is a ‘small piece of cloth cut as a sample’ and in Bahrain ‘baby’s swaddling clothes’ means in CLA ‘torn clothes’ (Hava); in the northern Gulf, the Form II Rayyaf has a range of meanings to do with ‘do s’thing late, come or stay late’, cognate with CLA Form IV QaRAfa ‘to beget a child in old age’; Jabga used throughout the Gulf to denote ‘a light meal eaten at midnight during Ramadan’ is a development of CLA Jabaqa ‘to give s’one the evening draught’ (Hava); id-dinya xirmis is an expression used in the {Arab dialect of Bahrain to describe ‘a pitch-black, moonless night’ identical to layl xirmis ‘dark night’ in the LisAn; fada ‘place where dates are laid out to dry’ in the village Ba¥¸rna dialects is also noted by Ibn Man¬¢r in the LisAn in the form fadAQ with exactly the same meaning, with an appended note that ‘this word is typical of the speech of {Abd al-Qais’—the tribal ancestors of today’s Ba¥¸rna5 (see below). One of the most interesting examples is slEma in the sense of ‘illness, misfortune, ill wind’ in imprecations such as slEma Cabbat-ha! ‘may an ill wind blow her over!’, current in southern Iraq, Kuwait and among the village Ba¥¸rna of Bahrain: slEma is cognate with CLA sulAmA ‘south wind’ (Hava), south winds in eastern Arabia being considered unhealthy as they bring an increase in heat, humidity, and dust (and make navigation in the Gulf difficult). Many Gulf idioms can also be traced back directly to Classical origins with little change in meaning. For example, during the course of my research, a farmer described the employment of an acquaintance in domestic service as yixdim Pala Pakmat baVn-vh ‘he works for his keep’ (lit ‘for the corner of his belly’), a phrase with impeccable Classical credentials: Pakama is ‘to fill up, block up’ and Pakamat al-baVn ‘the corner of the belly’ an expression used when referring to animals eating their fill (see Lane, Hava). Many more examples of this kind of archaism could be given. It is, of course, not just a matter of archaic vocabulary: the vestigial survival of tanwIn in the noun, verbs in which the mabnI li l-maGhUl is still productive, gender distinctions in the plural forms (including the imperative) of the verb, ossified forms of laysa and kAda, and the survival of particles like qad—these and other syntactic features also give the dialects of eastern, central and southern Arabia their distinctively ‘Classical’ tang. The particular combinations of these survivals differ from one area to another, but, taken as a whole, the dialects of Arabia do seem to represent the survival of a relatively archaic form of Arabic. Any two dialects of Arabic will have many words in common, and many of the highest-frequency dialectal words in the Gulf are of course shared with dialects from outside the area: the isoglosses for rAH ‘go’, Ga ‘come, GAb ‘bring’ miSa ‘walk, go’, for example, would cover the entire eastern Mediterranean area as well as Iraq and central and eastern Arabia, and have roughly the same 5

See Al-Tajir M. Language and Linguistic Origins in al-Bahrain, London, 1983, p.7-8. Such general items do, however, obviously form multi-word idioms which can be area-specific, e.g. in the Gulf dialects from the verbs quoted: rAH bOS ‘it came to nothing’, Pumr-vk iGi Cam sana? 6

xx

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

meaning everywhere6. Such pan-dialectal items are ignored for the purposes of the following discussion, in which we will concentrate on what is typical of the Gulf, at various levels of geographical specificity. At the most geographically all-encompassing, but specifically ‘Gulf’ level, there is a large shared stock of common, non-specialised verbs and nouns found in all dialects. These may be etymologically Arabic, as in the cases described in the previous paragraph, but are either not the usual, default terms for the actions or objects they denote in their MSA cognates and in dialects outside the Gulf (where they may also exist, but have different meanings), or they may not be known outside the Gulf area at all. Many other items in this category of common-core words were borrowed from languages with which Gulf speakers have had close contact at some point in their history. Most are these foreign imports are nouns, but include several high frequency function words. The degree to which some of these items have been phonologically and morphologically assimilated to dialectal patterns (broken plural patterns, verbal nouns) suggests that they may be of considerable antiquity. Some typical examples are7: Arabic verbs: istAnas ‘feel happy, content’; baVV ‘burst open’; baJa ‘want, need’; bAg ‘steal’; taras ‘fill’; Tibar ‘go out (tide)’; tall ‘pull’; tamm ‘stay, remain’; Gawwad ‘hold, grasp, get hold of’; Hadag ‘fish (with a line)’; tHaCCa/ tHakka ‘talk, speak’; istaHmag ‘get angry’; HAS/ HawwaS ‘get, obtain’; txarbaV ‘get confused’; daSS ‘enter’; dazz ‘push’; rigad ‘sleep, lie down’; rigal ‘wobble’; rAmaH ‘kick and struggle’; zafan ‘dance’; zAP ‘vomit’; siga ‘come in (tide)’; sOlaf ‘chat, converse’; samat ‘tighten, fasten’; sawwa ‘make, do’; Sallax ‘tell fibs, lies’; SilaP ‘pluck out, pull out’; Vabb ‘enter, alight on’; Vamm ‘cover’; Varr ‘beg’; VarraS ‘send, send for’; VAH ‘fall’; Pabbar ‘know how to, be able’; Payya ‘refuse, act harshly’; tJarbal ‘get mixed up’; istaJAF ‘get angry’; faRax ‘undress, take off (clothes)’; fakk/ faCC ‘open, undo’; giHaR ‘jump’; gaVV ‘throw’; kadd ‘work, earn’; lAP ‘feel nauseous’; naSS ‘fly up, rise up’; niSad ‘ask’; hadd ‘quit, abandon’; haGG/ hayy ‘go, leave’; hAwaS ‘argue with, quarrel with’; walla ‘go away, clear off’. nouns and adjectives: barAHa ‘open space between houses (in a village)’; dabaS ‘cattle’; GiHH/yiHH ‘watermelon’; GaHla ‘water pot’; GAhil ‘child’; Hibb ‘water pot’; Hurma ‘woman’; HaCi ‘speech, matter’; raGGAl/ rayyAl ‘man’; rayUg ‘breakfast’; sAlfa ‘matter, affair, business’; Baw ‘fire’; PES ‘rice’; Jubba ‘deep sea’; JarSa ‘clay pitch‘roughly how old are you? GAb gOl ‘he scored a goal’ amSi Pal-allah ‘I’m making ends meet as best I can’. 7 Many of the examples in the etymologically Arabic list can also found in the Najdi vocabulary lists in Ingham B. Najdi Arabic, Amsterdam, 1994, pp.174-186, and Sowayan S. The Arabian Oral Historical Narrative, Wiesbaden, 1992, pp. 244-304.

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

xxi

er, bottle’; gudUP ‘morning snack’; gEF ‘summer’; gAyla ‘early afternoon’; mAya ‘tide, current’; hAbb rIH ‘dextrous, expert’; harfi ‘tender, young (meat)’. particles and other functional items: bass ‘but, only, enough’; CiDi ‘like this’; Hagg ‘for, to, towards’; SlOn ‘how, why?’; ROb, ‘towards’; (mA) miS ‘there is(n’t)/ are(n’t); mAl ‘belonging to (in periphrastic genitive constructions)’; wAGid/ wAyid ‘a lot, very, much’. Other languages verbs: bannad (Pers) ‘close’; baVVal (origin unknown) ‘open’; tayyat (Eng) ‘tighten’; Cayyak (vn taCyIk) (Eng) ‘check’; fannaS (vn tafnIS pl tafnISAt) (Eng) ‘quit, fire (from a job)’; gazzar (ult from Pers gozaStan ‘to pass’) ‘spend time, survive, get through’; layyak (Eng) ‘leak’; tbandar (Pers) ‘put into port (ship)’; tgaSSat (Pers)‘go on a picnic, trip’; tgaSmar (Pers) ‘joke, play a trick’. nouns and adjectives: Alu (Urdu) ‘potato’; bAdgIr / bAkdIr (pl bawAdgIr) (Pers) ‘wind-tower (in a traditional house)’; bIb (pl byAba) (Port) ‘cask, drum’; Cilla (Pers) ‘most extreme weather in a season’; GAm (Pers) ‘glass’; GUti (pl GawAti) (Urdu) ‘shoes’; HafIz (Eng) ‘office’; xASUga (pl xawASIg) (Pers) ‘spoon’; xOS (Pers) ‘nice, good’; dirISa (pl darAyiS) (Pers) ‘window’; dirwAza (pl darAwºz) (Pers) ‘door’; danCal/ Candal (pl danACil/ CanAdil) (Urdu) ‘roof-beam’; drEwil (pl drEwiliyya) (Eng) ‘driver’; rubyAn (Pers) ‘prawns’; rOzana/ rOSana (pl rawAzin, rawASin) (Pers) ‘alcove, window recess’; rwEd (Pers) ‘radishes’; sAmAn (Pers)‘things, gear’; sbEtar (Eng) ‘hospital’; RAlUna (pl RawAlIn) (Urdu) ‘curry’; kUb (pl akwAb) (Eng) ‘cup’; kOt (pl akwAt) (Eng) ‘coat’; mEz (pl amyAz) (Port, poss via Pers) ‘table’; mOtir (pl mawAtir) (Eng) ‘car’; mEwa (Pers) ‘fruit’. particles and other functional items: xOb (Pers) ‘well, so, then’; sIda (Pers, Urdu) ‘straight ahead, immediately’; mUl and mUliyya (Pers) ‘never, at all’; hast (from Pers verb ‘is’) (N. Gulf hassit) ‘there is, are (S. Gulf ‘very’)’; ham (Pers) ‘also’. Outside this ‘common core’, there are some vocabulary items whose use is more common in one region or other of the Gulf littoral, or even limited to one community within a region (as we shall see below in relation to Bahrain). The following are typical of the dialects of southern Gulf coast from Abu Dhabi to Ras al-Khaima, extending into Buraimi and parts of the northern B¸«ina coast of Oman. They are recognised by Gulf Arabs as ‘southern’ features not normally used in the northern Gulf, and one has the impression that, among the younger generation, they are now being superseded by equivalents with a wider regional currency (here put in brackets after each item): rimas (tHaCCa, tkallam) ‘speak’; HAd (Paraf) ‘know’; xAz (waxxar)‘move (out of the way)’; sAr (rAH) ‘go’; Sall (SAl) ‘take away, remove’; iStall (rAH) ‘set off,

xxii

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

go’; iStaha (baJa) ‘want, desire’; tRawwax, iRVAx (istamaP, tsammaP) ‘listen to’; siHH (tamar) ‘dry date’; Sirwa (miTil, miTlAt)‘like, similar’; Vuwi (GidHa, GalIb) ‘well’; kandUra (diSdASa (Kuwaiti), TOb (Bahraini, Qatari)) ‘man’s long shirt’. In the same way, there are items which are restricted to the northern end of the Gulf (if we take the Qatar peninsula as the centre point)—Bahrain, Qatar, alHasa, Kuwait and northern Najd8, e.g. Hazza ‘time, period’; dann ‘impose a fine, punishment’; marGila/ maryila ‘manly deed, heroic act’; zaPam ‘supposedly, so-called’; samt (pl smUt) ‘virtue, chivalrous deed’; SigaH ‘jump, leap over’; Rayyaf ‘come late, be delayed’; Vagg ‘hit’; mJandim/ mJaldim ‘frowning, fretting’; fazz ‘jump up, start’; amda-/ mada- ‘have time to do s’thing’; nOda ‘sleepiness, nap’; haga (vn higwa, hagwa) ‘think, suppose’. Notes on the social and political history of Bahrain Before turning to the special developments which characterise the vocabulary stock of Bahraini Arabic, it is worth sketching briefly the political and social history of the indigenous Arabic-speaking communities which make up the bulk of the population, the (numerically larger) Ba¥¸rna and the {Arab, since this helps explain both the similarities and differences between their dialects. At the time of my field research in Bahrain, the primary dialectal distinction, which permeated all levels of language—phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon—and which still remains salient (if among the present younger generation less so) thirty years later, is that between the {Arab and the Ba¥¸rna as social groups. Although Bahrainis themselves sometimes label this a speech difference ‘between the ‘Sunna and Shº{a’ (there can by definition, in Bahraini parlance, be no Shº{º {Arab nor any Sunnº Ba¥¸rna), the difference has nothing intrinsically to do with sect. As in other cases of communal dialectal difference in the Arabicspeaking world, such as the so-called ‘Muslim’, ‘Christian’ and (until 1948) ‘Jewish’ dialects of Baghdad9, the historical origin of the difference in Bahrain is geographical, a consequence of population movements, whereas its subsequent survival is to do with the maintenance of social distance between the communities in question. Undoubtedly differences in religious belief played a (perhaps the) major role in maintaining this social distinction in Bahrain because of the virtual ban on inter-sect marriage, but so, until the advent of the foreign-run oil-industry in the 1930s, did differences in patterns of employment, and, until the 1970s and 80s and the efflorescence of new ‘mixed’ towns, differences in place of residence. It wasn’t simply that the {Arab and Ba¥¸rna prayed in different mosques, 8 Of the 400 items listed as ‘typically Najdi’ in Ingham’s list (n. 7), I noted 139 as occurring with the same or a similar meaning in one or other of the Bahraini dialects. 9 Blanc H. Communal Dialects in Baghdad, Cambridge, Mass., 1964, pp. 8-10, 168-171.

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

xxiii

but that they lived in different neighbourhoods (see maps), didn’t mix with each other, and did different jobs. The consequence was that for centuries their social and speech networks were mutually exclusive. The extent to which the two communities tended to act en bloc was vividly illustrated by the results of Bahrain’s one and only general election (in 1972). Because, at that time, there was such a close correlation between place of residence and sectarian affiliation, and because it was obvious, from name if nothing else, which candidates were from which sect, it was possible to see from the voting returns that voters in Ba¥¸rna districts voted en masse for the slate of Ba¥¸rna candidates, and ignored the non- Ba¥¸rna10. In recent years, concerted government efforts have gradually broken down the voluntary social segregation which characterised the demography of Bahrain until the 1970s, as have, in a more accidental fashion, the nondiscriminatory employment policies of the many international companies which now operate in Bahrain. To judge from informal observations in the late 1990s, the linguistic consequences of this have been a levelling out, at least in public contexts, of dialect differences among the younger generation compared with the generations of their parents and grand-parents, in the direction of a hybrid dialect which draws heavily in its phonology on the dialect of the socially and economically dominant {Arab. The Ba¥¸rna In modern eastern Arabian parlance—from Kuwait, through the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, to Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates—the term Ba¥¸rna (sing. Ba¥r¸nº), as already noted above, denotes that part of the indigenous, Arabic-speaking population which is exclusively Ja{farº Shº{º in religious belief. Local Ba¥¸rna oral tradition traces their ancient origin to the {Abd alQais, an Arab tribe who were originally from the Tih¸ma coastal strip, but who had migrated to historical al-Ba¥rayn—the area covered by present-day Kuwait, al-Ýasa and the eponymous Bahrain islands—by no later than the middle of the 2nd century AD. At the time of the Islamic conquest, the majority of them were Christian, possibly through contact with the Christians of al-Hºra, but there may have been among them some Zoroastrians11. Ptolemy, writing in 150 AD, mentions the ‘Abucaei’ (= {Abd al-Qais) as one of several Arab tribes living in eastern Arabia at that time. In addition to the {Abd al-Qais, the Greek sources and the early Arab historians also mention Tan¢kh, Bakr b. W¸}il, sections of their brother tribe Taghlib b. W¸}il, Tamºm and Azd {Um¸n, as other Arab tribal elements present in the population of the area in the centuries immediately before Islam12. Like {Abd al-Qais, these tribes had all migrated from south western and 10

154.

11 12

Nakhleh E. Bahrain: Political Development in a Modernising Society, Lexington, 1976, p. Potts op.cit. Vol II, p. 242. Potts op.cit. Vol II, p. 227.

xxiv

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

central Arabia, or in the case of Taghlib b. W¸}il, been exiled there by the Sasanian ruler Sh¸p¢r II, and eventually continued their migration north into Iraq and the Fertile Crescent. Some present-day Ba¥¸rna villagers claim a different, but still south-west Arabian origin: those in the north western corner of the main island, especially the village of Banº Jamra, claim southern Yemeni ancestry, and there was indeed a pre-Islamic Yemeni tribe known as al-Jam¸r¸t13, a term similar to the one—al-Jam¸ra—still used to refer to the present-day inhabitants of the village. In addition to these ethnically Arab elements in the eastern Arabian population of the early years AD, and most interestingly from the point of view of Bahraini language history, there may well have been substantial Aramaic and Persianspeaking communities, if we are to judge from the historical and ecclesiastical records (epigraphic evidence is meagre). In describing the pre-Islamic northward migrations of Tan¢kh through Najd and into north eastern Arabia, the early Arab historians—Ab¢ l-Faraj, al-Bakrº, and Ibn Khald¢n—mention that they encountered ‘Nabataeans’, a description which in this context had the general, pejorative meaning of settled, Aramaic-speaking agriculturalists; al-Jawharº’s attribution to a certain Ay¢b b. Kiribba of a statement that north-eastern Arabia before Islam was peopled by ‘Nabataeans who have become Arabs’14 lends support to this account. The origin of these Aramaic-speakers is probably to be sought in neighbouring Mesene (i.e. southern Iraq), then an Aramaic-speaking area. Politically, eastern Arabia was under Persian suzerainty for perhaps four centuries before the Islamic conquest, the religious affairs of its Christian population being in the care of local bishops subordinate to the metropolitan of Fars. Abundant Syriac records attest to the Christianity of the local population15, and a variety of early Arab sources comment on the noticeable admixture of Persian vocabulary in the dialects of eastern Arabia at the time of the coming of Islam16. Thus the elements in the pre-Islamic ethno-linguistic situation in eastern Arabia appear to have been a mixed tribal population of partially Christianised Arabs of diverse origins who probably spoke different old Arabian vernaculars; a mobile Persian-speaking population, possibly of traders and administrators, with strong links to Persia, with which they maintained close contact; a sedentary, nontribal community of Aramaic-speaking agriculturalists; and a Persian clergy who, 13

KaÈȧla U. MuPjam QabAQil al-PArab, Damascus, 1949, Vol I p. 203. Potts op.cit. Vol II, pp. 223-4. In the LisAn al-PArab the same quotation (sub nabIV) is attributed to #Ayyåb b. al-Qiriyya. 15 In a letter from the patriarch IsoPyahb I to the bishop of DayrÊn (on the coast of Arabia opposite Bahrain) concerning several questions about liturgy, sacraments, moral problems, etc., written between 581 and 585, there is a reference to the difficulty pearl-divers had in ‘observing the day of rest’. This suggests how far down the social scale Christianity had penetrated, pearldiving then, as in this century, being the employment of the lowest social classes. (Beaucamp J. & Robin C. ‘L’évêché nestorien de Masmahig dans l’Archipel d’al-Bahrayn’ in Potts D (ed) Dilmun: New Studies in the Archaeology and Early History of Bahrain, Berlin, 1983, pp 171-196.) 16 Potts op.cit. Vol II, p.228. 14

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

xxv

we know for certain, used Syriac as a language of liturgy and writing more generally, probably alongside Persian as a spoken language. These, then, would seem to be the elements out of which the population of eastern Arabia began to be forged in the mid-7th century when Islam arrived. Since then, Bahrain and eastern Arabia have been ruled by many dynasties, both local and foreign, but even if one takes with a large pinch of salt the traditional Ba¥¸rna claim to be literally the ‘original’ inhabitants of the Bahrain islands, the continuous existence of a quiescent, peaceable community of non-tribalised agriculturalists, throughout the vicissitudes of the intervening thirteen centuries, on exactly the lands in eastern Arabia and the Bahrain islands where a community of ‘Nabataeans farmers’ lived before Islam is certainly suggestive. I alluded above to an instance of the 13th century LisAn al-PArab attributing the agricultural term fadAQ ‘place for drying dates’, still in use today, to the eastern Arabian {Abd al-Qais, said by the present-day Ba¥¸rna to be one of their tribal ancestors. Another such interesting attribution to the dialect of {Abd al-Qais in the LisAn is the peculiar word saxxIn (pl saxAxIn), which Ibn Man¬¢r glosses as misHA munPaVifa ‘bent spade’, a description which matches precisely the RaxxIn (pl RaxAxIn) (with R rather than s) used by present-day Ba¥¸rna farmers, with its blade at 90º to the shaft. This non-Arabic word seems to be a local metathesis of the (ultimately) Akkadian word xaRRinnu ‘axe, field-digging tool’, also found in Aramaic, and which is also found in the southern Gulf Arabic dialects in the form xaRIn. If nothing else, these bits of linguistic data tell us that at roughly the mid-point between the coming of Islam and today (1) {Abd al-Qais were still present in eastern Arabia17 (2) some of them, at least, were farmers, and were using Arabic words peculiar to them to denote agricultural implements and activities which survive in almost identical form in the dialects of present-day Ba¥¸rna farmers. As we shall see in more detail below, other farming and material culture terms exist in the Ba¥¸rna dialects which have no plausible Arabic cognates but which turn up in Akkadian and/or Aramaic (as borrowings from Akkadian) with the same meanings as they have in Ba¥¸rna Arabic. These words are certainly not recent borrowings, and in fact appear to be substrate elements which hark back to a period when the ancestors of today’s Ba¥¸rna Arabic speakers were speaking a different Semitic language (Aramaic?), or a form of Arabic heavily influenced by Akkadian or Aramaic. In other words, the tradition which identifies the Ba¥¸rna with the ‘original’ inhabitants of Bahrain and eastern Arabia may not be all that wide of the mark. They may originally have been the result of a coalescence, probably after the Islamisation of the area, of the pre-Islamic Aramaic-speaking 17 In the second half of the 13th century AD, i.e. at about the same date as the completion of the LisAn al-PArab (1290), Ibn al-Muj§wir reports that the island of Bahrain (called here by its old name Uw§l) contained 360 villages, all except one being Im§mÊ (i.e. ShÊ#Ê) (TArIkh al-MustabRir ed. Löfgren, Leiden 1951-4, p. 301).

xxvi

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

agriculturalists and the local Arab tribes, among them {Abd al-Qais, who had migrated from south Arabia to the area before Islam. The suggestion rehearsed by Serjeant some thirty years ago, that ‘they [= the Ba¥¸rna] are descended from converts from the original population of Christians (Aramaeans), Jews and Maj¢s inhabiting the island and cultivated coastal provinces of eastern Arabia at the time of the Arab conquest’18 looks plausible in the light of the linguistic and historical evidence. The question of when the Ba¥¸rna became Shº{a is a matter of dispute. Ba¥¸rna tradition has it that their claimed ancestors, the {Abd al-Qais, sided with {Alº during the caliphal succession crisis of the first Islamic century, and their Shº{ism dates from this very early period19. Others have suggested that the conversion to Shº{ism may date from as recently as about 160020, the point when the Shº{ite Safavids began the last episode of Persian control over the Bahrain islands, and which lasted for about a hundred and fifty years until the mid-18 th century, just before the migration to Bahrain from Najd of the Arab tribes from which the present rulers of Bahrain, the @l-Khalºfa, are descended. This view is firmly rejected by the Ba¥¸rna themselves, who emphasise that, whilst there has always been a flow of Persian-speaking Shº{a (and, for that matter, Persian-speaking Sunnºs) into Bahrain, they themselves are not recent converts. Political turbulence and periodic bouts of oppression in Bahrain during the last three hundred years have caused several mass exoduses of Ba¥¸rna to the northern and southern Gulf, and to regions of southern Iraq and Iran where their co-religionists are in the majority. In some sense, the Shº{º cities of southern Iraq in particular are regional cultural, religious and even political centres for the Ba¥¸rna. One consequence of this is a noticeable southern Iraqi turn of phrase in the speech of some of them, and this is especially noticeable in Ba¥¸rna poetry.21 Migrations of Ba¥¸rna from Bahrain occurred during the short Omani occupations of around 1718 and 1800-1; during the early period of rule imposed by the invading tribes from Najd (from c. 1783); during a short period of Wahhabi control (1803-11); and at several periods from 1845 on, when the Daw¸sir tribe invaded from the mainland, occupying the north western corner of the main island of Bahrain, which had formerly been a Ba¥¸rna area. This latter invasion culminated in 1923 in an attack on the Ba¥¸rna village of {@lº, as a result of which some of the Daw¸sir were temporarily expelled from Bahrain by the then

18

Serjeant R.B. ‘Fisher-folk and fishtraps in al-Bahrain’, BSOAS XXXI (1968) p. 488. A view supported by KaÈȧla op.cit. Vol II p. 726-7. 20 Lorimer, reported in Al-Tajir, op.cit. p. 7 21 See my ‘The Rat and the Ship’s Captain: a dialogue (muHAwara) from the Gulf, with some comments on the social and literary-historical background of the genre’ in Studia Orientalia 75 (1995) pp. 101-120, and ‘The Debate of Pearling and Oil-Wells: a poetic commentary on socioeconomic change in the Gulf of the 1930s’ in Arabic and Middle Eastern Literatures 1/1 (1998), pp. 87-112. 19

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

xxvii

British Political Agent, Major C. K. Daly22. The colony of Ba¥¸rna boat-builders in Kuwait is probably a consequence of one of these migrations. At the time of my research, the rural Ba¥¸rna, scattered in about forty small villages, probably still formed the majority of the Ba¥¸rna population. The basis of the rural economy was a mixture of employment in the age-old occupation of agriculture (the produce was sold direct by the farmers themselves) and shift work in BAPCO, the oil company, or the then newly opened aluminium smelter, ALBA. In many cases, allotment farmers would do both, working at ALBA in the mornings and spending the afternoons farming their leased or owned land. There was still also a sizeable number of independently operating fishermen, and owners of fish-traps, selling their catch direct. Village-based crafts—pottery, weaving—were never large employers and were on their way out. The Ba¥¸rna make a social and linguistic distinction between village- and the town-dwelling Ba¥¸rna. The former are often referred to as al-Ýal¸yil, a term which is variously glossed as referring to the livestock and/or land from which they traditionally made their living, or to their claim to be the ‘owners’ of the land (though this latter meaning has no attestation in Classical Arabic). However, the Ba¥¸rna town-dwellers, whose speech appears to have accommodated to the dialect of the {Arab, seem to have come from the same stock as the villagers (Manama is really a Ba¥¸rna village which outgrew itself) and at the time of this research their dialect still shared many linguistic features with rural Ba¥¸rna speech. Massive changes in the demography of Bahrain over the last twenty-five years— the building of new towns with ‘mixed’ populations, the breakdown of sectrelated employment patterns, and the demise of agriculture—as well as increased access to public education, have reduced the social and linguistic distinctions between the urban and rural Ba¥¸rna populations on the one hand, and between the Ba¥¸rna as a whole and the {Arab on the other. The {Arab In Gulf parlance, the term {Arab collectively denotes not the Arabs as an ethnic whole, but an indigenous population which is historically of tribal Arabian origin. In modern Bahrain, as elsewhere in the region, the term also implies adherence to orthodox Sunnº Islam. The present ruling house of Bahrain, the @l-Khalºfa, are {Arab of eastern Najdº origin23, an off-shoot of the loose tribal confederation the {Ut¢b (as are the @l-Õab¸¥, the ruling house of Kuwait). They arrived in Bahrain in 1782-3 via Zub¸ra, a now ruined town on the western coast of the Qatar peninsula, which they had established from 1766. The conquest of Bahrain and establishment of @l-Khalºfa rule in Bahrain followed immediately on a period 22 Al-Tajir M.A. Bahrain 1920-1945: Britain, the Sheikh and the Administration, London, 1987, pp. 56-58 23 According to their own oral tradition, from a place called al-Had§r (see EI 2 #Utåb).

xxviii

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

of Persian control over the islands. The conquest was accomplished with the assistance of an assortment of tribal allies from Qatar and Najd24, many of whom elected to stay in Bahrain. However, the seat of power did not shift immediately from Zub¸ra to Bahrain, but only in 1796, when Sheikh Salm¸n bin A¥mad, the second ruler, chose al-Rif¸{ in the centre of the main island of Bahrain as his residence. During the course of the nineteenth century other tribal elements also migrated from the Arabian mainland to Bahrain, notably from the large alDaw¸sir tribe, who eventually occupied the north western corner of the main island, and the al-Na{ºm. Until the 1920s, Bahrain, small though it is, seems to have been divided up into different fiefdoms, over which one or other of the @l-Khalºfa sheikhs, or their allies, ruled. The position of the Ba¥¸rna degenerated to the point where, by the beginning of the 20 th century, they were little better than landless serfs. The present-day {Arab population is basically descended from the @l-Khalºfa and their 18th century allies, but the fluid or even non-existent borders of the 19th and early 20th centuries mean that there has been a constant inflow of triballydescended Sunnº population from mainland Arabia who have a similar background. The other indigenous Arabic-speaking Sunnº elements of Bahrain are the socalled Ýwala (also Hwila) (sing. Ý¡lº or H¡lº), a non-tribalised group of Gulf traders who, tradition has it, were originally Arabs who had become Persianised through long residence in the ports and towns of southern Persia. They have gradually become assimilated and intermarried into the {Arab social structure during the latter part of the 20th century, at least in the lower and middle echelons, if not at the top25. This is in sharp contrast to the Ba¥¸rna, who have not assimilated, but rather maintained a clear and separate identity. Only in very recent times, and only among the more liberal-minded urban population has it become possible for Ba¥¸rna to marry {Arab, but this is still unheard of among the more conservative rural Ba¥¸rna. The economic changes of the 20th century—notably the decline of pearling as one of the main bases of the economy in the 1930s, which was more or less simultaneous with the discovery of oil—gradually started the realignment of social relationships between the {Arab and Ba¥¸rna which has led to the relatively harmonious situation of today. A catalyst in this process was the oil industry, which was initially controlled and run by westerners who brought with them no prejudices about which of the local population might make the best employees. As a consequence, the Ba¥¸rna were able to gain the advancement on merit which might otherwise have been denied them.

24 Kelly, J.B. Britain and the Persian Gulf 1795-1880, OUP, 1968, p. 29; Abu Hakima, A.M. History of Eastern Arabia 1750-1800, Beirut 1965, p. 115. 25 Descendants of this originally distinct group are also found today in Qatar and in the United Arab Emirates, where the ruling house of Sharja (the Qaw§sim) are descended from them.

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

xxix

The Arabic vocabulary of Bahrain (i) Substrate elements Linguistically, the chequered political, economic and cultural history of Bahrain has left its mark on the vocabulary of its dialects. There has been borrowing on a large scale, and the pattern and volume of this borrowing reflect the type and intensity of cultural contact Bahrainis had with the speakers of the donor languages, as will be illustrated below. Before we consider the effects of more recent cultural contact, however, it is worth considering whether substrate elements have survived in the Bahraini dialects from the period before the Arab political dominance which began in the mid 7th century. A number of terms of basic material culture still in current use in Bahrain at the time this research was done would appear to be of Semitic but not Arabic origin. The term RaxxIn/xaRIn ‘digging tool’ used the whole length of the Gulf littoral by farmers, has already been mentioned as having an ultimately Akkadian origin, although it also passed into Aramaic, which may have been the immediate source of the Gulf Arabic term. Among other Bahraini Arabic terms associated with agriculture, sea-faring, and the local domestic milieu some of which also occur in Iraqi dialects, which may have a non-Arabic but Semitic origin are zabIl/ zanbIl ‘basket’ (ultimately < Akkadian zabbilu ‘basket’); sannUr ‘cat’ (< Aramaic SunArA < Akkadian SurAnu ); skAr ‘irrigation channel stopper’ and its associated verb sakkar (< Akkadian sekEru ‘close, stop up (a canal, water course)’); kalak which means both ‘metal bucket’ ({Arab dialect) and ‘(squareshaped metal) brazier’ (Ba¥¸rna village dialects) (< Akkadian kalakku ‘container, box, vessel (made of metal)’; fils ‘type of hollow sea-stone’ (< Akkadian pelSu ‘hole’); VibaP ‘to sink, get shipwrecked’: the cognate verb in Akkadian, Aramaic and Hebrew also has ‘sink’ as the basic sense, as in Gulf Arabic, unlike Classical Arabic; and most interestingly of all, the phrases silmat iS-Sams ‘the sun has set’ and sulUm iS-Sams ‘sunset’, phrases used by farmers and seafarers before the advent of watches to signify the end of the working day. As far as I know, this sense of the root s-l-m does not occur either in Aramaic or Classical Arabic, but it is common in the Arabic dialects of the Gulf coast (Landberg also notes it for Oman) and occurs with exactly the same sense in the Akkadian expression Sulum SamSi ‘setting of the sun’. The passage of this sense directly from Akkadian into the Arabic dialects of eastern Arabia—an area where Babylonian influence was strong for many centuries—would appear to be the most likely explanation. On the other hand, Bahraini diminutive forms in -Un(a) such as rIHUna, HabbUna ‘a little bit’, and RJErUn ‘small, insignificant’, are suggestive of Aramaic influence. What is most interesting about all the dialectal forms mentioned here is that they appear to be confined to the coastal strip of the Gulf, including Bahrain. The fact that some of them are also reported as occurring in the Arabic dialects

xxx

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

of Iraq26, where Akkadian and then Aramaic were spoken languages for many centuries suggests that the linguistic history of the Gulf may have followed a similar path to that of Iraq, i.e. the gradual arabicization of an area where other Semitic languages were once spoken. However, so little is known about the detailed ethno-linguistic history of eastern Arabia—in particular whether and to what degree Aramaic may have been a spoken language there in the centuries after the fall of the Babylonian empire and before the Islamic conquests—that we can do little more than speculate on how such vocabulary found its way into the Arabic dialects of the area. A number of Bahraini toponyms are also suggestive of Akkadian/Aramaic influence: the Ba¥r¸nº village (now a suburb of Manama) known as M¸¥¢z (< Aramaic maHOzA, ult < Ak maxAzU ‘town’) and the Muharraq island Ba¥r¸nº village of ad-D¹r, apparently known until the turn of the 20 th century by its full name D¹r ar-R¸hib ‘the monk’s monastery’27, in an area which was Christianised, and where Syriac is known to have been in use as a liturgical language before Islam28. (ii) Foreign elements (a) Persian The most pervasive foreign linguistic influence on the Bahraini dialects has been that of Persian. There have been several periods of imposed Persian political control over the islands dating back to the beginning of the Christian era (the last of which ended in the mid 18th century), and the trade contacts with Persia have always been close. Iranian political claims to sovereignty over Bahrain were not finally dropped until 1971. Persian immigration into Bahrain—in the most recent past from its southern provinces—has been a more or less constant factor in the demography of Bahrain for centuries, and at the time this research was carried out there were neighbourhoods of Manama in which the normal spoken language, at least in domestic contexts, was one or other of the Persian dialects of southern Iran. It is difficult to date the Persian borrowings with precision, beyond observing that many of those in current use pre-date the industrial revolution which occurred in the Bahrain economy of the middle of the 20th century. A further problem is ascertaining whether the route which these borrowings took into Bahraini Arabic (and indeed other Gulf littoral Arabic dialects) 26

e.g. Blanc op.cit. p. 74 for the -Un(a) suffix, and p.147 for sannUr in Iraq; Woodhead D and Beene W A Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic (1967) p. 201, 206 for zabIl/ zanbIl and p. 409 for kalak which in Iraq has one of the other meanings of the same Akkadian word kalakku, ‘raft’. 27 Lorimer J.G. Gazeteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia (1908) Vol IIA, p. 361. At the time of Lorimer’s work there still existed there ‘ruins…of what the Arabs suppose to have been Christian settlement’. Sachau Die Chronik von Arbela (1915), quoted in Potts, op.cit. Vol II p. 221 notes a concentration of Aramaic toponyms in N.W. Arabia. 28 Masm§hÊg, now known as al-MuÈarraq, was before Islam a Nestorian bishopric (for details see Beaucamp and Robin, n.15). Masm§hÊg has given its name to the modern BaÈr§nÊ village named Sam§hÊÅ, situated on the northern coast of the island a mile or so from ad-D¿r.

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

xxxi

was direct from Persian or mediated through another language, since many of the same borrowings are found in the same or a similar form in neighbouring Arabic dialects (especially of southern Iraq) and the languages of India (chiefly Hindi/Urdu and Baluchi), with all of which Bahrainis have had prolonged contact. A few examples, classified into the main semantic fields in which Persian borrowings occur, are given below (the forms of the original Persian words and their translations are taken from Steingass’s dictionary). It can be seen from this representative list that the main contribution of Persian was, unsurprisingly, in items relating to novel foods, clothing and domestic furnishings and equipment. There was also an influence on the vocabulary of architecture and building. foodstuffs and cooking: CAy, CAhi ‘tea’ (< idem); Sakkar ‘sugar’ (< idem); rubyAn ‘prawns’ (< arbayAn ‘sea-locust’); rwEd ‘radishes’ (< roQidanI ‘vegetables’); mEwa ‘fruit (other than dates)’ (< idem ‘fruit’); hamb ‘mango’ (< amba idem); trinG ‘citron’ (< turunG ‘orange’); mirizbAn/ mirzubAn ‘type of high quality date’ (< marzabAn ‘governor’); naxxaG ‘chick-peas’ (< nuxUd ‘pulse’); sabUs ‘bran’ (< sabos idem); bafr ‘ice’ (supplied in large blocks) (< barf ‘snow, ice’); baranyUS ‘dish of cooked rice with molasses’ (< baranG yUS ‘dark-coloured rice’); bACa ‘stew made from sheep offal’ (< pACa idem). domestic equipment: dOSag ‘mattress’ (< dUSak ‘bedding, quilt’); nihAli ‘type of carpet’ (< nihAla ‘a carpet’); istikAna ‘(small glass) tea cup’ (< idem ‘cup’); gUVi ‘packet, box, tin’ (< qUVi idem); CingAl ‘(eating) fork’ (< CangAl ‘fingers, claws, talons’); xASUga ‘spoon’ (< qaSiq idem); JUri ‘kettle’ (< qUri ‘tea-pot’); RifirVAs ‘set of workman’s metal eating tins which fit one inside the other’ (prob < Rufr ‘copper’ + VAs ‘dish’). textiles, dress-making: bafta ‘calico’ (< idem); zari ‘gilded cord’ (< idem ‘brocaded silk’, or zar ‘gold’); baxi ‘lining, quilting (e.g. of a jacket)’ (< baxya ‘quilting’); sifta ‘type of cloth with golden thread woven into it’ (idem ‘stiff kind of cloth’); lAs ‘silk’ (< idem ‘coarse silk’); malmal ‘muslin’ (< idem). implements, tools and handicraft-related: kAr ‘work, job’ (< idem); Sigirdi ‘building labourer’ (< SAgirdI ‘apprentice’); gOni ‘set-square used by builders’ (< gUnyA ‘carpenter or mason’s rule’); firgAr ‘dividers’ (< pargAr idem); handAza ‘boat-builder’s quadrant and plumb-line’ (< andAza ‘quantity, dimension’); giSbAr ‘wood-chippings, shavings’ (prob < xAS ‘parings’ + bAr ‘load’); GAm ‘pane of glass, window’ (< idem); tanaka ‘container made of tin’ (< idem ‘leaf or sheet of metal’). architecture and housing: dirISa ‘window’ (< darICa idem); dirwAza ‘door, gate’ (< idem); bAdgIr/ bAkdIr ‘wind-tower in a traditional house’ (< idem); rOSana/ rOzana ‘window-recess’ (< rawzana ‘window’); mIzAb/ mirzAb ‘drainage channel on the roof of a house,

xxxii

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

or on a boat’ (< mIzAb ‘canal, aqueduct, spout, drain’) ; barastaG/ barasti ‘type of palm-branch hut’ (prob < birasta ‘village abounding in palms’). agriculture: dUlAb ‘allotment farm in which there are palm-trees’ (< idem ‘waterwheel’ from the means formerly used to irrigate); sirkAl ‘piece of land’ (< sirkAr ‘estate, property’); Cilla ‘extreme part (hot or cold) of a season’ (< idem ‘forty days of Lent, or winter, when the weather is most severe’). the sea: bandar ‘port’ (< idem); firman ‘lateen-yard’ (< idem); sridAn ‘fire-box (for cooking) on a boat’ (prob < sirAG ‘candle’ + dAn ‘holder’); xinn ‘hold of a ship’ (< xAna idem) ; nOxaDa ‘ship’s captain’ (< nau xudA idem). ‘modern’ culture: barwa ‘paper, official document; quittance’ (prob < parwAna ‘official written document’); bIma ‘insurance’ (< idem); Paks ‘photograph’ (< idem (a re-borrowing back into Arabic of an Arabic word, but with its Persian meaning)); gaSma ‘spectacles’ (< CaSma idem); darbIn/ darbIl ‘binoculars, telescope’ (< dUr bIn ‘telescope’). In addition, there are a large number of miscellaneous Persian-derived nouns in common use, e.g. sAmAn ‘stuff, gear’ (< idem); rang ‘colour, type, kind’ (< idem ‘colour’); CAra ‘ruse, trick, stratagem’ (< idem); kaSta ‘trip, picnic’ (< gaSt ‘diversion, recreation’); ROJa ‘present brought back from a trip’ (< RawJAt idem); dast ‘slap, smack’ (< idem ‘hand’); bUz ‘mouth, gob’ (< pOz ‘lip, mouth’); SIr ‘heads (on a coin)’ (< idem ‘lion’ (which is depicted on Iranian coinage)); xinG ‘eye (of a needle)’ (< xAniG ‘hole into which boys throw nuts’); nESAn ‘target’ (< idem ‘mark’); VarVangi ‘wastrel, layabout’ (prob < tartand ‘vain, useless’); GinGAl ‘uproar, commotion; bother, trouble’ (< GanGAl ‘crowd, multitude’). Persian also provided a number of high frequency verbs and functional items which are Gulf-wide in their currency, some examples of which were noted earlier on in this essay. The prevalence of Persian-derived vocabulary in the dialects of Bahrain (and of the Gulf states more generally) is one of the main factors which distinguishes them from the dialects of central Arabia. Much of this Persian vocabulary, however, still current in the mid-1970s, was by the 1990s, obsolete or obsolescent. As in the case of Akkadian/Aramaic, Persian has left its trace on (Ba¥r¸nº) village place-names: ad-Dir¸z (= ‘straight’), adD¹h (= ‘village’), Jird¸b (= ‘whirlpool’), D¢mist¸n (= possibly < dimestAn ‘winter’ 29 dimestAn ‘winter’ is noted by Bertram Thomas in his article ‘The Kumzari dialect of the Shihuh tribe, Arabia, and a vocabulary’ in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, October 1930, p. 853. The article describes the still little-known Persian-based dialect of an isolated tribe in the Musandam peninsula. Thomas believes this word, and much of this tribe’s Persian-derived vocabulary, to be ‘pure Pehlevi’.

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

xxxiii

an older form of zemistAn29), as well as a number of toponyms with the Persian endings -bAd and -kAn: Salm¸b¸d, Karb¸b¸d, Karzakk¸n, Shahrakk¸n30. (b) Hindi/Urdu Commercial contacts between the Gulf states, including Bahrain, and India are of very long standing31. For many years India was the principal source for the import of gold for the Bahraini gold market, and Bahraini gold merchants were frequent visitors to Bombay. A number of the technical and measuring terms still in use in the gold trade are of sub-continental origin, e.g. daram ‘goldtester’, tOla ‘unit of weight (= 12 grams approx). Until thirty or forty years ago, travel to India was also the normal choice for Bahrainis needing medical treatment not available locally, and India was even a source of marriage partners for impecunious Bahrainis unable to afford local bride-prices 32. Until as recently as 1963, Bahraini currency denominations were the pies, annas and rupees of India (from which the British administered Bahrain’s external affairs until Indian independence in 1947). These terms (in the forms bEza (-At), Ana (-At), rubbiya (-At)) were still normal in the speech of much of the population in the mid 1970s, although replaced officially by the fils and dInAr. From the linguistic point of view, probably the most influential factor in introducing Urdu/Hindi words into the Bahraini dialects has been the expatriate Indian labour force. A small army of Indian clerks and managers ran most of the Bahrain public services until the late 1960s and the waning of British influence, and Indian workmen, servants, cleaners and laundry-men were, and remain, a highly visible presence. Few of these workers spoke much Arabic, and, because of the (until very recent times) poor standard of English of the Bahrainis, communication with Indian workmen and servants was often conducted in a kind of Arabicbased pidgin33. Borrowings from Indian languages (normally Hindi/ Urdu, but in many cases via Anglo-Indian) which derive from these kinds of contact include: employment-related: krAni ‘clerk’ (< idem); Citti ‘chitty, note’ (< idem); kaCCa ‘form, protocol’ (< xAkA ‘plan, sketch, draft’); dUbi ‘washer-man’ (< idem); tindEl ‘foreman’ (ult

30

Persian toponyms also occur in other Arab Gulf states, e.g. the town of al-Rust§q, Oman (= ‘garden’). 31 The generic Bahraini term for ‘Indians’, banyAn, is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit vanij ‘merchant’. 32 The Bahraini colloquial poet {Abdurra¥m¸n Rafº{, in his humorous poem il-Pirs il-Padil (‘Proper Marriage’), written in the 1960s, mentions this practice. 33 Smart has outlined the features of a similar pidgin used in Abu Dhabi, in ‘Pidginization in Gulf Arabic: a first report’, in Anthropological Linguistics 32 (1990) pp. 83-119.

xxxiv

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

< Malayalam tanBal via Anglo-Indian tandal idem); Cini ‘chisel’ (< CheQoni ‘chisel, punch, piercer’); GUniyya/ yUniyya ‘sack’ (< gOni idem). domestic: kirfAya, CirfAya ‘bed, bed-stead’ (< CArpAQi ‘four-legs’); banka ‘fan’ (< panka idem); biGli ‘type of lamp; torch’ (< idem ‘lightning’); CUla ‘primus stove’ (< idem); CwIt ‘bluing agent’ (prob < CIt ‘printed cloth’). There are also a number of common words for foods and items of clothing and textiles which are of Indian origin, e.g. clothes: sirwAl ‘(women’s) trousers’ (< idem); binGiri ‘bangle’ (< bangri idem); GUti ‘shoes’ (< idem); sAbAt ‘women’s leather shoes’ (< idem); manAris ‘sari-like garment made of silk’ (< banArisi ‘a type of silk used in women’s saris’ (< Benares, a city in India)); CIt ‘multicoloured printed cotton cloth’ (< idem ‘printed cloth’ (whence English ‘chintz’)). food: Alu ‘potato’ (< idem); RAlUna ‘curry, stew’ (< idem). There are also, as in the case of Persian borrowings, a few common all-purpose items, e.g. Cabb! ‘shut up!’ (< Cup! ‘silence!’); kaCra ‘rubbish’ (< idem); xiCri, xikri ‘mixed-up, muddled’ (< khichri ‘a mess of rice’ (applied metaphorically in Anglo-Indian parlance to a mixture or mess of anything); GOkam ‘difficulty’ (< Gokham ‘risk, danger’). (c) Turkish It is probable that the relatively few Turkish loans in the Bahraini dialects are not the result of direct contact with the Turks (the Turks never ruled Bahrain), but of contact with other Arabic dialects, probably those of Iraq, which absorbed much Turkish vocabulary during the period of Ottoman control. In Bahraini Arabic, there appears to be no particular cultural pattern in the type of Turkish borrowing which has occurred, e.g kazma, gazma ‘pick-axe, mattock’ (< kazma idem); VAwa ‘hot-plate for cooking flat bread’ (< tava ‘frying pan’); bUri ‘gramophone horn’ (< boru ‘horn’); timba ‘ball’ (< top idem); baxsam, bagsam ‘dry bread, rusk’ (< peksimet, ult < Greek paksimadi ‘ship’s biscuit, hard biscuit’); titin ‘tobacco’ (< tütün idem); VAbU ‘title-deed to a property; land registration office’ (< tapu ‘title-deed’); bOS ‘empty, useless’ (< bo× idem); sarsari ‘waster, ne’er-do-well’ (< serseri ‘vagabond, tramp’); zigirti ‘smartly-dressed man, fop; chivalrous, brave’ (< züGürt ‘destitute’).

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

xxxv

(d) European languages The earliest sustained contact with a European language was with Portuguese. The Portuguese briefly controlled the Gulf Coast in the 16 th century34, and have left a small linguistic legacy of terms chiefly relating to the sea and shipping, e.g. CAwiya ‘long (16 inch) nail used in ship-building’ (< cavilha ‘pin, dowel, peg’); durmEt ‘sleeping-shelf (on a boat)’ (< dormente ‘sleeping’) ; kAtli, kAtri ‘bench on the poop-deck on which the captain sleeps’ (< cátele, catre ‘bed’); burd ‘side (of a ship, but also more generally)’ (< bordo ‘board, broadside of a ship’); bindEra ‘flag’ (< bandeira idem); GAlbUt ‘small boat for carrying cargo or passengers’ (prob < galeota via Anglo-Indian gallevat). A number of other non-maritime but apparently Portuguese terms are: wAr, wAra ‘yard (in length)’ (< vara ‘rod, pole’); mEz ‘table, desk’ (< mesa idem); bAldi ‘tin mug’ (< balde via Hindi bAlti ‘bucket, pail’); bIb ‘five-gallon drum’ (< pipa or via English cognate ‘pipe’ in the sense of ‘cask, butt, barrel’ (e.g. of port wine); byUn ‘errandboy, messenger’ (< peão ‘foot soldier, farm-hand’ (cf French pion)). It is unclear whether all of these were direct borrowings or whether some of them came in via Persian (e.g. possibly mEz), or one of the languages of India (? bAldi)) into which they were also borrowed. Among other noteworthy curiosities borrowed from European languages are: the now obsolete term balyOz ‘consul, government advisor’ (< Greek baylos), formerly used colloquially (and even, as government papers show, in official correspondence) as a title to refer to the British Political Agent in Bahrain during the early part of this century; twAlEt ‘(man’s long) western hairstyle’ (< French toilette), a word which was being replaced in the 1970s by jaksan (< ‘Jackson’, from ‘the Jackson Five’, an American pop-group of the time who popularised the bushy ‘Afro’ hairstyle); atrIk ‘torch, light-bulb’, probably a corruption of the first element of the Swedish trycklampa ‘pressure lantern’ which was inscribed on the side of the pressure lanterns imported early in the 20th century. By far the most important European influence on the dialects of Bahrain and the Gulf generally, however, has been English. Starting with the oil industry in the mid 1930s, a veritable tide of English terms associated with industry and technology has washed over the Gulf dialects 35. In the Bahrain case, it left a peculiarly British-flavoured flotsam and jetsam of borrowings denoting the favourite comestibles of the 1930s and 40s British expatriate, some of which were adopted by the Bahrainis of that generation: kastar ‘custard’, GAli ‘jelly’, sAgU ‘sago-pudding’, nAmlEt ‘lemonade’, burmIt ‘peppermint’, CaklEt ‘chocolate’, 34

They were expelled from Bahrain by the Persians in 1602. Smeaton, in Lexical Expansion due to Technical Change, Indiana, 1973, has devoted a complete study to the process of the borrowing and assimilation of English technical terms into the dialects of eastern Saudi Arabia as a result of the operations of the oil industry. Very many of the hundreds of terms he lists occur in the same or a similar form in Bahrain. 35

xxxvi

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

rOl ‘bread-roll’, slEs ‘cream-slice (a type of English patisserie)’ and even gOlgEt ‘tooth-paste’, from ‘Colgate’ a proprietary brand of English tooth-paste. Some of the less technical (and in a pan-Arab context more saliently local) of the mass of English borrowings are now being replaced in the speech of the young and educated by their Modern Standard Arabic equivalents, e.g. sAQiq ‘driver’ for drEwil (< driver), mustaSfa ‘hospital’ for sbEtar (< hospital), sayyAra ‘car’ for mOtir (< motor), but almost as quickly as these are replaced, new borrowings from the international consumer culture of the 21st century are entering the dialect, e.g. dIS ‘(satellite) dish’, rimUt ‘(TV) remote control’, Ginz ‘jeans’. Some of the English borrowings which occurred in the data, particularly in the technical sphere, are highly job specific and probably unknown to the population at large, as in, for example, the aeroplane maintenance man who described his job thus: nbaVVil kawlin mAl il-anGin, nSIl-vh barra ‘we open the engine-cowling and take it off’, where the word kawlin ‘cowling’ has no general currency outside the aviation industry; or the illiterate allotment farmer who, in explaining the problems he was having with an irrigation pump, used the words lEtEnar ‘retainer’ and nibil ‘nipple’ to refer to its defective parts. Some two hundred English borrowings occurred in the data, and below I list some examples in the commonest categories: automobile-related: mOtir ‘car’; bAR, bast, bass ‘bus’; bIkAb ‘pick-up truck’; lAri ‘lorry’; sikswIl ‘six-wheel lorry’; kalakta ‘tractor’; dOzar ‘bulldozer’; sEkal ‘bicycle’; midgAr ‘mudguard, wing’; bambar ‘bumper, fender’; haran ‘horn’; lEt ‘head-light’; banCar ‘puncture’; rEwis ‘reverse’; sifti ‘safety-helmet’; trAy ‘driving test’ (< try); lEsan ‘licence’; rangsEd ‘wrong way (down a one-way street)’ (< wrong side); Gambin ‘bumpy (road)’ (< jumping). machinery, tools: bamb ‘pump’; wilf ‘valve’; bEb ‘pipe’; bElar ‘boiler’ (used in the phrase mAy bElar ‘sweet water’ (dispensed from a tanker)); blAyvz ‘pliers’; tanki ‘tank, cistern’; hOz ‘hose’; wayr ‘wire’; Saft ‘(cam-) shaft’; warwar ‘pneumatic drill; revolver’ (< revolver); sbAna ‘spanner’; bulV ‘bolt’; SEwil ‘shovel’; bAko ‘backhoe’; sling ‘hoist’. industrial materials: smIt ‘cement’; kankari ‘concrete’; Cinku ‘galvanised corrugated iron sheets’ (< zinc); naylUn ‘nylon, plastic’; rabil ‘rubber’; Ayil ‘oil’; gAz ‘petroleum; kerosene’ employment: kubbani ‘(The Bahrain Oil) Company’; fEnari ‘oil-refinery’; hafIz ‘office’ rigg ‘oil-rig’; wartEm ‘over-time’; (yOm il) Of ‘day off’; bEbfIta ‘plumber, pipe-fitter’; kUli ‘labourer, coolie’; fannaS ‘to fire; quit’ (< finish).

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

xxxvii

clothing: kOt ‘coat’; hAf ‘shorts’ (< half); blUz ‘blouse’; nEbi ‘bell-bottomed trousers’ (< navy). food: askrIm ‘ice-cream’; ParanGUS ‘orange-juice’; bastUg ‘biscuit’; buftIk ‘beef-steak’; GigAra ‘cigar, cigarette’ (see also the list above). household: aydIn ‘iodine’; bAkEt ‘packet’; kAtUn, kartUn ‘carton’; buVil ‘bottle’; glAR ‘drinking glass’; GEg ‘jug’; kAb and kUb ‘cup’. sport: balanti ‘penalty (kick)’; kurnar ‘corner (kick)’; winG ‘winger’; Sawwat ‘to shoot’. weights, measures and money: inC ‘inch’; fUt ‘foot’; darzan ‘dozen’; galan ‘gallon’; Ons ‘ounce’; kAS ‘cash’; nOV ‘bank-note’. Other commonly-used borrowings which do not fit into any particular category include: fuRR iglAR ‘excellent, first class’ (< first class); Cans ‘luck, fortune, chance’; sikrAb ‘scrap, useless’; sikvndhand ‘on the shelf, left over’ (< secondhand), and the denominative verbs kansal ‘to cancel, abolish’; Cayyak ‘to check’; tayyat ‘to tighten’; layyak ‘to leak’. (iii) Arabic vocabulary: specialised developments Notwithstanding the foreign borrowing just described, the vocabulary of the Arabic spoken by the older generations of Bahrainis gives a general impression of archaism, illustrated earlier in the context of the discussion of the general conservatism of the Gulf Arabic dialects. But this is not to say that there has been no internal innovation. When the vocabulary of the Bahraini dialects is compared with that of the dialects of inner Arabia (from whence much of its population originally came) on the one hand, and that of CLA on the other, two types of innovation are noteworthy. First, matters of form: by comparison with CLA, there have been developments in the system of derivational morphology. In the verb, to give just a few examples, one notes (1) theme III and VI forms with long mid-vowels O and E, e.g. HOmar ‘to go pink, reddish’, HOHaC ‘to wriggle about’ (< HAC ‘to weave’), tREmax ‘to feign deafness’, tErab ‘to dance the trEnbo (a type of wedding dance)’; (2) the free formation of quadriliteral verbs in various ways: via stem reduplication, especially of doubled verbs, e.g. naVnaV ‘skive off, play truant (by jumping over the school wall)’ ( < naVV ‘to jump, hop’), lamlam ‘collect up, gather together’ (< lamm ‘collect together’), via sonorant (l,n,r) insertion between the first two root consonants of triliteral roots, e.g. sarhad ‘nod off, fall asleep’ (< sahda ‘quietness, silence’), tHanda ‘moan and groan, complain’ (< Hada ‘urge, goad’), via the compounding (i.e. naHt) of elements of other verbs, e.g. daPwal ‘throw

xxxviii

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

away, get rid of’ (< daP ‘leave!’ + wall ‘clear off!’); (3) extension of the use of passivising and reflexivising prefixes in-, ista-, including their prefixing to other derived themes, e.g. inJaVVa ‘to be covered, veiled’, istafAham ‘to come to an understanding’36. Morphological innovation of one kind or another has of course occurred in all Arabic dialects if one takes the CLA system as the yardstick, though the details differ from region to region. Developments in derivational morphology specific to Bahrain and eastern Arabia more generally are dealt with in a comprehensive fashion in Volume III. Second, matters of meaning: there has been large-scale semantic extension of vocabulary brought from Arabia to meet the different circumstances of sedentary life on the coast. The vocabulary of the sea—in particular of pearl-diving— gives many examples of terms used in the central Arabian dialects (and CLA) which acquired a specialised nautical meaning, and sometimes lost their original senses. A few will be given here. Words derived from the CLA root s-q-b are exclusively associated in Bahraini Arabic with the masts on a boat: the verb sigab means ‘to fix a mast on a boat’, and sgUba is ‘a mast’ whereas in CLA saqb is ‘the pole of a tent’. The CLA root n-z-f is most commonly used to denote the drawing off of blood, whereas in Bahrain this verb and its verbal noun nizIfa is normally applied to the drawing off of water, specifically the practice of bailing out wooden boats which had been deliberately capsized in shallow water after being laid up for the winter, in order to cause their planking to expand before they put to sea. In CLA, the root n-h-m had various meanings associated with the urging on of camels by a camel-driver (e.g. Lane nahIm ‘the chiding of camels’). In his glossary of the (non-maritime) dialect of Dathºna, southern Yemen, Landberg also notes the verb naham as meaning ‘roar, stir up camels by shouting’. In Bahrain, however, (and other Gulf states with a pearling tradition) this root exclusively denotes the occupation of singing (naham, verbal noun nahIm), by a specialist singer (nahhAm) of songs (nihma) to encourage pearl-divers engaged in the heavy tasks of rowing, hauling in ropes, and raising sails. In southern Najd37, sigmih means simply ‘provisions, food’, while, for southern Yemen, Landberg gives saqqam ‘to feed’. In pearl-diving parlance, however, saggam and its verbal noun tisgAm came to refer to the first of three loan payments made to pearl-divers in the pearling close-season, the tisgAm being paid immediately on their return (at the end of September), and this is the only sense of this word in Bahrain and other maritime ex-pearling communities such as the ports of the erstwhile Trucial Coast. In Najdi Arabic, and Arabian Bedouin dialects in general, the main meaning of the verb fazaP is ‘to respond to a call for help in time of war’ as in Ingham’s example38 fzaPat Sammar ‘(the 36 37

275

38

Ingham op.cit. 74-5 notes the same kind of development in Najdi dialects. Kurpershoek M. Oral Poetry and Narratives from Central Arabia, Leiden, 1995, Vol II, p. Ingham B. op.cit. p. 105.

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

xxxix

tribe) of Shammar responded to the call (to provide assistance in tribal conflict)’. In Bahrain, the root f-z-P became mainly associated with the co-operative team work needed in launching boats—the basic meaning of fAziP pl fazPa is ‘one of a team who help to pull boats in and out of the sea’—and the sense of ‘helping in times of war’, presumably because tribal wars no longer occurred in the sedentarised society of the coast, became obsolete. In my data, it occurred only once in this sense—in an old man’s recollection of the Russian contribution to the allied effort during the Second World War: lO mA fAzPo ir-rUs, CAn rAHat brIVAnya u rAHat fransa ‘If the Russians hadn’t helped, Britain and France would have been done for’. In all these cases—and scores more examples could be given—the shift in semantic scope was associated with a shift in life-style, and/ or the narrowing of the meaning of a general term to a more specialised sense. A more recent semantic shift, but one which illustrates that the same principle is still operative, is provided by the word zAm which originally denoted ‘watch-period on board a ship’ in both CLA and Bahraini Arabic. Now, however, it normally means ‘shift’ in a factory: zAm in-nahAr ‘day-shift’, zAm awwal il-lEl ‘afternoon-shift’. (iv) Community-based differences in vocabulary At the time this research was done, Bahrain was still a classic case of a society in which there was major communal dialect differentiation 39: dialect differences, which largely corresponded to the {Arab-Ba¥¸rna social cleavage, permeated all levels of language from segmental phonology to vocabulary, and, despite the geographical proximity and intermingling of these groups in public contexts, were maintained by social distance. Subsidiary distinctions could also be made between the dialects of the urban and rural Ba¥¸rna; within the rural Ba¥¸rna community from one region of Bahrain to another; and, to a lesser extent, between the different {Arab towns and villages. These sociolinguistic distinctions are a principal concern of this whole study, and inform the dialect description in Volume III. Here, however, we will restrict ourselves to an illustration of communal differences in the basic vocabulary stock, concentrating on the major differentiation between the {Arab (A) dialects as a whole and the Ba¥¸rna (B) dialects as a whole, though with some separate remarks on the Ba¥¸rna village (B village) dialects. However, it should always be borne in mind that a very great deal of the vocabulary of all Bahraini dialects (and indeed the Gulf dialects as a whole) is shared, as was pointed out and exemplified at the beginning of this essay. The dialectal differences between the A and B communities undoubtedly stem from their different geographical origins. The A community’s dialects are developments of the Najdi dialects their ancestors spoke, whilst the B dialects are seemingly more mixed in origin, incorporating elements of the older strata 39

See Blanc op.cit. pp. 12-16.

xl

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

of Arabic dialects spoken in eastern Arabia long before the arrival of the A speakers. One striking feature of the B village dialects is their resemblance, grosso modo, in phonology, morphology and vocabulary, to a number of other dialects some distance away: to those spoken in the isolated mountainous interior of Oman, to certain dialects of the United Arab Emirates, and to the dialects of southern Yemen as described by Landberg. Each of these widely separated dialectal pockets is cut off from the others by desert populations speaking dialects which are typologically different. How did this situation arise? Broadly speaking, what seems to have happened on the coast of Arabia from Bahrain to the Musandam peninsula is that an older group of related dialects spoken by Arabian sedentaries, some of which anciently originated in southern Yemen, has been ‘submerged’ by Bedouin dialects brought by waves of migrants from central Arabia over a period of centuries. Today, these incoming Najdi (sometimes referred to as {Anazº) dialects are associated with the ruling families of the Gulf states, and are usually described in the literature as ‘Eastern Arabian’40 or ‘Gulf’ Arabic. However, older pre-{Anazº dialects survive as ‘islands’ in this sea of Najdi-derived dialects. In Bahrain, this pre-{Anazº stratum of dialects is represented by those of the B villages, and the distinction between them and the A dialects of the Najdi immigrants has been preserved by a social distance between them born of religious differences. However, the sharpness of the distinction has been somewhat blurred by subsequent internal developments. Basically, speakers of the urban B dialects of Manama have, probably over a long period, accommodated to the dialects of their {Arab neighbours in certain respects—chiefly phonologically and lexically— whilst retaining the original character of the B village-dialect morphology. This process of B dialect accommodation to the socially more prestigious, areally dominant A dialect has now spread to affect B villagers of the younger generation also. Another long-term cohesive factor has been the contact with foreign languages, which seems to have affected the A and B communities equally—it is not possible to distinguish any source or type of foreign borrowing, for example, which is exclusively associated with one community or the other. Nor, most interestingly, is it true that the elements in the dialects which I have speculatively attributed to an ancient east Arabian Akkadian and/or Aramaic substrate are found only in the B village dialects, as might have been the expectation if it is true that the B villagers, as they claim, are descendants of ‘the original Bahrainis’ and the A speakers are relative newcomers. Older generation A speakers in my data used these words just as often as B speakers, so either they must also have been part of the dialects which the A speakers’ ancestors brought with them, or, more probably, they have been absorbed into the A speakers’ dialects since their arrival—but at this point in this almost completely unresearched corner of 40 This is the term used by Tom Johnstone in his classic work Eastern Arabian Dialect Studies, London, 1967. Johnstone gives almost no information about the older pre-{Anazº stratum of Arabic dialects, to which he had difficulty in gaining access in the late 1950s.

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

xli

Arabic comparative dialectology, it is impossible to say which explanation is correct. Certainly at the time when this research was done, the vocabularies and phraseology of the A and B communities were still clearly distinct, particularly in the case of the B villagers, whose speech even B town-dwellers, let alone A speakers, sometimes found difficulty in understanding41. The most obvious point of difference was in words associated with employment which was the exclusive preserve of one group or the other. The agricultural terminology used by Ba¥¸rna farmers throughout Bahrain, for example, contained scores of items whose meanings were known only to them, e.g. the verbs baggaS, waggaS, tiPabbaf (roots {-B-TH), banna, karaf (roots Q-R-F), Pammar, which all refer to different types of digging and soil preparation; Sirb, sAba (roots S-Y-B), kiRfa (roots Q-Õ-F), faRla and xAfUr, which denote different shapes and sizes of seed- or growing beds42. Similarly, the vocabulary of pearl-diving, an occupation dominated by the {Arab (though by no means to the exclusion of the Ba¥¸rna) was strongly associated with the A dialect, and tended to reflect A rules of pronunciation and syllabication, e.g. gHama ‘descent to the sea-bed’, mGaddimi ‘boatswain’ (roots Q-D-M), riGa ‘go afloat, put to sea’ (roots R-Q-Y), yazwa ‘crew of a pearling boat’ (roots J-Z-Y). But vocabulary differences were not restricted to technical terminology. Many of the commonest actions and items of everyday life were typically expressed by different words, of which some examples are given below. It is emphasised that the examples given are illustrative only of differences in lexical choice for everyday concepts, and the separate question of communal differences in the morphophonological treatment of what was historically the ‘same’ item, e.g. A yad B Id ‘hand’; A hal B ahal/ ahl ‘family, kin’; A IdAm B UdAm ‘food’; A yaddam B waddam ‘to offer food’ is left to Volume III. Such differences are the result of phonological processes which historically affected the A and B dialects differently, possibly at a time before they were in their present geographical position. Examples of vocabulary differences: {Arab dialects Ba¥¸rna dialects Fahar VilaP Vagg Barab xarraP xawwaf 41

‘to go out’ ‘to hit’ ‘to frighten’

Village Ba¥¸rna were often jocularly referred to by A speakers as awlAd il-Pafar ‘the lads who say Pafar’, a particle meaning ‘perhaps’ which is frequently used by them. A speakers typically said kalAm-hum JalG (< CLA Jaliq) ‘their speech is obscure, difficult to understand’ to describe the B village dialects. 42 The glossary of Omani agricultural vocabulary put together by Brockett in The Spoken Arabic of KhAbUra, Manchester 1985 shows many parallels with the B-village terms, and is another pointer to the close cultural and linguistic relationship between ancient east Arabian sedentary communities.

xlii

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

taQaxxar dall tamm

mahal indall or dalla Ball

JabIb mirfaPa

bayyUt millAla

xirGa mVawwaP gaVu

xalaga miPallim sannUr

‘be late’ ‘to know the way’ auxiliary verb expressing continuous, habitual or iterative action ‘food left over for the following day’ ‘wood and rope hoist for storing leftover food’ ‘cloth, rag’ ‘Koran teacher’ ‘cat’

Even common functional items were typically different: for A speakers ‘what?’ was usually Sinhu (or with a feminine referent Sinhi), and for some A speakers SingAyil, but for B speakers it was typically wES or wEShu, or one of a number of other variants with an initial (w)ES- morpheme. Perhaps one of the most curious communal distinctions was between the verbs twaBBa and tmassaH: for the A speakers, the first verb means ‘wipe one’s behind’ and the second ‘perform ritual ablutions before prayer’, whereas for the B speakers the meanings of the two words are exactly the other way round! The B village dialects had a large number of peculiarities of their own in the area of non-technical ‘core’ vocabulary. As noted above, the word Pafar ‘perhaps’ (historical root consonants }-TH-R) is considered a marker of village B speech in Bahrain. A few examples of differences in the stock of common verbs are given here. Instead of the almost universal pan-Arab rAH ‘to go’, many speakers used Jada; the verb ‘to become’ in most of its senses was istawa/ istuwa rather then RAr, the commonest verb with this meaning for A and most urban B speakers; nawas was ‘to be happy’ in B village speakers’ speech, but usually istAnas in the speech of other Bahrainis; ‘to come to a stop, stop work’ was in the B villages often PabbaV, a verb not known in this sense to A speakers; similarly, the verbs PAbal and HaggaV both of which mean ‘to take care of, look after’ were heard only from rural B speakers; the verb Pabaf (cf CLA PabaTa) meaning ‘to work on the land’ was unknown in this sense in A communities; ‘to get, obtain’ was usually gabaB/ kabaB or Haggal/ Hakkal rather than the A and urban B verbs HaRal/ HaRRal and HawwaS; ‘to tear, rip’ was maSSag/ maSSak rather than A and urban B mazzag; ‘to wait’ was typically Haras in the B villages, more often niVar in A communities; in some villages naVa was ‘to give’ (as in Iraq) rather than A (and pan-Gulf) PaVa. Some items in the A and B village dialects seemed to be natural phonological variants of what historically may have been the same form, e.g. the correspondence of the bilabials in A Hamal versus B village Habal/ Hibal ‘to get pregnant, conceive’, A zamar versus B village zabar ‘to scold, tell off’, and other pairs in which the radical consonants show only voiced/voiceless or minor manner and place of articulation differences, as in A iHtAG (or iHtAy) and B villages iPtAz ‘to need’.

the vocabulary of eastern arabia

xliii

GUIDANCE NOTES The material The sources for this glossary are described in the General Introduction. Whilst it can be used independently of Volumes II and III, Volume I is intended as a companion volume to the texts which will appear in Volume II, although containing sentence attestations of usage from the full set of texts collected, only a fraction of which appear in the texts Volume. It is worth emphasising that this is a glossary, not a dictionary of Gulf Arabic. Only forms which actually occurred in the corpus of data, and were produced by elderly, uneducated speakers are included, apart from the small number of other categories of text mentioned in the General Introduction. The speech of educated speakers, who constituted half the original speaker sample in the sociolinguistic project out of which the present study grew, and who in some cases interviewed uneducated relatives for the original project, has been deliberately excluded. The objective is to present an accurate and detailed picture of the vocabulary and idiom of the older, less educated generations of the 1970s, rather than to provide a comprehensive dictionary of all the registers of the Bahraini (still less all the Gulf) dialects. Hence the glossary gives a very different impression of the vocabulary of ‘Gulf Arabic’ from Qafisheh’s Gulf Arabic-English Dictionary (1997), which is apparently based at least in part on the Arabic dialects of Bahrain. I would estimate that more than 50% of the words and senses of words in this glossary are absent from Qafisheh’s dictionary. Conversely, much of his material, which strikes me as typical of educated usage, does not feature in this work. This is to be expected, given Qafisheh’s different objectives, methods (chiefly, it would seem, direct elicitation) and the anticipated users of his dictionary. Wherever possible, word usage is exemplified through the verbatim citing of actual sentences or conversational exchanges in which the word occurred. The examples were selected as representative of usage from a much larger collection compiled on many thousands of record cards, themselves culled from the transcription of all the original tape-recorded data. The sentences are reproduced exactly as they were said, and the translations provide whatever contextualising comment is necessary to make them comprehensible out of context. Order of letters and root entries This glossary is intended for the use of Arabic linguists in general and comparative and historical Arabic dialectologists and Semiticists in particular, and the material has been arranged with this readership in mind. In particular, the ordering of

xliv

guidance notes

words is by historical, or (in the case of foreign borrowings) notional, root consonants. These appear in bold capitals separated by dashes, e.g. the Arabic root letters B-R-Z, and the notional root letters F-N-SH (for words derived from the English word ‘finish’). Actual Arabic words are in italics. Where the same set of root consonants apply to words which have different etymologies, the roots are listed separately with a supercript number (e.g. B-Þ-L1, B-Þ-L2 etc). Where no root consonants exist historically (for foreign borrowings) or notionally (for certain dialectal functional items which have no CLA antecedent), words are listed alphabetically, e.g. bAldi ‘tin drinking mug’, a Portuguese borrowing, is listed under B-A-L-D-Y; wES ‘what?’ (ultimately < wa ay Say) is listed under W-Y-SH. In several cases (see chart of correspondences below), the dialectal phonetic values of root consonants do not correspond to their CLA/ MSA ones, but the advantages for the comparativist user of retaining the traditional arrangement by historical root, rather than, say, arranging words alphabetically according to their present-day form, outweigh the disadvantages. Crucially, since many (but sometimes not all) words which derive from a single set of root consonants can have two (in some cases more) communally variant pronunciations, grouping them all together with appropriate clarifying annotation under one set of root consonants avoids duplication of entries and highlights which words from a root have a shared pronunciation, and which words vary. Thus A dialect TOr, B dialect fOr ‘bull’ both appear under TH-W-R; gassam, Gassam and yassam, all of which are communal variants of ‘to distribute’ are all listed under Q-S-M. The nature of the material has necessitated a few occasionally awkward compromises. Firstly, novel phonemes: there are two which do not occur in CLA (or many other Arabic dialects) but which are fully functional in eastern Arabian Arabic, and which have accordingly been given ‘root consonant’ status: CH, which is placed in the alphabetical order after TH, and G which is placed after Q. It should be noted, however, that these sounds are treated as root consonants only in words which were originally foreign borrowings. In order to comply with the historical principles on which the glossary is arranged, etymologically Arabic words which have the same phonetic realisations as ‘borrowed’ CH and G, viz C and g, but which are historically reflexes of Arabic K and Q, are listed under the relevant Arabic roots. Thus the Persian borrowing CingAl ‘fork’ is listed under CH-N-G-A-L, whereas the etymologically Arabic daCCa ‘bench, step’ is listed under its historical root D-K-K; gAri ‘cart’, a borrowing from Hindi/ Urdu, is listed under G-A-R-Y, whereas gara ‘he read’ is under Q-R-}. Secondly, lost phonemes: words which historically had a glottal stop (}) as a root consonant, largely lost in the eastern Arabian dialects, are nonetheless listed under the root lemma which contains it: thus rAs ‘head’ is found under R-}-S. The words which historically had an initial glottal stop are listed under the composite letter A/}. In order to distinguish between foreign borrowings which have an initial vowel and etymologically Arabic words which

guidance notes

xlv

had a (now lost) initial glottal as root consonant, the foreign borrowings beginning with a are listed first under the composite letter A/} (e.g. agzUz ‘(car) exhaustpipe’ is under A-G-Z-W-Z), followed by the Arabic words which historically had } as first root consonant (e.g. abad is under }-B-D, IdAm and UdAm (respectively A and B variants for ‘fish (or meat) eaten with rice’) under }-D-M). The few foreign borrowings beginning with i or o, however, have been treated (as they would be in a CLA/MSA dictionary) as if they had an initial glottal (e.g. Ons/ ins ‘ounce’ is listed under }-W-N-S, inC ‘inch’ under }-N-CH). This is messy and inconsistent compared with the treatment of borrowings beginning with a, but avoids the waste of space caused by having separate root letter entries O and I for just a few foreign borrowings. Interestingly, when native speakers are asked to transcribe such borrowings into the Arabic script, they invariably write them with an initial alif , which is a further justification for the solution adopted here. Thus the basic organising principle is that words, whatever their actual dialectal form, are listed under their historical root. Where this has been largely obscured by later dialectal developments, they are also listed alphabetically with a crossreference which directs the user to where the main entry for the item can be found. Thus the verbs niwis ‘to be happy, content’ and wannas ‘to entertain’ can be found respectively under N-W-S and W-N-S, but with a direction to the user to see under }-N-S, where they and all other words which are ultimately derived from historical }-N-S are grouped together. The correspondences between the root letters and actual dialectal phonetic realisations are as follows1: Root letter A (foreign words) }

corresponds to: a or A normally lost in initial position; equates to vowel length in medial position (with a few exceptions); lost in final position. B b T t TH T in A dialects; usually f in B dialects. CH (foreign words) C J G in most B dialects; y in most A dialects2. 1 A detailed discussion of the various phonological systems used in Bahraini dialects will be presented in Volume III, but see now Prochazka T. ‘The Shº{º dialects of Bahrain and their relationship to the eastern Arabian dialect of MuÈarraq and the Omani dialect of al-Rust¸q’ in Zeitschrift für arabische Linguistik 6 (1981), pp. 16-55; and my ‘Bahraini Dialects: Sectarian differences and the sedentary/nomadic Split’ in Zeitschrift für arabische Linguistik (1983) pp. 7-38, especially pp. 915. 2 See my ‘Phonological variation in Bahraini Arabic: the [j] and [y] allophones of /j/’ in Zeitschrift für arabische Linguistik (1980) pp. 72-89 for a discussion of the communal and lexical factors involved in the choice between these two reflexes.

xlvi Ý KH D DH R Z S SH Õ | Þ |H { GH F Q

G (foreign words) K

L M N H W Y

guidance notes H x d D in A and some B dialects; d in some B dialects. r z s S R B in B dialects; F in A dialects. V F in A dialects; B in B dialects. P J in B dialects; q or G for some speakers of A dialects. f g for A and urban B dialects, but some A speakers have G (or even y) in some words; some B village dialects have g, some k. In neologisms containing MSA q, some A speakers have J, q and G allophones in free variation (see GH above). g A, urban B, and a few B village dialects have conditioned affrication: k in back-vowel environments, C in front-vowel environments. Some B villages have C unconditionally in all environments. l m n h w, O and U y, E and I

The letters used in the transliteration system have their normal CLA/MSA values. For the sake of clarity, however, I give a phonetic description of symbols which may be unfamiliar to some users: T interdental voiceless fricative C alveolar voiceless affricate G alveolar voiced affricate (in the B village of {@lº, G < Old Arabic GIm is a palatal voiced stop) x velar voiceless fricative D interdental voiced fricative S alveo-palatal voiceless fricative F interdental emphatised voiced fricative

guidance notes J G g k

O E v o

xlvii

velar voiced fricative uvular voiced stop (i.e. a voiced q) velar voiced stop velar voiceless stop (but in some B village dialects, k < Old Arabic qAf has a more retracted articulation (= [_]) than k < Old Arabic kAf) long back mid-vowel (in some B villages original [aw] has been preserved) long front mid-vowel (in some B villages original [ay] has been preserved) short centralised mid-vowel (which mainly occurs as a reflex of unstressed i) short rounded low back vowel (which occurs only in final position as a shortening of final -O) Order of words within each root-consonant entry

Where they exist, theme I verbs are placed at the head of the entry, followed by all unaugmented theme I derivatives—nouns, adjectives, adverbs, participles (where these have a separate nominal sense from the same forms as active/ passive participles of the verb), etc. These are followed by theme II, III, etc verbs after each of which any derivatives are listed. The system adopted is similar to that used in Hinds and Badawi’s Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic (1986). Grammatical information Grammatical information for each word is given in abbreviated form within slashes (/…/) after it (see key in Abbreviations and Conventions). In particular, the following should be noted: verbs: the vowel of the prefix-stem (ps = ‘imperfect’) of theme I verbs is given in brackets in italics after the suffix-stem (ss = ‘perfect’), where known. Note that many types of verb form, in both the A and B dialects, are resyllabicated by general rule when they have vowel-initial suffixes, so that, for example, the ps theme vowel given in brackets for the singular unsuffixed form of theme I verbs does not always correspond to the vowel in a plural or otherwise suffixed form which may occur in a quoted sentence example, e.g. (A dialect) yiFrab ‘he hits’, theme vowel a, but yiFirbUn ‘they hit’, yiFirb-vh ‘he hits him’. In cases where resyllabication occurs in singular ps forms (as it does in the A dialects in theme I verbs which have a guttural consonant as first radical), the ps form is given in full for the sake of clarity (e.g. yJasil ‘he washes’). Verbal nouns of theme I verbs are given where they occurred in the data. Otherwise, as in all other cases, in whatever grammatical category, where a form which would normally be noted failed to occur in the data, nr (= ‘not recorded’) is entered. The principle

xlviii

guidance notes

is that only forms attested by actual usage appear in the glossary, even though this means that it is not always possible to give full sets of forms. For derived verb themes, the verbal noun is largely predictable, and only forms which are restricted in their occurrence (e.g. tifPAl and tafPUl which occur with some but not all theme II verbs) are given. Since the active (ap) and passive (pp) participles are similarly predictable, they are only given for types of theme I verbs where they behave differently from CLA/MSA or other more familiar dialects: verbs which historically had a glottal stop as first radical have an m- prefix in the ap, and hollow verbs retain the maCCUC shape in the pp, e.g. mAxiD from axaD, matyUH from tAH. nouns and adjectives: the plural(s), and in relevant cases, collective and instance nouns, are given if they occurred in the data. Transliteration of examples: degree of morphological and phonetic detail Sufficient detail is given to make the syntax of the example sentences clear without rendering the transliteration cumbersome and difficult to read. Morphological boundaries within phonological words are indicated (by a dash) in the following cases: object and possessive pronoun enclitics suffixed to verbs and nouns (e.g. Cift-vh ‘I saw him’, rAs-i ‘my head’); certain verbal proclitics (e.g. d-igdaP! ‘please eat!’, b-agUl lik ‘I’ll tell you’); negative, demonstrative, presentative, subordinating and distributive particles and pronominals which form compounds with independent or dependent pronouns (e.g. mA-nta... ‘you’re not…’ (but not in ‘coalesced’ alternative forms such as minta), ha-l-bEt ‘this house’, hADa-na... ‘(lit) here’s me..’, ka-hu yAy ‘here he comes’, ilA-hum... ‘suddenly they…’, Cinn-ik ‘it’s as if you…’, killv-kum ‘all of you’, ay-hum ‘which of them?’, S-kubr-vh ‘how big it is!’); after the appositional nominal mAl-, mAlat(e.g. l-iyHAla mAlat-na ‘our water-pots’); after certain adverbs and interrogatives (e.g. taww-vh... ‘he’s just…’, baPad-ha... ‘she’s still…’, bass-vk? ‘is that enough for you?’, wEn-hum ‘where are they?); to indicate tanwIn (e.g. bint-in zEna ‘a nice girl’); after the definite article il- and l-. Preposition-plus-pronoun combinations are not divided morphologically, and allomorphs (e.g. Palay, Palayya, PalEy, PalI, Paliyyi (all < Pala + 1st person suffix)) are listed at the head of the entries for each preposition where not predictable. The example sentences are in a broad, essentially phonological transcription. The only significant phonetic detail which is included where it occurs is as follows: consonant assimilation: as a consequence of the deletion by many speakers of short unstressed i in open syllable, the t- of 2/3rd person ps verb forms , and the t- prefix of theme V and VI ss forms is often (though not always by all speakers) assimilated to a following dental or alveolar stop, affricate or fricative, e.g. tidiSS → iddiSS ‘you/she enter(s)’, tiGi → iGGi ‘you/she come(s)’, tiVubbIn → iVVubbIn ‘you (fem) enter’, tiVawwarat → iVVawwarat ‘it developed’.

guidance notes

xlix

vowel reduction: where, as a consequence of resyllabication, short unstressed vowels are produced, these are often reduced to, and transcribed as, v, e.g. (A speakers) yvParf ‘he knows’, mvJarb ‘evening’. Centralised short vowels in certain other types of form, originally deriving from u or i, are also so transcribed where speakers’ pronunciations justified it, e.g. kill-vh ‘all of it’ (but other speakers kill-ih), A speakers Fvhvr ‘noon’ (other A speakers Fihir). It is to be noted that the non-phonemic emphatisation of sonorants and bilabials in certain words is not distinguished in the transcription, e.g. the A pronunciations of gabil ‘before’ and gumar ‘moon’ are normally [gab.v»], [gum . ar. ], but are not so transcribed. This kind of phonetic detail (some of which is sociolinguistically significant) will be dealt with in Volume III. However, where a dialectal form, contrary to CLA, has a consistently emphatised form, it is spelt with, and listed under, the emphatised consonant, e.g. Raxla ‘young goat, kid’ and RaxxIn ‘spade’, respectively under Õ-KH-L and Õ-KH-N. Communal variation and the attribution of forms As has already been pointed out, the A and B communities as a whole, and certain sub-groupings within them have communally specific linguistic forms at all levels of linguistic analysis. In the glossary, broad distinctions are drawn between what the corpus of data suggests are (a) country-wide shared vocabulary items which have a shared form, and consequently no symbol indicating communal specificity (b) words or forms of words which are typical of the {Arab dialects only (= ‘A’) (c) words or forms of words which are typical of the Ba¥¸rna dialects as a whole (= ‘B’) (d) words or forms of words which are typical of the Ba¥¸rna village dialects only (= ‘B villages’), or a sub-group of them (= ‘some/ certain B villages’). The communal attribution is placed after the form which it relates to. Thus the entry “Raxla and Rxala (A)” means that Rxala is typical of the A dialects, while Raxla is the norm for all other speakers; the entry “gaPad (a, i) and kaPad, yukPud, yikPid, yikPad (all B villages)” means that the ss gaPad with either an a or i vowel in the ps is normal for all except B villagers, who normally have kaPad as ss and a ps with u, i or a in combination with the noted prefix vowel. It seemed sufficient for the purposes of the user, and also more true to the data, to limit the level of detail in this fashion because, although the corpus on which the entries are based is extensive, it could not claim to be comprehensive. Because of the method of data collection, which deliberately avoided elicitation, not all forms even of common verbs occurred in the data for all of the sixty or so locations in which data were gathered. Providing further detail (e.g. by naming the villages in which examples were recorded) would merely have further complicated and considerably lengthened the presentation of the material without increasing its usefulness. For each word or form, the basis for the judgement of what is ‘typical’ of a

l

guidance notes

community’s usage was the total picture which emerged from the compilation of attributed sentence examples stored in the card index of all the data analysed. However, where, in some cases, a particular word is positively attributed to, say, the B dialect, without there being any explicit comparative comment such as ‘A speakers use X’, this should not be taken to imply that this word is definitely only ever used by B speakers. It may be that the word occurs in the same or a slightly different from in the A dialect, but its absence from the glossary merely reflects a shortcoming in the comprehensiveness of the corpus rather than a real communal difference. Other variations in form Variation in the form of words was by no means always to do with communal dialect differences. There was also a good deal of inherent variability in the form of certain words and form-types within a community, and some variants were the products of the application of variable phonological rules3. For example, kam and Cam were both used to mean ‘how much?’ without there being any way of differentiating between them—kam did not seem to be associated, for example, with more careful usage or an attempt to speak ‘correctly’. Similarly, both epenthesised and non-epenthesised variants like Sahar and Sahr, SuJul and SuJl occurred in utterance final position. Here, the pattern of distribution suggested that the origin of the non-epenthesised variant was probably MSA or conceivably other dialects from outside the area, since epenthesised variants were categorical for some uneducated speakers, but there were no speakers, educated or not, for whom the same was true of the non-epenthesised variants. In these cases, alternative forms are cited at the head of the entry. Verb forms posed a particular problem. In suffixed ps forms of theme II verbs, for example, of the general type CiCaCCiCv(C), the short unstressed third syllable is normally deleted and the consonant cluster reduced, e.g. yigaPPidUn → yigaPdUn ‘they cause (s’one) to sit down’. However, in more careful speech, the syllable is maintained. The example sentences have been quoted verbatim, and not edited to iron out this type of variability. The citation forms of themes V and VI of the verb were also highly variable, with some speakers having ta-, some ti- and some t- as the form of the derivational prefix. The choice was only partly dependent on the nature of the first radical consonant of the form, and much of the variability seemed to be free. In this case the commonest form is cited as the head word (where there were enough attestations to make a judgement possible).

3 For some details, see my ‘Patterns of communal language variation in Bahrain’, Language in Society 12/4 (1983) pp. 433-457; Language Variation and Change in a Modernising Arab State, (1987), esp. Chapters 6-8.

guidance notes

li

Organisation of word senses and choice of examples Distinct senses of each word are numbered, and slight differences of a sense which do not justify a separate sense number are given letters, thus 1a, 1b, etc. The most general senses of words are listed first, the more specific or technical last. However, where the commonest sense of a word is a localised one, this is listed first. For example, among the uneducated speakers who formed the population sample for this study, the word maRnaP normally had the sense ‘gadget, invention’, as in the following example il-maRAniP Pindi fIh fayda... it-tilifUn, irrEdu ‘some gadgets, I find, are useful…the telephone, the radio’. The normal meaning in MSA and other dialects, ‘factory’, was not much in active use, and is listed only as a secondary sense. The example sentences given under each numbered sense have been chosen to illustrate the word being used in the same sense but in different situations or contexts, or to show allowable syntactic variation, e.g. in the case of verbs, to show that prepositional complementation could sometimes vary without necessarily giving a change in the sense, as in bAP Pan... and bAP Pala..., both of which mean ‘to sell something for… (an amount of money)’. I have not hesitated to quote the same sentence at two or more points in the glossary if it contains good illustrations of the usage of several words. Where there are communal differences in the syntactic or contextual use of a word, this is indicated. Otherwise, example sentences are not categorised or ordered by communal affiliation. Where a head word has variant communal forms, inspection of the example sentences enables the user to deduce from which community an example came. Idioms Idiomatic extensions of a particular sense are indicated by º. Idioms which do not find under any particular sense of a word are separated from the main entry and indicated by ¶. Register and specialised vocabulary A limited amount of information concerning the typical register, stylistic context or token type of certain words and expressions is given in round brackets, e.g. (joc) = jocular, (pej) = pejorative, (prov) = proverb, etc. Italic annotations in square brackets, e.g. [naut] = nautical, [agric] = agriculture, [poet] = poetic language, indicate specialised or more technical usages.

lii

guidance notes Transliteration of proper names

Proper names in the English translations of the example sentences are given in a roman version of the transliteration system, except for names which have an established spelling in normal English, e.g. Ramadan, Koran, Mecca, Eid. References At the end of about half of the entries, there are references (in 8 point font size) to other Arabic dictionaries/ glossaries which contain the same or a similar word, form or expression. The point of this is to indicate the geographical spread of the word or expression in neighbouring areas. Hence the references cited are mainly for various parts of Arabia and Iraq, but occasional comparative reference is made to Egyptian, Syrian and other dialects from even further afield, especially in the cases where (a) the same, or a closely cognate word occurs in a geographically different dialect, but, not, to judge from the available references, in neighbouring dialects, e.g. mxawwax ‘rotten, rotted away’, which also occurs in Egypt; (b) an identical or similar idiomatic expression occurs outside the area, e.g. Bahraini b-arawwI-k inyUm il-gAyla (lit ‘I’ll make you see stars at noon-time’) and Egyptian (Hinds and Badawi p. 934) warrA n-nugUm fi Pizz iBBuhr (lit ‘he made him see the stars at the height of noon’), both of which indicate giving someone ‘a hard time/ a hell of a time’. See References for a full list of works consulted. The origin of foreign borrowings is indicated where known, or suspected, with appropriate references. Dialectal words which continue CLA words or senses which did not come through in the same form, or at all, to MSA are also indicated, the main dictionaries consulted being Lane, Dozy, the LisAn al-PArab, and (because it contains many late CLA references absent from Lane) J.G. Hava’s dictionary. However, the etymology of a considerable number of Bahraini words remains unexplained, and is noted as such. I would be glad to hear from users if they have any proposals. I emphasise that the references are not a comprehensive catalogue of the variant forms and meanings of the words in this glossary as they occur in other Arabic dialects. Desirable though such a set of equivalences might be as raw material for the comparativist and Arabic language historian, it is beyond the scope of this glossary and would be an enormous undertaking in its own right. Essentially, what I have tried to do is track down the typically Bahraini words and expressions which occur in my corpus in descriptions of neighbouring dialects, resorting to dialects further afield only when drawing a blank nearer home. The hope is that this provides a first step down the road of a comparative study of the vocabulary of the Arabian peninsula. Since, however, many ‘core’ dialect items are also ‘core’ in other dialects, near or far, with meanings which are substantially the same, I have not troubled to put in a reference section for them as they will be quite familiar to my anticipated readership.

guidance notes

liii

Where it seemed useful, I have included references to works which are historical, sociological, or anthropological studies of Bahrain and neighbouring areas. These references concern historical incidents, customs, practices and beliefs mentioned by speakers in the texts, some of which will form part of Volume II of this study. Works are cited by an abbreviation and page reference, followed either by the word in italics from the dialect in question which is related to the Bahraini headword, or simply idem to indicate the occurrence of exactly the same word. If no translation follows idem, the user is to assume that the meaning as well as the form of the word is identical, or virtually so, to the Bahraini headword; otherwise, the meaning of the word is given in roman. If, on the other hand, an Arabic word is given in italics after the page reference, followed by idem in roman, this means that, although the forms of the words in Bahraini Arabic and the dialect quoted are different, the meaning is the same or virtually so. In long entries, or in some shorter entries in order to make things as clear as possible, the cross-references to other dialects follow directly the particular sense to which they refer; otherwise cross-references are grouped together at the end of an entry.

liv

l

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

D¢mist¸n Ýajar al-{Ikur Jann¢s¸n Jidd Ýafª Jird¸b Karb¸b¸d Karr¸na Karzakk¸n al-Ma{¸mºr al-M¸lichiyya Mani Maq¸ba al-Maqsha{ al-Markh Nabºh Õ¸li¥ Nuw¹dr¸t al-Qadam Qurayya Salm¸b¸d Sam¸hºj San¸bis Sanad S¸r Õadad Shahrakk¸n ash-Sh¸kh¢ra as-Sihla T¢bli W¸diy¸n az-Zinj

¡ {Arab communities 43 {Askar 44 Budayya{ 45 al-Ýidd l Ba¥¸rna communities 46 Jaww 47 al-Jisra 1 Abu Õaybi{ 48 al-Mu¥arraq 2 {Ar¸d 49 Qal¸lº 3 {@lº 50 ar-Rif¸{ al-Gharbº 4 Barbar 51 ar-Rif¸{ al-Sharqº 5 Banº Jamra 52 Wasmiyya 6 Bil¸d al-Qadºm 53 az-Zall¸g 7 B¢rº 8 D¸r Chl¹b l¡ Mixed communities 9 ad-D¹h 54 al-Man¸ma 10 ad-D¹r 55 Madºnat {µs¸ 11 ad-Dir¸z

Map 1: Main {Arab and Ba¥¸rna communities in Bahrain, 1977-8

lv

l 1 2 3 4 5

Ba¥¸rna quarters an-Nu{¹m al-Mukh¸rga al-Ýa«ab al-Ýamm¸m R¸s ar-Rumm¸n

¡ {Arab quarters 6 al-Ý¢ra (north) 7 al-F¸¤il

l¡ Mixed area developed in the 60s and 70s 6 al-Ý¢ra (south) 8 Salm¸niyya 9 al-Guf¢l 10 al-Gu¤aybiyya – –– limit of original town

Map 2: The quarters of central Manama, 1977-8

lvi

lvii

ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS Linguistic (within slashes) adj adv ap art aux coll cond conj const coord def demon denom dim el enc expl extens fem ideo imper inan indef indir in n intens interj interrog invar masc n num neg obj part pass pers pl pp pref prep pres proc pron ps reflex

adjective adverb active participle article auxiliary collective conditional conjunction construct state coordinating definite demonstrative denominative diminutive elative enclitic expletive extensive feminine ideophone imperative inanimate indefinite indirect (object) instance noun intensive interjection interrogative invariable masculine noun numeral negative object particle passive personal plural passive participle prefix preposition presentative proclitic pronoun prefix stem ( = ‘imperfect’) reflexive

rel sing ss sub subj suff v var vi voc vt vn Other A B abus affirm arch esp euphem fig foll idem joc lit loc cit nr obs opp pej poss prec prob prov qv sarc sc sic s’one s’thing sub syn S1 S2 trad ult vulg w

relative singular suffix stem ( = ‘perfect’) subordinating subject suffix verb variant verb intransitive vocative verb transitive verbal noun {Arab usage Ba¥¸rna usage abusive affirmative archaic especially euphemism figurative following the same (form or meaning) jocular literally in the place quoted not recorded obsolete opposite pejorative possibly preceding probably proverb which see sarcastic that is to say said thus someone something under synonym 1st speaker in an exchange 2nd speaker in an exchange traditional ultimately vulgar with

lviii wt (…)

abbreviations and conventions

without contextually explanatory material (=…) clarification of pronoun reference º idiomatic extension ¶ idiomatic expressions which do not fit under any particular meaning of a word ≈ functionally equivalent to * reconstructed form Specialised vocabulary (in square brackets) agric agriculture naut nautical pearl pearling industry poet poetry Languages Ak Akkadian AI Anglo-Indian usage Aram Aramaic B Baluchi Ch Chinese CLA Classical Arabic

EgA Eng Fr Gk Har H Heb It Jap Lat Mal Man Meh MSA Pers Port Skt Soq Swe Syr T U

Egyptian Arabic English French Greek Ýars¢sº Hindi Hebrew Italian Japanese Latin Malayalam Mandaic Mehri Modern Standard Arabic Persian Portuguese Sanskrit Soqo«ri Swedish Syriac Turkish Urdu

abbreviations and conventions

lix

REFERENCES Gulf & Eastern Arabia AB (No author) Al-}Amth¸l al-Sha{biyya al-{Arabiyya, Bahrain, 1989. ANS Al-}Anª¸rº M.J. Lama¥¸t min alKhalºj al-{Arabº, Bahrain, 1970. BAH Al-Tajir M. Bahrain 1920-1945: Britain and the Administration, London, 1987. DICK Dickson H.R.P. The Arab of the Desert, London, 1949. DOS(I) Johnstone T.M. Some characteristics of the D¡sirº dialect of Arabic as spoken in Kuwait, BSOAS XXIV (1961), pp. 249-297. DOS(II) Johnstone T.M. Further studies on the D¡sirº dialect of Arabic as spoken in Kuwait, BSOAS XXVII (1964), pp. 77-113. EADS Johnstone T.M. Eastern Arabian Dialect Studies, London, 1967. GG Grosset-Grange H. Glossaire Nautique, Paris, CTHS, 1993. HAN Al-Ýanafº J. Mu{jam al-}Alf¸¬ alKuwaytiyya, Baghdad, 1964. HANZ Ýan¬al F. Mu{jam al-}Alf¸¬ al-{Ammiyya fº al-{Im¸r¸t al-{Arabiyya alMutta¥ida, U.A.E., 1978. HSN Hansen H.H. Investigations in a Shº{a Village in Bahrain, Copenhagen, 1968. J&M Johnstone T.M. & Muir J. Some nautical terms in the Kuwaiti dialect of Arabic, BSOAS XXVII, 1964, pp. 299-330. J&W Johnstone T.M. & Wilkinson J.C. Some geographical aspects of Qatar, Geographical Journal CXXVI (1960) pp. 442-450. KOC (No author) A Handbook of Kuwaiti Arabic, Kuwait Oil Company, 1951 KHUR Khuri F.I. Tribe and State in Bahrain, Chicago, 1980. KHUZ(I) Ingham B. Urban and rural Arabic in Kh¢zist¸n, BSOAS XXXVI (1973), pp. 531-553. KHUZ(II) Ingham B. Regional and social factors in the dialect geography of southern Iraq and Kh¢zist¸n, BSOAS XXXIX (1976), pp. 62-82.

MAT MUR

QAF(I) QAF(II) SARK SERJ (I)

SERJ(II) SHAM SME

TAG TAJ TIB

U&M UR(I) UR(II) YASS

Ma«ar A.A. ðaw¸hir N¸dira fº La¥aj¸t al-Khalºj al -{Arabº, Doha, 1983. Ingham B. Notes on the dialect of the @l-Murra of eastern and southern Arabia, BSOAS XLIX (1986), pp. 271-291. Qafisheh H. Gulf Arabic Intermediate Level, Arizona, 1979. Qafisheh H. Gulf Arabic—English Dictionary, NTC, 1997. Sarkis A.A. Al-Zaw¸j wa Ta«awwur Mujtama{ al-Ba¥rayn, Cairo, 1989. Serjeant R.B. Fisherfolk and fishtraps in al-Bahrain, repr in Farmers and Fishermen in Arabia, Variorum, 1995 (original pag). Serjeant R.B. Customary irrigation law among the Ba¥¸rna, in Farmers and Fishermen… (original pag) Shaml¸n S.M. Al-}Al{¸b al-Sha{biyya al-Kuwaytiyya Part 1 (alif -dh¸l), no place, 1969. Smeaton B.H. Lexical Expansion Due to Technical Change, as illustrated by the Arabic of al-Hasa, Saudi Arabia, Indiana, 1973. Shaml¸n S.M. T¸rºkh al-Ghawª {ala l-Lu}lu} fº l-Khalºj al-{Arabº (2 Vols), Kuwait, 1975-8. Al-Tajir M. Language and Linguistic Origins in al-Bahrain, London, 1982. Tibbetts G.R. Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean Before the Coming of the Portuguese, London, 1971. {Urayya¤ K.A. & Madanº S.A. Min Tur¸th al-Ba¥rayn al-Sha{bº, Beirut, n.d. {Urayfº R. Fun¢n Ba¥rayniyya, Bahrain, n.d. {Urayfº R. Al-{Im¸ra al-Ba¥rayniyya, Bahrain, 1978. Yassin M.A. Bi-polar terms of address in Kuwaiti Arabic, BSOAS XXXX (1977), pp. 297-330.

lx

references

South Arabia BRO Brockett A.A. The Spoken Arabic of Kh¸b¢ra, Manchester, 1985. CH Holes C.D. Unpublished Omani materials. DATH Landberg le C. de. Études sur les Dialectes de l’Arabie Méridionale: Dathºna. Leiden, 1905-13. DON(I) Donaldson W.J. Fishing and fishmarketing in northern Oman: a case study of artisanal fisheries development, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Durham, 1979. DON(II) Donaldson W.J. Units of counting and aggregation in Omani Arabic, JSS XXXIX (1994), pp. 87-96. GALL Galloway R.D. An Introduction to the Spoken Arabic of Oman, University of St Andrews, 1977. GLOS Landberg le C. de. Glossaire Dathînois, Leiden, 1920-42. GOI Goitein S.D.F. Jemenica, Leiden (repr.), 1970. HAD Landberg le C. de. Études sur les Dialectes de l’Arabie Méridionale: Ýa¤ramoût, Leiden, 1901. HOL Holes C.D. Towards a dialect geography of Oman, BSOAS LII (1989), pp. 446-462. IR Al-Iry¸nº M.A. Al-Mu{jam al-Yamanº fº l-Lugha wa l-Tur¸th, Damascus, 1996. OD Jayakar A.S.G. The O’manee dialect of Arabic, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1889), pp. 649-687 & 811-889. OP Jayakar A.S.G. O’manee Proverbs, Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society XXI (1904), pp. 435-498. PIA Piamenta M. A Dictionary of PostClassical Yemeni Arabic, Leiden, 1990-1. REIN Reinhardt C. Ein arabischer Dialekt gesprochen in Oman und Zanzibar, repr. Amsterdam, 1972. RHOD Rhodokanakis N. Der vulgärarabische Dialekt im Dofâr, II. Einleitung, Glossar und Grammatik, Vienna, 1911. SERJ(III) Serjeant R.B. A Socotran star calendar, in Irvine A. K., Serjeant R. B., Smith G. Rex (eds) A Miscel-

SHAH

WAT WILK

lany of Middle Eastern Articles: In Memoriam Thomas Muir Johnstone, Harlow, 1988, pp. 94-100. Jayakar A.S.G. The Shahee dialect of Arabic, Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society XXI (1904), pp. 246-277. Watson J.C.E. Õba¥t¢! A Course in Õan{¸nº Arabic, Wiesbaden, 1996. Wilkinson J. Water and Tribal Settlement in South Eastern Arabia, Oxford, 1977.

Central Arabia ABU {Ab¢dº M.N. Al-}Amth¸l al-{Ammiyya fi Najd, Riyad, 1979. DHA Ingham B. Notes on the dialect of the ðafºr of North Eastern Arabia, BSOAS XLV (1982), pp. 245-259. GLBA Landberg le C. de. Glossaire de la Langue des Bedouins {Anazeh, Uppsala, 1940. ING Ingham B. Najdi Arabic: Central Arabian, Amsterdam, 1994. KURP(I) Kurpershoek P.M. Oral Poetry and Narratives from Central Arabia I: The Poetry of al-Dind¸n, Leiden, 1994. KURP(II) Kurpershoek P. M. Oral Poetry and Narratives from Central Arabia II: The Story of a Desert Knight, Leiden, 1995. KURP(III) Kurpershoek P.M. Oral Poetry and Narratives from Central Arabia III: Bedouin Poets of the Daw¸sir Tribe, Leiden, 1999. MOD Ingham B. Modality in the Arabic Dialect of Najd in Actes des Premières Journées Internationales de Dialectologie Arabe de Paris, 1994, pp. 185-200. MUT Ingham B. Notes on the dialect of the Mu«air of E. Arabia, ZAL 2 (1979), pp. 23-35. RWA Musil A. The Manners and Customs of the Rwala Bedouins, New York, 1928. SOC Socin A. Diwan aus Centralarabien, Leipzig, 1900-1. SOW(I) Sowayan S. Naba«º Poetry, California, 1985. SOW(II) Sowayan S. The Arabian Oral Historical Narrative, Wiesbaden, 1992.

references Iraq AH AQ BAK BLA DAL ERW HALW JAS KHA KOV MEIS(I)

MEIS(II) NAK NAQ

W&B

Abu-Haidar F. Christian Arabic of Baghdad, Harrassowitz, 1991. Jastrow O. Der arabische Dialekt der Juden von {Aqra und Arbºl, Harrassowitz, 1990. Al-Bakri H. Dir¸s¸t fº al-}Alf¸¬ alMawªiliyya, Baghdad, 1972. Blanc H. Communal Dialects in Baghdad, Harvard, 1964. Dalºshº A. Al-}Al{¸b al-Sha{biyya fi Baªra, Baghdad, 1968. Erwin W.A. Short Reference Grammar of Iraqi Arabic, Georgetown, 1963. Ýalw M. Õuwar {Ir¸qiyya Mulawwana, Baghdad, 1970. Jastrow O. Die mesopotamische qeltu-Dialekte, Vol I and II, Wiesbaden, 1978 and 1981. Kh¸q¸nº A. Fun¢n al-}Adab alSha{bº, Vol I-IV, Baghdad, 1962. Kovalenko A. Le martyre de Husayn dans la Poésie Populaire d’Iraq, Geneva, 1979. Meissner B. Neurabische Gedichte aus dem Iraq, Mitteilungen des Seminars für orientalische Sprachen zu Berlin, VI, 1903, pp. 57125. Meissner B. Neuarabische Geshichten aus dem Iraq, Leipzig, 1903. Nakash Y. The Shº{ºs of Iraq, Princeton, 1994. Naqq¸sh S. Nuz¢la wa Kh¹« ilSh¹«¸n, Association for Jewish Academics from Iraq, Jerusalem, 1986. Woodhead D.R.& Beane W. A Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic: ArabicEnglish, Georgetown, 1967.

Other Arabic dialects BAR Barthélemy A. Dictionnaire ArabeFrançais, Dialectes de Syrie, Paris, 1935. DEN Denizeau C. Dictionnaire des Parlers Arabes de Syrie, Liban et Palestine, Paris, 1960. H&B Hinds M. & Badawi El-S. A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic, Beirut, 1986.

JAR PROV TAN

lxi Jargy S. La Poésie Populaire Traditionelle Chantée au Proche-Orient Arabe, The Hague, 1970. Landberg, le C. de. Proverbes et Dictons du Peuple Arabe, Leiden, 1883. Marçais W. Textes Arabes de Tanger, Paris, 1911.

Classical Arabic DOZ Dozy R. Supplément aux Dictionnaires Arabes, Leiden, 1881. HAV Hava J.G. al-Far¸}id al-Durriyya, Beirut, 1951. L Lane E.W. Arabic-English Lexicon, repr. Islamic texts Society, 1984. LA Ibn Man¬¢r. Lis¸n al-{Arab (18 vols), Qum, Iran, 1405 A.H. WR Wright W. A Grammar of the Arabic Language, Cambridge, 1896, repr 1964. Other languages and reference works AD Oppenheim A.L. et al. The Assyrian Dictionary, Chicago, 1956BROC Brockelmann C. Vergleichender Grammatik der semitischen Sprachen, Berlin, 1908-13. D&M Drower E.S. and Macuch R. A Mandaic Dictionary, Oxford, 1963. HOB Yule H. and Burnell A.C. HobsonJobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, repr. London, 1986. FE Feghali M.T. Études sur les Emprunts Syriaques dans les Parlers Arabes du Liban, Paris, 1928. FR Fraenkel S. Die aramäische Fremdwörter im Arabischen, Leiden, 1886. JOH Johnstone T.M. Ýars¢sº Lexicon, London, 1977. LES Leslau W. Lexique Socotri, Paris, 1938. PS Payne Smith J.(ed) A Compendious Syriac Dictionary, Oxford, 1903. ST Steingass F. A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, 1892, repr. Beirut, 1970.

lxii

lxiii

GLOSSARY

1

A/} A v /interrog part/ (B only) placed after the questioned element(s); in postvocalic position yv or hv. minhu, GAsim v? who, J¸sim? awlAd-iS vmSattatIn v? have your children been split up (sc between different ex-spouses)? hADa bEt-ik v? is this your house? intIn bitt-i flAna hv? are you my daughter called so-andso? lA taHrig-kum ir-ramBa yv? …so that the hot ground wouldn’t burn your feet? A-B-B-A abba-, and aba-, abA- /pref of 1st person ps indicating proximate intent/ (B only) ana baPad abba-Pazm-vh I’m going to invite him too. hADa-na aba-Jdi, aba-diSS is-sUk I’m just about to go, I’m off to market. abaJdi zAm il-vBHa u abA-GI-S I’m going off on the day-shift now, and then I’ll come back to you. KURP(II) 328: ab-, tab-, nab- etc. to want to; KHUZ(II) 81: aba- future part in Zubair (S.Iraq); GLOS 11ff: abA, tabA, yabA to want; BRO 65: bA, ybA to want, require; be about to. See also B, B-GH-Y.

A-T-R-Y-K atrIk and itrIk /n pl nr/ 1 hand-held electrical torch. 2 electric light bulb. [poet] tiSaJJil il-mawAtir lO tSibb atrIk? can you make cars go, or light electric bulbs? SHAM 111-2: hand-torch

and after 1934 light-bulb < T katrIk; HAN 61: trIk pl trIkAt electric lamp < Eng electric; SME 64: trIk pressure lantern < Sw trycklampa (= ‘pressure lantern’) written on lamp.

A-KH Ax /interj/ ouch! min VAH lA kAl “ax” wi lA “wEl” when he came off (the motor-bike) he uttered no cry of pain at all.

A-R-N-J

aranG and ParanG /n pl arAniG/ orange-tree. < Eng orange.

A-R-N-J-W-SH

aranGUS /n no pl/ 1 orange-juice. 2 soft drink. yikasmUn aranGUS u kEk they pass round soft drinks and cake (at weddings). < Eng orange-juice.

A-R-Y-F

arEf and ParEf /n no pl/ R.A.F. (Royal Air Force, formerly based in al-Mu¥arraq) hospital. mA-hum rABIn b-ywaddUn-ha s-salmAnIya, mA adri arEf they wouldn’t agree to put her in Salm¸niyya (hospital), or I don’t know (perhaps it was) the R.A.F. (hospital). SME 68: ParEf < Eng ‘R.A.F.’ (= Royal Air Force).

A-S-K-R-Y-M askrIm and PaskrIm /n/ ice-cream. HANZ 410: PaskrIm idem. < Eng ice-cream.

A-G-Z-W-Z agzUz /n/ (car) exhaust-pipe.

< Eng

exhaust.

A-L-W Alu /n no pl/ potato. yixarriz, yiRIr Sikil il-Alu it goes bead-shaped and becomes like a potato (sc it gets

2

A-M-R-Y-K-A-N – }-B-D

club-root).

EADS 57, HANZ 37,QAF(II) 1: idem; < U idem.

A-M-R-Y-K-A-N

amrIkAn 1 /coll n/ (the) Americans. CUf wEn wuRlaw l-amrIkAn! look at what the Americans have achieved! 2 /adj/ American, in certain contexts. VAgat amrIkAn a bolt of American (cloth). amrIkAni /adj/ American. mA miS illa l-amrIkAni all there was was the American (Mission Hospital). A-N-A Ana /n pl -At/ anna (Indian currency denomination used until early 1960’s in Bahrain, and still used in speech of older population). AntEn ≈ a couple of bob (lit. two annas). ana GAy atraGGa akidd arbaP AnAt I’m hoping to earn a few quid (lit. four annas (= 25 fils in current coinage)). lAkin PaSar AnAt fIha xEr! but you could buy a lot for ten annas (in those days). 1

A-N-A2 Ana /pers pron/ I. see }-N-A.

A-N-A-N-A-S

anAnAs and HanAnAs /n no pl/ pineapple. guwAVi HanAnAs tins of pineapple juice. Prob < Fr ananas pineapple.

A-N-J-R

anGar and anyar /n/ anchor.

QAF(II)

20: idem. < Eng anchor.

A-N-J-N

anGin /n pl -At/ engine. nbaVVil ilkawlin mAl il-anGin we take off the engine cowling. < Eng engine.

anGinIr /n pl nr/ mechanic.

HANZ 145:

GinIr idem. < Eng engineer.

A-Y-D-Y-N

aydIn /n no p/ iodine (for wounds, etc.) < Eng iodine. HAN 26-7 idem.

A-Y-S-Y

aysi /n pl -yyAt, aysiyya/ airconditioning unit or system. il-awwal lA Pindvna bankAt, wi lA aysiyyAt in the old days we had neither fans nor air-conditioners. < Eng A.C. (= airconditioning).

A-Y-L

Ayil and Ayl /n no pl/ 1 oil (for engines, machines, etc.). 2 petroleum. QAF(II) 1: idem. < Eng oil.

}-B-D

abad /adv/ 1 always. ana HOl abad aHUs I’m always weeding, the whole year round. 2 (with neg) never, at all. sawwi rUH-iC Cinn-iC abad mA fIC Say! pretend that there’s nothing at all the matter with you! abad mA yinHaRa they can never be counted. abad mA yistaHUn they never feel a sense of shame. abd-an /adv/ 1 totally, completely. PARfa tyawwid il-maHmil...abd-an yiSIl-vh ha-n-namUna u yigilb-vh a tornado got hold of the ship…picked it right up like this, and flipped it over. abd-an, mistAnsIn min aHsan mA kAn totally - we were as happy as can be (in reply to ‘what was it like to work for the English?’). mA iyi min Di illa abd-an mayyar il-bEt killiS as soon as he returned from that (=

}-B-R – }-B-W

pearling season) he completely restocked the house (with provisions). ING 173: abdan absolutely, completely. 2 (with neg) never, at all. mA yitkalkal SI abd-an it never leaks out. CAy awwal abd-an mA miS fi lbaHrEn in the old days, tea was completely unknown in Bahrain. mA niwist amiss sayyAra abd-an I’ve never dared to come anywhere near a car. QAF(II) 2: idem meaning 2.

}-B-R

ubra (A) and ibra (B) /n pl ubbar, ibbar/ needle. bi l-ubra yixayVUn they would sew using a needle and thread. xinG ibra eye of a needle. alHIn ubbar u adwiya these days there are vaccination needles and medicines.

}-B-L-S

iblIs /n/ Satan, the devil. mifl iblIs mihtadd fi PAfyat-i he came at me like the devil let loose. tAli yigiRR PalEh iblIs u yiVallig-ha then the devil played a trick on him (causing him to) divorce her. allah yigVaP iblIs-ik! mA tSUf tiswAt-ik? damn you, you little devil! just look at what you’ve done! HANZ 437: allah yiJarbil iblIs-ik! with similar meaning.

}-B-W

abu /n with enc pron abU- (1st sing abU-y (A), abU-yi (B)/ 1 /pl ubuhAt (A), abwa (B) / father. abwat-na galAlIf our fathers (before us) were (also) shipwrights. il-abu mA hammvh Say my father wasn’t the least bit bothered. in-nuRR mAl abU-y half of it is my father’s. abu l-bint the girl’s (= bride’s) father. abu-y il-POd my

3

grandfather. abU-y(i) informal mode of address (1) to an older male ≈ ‘dad’ (2) to a younger male ≈ ‘sonny’. igdaP abU-y! eat up, son! (said by sixty-year old man to thirtyyear old). 2 /no pl/ the main one, largest one of a set or group. fAB min Gihat abU-hum it (= the land) got flooded because of the main (drainage channel). wAHid, il-POd, ilabu one, the big one, the main one. 3 /and bu, with masc n as referent, and with foll n pl ummahAt, see also under umm / the one with the…, the one having… abu d-dAr person living in a proper house (as opposed to a palm-branch hut). ummahAt ilbarastaGAt those who live in palmbranch huts. abu z-zalaf man with side-burns. rISa mAl abu naxla a hairgrip in the shape of a palm-tree. bamb abu xams iHRAn a fivehorsepower irrigation pump. samAd abu l-Habb fertiliser in pellet form. abu fitIl hurricane lamp (lit. the one with the wick). bu PaSar ten dinar bank-note. bu RfAr jaundice. abu gurR child’s sweet lollipop (because of its shape - gurR is a flat round loaf). abu gaVu ‘ Craven-A’ cigarettes (the packet depicts a cat). abu S-SmEla pest which attacks lotus (sidr) trees, so called because it causes a embossed bracelet (SmEla)-like lesion on the leaf. abu l-fann expert, knowledgeable person. bu PagUf expearl-diver, ‘old-timer’. abu l-iHsAn generous person. abu/ bu SalAx inveterate liar, braggart. abu VbEla peripatetic drummer who formerly woke neighbourhood before first light during Ramadan. awlAd ifnEn, waHid abu falAfa snIn, u wAHid abu

4

}-B-Y – }-TH-R

sanatEn two boys, one aged three, and one two. ¶ alPan abU-h ha- : as in alPan abU-h ha-S-SaJala! what a bloody awful job this is! (lit. I curse its father, this job). ¶ abu /in constr/ used in some nicknames corresponding to certain given names, e.g. abu GAsim for mHammad, abu Pabdallah for PIsa, abu yaPgUb for yUsif, abu HsEn for Pali, abu Pali for HsEn and Hasan, abu rASid for Pabdur-raHmAn, abu hASim for Palawi, abu xalIl for ibrAhIm, abu yUsif for aHmad.

axu). 1b yAbU-y syn of yubba. 2 yAbu / foll by name of first-born child: informal mode of address used by husband to wife/ allAh yihaddI-C yAbu Hasan! behave yourself, won’t you! cf YASS 297ff.

yubba and yA yubba informal mode of address used (1) to a father or any older male ≈ ‘dad’, ‘old fellow’ (2) used by father to child, or by older persons (male or female) to younger person (male or female), or by husband to wife. SlOn-ik yA yubba wiyya S-SuJil? how are things at work, son? (father to son). git lA yubba, il-badar muhu min CIs-kum! I said, no matey, the seeds won’t be paid for by you! (older man to younger). al-HIn lA yubba, al-HIn JEr. now my dear, it’s all different. (older woman to younger woman). GLOS 10:

mAtam /n pl mawAtim, mayAtim/ Shº{º funeral house for the commemoration of the death of al-Ýusayn and other Shº{º saints. mAtam il-fatAya, mA nrUH mAtam in-niswAn we would go to the funeral house especially for girls, not the one for women.

yA yubba < abb (the ‘primitive form’ common to Aramaic, Tigrinya and other Semitic languages); cf YASS: 297ff

yAbU- 1a / foll by enc pron, which reflects gender and number of addressee: informal mode of address used by father to child or older man to younger person (male or female)/ git lA yAbU-k, ana mA fIni BrUra I said no, my young friend, there’s nothing the matter with me. (cf yumm- and yAxU- under umm and

}-B-Y

aba(i) /vi vn nr/ refuse, be recalcitrant. yiQbi, mA iGi he refuses, he won’t come. aba u istakbar he (= Satan) refused (to prostrate himself before God) and acted above his station.

}-T-M

}-T-Y

ata(i) /vi vn nr/ come towards, make for. kil mA hiGsat iB-Barb wi t-tamSIk, hi atat barr the more it (= whale) felt it was being beaten and sliced up (on the inside), the more it made for dry land. taQti barr JAdi it made straight for dry land. BRO 49: ta, yAti to come, bring; CH: idem commonly used in Jabal Akh¤ar region of Oman; CLA QatA to come. See also }-D-Y.

}-TH-R

aTar and Pafar (B) /n pl ATAr/ 1 track, trace. hAy bani ParrAf illi yiguRRUn il-aTar? is (what you’re referring to) the same bani ParrAf (qv) who are (famous as) trackers? 2 effect. wES aTar-vh? what effect does it (= fertiliser) have?

}-TH-L – }-J-L1

Pafar /adv/ (B villages only, < QaTar) perhaps, probably. Pafar hi fi bEt vxt-i I think she’s at my sister’s house. alHIn Pafar iGi aCfar min ifnaPSar sana min twaffa abU-yi it’s probably about twelve years now since my father died.ºawlAd il-Pafar (joc) those who say Pafar (= the Ba¥¸rna). W&B 31: QaTAri it seems that, it turns out; MEIS(II) 112: QaTArI I think; DATH 493-5: aTAri it appears that.

PafarAt var of Pafar (qv), (B villages only) /adv with enc pron/ perhaps, maybe. il-awwal ana PafarAt-hum iwaddUn...al-HIn Pafar mA iwaddUn in the old days I think perhaps they used to take them… now I don’t think they do. DATH 494: idem.

}-TH-L

aTal /coll n/ type of underwater vegetation. Sayar il-aTal aTal bushes. HAV 14: tamarisk; W&B 4: tamarisk.

iTla /in n/ of aTal. aSyAr iTla aTal bushes.

}-J-J

aGGaG /vt/ cause, stir up (trouble). hAy illi aGGaGat wakPat PAli that was what caused the incident at {@lº. Cf L 23: QaGGaGa Sarran he kindled mischief.

}-J-R

maQGUr /adj/ greeting to one engaged in any productive activity such as farming (lit may you be rewarded (sc by God)). aGAr /n pl -At/ 1 rent payment. tsUg liha aGAr you have to pay her rent. 2 rented property. bEt-na aGAr we live in a rented house.

5

aGar /n no pl/ pay, recompense. illadi yaPmalUn l-aGar yisawwi lvh maksab fi l-Ganna he who earns his pay (in this life) earns himself a reward in the next. iGra /n pl -At/ 1 wages, pay. xaD iGrat-vh u sallam salAm he took his pay and cleared off. kImat iGrat illi yiStvJil Pindi mA aPVi iyyAha I won’t even give her the same wages as those who work for me. yiParf iVVabIb inna iGrat-vh kalAm the doctor realised that the reward for his work would be just words. 2 fare. yAxiD PalEk iGra he (= truck-driver) will charge you a fare (for giving you a lift). aGGar /vt/ 1 let (a house) to s’one. min iyUn il-xawAriG, mAl l-idyAr RAraw yiQaGrUn l-ibyUt PalEhum since the foreigners have come, those who live in villages have started letting houses to them. 2 lease, rent (a house). il-awwal baPad mub miTil alHIn... Vallagt-ha, gAlaw lAzim tiQaGGir liha bEt the old days were not like now… (in those days) if you divorced your wife, people said you must rent her a house.

}-J-L1

aGal and PaGal, Payal (A) /part w various functions/ 1 affirmation ≈ yes, of course. E, b-asawwi, PaGal, lA?! yes, of course I’ll do it! 2a conclusion of one subject, start of another ≈ right! habbO-h...lEn ibirzaw, gAlaw Payal bArzIn! they cleaned it (= ship’s hull)…when they’d finished, they said ‘right! we’re all set!’ 2b consequence,

6

}-J-L2 – }-KH-DH

inference ≈ so, then. PaGal tiSrab gahwa? so (that means) you drink Arab coffee then? (addressee had shown he knew Arabic). JadEna bEt bu PumrAnaw, gAl mA Sifna aHad... PaGal Jada wEn v? we went round (looking for him) to Bu {Umr¸n’s and he said ‘I haven’t seen anyone’ so where on earth could he have gone? Payal SlOn? ... fi DAk iz-zaman hast nAs itbUg so why (did he do that)? because, in those days, there were people who stole. 2c concessive ≈ but, however. gAl “gUmi sawwi lEna finGAl”, yaPni hu yikRid ila l-CAy, aGal maratt-vh tiPruf tisawwi fanAGIl... he said ‘go and make us a cup’, meaning tea, but his wife knew how to make cups…EADS 70, 108, 129,

178, 182,192,194, 232, 241,244, 247, 251 with similar ranges of meaning; HAN 265-6, HANZ 428: Payal d’you think, suppose?

}-J-L2

aGal /n/ sake. bass aGal-i hAda xARR b-asawwi liyyi just for my own sake I’m going to do it.

}-Ý-D

aHad and Had /n/ 1 someone, anyone. /w prec lA or mA/ no-one. mA aPruf aHad I don’t know anyone. nawAVir Pan lA yibUg aHad l-vgmAS (they put) watchmen so that no-one could steal the pearls. lA aHad yitHaCCa! let noone speak! - maHHad no-one: see sub M-A3. 2 (yOm) il-aHad Sunday. il-aHadAniyya /n/ (B villages) Sunday. iHdaPSar /n/ eleven. sAPa PaSar u nuRR, iHdaPsar at ten-thirty or eleven o’clock.

}-Ý-N-A

iHna /pers pron/ we.

}-KH-DH

axaD and xaD or xaDa, yAxiD (A); axad, yAxid (B) /vt and vi vn axD ap mAxiD pp mAxUD / -/vt/ 1 take, take away, remove. axaD iS-SanVa he took the bag. xiD hADa wiyyAk take this with you. axaDaw rUH-hum u VlaPu they took themselves off and went out. 2 get, obtain. mAxDIn fikra mub zEna Pan il-madAris they’ve got a bad impression of (government) schools. axad raQy-iS lO mA axad-vh? did he ask your opinion or not? lAzim yAxiD gOl! he must score (a goal)! 3 grab, take hold of. ila tHaCCat, xaDv-ha Vaggv-ha whenever she spoke, he grabbed hold of her and belted her. 4 attack, set about. gumt AxD-vh bi RRaxxIn I set about it (earth) with a spade. 5 take, spend (time). yAxiD lI subUP, subUPEn that takes me a week or two. min ParrisEt, xaDEt liyyi TalATIn sana it’s thirty years since I got married. 6 use, resort to, dip into. lEn RAdv-na l-Harr wAyid, xaDEna lmahaffa when it got really hot, we used hand-fans. ha-T-TalATIn rubbiya nAxiD fIha Sahar wAHid we’d dip into those thirty rupees over the course of a month. 7 eat, devour. iR-RarRUr yiniSS PalEk fI wEh-ik u inta tAxiD tamra cockroaches would fly up in your face as you were eating a date. xaDa nuRR warC-vh it (shark) devoured half his thigh. 8 buy. bi Cam axaDt-vh? how much did you buy it for? axaD-ha raxIR he bought it cheaply. 9 charge (money). yAxiD PalEk iGra he’ll charge you a fare (or a fee). Cam tAxiD PalEh? how much

}-KH-R

do you want for it? 10 marry. axadt niswAn fintEn I took two wives. hAda zOG-i lO darEt bvh, mA axadt-vh. if I’d known what this husband of mine was like, I wouldn’t have married him. axad umm-ik Pala gallat tamr he married your mother for (a dowry of) a sack of dates. -/vi/ 11 take to, flourish in. naggalnA-h u lA axad Pala arB-ha we transplanted it, but it didn’t take in its (new) plot. 12 penetrate, go in. iR-RaxxIn wAl biha tAxiD the spade would hardly go in. ¶ xallI-C mA tifPal Say, in-nAs tAxiD bi l-alsina even if you’ve done nothing, people take notice of gossip. twAxaD /vi/ fight one another. byitwAxDOn Hagg iV-VamaP they would fight each other out of sheer greed.

}-KH-R

Axar /adj fem uxra pl -In/ other. maHall Axar another place. Axir /n/ 1a /w foll indef n/ the last. Axir wAHid the last one. Axir saPya the final running (= pilgrimage ritual) 1b /w foll def n/ the last or latter part of. fi Axir iz-zamAn recently. zAm Axir il-lEl night-shift. 2 Axir /adv/ and Axir in /conj/ in the end, when finally. lEn Axir yaw, tammaw kil wAHid yidAbiS min mukAn li mukAn when finally they came back (from pearling), each one would run around from one place to another (searching for other work). Axir in vhuwwa Valab min allah an yinAzP-vh Pan DElEn, mA yirBUn when finally he asked God to set him (= Satan) apart from them (= the angels), they refused. 3 /interj/ used to accept an offer in bargaining.

7

bagara Hakka lO mA taHlib, wES itsawwi fIha?! kilt ana “Axir!” (he said ) ‘a cow, even if one that gives no milk - what use to you is that?’ I said ‘OK (I will accept that)!’ Axra /n/ 1 upshot, outcome. Axrat-ha baPad mA tammamO-h the upshot was that they didn’t complete it. hADi Axrat-ha... ir-rayyAl yiRbaH mara, wi l-mara tiRbaH rayyAl! so it’s finally come to this… men are becoming women, and women men! 2 end part of s’thing. Axrat mvQaxxirat-ha fIh ubra at the end of its (sc sting ray’s) tail, there’s a needle. Axri /adj/ final, last. ana l-Axriyya, ilaxIra killiS. I was the last (to get married), the very last. ana l-Axriyya I was the last (of my siblings to be born). axIr /adj/ final. il-axIr finally. axxar and waxxar /vt and vi/ -/vt/ 1 hold back, keep back (money, food). awaxxir Pala nafis-na, azayyid-hum I stint on my own family and increase (what I give) them. [poet] nOV Pugub nOV, mA axxirEt (I coughed up) note after note, I held nothing back (of the dowry). 2 delay. lA tiQaxxir iV-VawwAS don’t hold up the pearl-merchant. -/vi/ 3 move aside, out of the way. waxxir Panni! get out of my way! W&B 490, HANZ 113: idem remove, clear away, move aside.

mvQaxxira /n pl -At/ tail, end, posterior.

8

}-KH-W – }-D-B

taQaxxar and twaxxar /vi/ 1 be late, go beyond appointed time. ha-s-sana taQaxxarat il-HurUra wAyid this year the hot weather has gone on longer than usual. taQaxxart Palay wAyid you’ve kept me waiting a long time. 2 be old fashioned. lA tgUlIn Hagg aHad tara yiFHak PalEC, u yigUl inn-iC mitQaxra al-HIn don’t say that to anyone or they’ll laugh at you and say you’re behind the times. 3 twaxxar = axxar meaning 3.

}-KH-W

ax /n w enc pron axU (1st sing axU-y (A), axU-yi (B)) pl ixwa and axwa (both B), ixwAn (A and B)/ brother. hADElA ixwat-i those are my brothers. waPPa ixwAn-vh he woke up his brothers. wald axU-yi my nephew. bint axU-yi my nieceº il-ax polite address form to a male interlocutor il-ax inglIzi? are you English? yA xUy familiar address form to a male age equal ≈ ‘my friend’. ax-un PazIz polite greeting, or greeting response to a male age or social equal. S1: (answering knock) min? S2: xAdim-k! S1: ax-un PazIz! S1: who’s that? S2: your servant! S3: (no you’re a) dear brother! yAxU- (some A speakers yAxI- ) /foll by enc pron reflecting gender and number of interlocutor: informal mode of address given by male to an age equal (male or female)/ faBIl mA Pindna yAxU-k I haven’t any to spare my friend. iRbir yAxU-k, il-wAHid mA yikUm nOba waHda! be patient, my friend, no-one succeeds straightaway! yAxwayy- as yAxU-, but given by age superiors to age inferiors (male or

female). S1: il-awwal yigUlUn yigasmUn samaC... inta laHagt PalEh, ayyAm is-samaC? S2: wallah, yAxwayy-ik, mA gassamt is-samaC. S1: they say that in the old days they used to share out fish (in a neighbourhood)… did you ever experience that, the time when they used to give out fish? S2: my dear young friend, I never shared out fish. cf YASS: 297ff.

uxt and xit /n pl xawAt / sister. ºil-xit polite address form to a female interlocutor (cf il-ax) il-xit mita daxaltIn maHw il-ummiyya? you, sister, when did you start coming to literacy classes? yA xt-i and yA xwayt-i familiar address form to female age equal. wi l-bint, yA xwayti, isim-ha nUra and the daughter’s name, my dear, was N¢ra. yAxt- /foll by enc pron reflecting gender and number of interlocutor: informal mode of address given by a female to an age equal (male or female)/ yAxwayt- similar in use to yAxt- but used by an age superior to age inferior. yallah yAxwayt-iC, imSay daffat-iC! come on, little sister, get a move on! cf YASS 297ff.

}-D-B

addab /vt/ correct s’one’s behaviour, chastise. mA twAfig Pala taQdIb-vh she won’t agree to him being shown the error of his ways. il-awwal PiyAl-hum muQaddabIn, niswAn-hum muQaddabIn in the old days the children were well behaved, the women were well behaved.

}-D-M – }-D-Y

taQaddab /vi/ behave oneself. [poet] yitQaddab aw aSPal wAld-vh bi n-nAr! he’d better behave or I’ll give him hell! (lit set fire to his father).

}-D-M

IdAm (A), UdAm and widma (B) /n pl nr/ fish or meat as an accompaniment to rice. S1: il-yOm Sinhu IdAm-iC? S2: il-yOm wallah Pindvna nitfat hAmUr. S1: what did you have for lunch today? S2: today we had a bit of grouper-fish. trUH is-sUg, trUH tyIb IdAm you’d go to the market, you’d go and get some fish. PES vb widmatvh, lAzim widma. (we’d have) rice with something to go with it, there had to be (meat or rice) to go with it. mA Pindvna UdAm, niTlaP lEna vHla nitrayyag bvh. if we didn’t have any fresh meat or rice, we’d get some dried fish and breakfast on that. HANZ 658: widAm, IdAm food, sustenance; KURP(II) 467: liquid sheep’s butter; SERJ(I) 509: iydAm fish fetching the lowest prices in the market; HAV 5: QidAm daily sustenance, condiment.

yaddam (A) and waddam (B) /vt/ 1 partake of a meal. mA tyaddim! come on, you’re not eating anything! 2 present a guest with the choicest portions of meat or fish (IdAm). 3 catch fish, get a ‘bite’. mA waddamt Say? have you caught anything? KHUZ(I) 538: yaddam he ate a meal; meaning 2 poss < qaddam via y