Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia, Volume III: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Style (Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 1: The Near and Middle East / Handbuch der Orientalistik, 51) [Annotated] 9004302638, 9789004302631

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Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia

Handbook of Oriental Studies Handbuch der Orientalistik section one

The Near and Middle East Edited by Maribel Fierro (Madrid) M. Şükrü Hanioğlu (Princeton) Renata Holod (University of Pennsylvania) Kees Versteegh (Nijmegen)

VOLUME 51-3

Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia Volume III: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Style

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ho1

Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia

Volume Three: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Style By

Clive Holes

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress control number: 00051896

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0169-9423 isbn 978-90-04-30263-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-31110-7 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. 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. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents General Introduction vii Acknowledgements xi Volume III: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Style xiii Map 1 and Key xiv Map 2 and Key xv Abbreviations and Conventions xvi References xviii 1 Communities, Histories, and Dialects in Bahrain and the Wider Gulf 1 1.1 Communities 1 1.2 Historical Memory, Real and Imagined 6 1.3 Language History 10 1.4 Core and Periphery 32 1.5 Eastern Arabia and Central Asia 41 1.6 Summary and Conclusions 48 2 Phonology 50 2.1 Phoneme Inventory: Consonants 50 2.2 Phoneme Inventory: Vowels 65 2.3 The Syllable 69 2.4 Consonant Clusters 71 2.5 Stress 76 2.6 Phonotactics 76 3 Morphology (I) 81 3.1 Pronouns 81 3.2 Adverbs 100 3.3 Particles 103 3.4 Nouns 116 3.5 Adjectives 128 3.6 The Construct State 130 3.7 Nunation (tanwīn) 131 3.8 Numerals 134

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4 Morphology (II) 138 4.1 Verb Patterns and Stems: Active Voice 138 4.2 The Internal (‘Apophonic’) Passive 166 4.3 Quadriliterals 168 4.4 Inflectional Morphology 184 4.5 The Strong Verb: Imperative 201 4.6 The Strong Verb: Participles 202 4.7 The Verbal Noun 204 4.8 The Geminate Verb 209 4.9 The Weak Verb 209 4.10 Irregular Verbs 211 5 Syntax 213 5.1 The Noun Phrase (NP) 213 5.2 The Verb Phrase (VP) 227 5.3 Agreement 326 5.4 Word Order 354 5.5 Clause Co-ordination 369 5.6 Subordinate Noun Clauses 374 5.7 Relative Clauses 387 5.8 Clauses of Reason 391 5.9 Clauses of Purpose and Result 393 5.10 Clauses of Comparison and Degree 397 5.11 Conditional and Time Clauses 402 6 Style in Spoken Discourse 434 6.1 Involving the Listener/ Interlocutor 435 6.2 Narrative Techniques 447 6.3 Dramatization 458 6.4 Affect 463 7 Some Trends in Dialectal Change Since the Mid-1970s 467 7.1 Sociolinguistic Studies of Bahrain of the 1970s 467 7.2 The Work of al-Qouz (2009) 469 7.3 Further Observations Post-1970s 474 Further addenda and corrigenda to Volume 1 479

General Introduction The aim of Dialect, Culture and Society in Eastern Arabia is to give a detailed description of the Arabic dialects and culture of the island state of Bahrain of the pre-oil era, as spoken and remembered by uneducated Bahrainis who were aged forty or over in the mid-1970s. The linguistic description contained in Volume 1: Glossary, (2001) and the present Volume 3: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Style, is based on an extensive archive of recorded material, gathered for its ethnographic as well as its purely linguistic interest. Topics covered in Volume 2: Ethnographic Texts (2005) 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. The original project out of which this study grew was a sociolinguistic enquiry into generational language change in Bahrain, the results of which were extensively reported in the 1980s and 1990s in book- and article-length publications. The present three-volume study is devoted exclusively to the language and culture of the least educated half of the original population sample1: 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 waxwork 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 bowdlerized and modernized to make it intelligible to the younger generation—for television docu-soaps with nostalgic titles like Firǧān L-Awwal (‘The Neighborhoods of the Old Days’) and il-Bēt il-ˁŌd (‘The Big (i.e. extended-family) 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 forty years ago, zād il-xēr u qallat il-anāsa ‘we’re better off these days, but life isn’t so much fun’.

1 It is thus radically different from my earlier books Gulf Arabic, Routledge, 1990, and Colloquial Arabic of the Gulf, 2nd edition, Routledge, 2010 (1st edition 1984). These two books were both based solely on the Gulf Arabic spoken by educated speakers.

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general introduction

The speaker sample for this study consists of approximately one hundred uneducated native speakers, divided approximately equally by sex and sectarian allegiance into ˁArab (= indigenous Bahraini Sunnīs) and Baḥārna (= indigenous Bahraini Shīˁa), 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 Bahrainis known to the interlocutors—usually 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, oddjob men, cleaners, messengers, small shop-keepers and market traders, usually interviewed at their places of work. 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 xurāfāt (‘old wives’ stories’) and ḥazāwi (‘folk tales’), and some of the ˁArab men told jokes, riddles, and anecdotes which they claimed had some historical basis and which were often studded with verses of dialect poetry and adages 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 ˁArab dialect in the series Tamṯīliyyat il-Usbūˁ (‘the Weekly Play’), and two half-hour comedies in the Manāma Baḥārna dialect performed by the wellknown Shīˁī comedians Jāsim Khalaf and Ṣāliḥ al-Madanī in the series Aḥmad ibn Aḥmad ibn Aḥmad wa l-Ḥaǧǧī ibn il-Ḥaǧǧī ibn il-Ḥaǧǧī (‘Ahmad son of Ahmad son of Ahmad, and the Pilgrim son of the Pilgrim son of the Pilgrim’), plus two interviews of personal reminiscences, one with the comedian Jāsim Khalaf, and the other with an illiterate Sunnī former stone-cutter and singer on a pearling boat. Both of these interviews were in the series ˁAla Ṭarīq 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 Madanī) semi-scripted, provided excellent examples of certain types of data—particularly arguments between family members and friends, albeit fictitious ones—which occurred

general introduction

ix

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 radio interviews. In my judgment, 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 late Sunnī Bahraini dialect poet ˁAbdurraḥmān Rafīˁ, originally published in written form under the title Qaṣāˀid Shaˁbiyya (‘Popular Odes’), and subsequently recorded by him on tape, with some additional material, such as il-ˁArab Mā Khallaw Shay (‘There’s Nothing the Arabs Haven’t Done’), and half-a-dozen long poems in the munāḏ ̣ ara (‘debate’) genre by various well-known Baḥārna poets from Bahrain (all now dead) which form part of a Gulf-wide collection of Shīˁī verse first published in Bahrain in 1955 and entitled Tanfīh al-Khawāṭir fi Salwat al-Qāṭin wa l-Musāfir (‘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. Although, particularly in the case of the Shīˁī 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 Volume 1: Glossary I have been careful to mark examples taken from poetry ([poet]) to distinguish them from ordinary speech. Although the present work is based on field-work conducted in Bahrain in 1977–78, subsequent lengthy periods of residence and field-work in the Gulf, especially in Oman, 1985–7, and frequent visits to Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Yemen and Iraq over the last thirty years have provided me with an updated regional context for my dialect researches. This will be particularly evident in the present volume, in which, as well as giving a lengthy synchronic description of their structure as they were in the 1970s, I attempt to relate the Bahraini dialects historically and geographically to those of southern Iraq, central and southern Arabia, and to the central Asian Arabic dialects, with some attention to ancient substrate features (Chapter 1). In the final chapter, I briefly summarize how the Bahraini dialects have evolved since the original work for this study was done in the 1970s, as elaborated in more recent work on these dialects (notably al-Qouz 2009). 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 standardized vocabulary of

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general introduction

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 links with the pre-Islamic cultures of eastern Arabia, Mesopotamia and even further afield. 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 complementary to, and supportive of, that of archaeology and the written historical record.

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: the late ˁAlī Ibrāhīm Hārūn of Banī Jamra village, then one of the agricultural advisers to village farmers at the Agricultural Experimental Research Station, Budayyaˁ, and ˁĪsā al-ˁArādī of ˁArād village, then an employee of the Ministry of Information. ˁAlī 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 skillfully transformed by him, once business was done, into relaxed occasions for coffee, dates and sawālif 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 in the pragmatics of social interaction and the dynamics of village life. ˁAlī was also a tireless helper in the 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 this study is based. Equal in importance in the successful execution of my work was ˁĪsā, who not only introduced me to his elderly relatives in ˁArād, but was no less of a help than ˁAlī in transcribing recordings of speakers, especially the women, from both sides of the sectarian divide. This was a Herculean task on which we laboured together for hundreds of hours. ˁĪsā who is himself a graduate in, and lifetime student of the Arabic language, has an insatiable curiosity about the dialects of eastern Arabia and their history, and provided me with a great

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acknowledgements

deal of detail and insight on aspects of the morphology of the Bahraini dialects which were inevitably only partially revealed by the linguistically unstructured nature of a tape-recorded corpus. 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 Ḥasan al-Mehrī, at that time Director General of Education, and his ministerial colleague Saˁīd Ṭabbāra; Graham Ness, then British Council Representative and his wife Jenny; and Ḥusayn Ḍayf and the late Aubrey Jumˁa, both then teachers at the British Council. Thanks also to the late Jāsim Sharīda of Bahrain Radio who gave me copies of radio plays and other broadcast materials, and to the Director of Bahrain Television, Khālid al-Dhawādī, for generously providing me with copies of recent video docu-soaps 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 Shawqī al-Zayyānī for very kindly providing me with a base in Manāma in which to live and share his company for the whole period of my field-work. Shawqī 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 much of this study has been written. I am also very grateful to my wife Deidre for her constant encouragement and interest, and her expert computer assistance. 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, not a student of his nor even a member of his university. This book is dedicated to his memory.

Volume III: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Style

∵

Map 1: Main ʿArab and Baḥārna communities in Bahrain, 1977–1978

Map 2: The quarters of central Manama, 1977–1978

Abbreviations and Conventions Linguistic BA Bahraini Arabic A ˁArab (community and dialects) B Baḥārna (community and dialects) AU ˁArab Urban (dialects) AV ˁArab Village (dialects) BU Baḥārna Urban (dialects) BV Baḥārna Village (dialects) OA Old Arabic CLA Classical Arabic MSA Modern Standard Arabic adj adv ap aux coll com comp COMP conj const coord d def dim el enc f imp indef indir interrog

adjective adverb active participle auxiliary collective common complementiser complement conjunction construct (state) coordinating direct definite diminutive elative enclitic feminine imperative indefinite indirect interrogative

intrans invar m n neg NP obj p-stem part pass pers poss pp pref prep pron pl reflex s-stem sng subord subj suff trans v var vn VP

intransitive invariable masculine noun negative Noun Phrase object prefix-stem particle passive personal possessive passive participle prefix preposition pronoun plural reflexive suffix stem singular subordinating subject suffix transitive verb variant verbal noun Verb Phrase

Languages Aram Akk Eng Fr H Pers

Aramaic Akkadian English French Hindi Persian

abbreviations and conventions

Port Syr T U Other cf esp idem fig lit obs pearl poet poss prob qv sc sic s’one s’thing sub ult vulg ≈

Portuguese Syriac Turkish Urdu compare with especially the same (form or meaning) figurative literally obsolete pearl-diving poetry possibly probably which see that is to say said thus someone something under ultimately vulgar equivalent to

xvii

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xx CDA CF CH COH COM CORR COW DAHL DATH DCSEA I DCSEA II D&M DEN DHA DICK DIEM DNA

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Holes C.D. Form X of the verb in the Arabic dialects of Eastern Arabia, in Khan G. (ed.) Semitic Studies in Honour of Edward Ullendorff, Brill, Leiden, 2005, 115–125. HOL5 Holes C.D. Retention and loss of the passive verb in the Arabic dialects of northern Oman and eastern Arabia, JSS 43/2 (1998), 347–362. HOL6 Holes C.D. A participial infix construction of eastern Arabia – an ancient pre-conquest feature? in Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 38 (2011), 75–98. HOL7 Holes C.D. Word order and textual function in Gulf Arabic, in Owens J. & Elgibali A. (eds.) Information Structure in Spoken Arabic, Routledge, London, 2010, 61–74. HOL8 Holes C.D. The Arabic dialects of Oman in a socio-historical perspective, in ZAL 31 (1996), 34–56. HOL9 Holes C.D. Reflexes of CLA qad and qaṭ in the Arabic dialects of eastern and central Arabia, in Aspects of the Dialects of Arabic Today (Proceedings of the 4th Conference of AIDA), Marrakesh, 2000, 88–97. HOL10 Holes C.D. An Arabic text from Ṣūr, in HOL & de J (qv), 87–107. HOL11 Holes C.D. Towards a dialect geography of Oman, in BSOAS LII (1989), 446–462. HOL12 Holes C.D. Kashkasha and the fronting and voicing of the velar stops revisited: a contribution to the historical phonology of the peninsular Arabic dialects, in Kaye A. (ed.) Semitic Studies in Honor of Wolf Leslau Volume I, Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1991, 652–678. HOL13 Holes C.D. The ‘mixed’ Arabic of the letters of 19th and early 20th century Gulf rulers’ in Lentin J. & Grand’Henry J. (eds.) Moyen Arabe et Variétés Mixtes de l’Arabe à travers l’Histoire, Peeters, Louvain, 2008, 193–229. HOL14 Holes C.D. Language and identity in the Arabian Gulf, in Journal of Arabian Studies 1/2 (2011), 129–145. HOL & Holes C.D. & Abu Athera S.S. Poetry and Politics in Contemporary ABU1 Bedouin Society, Ithaca, Reading, UK & AUC Press, Cairo, 2009. HOL & Holes C.D. & Abu Athera S.S. The Nabaṭī Poetry of the UAE, Ithaca, ABU2 Reading, 2011. HOL & de J Holes C.D. & de Jong R. (eds.) Ingham of Arabia: A Collection of Articles Presented as a Tribute to the Career of Bruce Ingham, Brill, Leiden, 2013.

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WEB WELL WETZ WILK WILK2 WILM WKAS WR YAS YASS ZIM ZAY

CHAPTER 1

Communities, Histories, and Dialects in Bahrain and the Wider Gulf This introductory chapter sets the historical and social scene, regionally and locally, for the linguistic description of the Arabic dialects of Bahrain which follows in Chapters 2 to 6. The final chapter, Chapter 7, provides a sketch of how the Bahraini dialects have evolved since the original field-work (1977–78) on which the description in Chapters 2 to 6 is based. 1.1 Communities Special terms for distinct communities in Bahrain and the wider Gulf were part of common parlance at the time the fieldwork for this study was conducted, and most of them remain current. Some were briefly defined in Volumes 1 and 2 of this study, but will be revisited in a little more detail here: 1.1.1 The ˁArab ‘ˁArab’ (in Bahraini Arabic ˁarab, occasionally ˁirbān) is one of a set of mutually exclusive community descriptors, of which the other principal ones in Bahrain are ‘Baḥārna’ (baḥārna), ‘Ḥwala’ (ḥwala) and ‘ˁAǧam’ (ˁaǧam). In Bahraini and Gulf parlance more widely, the term ˁArab denotes Arabic-speaking Gulf communities which can trace their genealogy (or claim they can) to the formerly nomadic bedouin tribes of central Arabia (Najd). All of the major ruling families of the Gulf States, including the Āl Khalīfa of Bahrain, are ˁArab in this sense, as is much of their population. The Gulf ˁArab are all, seemingly without exception, Sunnīs. At the time of this research, the largest proportion of the Bahraini ˁArab lived in distinct, named quarters ( firīǧ, pl firgān) of the larger towns of Bahrain, Manāma and Muḥarrag, and the others in smaller, exclusively ˁArab townships and villages: Budayyaˁ, al-Ḥidd, Galāli, East and West Rifāˁ, Zallāg, Jisra, Wasmiyya, Jaww, and ˁAskar (see maps). The Najdidescended ˁArab of Bahrain have to a considerable degree (though not at the upper echelons of society) merged with the other main Sunnī element in the population, the Ḥwala (see 1.1.3 below), and are in dress and speech virtually indistinguishable from them, at least in Manāma and Muḥarrag. However, the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004302631_002

2

CHAPTER 1

population of some of the smaller and more isolated ˁArab settlements listed above was still at the time of this research of purely Najdi origin, and this still shows to a certain degree in their speech, as we shall see. The age-old pattern of the residential segregation of the ˁArab and Baḥārna has continued in more recent times in new settlements such as Isa Town, built in the 1960s and 70s and Hamad Town, developed from the mid-1980s.1 Employment patterns used also to be distinct: in the pre-oil era, the ˁArab dominated the pearling industry at every level from the financiers and boatowners to the pearl merchants and down to the impoverished diving crews, whilst agriculture and cottage industries such as pottery and weaving were exclusively Baḥārna occupations. There seems to be no sng noun corresponding to ‘ˁArab’ when used in its local sense: they are referred to collectively as il-ˁarab, and if one wishes to describe an individual, one says ǝhuwwǝ min il-ˁarab, lit ‘He is from the (tribal) Arabs’, because the sng noun/ adjective ˁarabī would be interpreted as referring either to the Arabic language or, adjectivally, to ‘(pan-)Arab’ in a more inclusive set of senses. In Bahrain, the term is used both by the ˁArab to selfreference, and by non-ˁArab in reference to them, but in everyday contexts, it is often used by the ˁArab themselves as a synonym for ‘men’ (rayāyīl) or even just ‘people in general’ (nās), as in these examples: činn-ah fi gargūr gāˁidīn . . . ˁarab wāyid u hawa ṣalīb ‘It was as if we were crammed into a fish-trap . . . lots of men and a galeforce wind’ (in a description of a storm at sea and men rescued from a shipwreck) mā miš ˁarab il-lēla ‘There aren’t any people (on the street) tonight’ (remark made to me when walking through the town of Muḥarrag one evening in Ramadan) al-ḥīn ˁarab ǝdrisat u taṭawwarat ‘These days, people have got educated and become more sophisticated’ (woman talking at an illiteracy-eradication centre) 1  GENG 40 n 13, writing on the current situation, notes: ‘My own 2009 mass survey gives some additional substance to Holes’s observations [sc on the degree of sectarian segregation]. There, only 25% of surveyed districts were not exclusive either to Sunnī or Shīˁī, and of these mixed areas, one half was confined to two urban developments. Excluding these, the survey uncovered just thirteen other ethnically mixed blocks across the remainder of the island, amounting to just 11% of the 119 total multiple-respondent districts.’

Communities, Histories, and Dialects in Bahrain

3

But derivatives of the term can carry other social meanings, depending on who is using them. A semi-literate village woman of the Baḥārna community made the following observation when being interviewed about how things have changed in Bahrain: mā istaˁrab il-awādim illa l-ḥīn ‘It’s only recently that people have become “ˁArab-ized” ’ The Pattern X verb istaˁrab means here ‘to behave like a member of the ˁArab community’, which in the context referred to the fashion for the public celebration of weddings in western-style hotels, something which was unheard of in Bahrain before the late 1960s, but had been pioneered by well-heeled members of the ˁArab community and was spreading, at the time in the mid-1970s when this remark was made, to the speaker’s own community, the Baḥārna. 1.1.2 The Baḥārna ‘Baḥārna’ (baḥārna) is the other key communal label, which, like the term ˁArab, is used by all in Bahrain. It is the pl of baḥrānī, literally ‘one who comes from Bahrain’ but in Bahrain it is used only to refer to the indigenous, nontribalised, Arabic-speaking ‘Twelver’ Shīˁī population of the islands, who are its largest ethno-social group. Baḥārna and ˁArab are thus mutually exclusive terms: you cannot be both.2 Like the term ˁArab, the term Baḥārna is not exclusive to Bahrain either, as communities carrying this name can be found in every Gulf state. Some of them are relatively recent migrants from the Bahrain islands, but others may be the descendants of ancient Baḥārna populations that had been living in other areas of the Gulf coast for many centuries, as mediaeval ‘Bahrain’ originally designated the whole of the Gulf coast from the mouth of the Šaṭṭ al-ˁArab waterway in southern Iraq to the Qatar peninsula. In Kuwait, there is a community of Baḥārna who migrated from Bahrain as boat-builders (galālīf ), and there are also groups living in southern Iran,3 Qatar, the UAE4 and Oman.5 The largest community of Baḥārna outside the Bahrain islands is in al-Ḥasa, the region of eastern Saudi Arabia directly oppo-

2  The word baḥrēnī pl baḥrēniyyīn, on the other hand, simply denotes anyone who carries a Bahraini passport. 3  There was at one time a large Baḥārna community in the city of Khorramshahr, also known as al-Muḥammara, which in former times was used as a bolt-hole to escape to when the rule of the Bahraini ˁArab became too oppressive. 4  ˁUbayd (IBD 35) notes an ‘old community of Baḥārna’ resident in Abu Dhabi. 5  One section of the Āl Wahība of south-eastern Oman is known as ‘al-Baḥārna’.

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site the islands in which the biggest Baḥārna-majority town is al-Qaṭīf, and to which, since 1986, Bahrain has been linked by a causeway. The modern-day Bahraini Baḥārna regard themselves as the descendants of the ‘original’ indigenous Arabic-speaking population of the islands who were there for many centuries—some Baḥārna would claim a millennium or more—before the arrival of the Najdi ˁArab in the late-18th century CE, a claim which is disputed by the latter. It is unclear for how long the Baḥārna have been Shīˁī.6 A large proportion of them—perhaps the majority—still live in more than sixty small villages whose economy was based, in the late 1970s, on allotment farming and fishing and, in some villages, on cottage industries such as pottery and weaving, along with shift work for BAPCO or ALBA.7 The village Baḥārna are sometimes referred to as ḥalāyil, which means ‘livestock’ and, it seems, originally referred to the animals they kept. A Baḥārna woman from the Manāma quarter of Rās Rummān, for example, remarked to me: ana māxda min il-ḥalāyil ‘I got married to a Baḥārna villager’ There is also an adjective ḥalāylī ‘Baḥārna villager’. Nowadays, these terms are only used in reference to villagers, even though, when this research was being conducted, it was still not uncommon to see livestock being kept by urban Baḥārna in sheds and byres in their houses in Manāma. Some of the Baḥārna quarters of Muḥarrag and Manāma still carry the name of their residents’ main occupations of days gone by, e.g. il-ḥayāyīč ‘the sail makers’ (Muḥarrag), il-maxārga ‘the pearl-borers’ and is-saggāya ‘the water-sellers’ (Manāma). 1.1.3 The Ḥwala The ‘Ḥwala’ (ḥwala) were once a distinct class of the urban population of eastern Arabia. Their origins are obscure as is the etymology of their name and even its pronunciation: Hwala, with a ‘soft’ h, is an alternative (Persian?) pronunciation. The sng is ḥōli, and the sense is supposedly connected to the verb tḥawwal ‘to change oneself’ or ‘to move from place to place’, apparently based on the belief that the Ḥwala, though some of their family names have a Persian

6  Local tradition has it that they were so from the earliest period of Shīˁism, a claim supported in KAH Vol. 2 726–727. What is certain is that by the time of the ˁUyūnid dynasty (13th century) they had become quietist ‘Twelvers’, possibly following conversion from the Ismaˁīlī doctrines of the Carmathians, of which Bahrain (in the mediaeval definition of the term) was a 10th century stronghold. 7  The Bahrain Petroleum Company and Aluminium Bahrain, respectively.

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5

ring to them,8 were originally Arabs who moved across the Gulf to Persia and then moved back to Arabia again. The term is now falling out of use, though in Bahrain (and elsewhere) the sense that the Ḥwala are not ‘real’ natives of Arabia lingers on,9 and surfaced in this research in remarks such as the following, made by an elderly Baḥrāni from Manāma about the composition of the Bahraini workforce when BAPCO began operations in the 1930s: il-waṭani mā yitnāzal yirūḥ il-yibal, lā? yirūḥ ḥōli, yirūḥ hindi . . .  ‘Indigenous Bahrainis wouldn’t deign to go (and work) at the oilcompany, would they? The Ḥwala would go, the Indians would go . . .’ The Ḥwala have long held a dominant position in the commercial life of Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE, and are also prominent in local politics and the professions. They are all Sunnīs. At the beginning of the 20th century, it seems that they were evicted from Iran, and at that time were Persian-speaking, but after their return to eastern Arabia they gradually assimilated and intermarried with the middle-class urban ˁArab who shared their Sunnī religious affiliation, and are now Arabic-speaking, at least in the public sphere. 1.1.4 The ˁAǧam Literally ‘non-Arabs’, the term ‘ˁAǧam’ (coll ˁaǧam, sng ˁiǧmi) in Bahrain generally denotes naturalised Shīˁī Bahrainis of Persian origin, of whom there is a large community in Manāma. Most of them hail from southern Iran and, at the time of this research, many of them still spoke southern Persian dialects alongside their rudimentary Arabic,10 and worked in the markets and ports as labourers, night watchmen and at other lowly jobs such as driving taxis. The indigenous Arabic-speaking Baḥārna have always been highly sensitive to, and very resentful of, the Sunnīs lumping them together with the ˁAǧam on the grounds that they are all Shīˁa and therefore likely to be fifth-columnists with Iranian sympathies. This idea was widespread in Bahrain for many years after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and was resorted to as a ‘divide-and-rule’

8   Among the best-known Bahraini Ḥwala families are al-Muˀayyad, Fakhroo, Kānoo, Bastakī, Shirāwī, Khunjī and Koohejī. 9   EADS 116, reporting Qatari usage of the late 1950s, gives the variant ḥwēli ‘Persian trying to pass off as an Arab’; HANZ (UAE) 721 spells it hōli in the Persian fashion and gives ‘Persianised Arabs’ as the meaning. 10  The poor Arabic of the ˁAǧam is the butt of many Baḥārna jokes. The Baḥārna are conscious of their own low social status, and like many such groups, tend to ‘take it out’ on a group further down the pecking-order than themselves, in this case the Shīˁī ˁAǧam.

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tactic to drive a wedge between different elements of opposition to the government during the troubles of 2011 and after. But such is the level of mutual communal ignorance and distrust in Bahrain that many Sunnīs swallowed it unquestioningly. 1.1.5 Other communities A number of other communal labels were also in use in the mid-1970s: ‘Bānyān’ (bānyān): this collective term, and its sng bānyāni was used by many elderly Bahrainis to mean ‘non-Muslim Indians’, a synonym of hnūd, sng hindi or hindūs. The original meaning, however, still known to some at the time of my research, is ‘Hindu trader’, communities of whom resided in the Gulf ports, on the Arab and Persian sides of the Gulf, for many centuries.11 ‘ˁAngrēz’ (collˁangrēz, sng ˁangrēzi)12: this term was originally a Hindi/ Urdu term for ‘the English’13 and was probably borrowed into Gulf Arabic at an early date. The meaning was later extended to include any pale-skinned European or Westerner. Younger speakers at the time of my research tended to use the more recent neologism inglīz. 1.2

Historical Memory, Real and Imagined

From the foregoing it will come as no surprise that the history of Bahrain and the popular beliefs about the origin of its inhabitants are areas of contestation. The Baḥārna version of the story is that they are the descendants of the ‘original’ inhabitants of the region and are its rightful owners, having been usurped and dispossessed by the bedouin tribesmen who arrived from Najd in about 1783 CE, led by the ancestors of the ruling family, the Āl Khalīfa. But who were these ‘originals’ the Baḥārna claim descent from? It is well known that the south Arabian tribe Azd ˁUmān had settled in large numbers in southern Iraq, Bahrain and its adjoining coastal region by no later than the 6th/7th century

11  See HOB 63–64 for the history of this term, which is ultimately < Sanskrit vanij ‘merchant’, and appears to have first entered Gulf speech in the 16th century, possibly via Portuguese. Many of the Bānyān were from Gujerat: banya in Gujerati means ‘grocer, merchant’, the -ān ending being the pl marker. 12  Here, as in several other high-frequency items in Bahraini Arabic, the initial glottal becomes a pharyngeal. 13  SHAKES 210.

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CE.14 A second prominent tribal element in eastern Arabia during the same early period was the ˁAbd al-Qays (sometimes ˁAbd Qays), originally from the Tihāma,15 and later part of the great confederation of Rabīˁa.16 Since no later than the 6th century CE, they had also been living in the Bahrain islands and the adjacent mainland settlements, including al-Qaṭīf.17 Before Islam came they were mainly Christians, but it is likely there were also Zoroastrians and Jews living among them.18 Various mediaeval sources claim that ˁAbd al-Qays supported the claims of ˁAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib to the Caliphate at the arbitration following the so-called Battle of Ṣiffīn in 36AH/ 657 CE,19 which, if true, means that these inhabitants of Bahrain were among the earliest adherents of the ‘party of ˁAli’, viz the Shīˁa. By the 9th/10th century the Carmathians, Ismāˁīlī Shīˁa who originated in southern Iraq, were ruling the ancient territories of al-Bahrain, including the eponymous islands. Then, from their demise at the end of the 10th century CE, Bahrain was ruled by the ˁUyūnids (11th–13th centuries), apparently a descent group of the ˁAbd al-Qays, followed by the ˁUṣfūrids (13th–15th centuries) and the Jabrids (15th century). The Portuguese arrived in the early 16th century and, as absentee landlords, held sway over the islands by proxy through local Persian Sunnī governors (mirzubāns) for about eighty years, until the Persians, under Shāh ˁAbbās I, expelled them in 1602. The Persians ruled Bahrain for the next century and a half, with some short-term interruptions, until the arrival of the Sunnī Āl Khalīfa and their allies in the 1780s. Little is known about the social and confessional composition of the islands during this long period, but Ibn al-Mujāwir, writing in the second half of the 13th century, noted that the island of Awāl/Uwāl (the old name for Bahrain’s main island) at that time contained 360 (sic) villages, all except one being ‘Imāmī’ (i.e. Shīˁī).20 It is from elements of this late antique and mediaeval mélange that the Baḥārna claim descent, ‘ˁAbd al-Qays’ being their standard response to the perennial question ‘from whom are the Baḥārna descended?’ but more 14  POT 224. 15  According to the 15th century historian al-Qalqashandī in Ṣubḥ al-Aˁšā, quoted in TAJ 17. 16  Their name is preserved in the Geography of the Greek-Egyptian polymath Ptolemy (c. 90–168 CE) as ‘Abucaei’ (see POT 225), which means that this tribe was already wellknown in the 2nd century CE. 17  EI sub ˁAbd al-Qays. 18  POT 242; SERJ (I) 488. 19  KAH Vol II 727. 20  Quoted in SERJ (I) 488.

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detailed and complicated tribal pedigrees have been proposed by some.21 Some Baḥārna villages also have their own individual histories, e.g. the people of Banī Jamra (al-ǧamāra) claim very early Yemeni descent. As we shall see below, there is linguistic evidence to support Serjeant’s speculation that the Baḥārna are the product of a mixed ethnic history in which, along with an ancient Arab element, there are other distinct strata: an Aramaic/ Akkadian lexical substrate which probably arose through connections with southern Iraq (from which Bahrain and the rest of the Gulf coast was controlled for many centuries in antiquity), as well as morphological elements which also appear ancient, some of which are of south Arabian origin. Of course, none of this is known to ordinary Baḥārna, who, in the course of my field-work, when the issue of their origin came up in conversation, simply repeated the mantra that they were the ‘original’ inhabitants of Bahrain, some of them harking back to an imaginary idealised past when every Baḥrānī village owned its own lands, had its own ruler (called the wazīr) and peace and justice ruled, in implicit contrast to their present state of dispossession and marginalisation. These feelings of grievance are acted out annually in the ˁĀšūrāˀ processions (known as ˁazā ‘mourning’) with their rituals of self-flagellation, chest-beating, and chants for the ‘wronged Ḥusayn’ (ḥusēn il-maḍlūm), as well as in the histrionics which accompany the reading of the hagiographies of the Twelve Imāms recited in their local ‘funeral houses’ (maˀātim). For many Baḥārna at the time of my fieldwork, a regional Shīˁī religio-cultural commonwealth existed which knew no national borders and of which they felt themselves an integral part, the central element of which was the ritualised ‘visiting’ (ziyāra) of Shīˁī shrines in Iraq and Iran, which for some seemed almost as important as the performance of the Ḥajj itself. By contrast, the history of the Bahraini ˁArab is more straightforward, and recent enough in recorded history for it to be remembered with greater certainty. Today’s small ˁArab settlements were each originally (and to an extent still are) single-tribe entities, e.g. the Manāniˁa in Galāli, the Dawāsir in Budayyaˁ and Zallāg, the Āl Bu Rumayḥ in Jaww, the Āl Bu ˁAynayn in ˁAskar, the Āl Bin ˁAlī in al-Ḥidd. The larger settlements of Muḥarrag and Manāma were always tribally mixed, with different ˁArab tribes dominating different quarters, e.g. the Jalāhimah in the Muḥarrag quarter of Ḥālat Bu Māhir. All of these tribes are Najdi in origin, and descended from various branches of the ˁAnaza. The initial take-over of Bahrain by the Āl Khalīfa dates from the 1780s, but some of the ˁArab arrived later than this, such as the Dawāsir, a powerful Arabian tribe which settled on the west coast of Bahrain in about 21  See, e.g. TAJ 16–23.

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1845 and grew rich from the pearling trade. Even as late as the 1920s, some of these tribes were laws unto themselves and ruled what were effectively independent fiefdoms within Bahrain, acting with complete authority and impunity in the areas they controlled. This was the cause of friction and sometimes violence with the rural Baḥārna, whose status had been reduced by the early 20th century to little more than that of landless serfs.22 The British Political agent of the 1920s, Major C.K. Daly, intervened to stop such abuses, which led to years of communal tension and occasional bloodshed, such as what the village Baḥārna still refer to as the ‘ˁĀlī incident’ (wakˁat ˁĀlī) of 1923 when several Baḥārna villagers were killed in a raid by the Dawāsir following a petty argument in a market. As punishment, the Dawāsir were summarily expelled from Bahrain by Daly, and settled in the port of Dammām on the Saudi coast opposite,23 though some were allowed back a few years later. Over the course of the last century, the ˁArab have come to regard themselves as a single community ethnically and confessionally, with the Āl Khalīfa at their head, even if there have been periods when this unity has been tested, as it was in the 1950s at the high tide of the anti-colonial Arab Nationalist credo propounded by Gamāl ˁAbd al-Nāṣir, which many Bahraini ˁArab espoused in contrast to the more quietist Baḥārna. The general tendency has been for the genealogical bonds of the urban ˁArab community, real or imagined, to assume more importance with the passage of time as exclusivist concepts of ‘Bahraini identity’, and a concomitant ‘Najdi-isation’ of public expressions of Bahraini popular culture, such as its colloquial poetry, have been actively promoted.24 This has gone hand-in-hand with a parallel tendency, noted earlier, for some ˁArab to dismiss the Baḥārna’s claim to being the ‘original’ Bahrainis, and assert that they are in fact recent Persian immigrants—an assertion for which there is no historical evidential base whatsoever.

22  LOR Part 2 Vol. 1 259–260. 23  Two oral accounts of this incident, one from each side, form part of Chapter 3 of Volume II of this study (DCSEA II 145–155). 24  See DNA for evidence of ˁArab bias in the depiction of local characters in Bahraini TV serials. A similar bias is also evident in the depiction of ‘typical Bahraini scenes’ in the Bahrain National Museum in which there is little space devoted to Baḥārna occupations and crafts.

10 1.3

CHAPTER 1

Language History

Given the lack of written records compared with neighbouring Mesopotamia, reconstructing an accurate history of what languages were in use in Bahrain and the neighbouring areas of the Gulf over the course of their long history is next to impossible. But whenever languages are superseded by others, especially if the predecessor languages were spoken widely and for a long period, they generally leave traces behind them. One has only to think of the linguistic history of English for proof of this, in which there are still distinct ‘layers’ of Celtic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Norman French vocabulary many centuries, even millennia, after these languages ceased to be spoken in Great Britain. In the parts of South Wales where Welsh has not been widely spoken for centuries, aspects of the phonology and even phraseology of Welsh25 still underlie and show through in the English dialect spoken natively by nonWelsh-speakers (what laymen term a ‘Welsh accent’). The same general principle can be applied to Gulf Arabic, which retains elements of the languages which were once spoken in the same geographical space where Arabic is spoken now, and, as we shall see below, this is not merely a question of lexis, but also of structural elements. The first problem is periodization, given the lack of direct evidence for what languages were spoken on the Arabian Gulf coast. For example, it is prima facie likely that there were several separate periods of Persian linguistic influence, in view of the long history of contact which the now Arabic-speaking population of the Arab side of the Gulf has had with speakers of that language, whether in the guise of traders, rulers, or, most recently, economic migrants. How is one to disentangle them? A second, related, problem is that it is often impossible to know whether given language items entered the Arabic dialects of the area as part of an ancient inherited substrate, or as acquisitions ‘imported’ on a more recent vector of influence. This is the problem with some of the Akkadian and Aramaic words which are obviously present in Bahraini and other Gulf dialects: have these items been continuously present in the Gulf from an early period, due to the Mesopotamian influence to which the Gulf was subject, or did they come in more recently via contact with neighbouring dialects of 25  My Welsh grandmother, who knew no Welsh at all, regularly used ‘Wenglish’ expressions like “There’s tidy for you!” (= ‘That looks really nice!’), ‘Rise me a ticket! (= ‘Buy me a ticket!’), and ‘A miner he was, not a builder’ (= ‘He was a miner, not a builder’). Such expressions are directly calqued on the vocabulary, syntax and word-order of the equivalent sentences in Welsh, which must once have been used in the English-speaking area of the Vale of Glamorgan where my grandmother was born and brought up.

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Arabic, or even other languages (e.g. Persian), themselves full of old substrate or borrowed elements, which have been influential on certain sectors of the Gulf population? There is an associated problem/ possibility: that some of these items were present in Arabic from an early date, but were simply not recorded, for one reason or another (ignorance; deliberate omission of what were perceived to be ‘dialectal’ forms; selective coverage of semantic fields) by the early Arabic lexicographers. We know that Arabic was a spoken language for many centuries before the earliest written records we have for it,26 but we simply have no direct knowledge of what it was like. An illustration of these problems is provided by the Bahraini (and Kuwaiti) word zabīl, which denotes a type of palm-leaf basket used for carrying dates or harvested crops. This word is attested in neo-Babylonian Akkadian as zabbīlu, and also in its overlapping/ successor language of southern Iraq, Old Aramaic, as zbīlā, which may be the older form. In Arabic, it occurs in the CLA dictionaries, and also in modern Iraqi Arabic (zbīl) and in Persian (zanbīl), where it is clearly a borrowing. But what was the pathway which brought this item, which apparently originated a very long time ago in Mesopotamia (though in what original language?) into Gulf Arabic? Is it ancient, or is it a relatively recent import? One can only speculate in answer to such a question by taking account of factors such as the categories into which this and many similar items of material culture fall; which sectors of Gulf and neighbouring populations use them (and, just as significantly, which do not); and in what types of social context they occur. The ‘sociolinguistic profile’ which emerges from the answers to these and similar contextual questions give one a sense of what their pathway is likely to have been. Occasionally, there is useful circumstantial evidence in the old Arabic sources, such as the Ṣaḥāḥ of al-Jawharī (completed by the late 10th century CE) and the Lisān al-ˁArab of Ibn Manḏ% ūr (completed 1290 CE), which show that some items still in use today were first attested for a particular tribe’s dialect (luġa) at a time no later than that source’s compilation (and possibly much earlier); and what we know from local lore, and the Arab historians’ accounts of that tribe’s movements in ancient times, may enable us to place the earliest known use of an item in a rough geographical location.

26  The earliest written Arabic so far discovered consists of two lines of poetry which form the last two of five lines of writing, the first three of which are in Aramaic, inscribed on a rock and discovered at Ein Avdat, Israel, in 1986, and dated to no later than 150 CE. The whole inscription is written in the Nabataean script. The next oldest piece of written Arabic is the Nemara funerary inscription in the Syrian desert, and dated to 328 CE, which also uses the Nabataean script.

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1.3.1 Ancient substrates and influences There were two main sources of ancient influence on the Arabic dialects of Bahrain and the wider Gulf: Mesopotamia and South Arabia. These are dealt with below.27 1.3.1.1 Mesopotamia The Arabian Gulf coast in remote antiquity was on a major trade route from India to Mesopotamia, and ‘Bahrain’, which included the eastern Arabian coast opposite the eponymous islands, perhaps as far north as modern Kuwait, and was then known as Dilmun or Tilmun, was on it. Dilmun was famed for its abundant fresh water and lush vegetation, and there are even references to it in the Akkadian epic poem which tells the story of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, King of Uruk. Trade and political links with southern Mesopotamia were close; by the 7th century BCE, Dilmun was under direct Babylonian control. In Greek and Latin historical works, there are detailed descriptions of its flora and fauna.28 The present-day Bahraini toponym ˁArād is recorded by Strabo (1st century CE) and Ptolemy (2nd century CE) in the Greek form Arados, which then referred to the whole island known today as Muḥarraq, not just the presentday eponymous Baḥrānī village of ˁArād. Several centuries later (4th/5th century CE), what is now another village on Muḥarraq island, Samāhīj, was known by the Sasanian Persian name Mashmāhīj, and again at that point referred to the whole island.29 It was the seat of a Nestorian Christian bishop who was answerable to the Catholicos on the other side of the Gulf, and with whom we know from written records that he corresponded in Syriac.30

27  More recent influences from Portugal, modern Iran, Turkey, India and the Englishspeaking world are covered in DCSEA I xxx–xxxvii. 28  POT 125–153. 29  Other old Persian-derived toponyms in Bahrain are id-Dēh ‘village’, Dirāz ‘straight’, Jirdāb ‘whirlpool’, Karrāna ‘margin, side, boundary’, and several villages with the Persian suffixes -abād ‘place of, abode of’ added to proper names, e.g. Karbabād, Salmabād and -stān ‘place of’, e.g. Dimistān possibly < dabistān ‘school’, though this word, which also occurs as a toponym in Musandam, Oman, is an old Persian word for ‘winter’ (modern Persian zamistān). 30  B & R 181 note that, in Syriac correspondence conducted between 581 and 585 CE by the patriarch of the Nestorian church Išoˁyahb I and the Bishop of Dayrīn, a settlement on the Arabian coast opposite the Bahrain Islands, there is reference to the difficulty of pearldivers observing the day of rest. As the authors point out: ‘ce passage montre surtout que le christianisme s’était répandu chez les habitants autochthones de l’île dans les catégories les plus modestes’. Syriac was the language of the Nestorian church in the area and

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There are without question traces of Akkadian and Old Aramaic influence in the Gulf Arabic dialects of today, especially in the vocabulary of farming and material culture more generally,31 which, like the surviving Aramaic place names,32 link the Gulf culturally, linguistically and perhaps ethnically with ancient Babylonia.33 As might be expected, many of these lexical items, given here in their Bahraini form, also occur in the Iraqi Arabic dialects, e.g. ˁakkār ‘date-palm cultivator’ < Akk ikarru ‘farmer, ploughman’, guffa ‘palm-leaf basket or pot’< Akk qappatu (same meaning), bāri pl bawāri ‘reeds (used as a building material)’ < Aram būriyā ‘reed mat’, Akk burû ‘reed mat’, šīṣ ‘inferior quality dates’< Aram šīṣā, Akk šuṣu (same meaning), ˁangēš ‘edible pulp of lotus fruit’ < Akk angāšu ‘plum’,34 harfi ‘fresh, young (meat); early (crop)’ < Akk ḫurpū ‘early crop’, giḏla/ gidla ‘plait, fringe, forelock’ < Akk gidlu/ gidil ‘plaited string’, nīr/ nīra ‘yoke (for ploughing animals); cross-beam (on a loom)’ < Akk nīru (same meanings), sannūr35 ‘cat’ < Aram sinnawr, Akk šurānu (same meaning), naṭa36 ‘to give’ < Aram natan, Akk nadānu (same meaning). However, many other words with an Aramaic or Akkadian origin, unattested in the Iraqi Arabic reference works available to me, also occur widely in the Gulf coastal region, and not just in Bahrain, e.g.

some form of Aramaic may well have been the medium of normal social intercourse too, at least among some sections of the population. 31  See SEM and ARA for a provisional list. 32  The Manāma suburb of Māḥūz is one such, which seems to be < Aram maḥōza < Akk māḫāzu ‘shrine, cultic centre, town’. The village of Dēr < Syr dēr ‘cloister, monastery’, and still known as late as the end of the 19th century as dēr ar-rāhib ‘the monk’s cloister’ attests to the pre-Islamic Christian presence in the Gulf. 33  An intriguing possible reference to this occurs in the 13th century LA sub the lemma n-bṭ, in which a saying is attributed to a certain Ayyūb b. Qiriyya: ‘the people of Oman are Arabs (ˁArab) who have become Nabatean-ized (istanbaṭū) and the people of Bahrain are Nabateans (Nabīṭ) who have been Arab-ized (istaˁrabū)’. ‘Nabīṭ/ Anbāṭ’ were (often slighting) bedouin appellations for the generality of non-Arab Aramaic-speaking agriculturalists, wherever in Arabia or Iraq they lived. 34  In Christian Baghdadi ˁanǧāṣ is ‘plum’. 35  A Baḥārna word; the ˁArab use gaṭu. 36  Used only in some Baḥārna villages; the ˁArab and most Baḥārna have ˁaṭa.

14 Akkadian37/ Aramaic

CHAPTER 1 Meaning

Akk šulum šamši ‘sun-set’ Aram ḫaṣṣīna, ‘axe, hatchet; Akk ḫaṣṣinnu field tool for clearing shrubs, bushes’ Aram sikǝrā, ‘to block off, Akk sekēru dam up (a water channel)’ Akk palgu

Arabic

sulūm iš-šams ‘sun-set’ xaṣīn ‘axe, chopper’ ṣaxxīn/xaṣīn39 ‘hoe, spade for digging, clearing weeds’ sakkar;40 skār ‘to block off a water channel; material for blocking channels’ falaǧ/ falay/ ‘irrigation falag channel’

Akk ḫinnu

‘ditch, canal (usually for irrigation’ ‘to break up xaff clods of earth’ ‘ship’s cabin’ xinn

Aram ṭabaˁ, Akk ṭebû41 Akk gigurru

‘to sink (of a boat)’ ‘reed basket’

Akk ḫēpû

Meaning

ṭabaˁ gargūr42

‘to break up clods of earth’ ‘ship’s hold’ ‘to sink (of a boat)’ ‘bee-hive fish-trap’ (originally basket made of woven palm sticks, and turned upside down)

Attested38 in:

Bahrain, Oman UAE, Oman Basra, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE Bahrain

Bahrain, UAE, Oman Bahrain Bahrain, Kuwait, UAE Bahrain, Kuwait, UAE, Oman Bahrain, UAE

37  The reference work consulted for Akkadian in this chart is CDA. 38  The evidence of use in these places is my own observations during long-term residence in the Gulf, mainly in Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, and reinforced by the work of others such as EADS (whole Gulf), BRO (Oman), HAN (Kuwait), HANZ (UAE) and BAQ. 39  Seemingly a metathesis of the theoretical ‘root consonants’ x-ṣ-n. In the northern Gulf ṣaxxīn ‘spade, digging tool’ is current; in the lower Gulf, the unmetathesised xaṣīn ‘axe, chopper, tool for land clearance’. 40  This word also occurs in areas of southern Yemen: Landberg (GLOS 1956) comments that it is ‘without doubt an Aramaic borrowing’. 41  The pharyngeal consonants disappeared in all positions in Akkadian. 42  gargūr < gigurru via dissimilation.

15

Communities, Histories, and Dialects in Bahrain Akkadian/ Aramaic

Meaning

Arabic

Meaning

Attested in:

Aram/ Akk qapīru

‘container for fish/ dates’

ǧifīr

Bahrain, Kuwait, UAE

Akk kalakku43

‘metal box’

kalak

Akk bâru

‘to catch (birds, fish)’

bāra

Akk dalāḫu

‘to muddy, stir up’

dallax

Akk abāru

‘to bind tightly habbar (limbs)’ ‘to protest’ rabša

‘palm-leaf shopping basket’ ‘metal bucket; box-shaped metal brazier’ ‘to collect fish from a fish-trap; hunt, search (the sea-bed for pearls)’ ‘to discolour, render turbid, muddy’ ‘to bind (broken limbs)’ ‘commotion, tumult’

Akk rabāšum

Bahrain, UAE

Bahrain, Kuwait, UAE

Bahrain, UAE

Oman Bahrain, Oman

The above is only a selection of the more obvious candidates for a non-Arabic Semitic substrate. Whilst it is true that some of these words also occur in a similar form in dictionaries of Classical Arabic44 and must be old borrowings in that register of the language, it would wrong to conclude from this that 43  This word also means ‘raft’ in Akkadian, its normal sense in Iraqi Arabic. 44  For example, saxxīn, apparently a metathesized form of the Mesopotamian xaṣīn (see above), which designates ‘a spade or hoe whose shaft is at right-angles to the blade’, is described in exactly these terms (misḥā munˁaṭifa) in the 10th century dictionary SH, and noted as luġat ˁAbd al-Qays ‘a dialectal word of the ˁAbd al-Qays’, the main eastern Arabian tribe from which today’s Baḥārna claim descent, and present in eastern Arabia from no later than the 7th century (and possibly much earlier). Another interesting farming term still in current use (though not in this case of Akkadian/ Aramaic provenance) is fada ‘flat surface for drying dates’. It is in LA (late 13th century) as fadāˀ with the same meaning, and similarly glossed as luġat ˁAbd al-Qays. These attestations suggest that such farming words were typical of the ancestors of today’s Baḥārna at least seven to ten centuries ago, probably earlier. Farming has always been the Baḥārna’s occupation par excellence.

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CLA was the source of the word in the Arabic dialects of the Gulf. The most persuasive piece of evidence for the transfer of these terms as elements of a substrate directly from the ancient languages into the Arabic dialects of the area is their geographical and social distribution: at the time of fieldwork, they were (a) part of the everyday word stock of the illiterate class of farmers, fishermen, and manual labourers in the Gulf coastal population, and (b) not found, as far as I know, in the dialects of central Arabia, which, unlike the Gulf, was not subject to ancient Mesopotamian influence. As dialect words, these lexemes are basic to a sedentary life-style of horticulture and fishing: the phrase sulūm iš-šams, ‘sun-set’, for example, a locution unattested in CLA or any other variety of Arabic, and seemingly an Arabicization of Akk šulum šamši, was used by the Baḥārna zarārīˁ to mark the end of the farming day before the advent of wrist watches. Words and phrases with a similar profile tend to occur in bundles in coastal areas where, in ancient times, varieties of Akkadian and/or of its successor, Aramaic, were likely to have been in spoken use. Possible traces of Mesopotamian influence also exist in grammatical constructions and function words. The most noteworthy example of this is in the existential particles aku ‘there is’, and its negatives māku and (in co-ordinated negatives) lāku ‘there is not’. Today, these particles are thought of as typical of the dialects of Iraq and its northern Gulf neighbour Kuwait. However, this research has shown that they are also in common use in some Bahraini Baḥārna dialects,45 e.g.46 aku hast mustašfa, lākin mā yaˁtaqid bi l-mustašfa (Manāma 1) ‘There was indeed a hospital, but he didn’t believe in (using) it.’ māku dāˁi tikalfūn rūḥ-kum (13) ‘There’s no need for you to put yourselves to any trouble’ l-awwal mā miš amrāḏ# ha-l-kiṯir. . . . wi lāku maraḏ# il-kila, wi lāku iltihāb (Manāma 7) ‘In the old days, there’s weren’t that many illnesses . . . or any kidney disease or any arthritis’ 45  In the quoted examples in this chapter and henceforth, the bracketed numbers refer to locations in Bahrain on Maps 1 and 2. Otherwise, the source of the quoted example, if not from Bahrain, is given in brackets after the example. 46  They were recorded in six locations: B villages 3, 13, 34, and in four neighbourhoods of the capital: Manāma 1, 2, 3, and 7. For more Bahraini examples of aku/māku/lāku and examples of other particles of existence, see 3.3.6.

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An Arabic-internal explanation of the origin of aku—as an apocopated form of yakūn—has on occasion been proposed,47 but prima facie that looks ad hoc and based on a superficial partial phonological similarity. More plausible, linguistically and historically, is that it is a development of the same regional nonArabic Semitic substrate which bequeathed the lexical items listed above. In various forms of Akkadian, makû is a common verb and noun meaning ‘want, lack, need; to be absent, missing’.48 There is no corresponding positive form aku recorded in Akkadian, only bašû ‘to exist’. But if māku came into Arabic as a substrate form or an early borrowing, it is possible that aku ‘there is’ arose later as an internal development via the reanalysis of māku as mā + aku, as if the first element was the Arabic negative mā. A similar type of process seems to have produced another pair of Gulf existential particles (more widespread in Bahrain than aku and māku), miš ‘there is’ and mā miš ‘there isn’t’, whereby the positive form miš arose as a secondary development via the deletion of mā from the negative form mā miš, itself an abbreviated form of mā min šay ‘there is nothing’, which survives alongside mā miš as an alternative locution. An alternative theory for the origin of aku/māku/lāku has recently been proposed by Müller-Kessler,49 which posits the Mandaic50 particles ʾk’ ‘there is’ (probably pronounced ˀīku), and lykʾ ‘there is not’ (= līku) as the source. Another possible morpho-syntactic link with predecessor Semitic languages is the particle lō, which has two distinct functions in the Baḥārna dialects of Bahraini Arabic: as a conditional particle signaling a hypothetical or counterfactual condition (= ‘If it were the case that . . .’/ ‘Had it been the case that . . .’)—this is a function shared with most other Arabic dialects—but also as a coordinating conjunction (= ‘or’). Arabic lō is cognate with Akkadian lū, which in Akkadian has, among other functions, the same two it has in Baḥārna Arabic: to signal hypothetical conditional clauses, and as the normal way of expressing the conjunction ‘or’. The Bahraini ˁArab dialects, however, which are descended from those of central Arabia, don’t use lō as a conjunction, and in the wider Gulf area, this conjunctive usage seems to be limited to the 47  HAN 22. 48  CDA 192. 49  See M-K. 50  Mandaic was an ancient variety of Eastern Aramaic, spoken in pre-Islamic times in southern Iraq and in the area around Ahvaz in the southern Iranian, now Arabic-speaking province of Khūzistān by the Mandaeans, Christian Gnostics (manda means ‘knowledge). The Mandaeans were one of the Christian communities known to the Arabs and referred to generically in the Qurˀān as al-Ṣābiˀūn. See http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ mandaeans-5-language.

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Baḥārna dialects.51 But, significantly, it is also found in the dialects of Muslim Baghdad52 and widely in southern Iraq/ Iran.53 Like aku/māku/lāku, the conjunction lō is the vehicle for expressing a basic syntactic function, and its geographical distribution, which mirrors areas of ancient Babylonian influence, is suggestive of an old substrate influence rather than a borrowing through recent contact. 1.3.1.2 Southern Arabia If one source of ancient linguistic influence on Bahrain and the rest of the Gulf was Mesopotamia to the north, another was from the south. We have already noted that the ˁAbd al-Qays and Azd tribes had arrived in eastern and south-eastern Arabia from the south-west of the peninsula by no later than the late 7th century. A comparison of the dialects of certain sectors of the modern population of eastern and south-eastern Arabia with the dialects of Yemen shows not just shared vocabulary, but as in the Akkadian/ Aramaic case, shared elements of morpho-syntax. These elements, taken together as a ‘bundle’, are sufficiently unusual in the Arabic dialects as a whole for it to be unlikely that they arose independently of one another in the locations where they occur, which are far removed from one another. Their distribution is suggestive of a common source which was spread by a later diaspora. What we know of the population movements in south Arabia in ancient times (admittedly relatively little) suggests that this source may have been south-western Arabia. The dialects in which these elements occur, in addition to those of the Baḥārna of Bahrain and eastern Saudi Arabia, are those of the ‘sedentary’ population of northern Oman (mountain and riverine populations, together with the nearby littoral), of some communities in the UAE, and of areas of south-western Arabia.54 Geographically, these dialects are all on the periphery of the Arabian Peninsula and form a broken chain around it,55 from Bahrain in the north east, to southern Yemen in the south-west. There are still some large blanks on this dialectal map, but a sufficiently large area of it is has become 51  First noted as a peculiarity of Bahrain by Johnstone in his study of the Gulf (EADS 159). 52  BLA 156. 53  MEIS xxxv for S Iraq; ING 17 notes it in a text from Khūzistān. 54  What follows is based on research reported in ARA and HOL12 for the whole area, and in addition: for Oman, REIN, BRO, HOL8, HOL11; for south-western Arabia HAD, DATH, GLOS, DIEM and BEHN2; for the Baḥārna dialects of Bahrain DCSEA I and II, the data in this volume, and many previous works by Holes; PRO2 and QAS for the Baḥārna dialects of eastern Saudi Arabia; and for the UAE EADS, HANZii, IBD, HOL6, HOL8, RAW, and other still unpublished field-observations. 55  For convenience’s sake in this section, we will term these ‘peripheral’ dialects.

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19

well-known enough in the last three to four decades of dialectological research for it to be possible to build a coherent if still incomplete picture. Group 1. The most striking linguistic features which all these dialects share— and it should be noted that the features below are only the most obvious among many others—are five: (1) A voiceless reflex of Old Arabic (OA) q In southern Yemen, the reflex is /q/,56 as it also is in the sedentary dialects of Oman, i.e. those of the mountains and river valleys of the north, the capital area around Muṭraḥ and Muscat, and the Bāṭina and south-eastern coastlines, as well in Musandam. The reflex is /k/ in the area around Rās al-Khayma in the UAE,57 as it is in some mountain locations in the Jabal Akhḍar region of Oman. In most village Baḥārna dialects of Bahrain unaffected by contact with towndwellers,58 it is also /k/ or a slightly more retracted /ḳ/. These voiceless reflexes contrast saliently with the voiced reflex, most often /g/ (with affrication in some areas to /ǧ/ or /dz/), which is found throughout central Arabia, in all the ˁArab dialects of the Gulf which historically originated in Najd, and in the dialects of the bedouin of the deserts of Oman. (2) 2fsng enclitic -(i)š ‘you’ In the southern third of Arabia—much of Yemen;59 virtually all of Oman,60 and some dialects of the eastern coastal areas of the UAE;61 and in the Baḥārna 56  DIEM 9 remarks that the /g/ realisation of qāf and the /ǧ/ realisation of ǧīm are typical of the (bedouinised) dialects of the high plains of northern Yemen, whereas the /q/ realisation of qāf and the /g/ realisation of ǧīm are typical of south Yemen (exactly as in the sedentary dialects of Oman). 57  IBD 185–186. 58  In eastern, southern and western Baḥārna villages in Bahrain at the time of my field-work, /k/ was the normal reflex, especially among the elderly. In villages nearer to the capital, Manāma, and in Baḥārna neighbourhoods of the capital itself /g/ had become the norm for urban Baḥārna as it was for the ˁArab, in all likelihood as a result of the constant long-term exposure of the urban Baḥārna to the /g/ of the socially (if not numerically) dominant ˁArab urban community. 59  See BEHN2 82–85 and DIEM 39–63 for -(i)š in southern Yemen. 60  The only exception so far noted for interior Oman is the Āl Wahība of the south-eastern desert region, where the 2fsng is a palatalised ky (WEB 475). 61  The UAE seems to be predominantly -č using in its western and southern region (e.g. Al-ˁAyn), but in the absence of a comprehensive dialectological survey, it is not possible to say for certain which sub-communities use -š and which -č. Among the attested -š users

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dialects of Bahrain and the eastern province of Saudi Arabia on the coast directly opposite—the reflex is -(i)š, e.g. umm-iš ‘your (2fsng) mother’, abū-š ‘your (2fsng) father’.62 It is also significant that -š is also the 2fsng enclitic pronoun in all the modern South Arabian languages of Yemen and Oman. This -(i)š reflex is in stark contrast to the situation in the ˁArab dialects of central and eastern Arabia, where it is either an alveolar affricate -(i)č: thus umm-ič and abū-č in Kuwait, the dialect of the ˁArab of Bahrain, Qatar, the ˁArab dialect of the UAE; or a dental affricate: umm-its and abū-ts in Najd. (3) infix -in(n)In all the ‘peripheral’ dialects listed—southern Yemen, Oman, the UAE,63 the Baḥārna dialects of Bahrain64 and eastern Saudi Arabia—there is an infix, -in(n)- between an active participle (ap) with verbal force and an object enclitic, e.g. ana gāy-inn-ak bākir65 (Daṯīna, south Yemen) ‘I’ll come to you tomorrow’ šu ḏī musūwy-inn-ah?66 (Daṯīna, south Yemen) ‘Who is it that has done it?’ tiḥkil sittat ašrāb mākl-in-ha l-ḥašīš (1) ‘You’ll find six seed-beds overgrown with weeds’ (lit ‘which weeds have eaten’)

are the east coastal populations which border northern Oman; Rās al-Khayma (specifically noted by IBD 194 and HANZii 347); and some areas of Shārja and Dubai. Though Oman is overwhelmingly -š-using, there are some exceptions to this: in the area around the UAE/ Oman border at Al-ˁAyn / Buraimi, the Omani members of the Āl Bū Shāmis, whose tribal dīra straddles the border, are 2fsng -č users, and, in harmony with this, they speak an ˁArab dialects in terms of its basic phonological and morphological features. 62  See 3.1.2. 63  The extent of the use of this feature in the UAE remains to be fully investigated, and there are probably some dialects in which it does not occur, but it certainly occurs commonly in the eastern UAE, and even makes an appearance in a formal letter from the Ruler of Abu Dhabi (western UAE) dated 1897: wāṣlat-inn-ak taˁārif-in minnā ‘instructions from us will have reached you’ (see HOL13 199–200). 64  See 4.6.1. 65  DATH II.II 721. 66  DATH II.II 721.

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ǝmbaddid-inn-ah ˁala gadd il-maḥallāt (34) ‘(I ) have spread it (= rat poison) all over the farm plots’ sabab-ha muġṭa bāykat-inn-ah čalba min l-ǝbdayyaˁ (3) ‘The cause of it (= village battle) was a vessel-top which some bitch from Budayyaˁ had stolen’ il-bāki kill-ǝh mulk min ˁind iš-šyūx šār-inn-ah (17) ‘The rest is all property which he’s bought from the Sheikhs’ maktūb yāyb-inn-ah ḥagg iš-šyūx67 (Abu Dhabi) ‘A letter (I) have brought for the Sheikhs’ yāy-in-ha68 (Abu Dhabi) ‘I have been there’ taw nūkil ha-l-maskūt . . . mā fāyid-in-nī (Muḍaibi, Oman) ‘Now I’m eating these biscuits . . . but they’re not doing me any good’ min maˁṭi-nn-ak? ana maˁṭi-nn-ak (Saḥam, Oman) ‘Who’ll give you (money)? I’ll give (it) to you.’ bāl-in-nī baliyya (Ṣuḥār, Oman) ‘He’s a real nuisance to me’ tūgaˁ-ha mā rāymat-in-ha (Nizwa, Oman) ‘It’s causing her (so much) pain she can’t stand it’ tafni, māf-inn-ah ha-l-wugūt (Āl Wahība, Oman) ‘They (= oryx) died out, those droughts killed them off’ All these dialects have this construction in the singular69 and some (southern Yemen and Oman for certain) have the full paradigm, inserting the infix with 67  RAW 110. 68  EADS 169. 69  See DATH Vol II.II 720–723, and DIEM 132 n.1 for southern Yemen (Landberg comments that ‘this construction is common to the west of the Ḥaḍramawt, even in Yemen (by which he means the north), but its use is, however, limited’); Holes section 4.6.1 of this volume (and many previous studies) for Bahrain; PRO2 75 and QAS issue 26 for eastern

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mpl and fpl forms also, e.g. southern Yemen: maḥna ši ˁāwizīn-inn-iš ‘we (mpl) don’t want you (2fsng) at all’, sāriqāt-inn-ak ‘(they, fpl) will rob you’; Oman: here the mpl simply doubles the -n-, e.g. kātbīn-n-uh ‘(they, mpl) have written it’ and the fpl is as in south Yemen, e.g. il-ḥarīm mkaffiyāt-in-hum ‘the women can manage them (by themselves)’.70 This rare construction has been sporadically attested in other Arabian dialects,71 but nowhere in the ‘heartland’ Arabic-speaking areas of the Levant or Egypt. As we shall see below in 1.5, it also turns up (significantly) in several Arabic dialects far removed from Arabia—in Sudan, Nigeria and in central Asia—which are also, like the areas of the Arabian Peninsula where it occurs, ‘peripheral’, but on a much larger geographical canvas. In some of the dialects which have this -in(n)- infix with ap constructions, the infix also occurs, but less consistently, on p-stem verbs with an object enclitic, e.g. šaxbūṭ yi#ḏaġġiṭ-in-hum #ḏaġṭ ‘Shaikh Shakhbūṭ72 was putting great pressure on them’; yišill-inn-ah ‘he removes it’, (both examples recorded at Tanˁam, Wādi Aswad, northern Oman from a tribesman of the Durūˁ); n-sawwi-nn-ah ‘we do it’, yiˁǧib-inn-ah ‘it pleases him’ (from a UAE nabaṭī poem).73

Saudi Arabia; HOL6 76, 78–79 for the UAE; REIN 139–142, BRO 17–18, WEB 476, HOL11 448 and HOL8 44–45, 48–49 for Oman. 70  In the ‘peripheral’ dialects which have no gender distinction in the pl verb, such as the dialects of the Baḥārna, there is no -in(n)- insert in the pl form, so kātbīn-ah ‘they (com pl) have written it’. 71  There are several examples of it in a bedouin text of Wetzstein’s from the Syrian desert (e.g. WETZ 191, n.2) but in other cases in his text the -in(n)- infix is missing where it could have occurred, so it seems not to have been obligatory, but Wetzstein makes no comment on this inconsistent use. SOC 187 declares that this construction does not occur in Najd, and nor has it been reported in more recent studies of Najdi, such as ING. 72  Former Ruler of Abu Dhabi (1928–1966). 73  WEB 476 notes that the infix also ‘occasionally’ occurs on p-stem verbs in the dialect of the Āl Wahība. In Oman generally, it is normal for the final -n of the 2fpl and 3fpl verb, whether the verb is p-stem or s-stem, to be doubled when suffixed with vowel-initial enclitics, e.g. ˁi#ḏām-ah yiˁawrin-n-ah ‘his bones (fpl) are causing him pain’; yirīdan-n-ak ‘they (fpl) want you’; ǧan-n-ah u ˁaṭan-n-ah dawa ‘they (fpl) came to him and gave him medicine’ (first and third examples from Tanˁam, northern Oman, second one from the Jiddat al-Ḥarāsīs, southern Oman). Similar 2fpl and 3fpl suffixed forms with -n doubling are noted by for southern Yemen (DIEM 51). Whether this -n- doubling is related to the -in(n)- infix is doubtful, as the doubling of final -n when it is preceded by a short vowel and followed by a vowel-initial enclitic pronoun is widespread across many types of form in all the ‘peripheral’ dialects, e.g. in suffixed prepositions: min ‘from’ → minn-ah ‘from him’ and ˁan ‘from’ →ˁann-iš ‘from you(f)’.

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A maverick example of the infix on a p-stem verb (in this case -an(n)- not -in(n)-) has been noted in a Baḥārna colloquial ‘debate poem’: abusṭ-ann-ah ‘I’ll knock him flat’.74 It is worth noting that the p-stem verb with an -an(n)infix occurs widely in the (Shīˁī) dialects of southern Iraq, e.g. axābr-ann-ak ‘I will telephone you’, akitl-ann-a ‘I will beat him’, āxḏ-an-ha ‘I will take it (f)’, aGasm-an-hin ‘I will divide them (f)’,75 and its occurrence in this poem may simply be an idiosyncrasy of the poet, whose poetic idiom shows other evidence of southern Iraqi influences. But the infix on the ap form has not so far been attested at all for southern Iraq, or for any other Iraqi dialect. Further research is needed before the full situation becomes clear, but the current picture is that (1) in south Yemen in the dialects which have it, and in the Omani dialects (all of them), the infix is obligatory in the ap, but is also attested, though only in a very few Omani dialects, in the p-stem; (2) in the Baḥārna dialects of Bahrain and eastern Saudi Arabia, it is also obligatory on the ap, as in Oman, but, in normal speech, does not occur in the p-stem; (3) in southern Iraq it occurs only in the p-stem, and not with the ap. The situation in the UAE is currently unclear but, in the dialects which have the infix at all, the situation seems to be similar to that in Oman. Thus it seems from this that the Yemeni, Omani and Baḥārna infix construction is essentially the same, and probably sprang historically from the same source, but that the Iraqi construction may have a different origin. We will return to this question in 1.5 below. (4) 2fsng intīn (var intīna) and 2compl intūn ‘you’ In the Baḥārna dialects of Bahrain76 and eastern Saudi Arabia,77 in the Shiḥḥī dialect of the Musandam peninsula, Oman78 and in certain dialects of southwestern Saudi Arabia and southern western Yemen,79 the 2fsng and 2 common pl pronouns are respectively intīn (var intīna) and intūn. In the same dialects, the corresponding s-stem personal endings are -tīn(a) and -tūn. These forms 74  OIL 95, 105 n.7. 75  ING2 16. 76  See 3.1.1. 77  QAS issue 23, which gives ˀintīn and ˀintūn for al-Qaṭīf and many of the villages in the vicinity. 78  SHAH 252 notes intīn and intūn, SHAH 255 katabtīn and katabtūn, SHAH 258 ǧītīn and ǧītūn though without any sentence examples. 79  PRO 125 gives ˀintīn and ˀintōn and PRO 27 the corresponding s-stem verb forms in -tīn and -tōn for the village of Ṣabyā in the extreme south west of Saudi Arabia. Similar 2fsng and 2pl pronoun and s-stem forms with the final -n and a preceding long vowel are recorded for the neighbouring Tihāma coastal plain in Yemen (BEHN2 73, 76, 118, 124; GREEN 59–60).

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have not so far been attested elsewhere in Oman, and it is not known whether they occur in the UAE. Some examples from the Baḥārna dialects: mā intīn kāṣṣa lisān-iš, lā?! (10) ‘Won’t you (f) hold your tongue?!’ mā kabaltīn, yǝġdi li ġēr-iš (28) ‘If you (f) don’t accept (him), he’ll go to someone else’ intīn min yōm ˁarrastīn, gaˁadtīn iyya ˁēla, lō b-rūḥ-iš? (16) ‘After you (f) got married, did you live with (another (= the husband’s)) family or by yourself?’ baˁad intūn bālīn rūḥ-čim balāwi, zaḥma! (3) ‘You (pl) really are putting yourselves in a fix, what a problem!’ kāl “aˁruf-kum intūn il-baḥārna!” (30) He said “I know what you (pl) Baḥārna are like!” illi kabaḍtūn-ah wiyya ḥamīd tamām (12) ‘What you (pl) got (= manure) from Hamid was excellent’ xaffaktūn-na minn-ah ha-s-sana, mā ṭalaˁ (41) ‘You’ve (pl) made us make a loss from it (= seed) this year, it hasn’t germinated’ (5) šī/šay as a multi-functional particle—existential, negative, or interrogative,80 and related idiomatic meanings—is widely attested in the southern Yemeni Arabic dialects81 and in some other parts of Yemen (notably Ṣanˁāˀ) as well as in three Modern South Arabian languages.82 Typical examples from Yemen:

80  See 3.3.2, 3.3.4 and 3.3.5. 81  For the distribution of šī ‘there is’ in Yemen, see Landberg (GLOS 2103–2104) for southern Yemen, and Behnstedt (BEHN2 172) for the south-east of what was the Yemen Arab Republic, which adjoins the region described by Landberg. 82  Ḥarsūsī śī, śi, śey; Śḥeri śi (JOH 123); Mehri ś (JOH2 390).

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(i) existential: in kān šī karaˁ83 (Daṯīna, south Yemen) ‘If there is any rain water’ (ii) negative: mā šī lik nadīd84 (Daṯīna, south Yemen) ‘You (m) have no equal’ māna šī qabīlī 85 (Daṯīna, south Yemen) ‘I am not a tribesman’ (iii) interrogative: šī xēl ˁinda-kum?86 (Daṯīna, south Yemen) ‘Do you have any horses?’ šī maˁ-iš ˁiyāl?87 (Ṣanˁāˀ, Yemen) ‘Do you (f) have any children?’ -šī bih maˁa-kum bunn?88 (Ṣanˁāˀ, Yemen) -mā šī ‘Do you (mpl) have any coffee beans?’ ‘No’ Wilmsen has argued that šī is not, as is often assumed, a reduced form of šay, and that, historically, it originated in south-west Arabia.89 These claims are controversial, but whatever the truth of the matter, it is clear that the functions of šī/ šay in the Baḥārna dialects, the Omani dialects and those of the Gulf

83  DATH II.I 24. 84  DATH II.III 1539. 85  DATH II.I 104. 86  DATH II.III 1635. 87  SAN 266. 88  SAN 404. 89  See, in particular, WILM 120–126.

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coast which neighbour Oman (Rās al-Khayma, Dubai), are virtually identical with those of ši in Yemen, e.g. (i) existential (= ‘any/some; to some extent, a little; there is . . .’): šay baṭn-ah yiˁawr-ah—daxtar! (Manāma 6) ‘(If he had) any pain in his stomach—(he went straight to) the doctor!’ tāli, čidi sāˁa iḥdaˁš šī, tigarrī-na, sāˁa iṯnaˁš ninhaḍ (11) ‘Then, at about eleven o’clock or so, she’d get us to read, and at twelve we’d get up (to leave)’ yinaqlū-h šī, yinaqlū-h90 (Rustāq, Oman) ‘They move him around a bit, they move him around’ ḥmīr šē . . . l-ḥmīr barra91 (Shawāwī dialect, N. Oman) ‘There were donkeys . . . the donkeys were outside’ il-ayġa šī 92 ( Ṣūr, Oman) ‘Aygha (= a neighbourhood in Ṣūr ) exists (to this day)’ (ii) existential partitive (= ‘some . . .’ others’): šī aṣīd-ah, ši yiṭīr (6) ‘Some I catch, others escape’ šī taww-ah ṭāliˁ, šī fāmir (19) ‘Some just coming up, others flowering’ šay yūšib, šay taw ṯāmir (Nizwa, Oman) ‘Some fattening up, others just flowering’ šay fīha nagˁatēn, šay fīha nagˁa waḥda (Tanˁam, Oman) ‘Some could fire two shots (sc without reloading), some only one’

90  CH. 91  EAD 92. 92  CH.

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(iii) interrogative = ‘any/ at all?’). In its interrogative function, when it often follows the element it refers to, it works like a suffix (and is marked as such in Reinhardt’s treatment of it in Omani Arabic): xēš šay, lō naylūn? (14) ‘Was it made of sacking material, or plastic?’ fi wēn zaraˁtūn, xawāfīr šay? (5) ‘Where did you plant (them), in seed-beds?’ šay ṭabīx? ṭabīx ˁēš, ˁēš u sālūnā (20) ‘Was there any cooked food? Cooked rice, rice and curry.’ wagaˁ šay fi īdē-š? 93 (Nizwa, Oman) ‘Is there any pain in your (f) hands?’ fi ˁūq šī-hǝ?94 (Rustāq, Oman) ‘Is there any pain?’ šī ahl-ik bāqīn?95 (al-Ḥaṣṣāṣ, Samāyil Gap, Oman) ‘Are your parents still alive at all?’ šayy ˁid-kum ˁēš?96 (Dubai, UAE) ‘Have you any rice?’ (iv) negative (‘not any’): astaˁǧib . . . wi lā yiˁawwir-ni ši (Manāma 1) ‘I was amazed . . . it didn’t hurt me at all!’ mā yitkalkal minni u minni ši (19) ‘It doesn’t leak out everywhere at all’ maḥḥad lih ši bǝġiya (19) ‘Nobody had any desire for it’ 93  CH. 94  CH. 95  CH. 96  EADS 170.

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inšallah mā istuwa šay ḏarar ˁalēk97 (Dubai, UAE) ‘I hope you suffered no harm’ mā šāy daxtar98 (Nizwa, Oman) ‘There were no doctors’ mā ši guwwa fēha99 (Ṣūr, Oman) ‘She has no strength left’ hāḏi šiši100 byūt (Wādi Saḥtān, Oman) ‘(In) this (area), there were no houses at all’ Group 2. This group of three features is not quite so inclusive, but has a similar geographical distribution to Group 1: (6) All B dialects have /f/ for OA /ṯ/, e.g. ifnēn ‘two’, falāfa ‘three’, fōr ‘bull’, kufr ‘amount’. This is a highly salient (and now stigmatized) feature of the B dialects as a whole, and there is evidence of its once widespread incidence in the ‘peripheral’ group of dialects (Yemen, UAE).101 (7) and (8) interrogative particles -ǝ? and lā?

97  EADS 234. 98  CH. 99  CH. 100  Recorded by CH. šiši ‘nothing at all’, an emphatic form, is now an unusual usage in Oman, though it occurs in Reinhardt’s 19th century material gathered in Zanzibar (REIN 301), Brockett notes it for Khābūra (BRO 140), and Eades for the Jabal Ḥaǧar, Northern Oman (EAD 92) (in which it is misunderstood). 101  /f/ < /ṯ/ is noted by Landberg (GLOS 244–245, HAD 538) as ‘very frequent in all the southern dialects’ (sc of Yemen), including the coast. ˁUbayd (IBD 35) notes it as a categorical feature of the ‘old Baḥārna’ (qudāmā l-baḥārna) dialect of Abu Dhabi spoken now only by the ‘elderly’ (kubār as-sinn), who are presumably descended from Baḥārna from Bahrain/ eastern Saudi Arabia who migrated there at some point in the past, as they did to other parts of the Gulf (Kuwait, southern Iran); but /f/ < /ṯ/ is not general in the main body of the UAE dialects, occurring in a few words only. (/d/ < /ḏ/ and /ḍ/ < /#ḏ/, on the other hand, are widespread on the east coast of the UAE and in the dialects of neighbouring areas of northern Oman (IBD 74)).

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In the Baḥārna102 and the Omani dialects,103 a clitic -ǝ? (-hǝ? or -yǝ? when postvocalic), may be suffixed to any part of a sentence form a yes/no question, e.g. minhu? ǧāsim-ǝ? (9) ‘Who? (D’you mean) Jasim?’ awlād-iš ǝmšattatīn-ǝ? (Manāma 5) ‘Are your children split up (between different fathers)? intīn bitt-i flāna-hǝ? (5) ‘Are you my daughter called so-and-so?’ lā taḥrig-kum ir-ramḍa-yǝ? (11) ‘(You mean) so that the hot ground wouldn’t burn your feet?’ ištaġal, tšūf-ǝ? (Ṣūr, Oman) ‘He found employment, d’you understand?’ miṯil inta . . . bġēt iz-zawāg-ǝ? (Wādi Saḥtān, Oman) ‘You, for example . . . did you want to get married?’ il-yōm-ǝ gāyīn? (Nizwa, Oman) ‘Was it today that they came?’ fi ˁūq šī-hǝ? (al-Ḥaṣṣāṣ, Samāyil Gap, Oman) ‘Is there any pain?’ In the same dialects, the negative particle lā can be suffixed to statements to form tag-questions which superficially ask for an interlocutor’s confirmation, though almost always rhetorically, assuming that confirmation is self-evident from the situation; or as a way of maintaining the listener’s attention; or, when suffixed to an imperative, as a means of cajoling, e.g. ana mitˀaxxir asbāb in-naxīl hādīk, lā? (36) ‘I’m behind (with my crops) because of these palm-trees, aren’t I?’

102  See 3.3.5. 103  REIN 34, 110–111 records this feature for his Zanzibari Omani informants.

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nḥuṭṭ fīh šakkar, lā? u čāy, lā? nišrab u nākl-ah wiyya xubz, lā? iyya kamāč . . . (16) ‘We put sugar in it, didn’t we? And tea, didn’t we? We would drink and eat it with bread, wouldn’t we? With toasted bread . . .’ ī, lā?! (1) ‘Yes, of course (that’s true)!’ išrab, lā? (6) ‘Drink, why don’t you?’ (said to a person who wasn’t drinking his coffee) yaˁml-uh bi rigl-uh, yikanz-uh, lā? (Wādi Saḥtān, Oman) ‘He does it with his foot, he compresses it, doesn’t he?’ ham zūgt-ik hiya gāya awwal, lā? (Ṣuḥār, Oman) ‘Your wife used to come as well, before, didn’t she?’ It is noteworthy that the same construction occurs in some varieties of Yemeni Arabic, but with the other main negative particle in use everywhere, mā: bass mumkin aštari lī fils min as-sūg, mā? 104 (Ṣanˁāˀ, Yemen) ‘I can buy a small stone from the market place, can’t I?’ mā gad ǧā-š, mā? 105 (Ṣanˁāˀ, Yemen) ‘He hasn’t come, has he?’ All or most of the unusual functional elements illustrated in this section occur in what we are terming a group of ‘peripheral dialects’ of Arabia, all of them in typological terms ‘sedentary’; none of them occur in the central Arabian dialects such as those described by Ingham for Najd, or in the ˁArab dialects of the Gulf coast which are their recent descendants. In tabular form:

104  SAN 405. 105  WAT 134.

31

Communities, Histories, and Dialects in Bahrain dialect type ↙ feature

↘

‘sedentary’

‘bedouin’

E. Arabian Baḥārna

Omani & UAE sedentaries

Yemeni coastal sedentaries

Gulf / Najdi ˁArab

1

reflex of OA /q/

k

q or k

q

g and ǧ/ dz

2

2fsng enclitic pronoun

-(i)š

-(i)š

-(i)š

-(i)č / or -(i)ts

3

-in(n)- infix on suffixed ap

yes

yes

yes (south)

no

4

intīn and intūn as 2fsng and 2pl pronouns/ -tīn and -tūn as s-stem suffixes

yes

yes (some UAE only)

yes (west and south west coast)

no

5

ši/šay as existential/ yes interrog/ neg particle

yes

yes

no

6

reflex of OA /ṯ/

f

some f in UAE

f widespread

ṯ

7

interrog clitic -ǝ?

yes

yes

no data

no

8

interrog clitic -lā? /-mā?

yes

yes

no data

no

The possible explanation for the distribution of features in this table is that the ‘peripheral sedentary’ and ‘bedouin’ dialects had different histories and geographical origins. The most salient and widely shared of the ‘sedentary’

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features are 1–6. It is unlikely that such a ‘bundle’ of non-lexical features, some of them rare in the Arabic dialects as a whole, would have arisen independently in each of the locations where they are found today. We noted above that there were early population movements from Yemen into south-eastern Arabia and thence to eastern Arabia106 (notably of the ˁAbd al-Qays and Azd), and it may well be that the pattern we observe in the distribution of these features is one of the traces left behind by those early waves of migration and settlement from the south-west. Supporting evidence for the great age and the provenance of some of these features comes from an unexpected source which we will turn to in 1.5 below—the Arabic dialects of central Asia. But, before we consider that, there were two other major constituent elements which created the dialect situation in contemporary eastern Arabia. One, which we can be certain about, was the ˁArab migrations from central Arabia, the most recent of which occurred in the late 18th century, and which produced the ruling families of all the present-day Gulf States, as described earlier. The other was a possibly much older element which cannot be dated with any certainty, represented by certain widespread dialect forms associated with old coastal populations, and which the data distribution suggests were not brought in by the more recently arrived Najdi element, and are not found in the Baḥārna dialects either. It is these two influences we will turn to now. 1.4

Core and Periphery

We have thus far depicted the typologically ‘sedentary’ dialects of Arabia— those of the Baḥārna, the northern Omani rural and town populations, and parts of southern and western Yemen—as forming an ancient ‘chain’ around Arabia’s southern and eastern periphery. Over the course of their history, these dialects have been subject to periodic pulses of ‘invasion’ from the ‘core’ of Arabia, in the form of contact with the speech of incoming Najdi populations. This has been the principal ‘external’ influence on the Gulf dialects as a whole over the last two centuries, and we will turn to its linguistic effects in a moment. But before we do, it seems that, at the time when the Najdis arrived, there were other non-Najdi ˁArab population elements present as well as the Baḥārna. One of them was the so-called Ḥwala referred to earlier, a distinct community who claim to be indigenous ‘coastal’ Gulf Arabs and who, in modern times, became heavily involved in Gulf trade, many of them choosing to 106  WILK2 73, 76–77.

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reside on the Persian coast, but moving freely back and forth across the Gulf. Over a century ago, and for political reasons, there was large-scale migration by Ḥwala families back to the Arab coast of the Gulf. They were at that point mostly Arabic-Persian bilinguals, but most, if not all, have by now become Arabic monolinguals. At the time of this research, they still formed a large proportion of the Sunnī population of the two biggest towns of Bahrain, Muḥarrag and Manāma. In Bahrain (and seemingly elsewhere in the Gulf), there are linguistic features which still today distinguish the speech of non-Najdi Sunnī ˁArab communities, including the Ḥwala, from the Najdi tribally-descended element. These features are found not just in Bahrain, but all around the Gulf rim, from southern Iraq to Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, though, as far as I am aware, they have not thus far been attributed to a well-defined social group. The main distinctive feature is the 1st and 2nd persons of the s-stem verb, which are formed via the insertion of a long mid-vowel /ē/ between the basic verb-stem and any consonant-initial suffix in all verb-types, not just in finally-weak and doubled ones (as is normal in all modern Arabic dialects). Thus, alongside the expected forms from finally-weak stems such as /nisēt/ ‘I/you (m) forgot’, /girēti/ ‘you (f) read’, and the doubled /ḥabbēna/ ‘we loved’, we encounter forms such as /gālēt/ ‘I/you (m) spoke’ (hollow, pattern I), and /šrubēt/ or /širbēt/ ‘I/you (m) drank’ (strong, pattern I), /gazzarēna107/ ‘we passed (the time) (strong pattern II) ’, /tizawwiǧēt/ ‘I/you (m) got married’ (strong, pattern V), thāwišēt ‘I argued’ (hollow pattern VI); iḥtāǧēt ‘I needed’ (hollow pattern VIII), /istafādēna/ ‘we benefitted’ (hollow, pattern X), tṣarwiˁēt ‘I was dumb-struck’ (quadriliteral). Speakers who use such forms may treat any past-tense stem in this way, whether simple or derived.108

107  This is a particularly interesting hybrid form: the pattern II stem, gazzar is not lexically Arabic, but formed by doubling the middle ‘radical’ of the Persian present stem gozar of the verb guzāštan ‘to pass’, then adding the /ē/ infix and the personal suffixes. 108  See 4.4.1.1 for further details of these forms in Bahraini Arabic. There is even a lengthy comical colloquial poem by the Bahraini poet ˁAbdurruaḥmān Rafīˁ az-zawāǧ al-ˁadil (‘proper marriage’) which rhymes in -ēt, and which features many such verbs, e.g. mā kubrēt ‘you haven’t grown up’, šayyibēt ‘you’ve grown old’, yimˁēt ‘I saved up’, tisallifēt ‘you borrowed’ hlakēt ‘I died’, rāḥēt ‘I went’, ṭlubēt ‘I sought’ and many more. That poem was written in 1970. More recently, it is interesting to note that on Bahraini internet forums in which old customs and ways of speaking are discussed and exemplified, verb forms of this type figure prominently, and are labelled as ‘old-fashioned Muḥarragī dialect’, see section 7.3 'A dialects' in the final chapter of this book for an example.

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In recent times, forms such as these were first reported by Tom Johnstone based on field-work done in the late 1950s. He notes them as being then common in Bahrain and northern Qatar,109 commenting that ‘such forms are stigmatized by native speakers as vulgar, but they are extensively used nevertheless’. But he says nothing further about the social profile of the speakers who use them. Similar forms were described by Meissner more than a century ago for parts of southern Iraq and neighbouring regions, but have been reported for several Gulf locations since—Kuwait, Khūzistān, and the UAE.110 They also occur, but in a more restricted set of forms, in the Muslim dialect of Baghdad.111 Further afield, forms of this general type have been reported for eastern Sudan112 and N. Africa (Chad, and some dialects in Morocco and Algeria)113 but the details of the African data are sketchy. My own research has shown that in Bahrain these unusual s-stem forms are not just restricted to the dialects of the ˁArab population, but to a particular subsection of it. I recorded them only for ˁArab speakers living in certain neighbourhoods of the capital city (Manāma (6, 7, 8, 10) and in the ˁArab towns of Muḥarrag (48) and al-Ḥidd (45), and, in particular, they seemed to

109  EADS 92, 110. 110  Southern Iraq and Iran: MEIS xli, in a footnote, notes several examples and describes them as typical of the speech of Marsh Arabs. I recently noted the form occurring twice in a colloquial poem by the Iraqi poet ‘Abbās Jījān, who is from Basra: qarrirēt ‘you decided’ and hāǧēt ‘you flared up (in anger)’. Ingham (ING2 12) has highlighted this feature as one of a number of markers of the dialect of the riverine sedentary cultivators (his “U” (= “urban”) dialect) of Khūzistān in southern Iran. Kuwait: I have been informed by the Kuwaiti linguist ˁAbdul-Muḥsin ˁAlī Dashtī that such forms are typical of the Arabic speech of Fōdar, an island off the Iranian coast near Bushire, from which some communities (known as Fawādira (HAN 283) migrated to Kuwait. Dr Yousuf al-Bader confirmed to me that they are used by many Kuwaitis. UAE and Oman: the descriptions we have of the dialects of the southern Gulf are patchy and incomplete, but I have encountered sporadic examples in the dialect poetry of the UAE (e.g. ˀašširēt ‘I signalled’), which suggest they do occur there. In 1987, I was told by a (non-linguistically trained) Omani living in the desert settlement of Tanˁam, near ˁIbrī in northern Oman that forms such as xāfēt ‘I/you (m) feared’ and qālēt ‘I/you (m) said’ were current in Izkī, the Omani town from which this informant originally came. I have so far been unable to check this claim. 111  ERW 97–99 gives examples for patterns IV, VII, VIII and X of the hollow verb but states that forms with the long /ē/ do not occur in any strong verb stem, simple or derived, nor in theme II of the hollow verb. This is different from the situation in southern Iraq, Bahrain, N. Qatar, and Khūzistān, and the UAE where they can occur in all verb-types. 112  REICH 244. 113  SING 264.

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be typical of the speech of the Ḥwala;114 the Baḥārna do not use these forms at all.115 Johnstone’s comment about the occurrence of these forms in northern Qatar is consonant with the social make-up of the whole area, as the Sunnī population of coastal northern Qatar is drawn from the same population that makes up the major subdivision of the Sunnī population of Bahrain which lives in Muḥarrag town and Manāma. The ˁArab speakers who do not have these forms, on the other hand, trace their origins to central Arabia. Many of the men in this category, especially in East and West Rifāˁ where the King’s palace is located, were employed at the time of my field-work in the military or as retainers of the Āl Khalīfa. Other enclaves of ˁArab dialects speakers with Najdi origins are Budayyaˁ, Zallāg, Rifāˁ, Jaww and ˁAskar, where these unusual verb forms were also not recorded.116 How are these forms to be explained? What we know of the demographic history of eastern and north eastern Arabia suggests that some form of linguistic accommodation might be a possibility. The Gulf basin, on both sides of the water, has had a millennia-long history of linguistic and cultural contact: Arabs and Persians have co-existed and intermarried in the aftermath of military conquests, trade, and economically-motivated migration since before Islam virtually up to the present day. The riverine populations of southern Iraq; the neighbouring southern province of Iran known as Khūzistān (and informally known as ‘ˁArabistān’ because of the ethnicity and language spoken by its population); Kuwait, Bahrain and northern Qatar—all are areas with ethnically mixed populations in which a large Persian element has historically been absorbed. In the reverse direction, the Ḥwala migrated in the past to the southern coast of Iran and settled there, only returning to the Arab side of 114  One middle-aged woman from Muḥarrag, who was a Persian-Arabic bilingual, made particularly heavy use of these forms. ING3 39 regards these forms as a ‘reductional’ change, which seems correct, but he is wrong in attributing them in Bahrain to the ‘Shi’a dialect of Bahrain’—in fact, with the one easily explicable exception noted below, they are one of the most salient features of Sunnī speech in Bahrain. 115  The exception is the Baḥārna village of Dēr on the island of Muḥarrag, and two Baḥārna quarters of neighbouring Muḥarrag town, which is otherwise overwhelmingly Sunnī in its confessional allegiance and whose dialect has exerted a strong influence on the dialects of the Baḥārna who live in these areas. The occasional /ē/ s-stem forms recorded in Dēr are a fascinating hybrid of stereotypically Baḥārna and Sunnī verb morphology, e.g. istafādētīn ‘you (fsng) benefitted’, in which the stem with /ē/ is typically Sunnī and the -tīn 2fsng suffix typically Shīˁī. 116  There are various Najdi ˁArab tribal descent groups: the ˁUtūb in Rifāˁ; the Dawāsir in Budayyaˁ; the Dawāsir, Āl Bū Rumayḥ and Āl Ghatam in Zallāg; the Āl Bū ˁAynayn in ˁAskar; the Āl Bū Rumayḥ in Jaww.

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the Gulf in the early 20th century when they were expelled from Iran. There has always been a good deal of bilingualism in the Gulf States and on the coast of southern Iran. Gulf Arabic is full of Persian (and Indian) borrowings, by no means restricted to the names of many hundreds of material artefacts. A number of high-frequency function words like /hast/ ‘there is’ (< Pers ast ‘(there) is’) and its local variant forms occur the length of the Gulf, in Khūzistān,117 Kuwait,118 Bahrain, Qatar,119 the UAE120 and coastal Oman (where the word is used to mean ‘very, many, a lot’),121 /ham/ ‘also, too’, /ha-n-namūna/ ‘like this’, /š-rang/ ‘what kind of . . .?’ / are Persian-derived, even /māl/, the particle of Arabic origin used to form analytic noun-phrases, may have entered the Gulf dialects from Persian, in which it is also used for this purpose. There is a vast store of non-Arabic vocabulary in the Gulf dialects, much of it Persian, which is shared from Basra in the north to Muscat in the south, and reflects a common history of sustained cultural contact. The possibility must be entertained that the /ē/ s-stem form is a survival of a coastal Arabic dialect that was formed in the stable conditions of bilingualism which probably existed on both sides of the Gulf coast over many centuries, and produced so many loanwords in both directions.122 Like the distinctive features of the ‘peripheral’ dialects described earlier, the feature described here for the non-Najdi Sunnīs is becoming recessive, both in Bahrain and the wider Gulf. A process of homogenisation is under way, based on the Najdi dialect brought originally over two centuries ago by the ancestors of the present Gulf ruling families and those who came with them, which has gradually become the regionally prestigious norm. The main features of this dialect, represented in Bahrain by what I shall be calling in Chapters 2–7 the Bahraini ‘A’ (ˁArab) dialect as it was in the mid-1970s forms one of the two main themes of this book, the Bahraini ‘B’ (Baḥārna) dialects forming the other. However, the changes have not been all in one direction, if one compares the central Najdi dialects as described in many studies by Ingham with what

117  ING2 15. 118  HAN 398. 119  EADS 165. 120  HANZii 714. 121  BRO 211. 122  Even as late as the 1960s, when I worked as an English teacher in a Manāma intermediate school for boys aged 10–14, Persian was as much used as Arabic as the language of conversation between the boys in the classrooms I taught in.

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they have developed into on the Gulf coast. In his study of how the dialects of north-eastern Arabia have evolved,123 Ingham sums things up as follows: Comparison of the dialects of inner Arabia with those of the outer fringe, namely Mesopotamia and the Gulf, reveals a marked generalisation: that the outer dialects, and more particularly those of Mesopotamia, have reduced a number of contrasts still extant in the dialects of the interior124 What Ingham calls ‘the outer dialects’, which includes those of Bahrain, all had a Najdi element in them in the dialectal melting pot of two to three hundred years ago, together with other elements. But the dialectal ‘mix’ was not the same everywhere, so it is not surprising that the outcome of the general homogenisation which has occurred since has not been the same either. In Qatar, for example, the Najdi element in the population seems to have been more dominant numerically from the start, and the resulting dialectal koiné reflects that fact more than the case of Bahrain and Kuwait, which have been subject to a wider variety of influences, resulting in a greater degree of ‘levelling’. But what Ingham says nonetheless applies grosso modo everywhere in eastern Arabia. If we take five salient morpho-syntactic and morpho-phonological features common to the contemporary Najdi dialects, and compare them with the dialects of the Najdi-descended Bahraini ˁArab, it becomes clear how ‘reduced’ the latter is: (1) the internal (apophonic) passive125 In the dialects of Najd, the ‘internal’ passive is still fully functional in all persons of the verb and in both the s-stem and the p-stem. In the Bahraini ˁArab dialects, by contrast, it now occurs only sporadically, only in the 3rd person, mainly in the s-stem, and only in a limited set of verbs. It is effectively a ‘fossilized’ form. Overwhelmingly, passive verbs are now expressed by inprefixation,126 or by an active verb of unspecific 3rd person reference, even 123  ING3. The area covered is roughly from Basra, Iraq in the north to al-Ḥasa in eastern Saudi Arabia to the south, and includes all the tribal dīras to the west of this line as far as the Nafud desert (see the map, ING3 6). 124  ING3 33. 125  For details, see 4.2. 126  In the Bahraini and Omani dialects, the use of in- and other derivational prefixes has been extended to the point where they can be applied to derived verb patterns, e.g. in- + pattern II ˁawwar ‘to hurt’ → inˁawwar ‘to get hurt’, in- + pattern V tafarrag ‘to disperse’ → intifarrag

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with verbs like ‘to give birth’, so that ‘I was born’ is normally either inwilidt or ǝwlidō-ni lit ‘they gave birth to me’ rather than the internal passive ǝwlidt. The internal passive is more common in the Baḥārna dialects, but still not very frequent in absolute terms. (2) gender distinctions in the 2nd and 3rd pl pronouns and persons of the verb In the dialects of Najd these distinctions still exist everywhere; but in all Bahraini ˁArab dialects (and those of the Baḥārna) they have totally disappeared. The fpl hangs on in Bahraini Arabic only as a sporadically encountered adjectival form in noun phrases (e.g. ḥfērāt ṣaġīrāt ‘small holes’), but the vast majority of speakers do not use it even in this type of structure. (3) dialectal tanwīn on the indefinite noun127 In the dialects of Najd, even in informal speech contexts (i.e. excluding dialectal poetry, proverbs, adages, riddles or other ‘frozen’ formats), -in on indefinite nouns, participles, adjectives, and, in some areas of Najd, even proper names is very common, and occurs in a wide variety of types of noun-phrase. In Bahrain, dialectal tanwīn in informal ˁArab speech is now unusual even in the speech of the elderly, and occurs only in a very limited range of phrase types, mainly involving distributive nominals like kill-in ‘each and every (person)’, and nās-in . . . . nās-in ‘some people . . . other people’, e.g. iylisaw, kill-in maḥall-ah (48) ‘They sat down, each in his place’ kill-in ya yifṭar (Manāma 8) ‘All who passed by (were given food to) break their fast’ nās-in rāḥaw, nās-in inzalaw (48) ‘Some people left, some people stayed’ In the Baḥārna dialects it occurs more frequently and in a wider range of phrase-types,128 e.g.

‘to get dispersed’, ista- + pattern II ˁallam ‘to teach’ → istaˁallam ‘to learn, be taught’. This type of innovation is also found in Najdi. 127  See 3.7 for fuller details. 128  A similar distribution and incidence of dialectal tanwīn to this has been found in the speech of elderly northern Qatarīs recorded in the 1980s. See BET for details.

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39

(a) N + Adj: ṭamāt-in sahil (2) ‘poor-quality tomatoes’; kār-in zēn (< kāri-in) (24) ‘a good Qurˀān reciter’; raǧǧāl-in zēn (3) ‘a decent man’; bint-in zēna (frequent in all locations) ‘a nice girl (esp for marriage)’; rāhat-in zēna (34) ‘a nice rest’; māy-in bārda (21) ‘cold water’; arāḍ-in šādda (5) ‘soils that hold together’ (b) N + other modifying adjunct:  . . . arāḍ-in bayyaˁ-ha (1) ‘. . . lands which he sold’; . . . arāḍ-in ǝwkūfāt-na (17) ‘. . . lands held as our religious endowments’ (c) on N when phrase-final: takallam, wallah, gōlat-in! (20) ‘Say something, by God!’  . . . lēn ǧāz lēha šay ˁind rafīgat-in (16) ‘. . . if she fancied something that belonged to some friend or other’ (d) distributive Ns: marr-in lik, marr-in ˁalēk (3) ‘Sometimes for you, sometimes against’ yōm-in čidi, yōm-in čidi (28) ‘One day like this, another like that’ (e) as an adverbial (normally -an): lazm-an (3, 30) ‘obligatorily’; baˁad-an (13, 19, 28) ‘afterwards’; qabṭ-an ‘completely’; bi l-ˁamd-an (sic) (11) ‘deliberately’.129 But even so Baḥārna usage still does not have the wide scope of tanwīn in the Najdi dialects as described by Ingham.130 129  In none of these cases does it appear that the form in question is a borrowing from CLA/ MSA. 130  ING 47–50.

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(4) the (so-called) ghawa-syndrome This is one of the classic features of central Najdi dialects.131 It involves the resyllabication of words of the general form C1aC2Cv(C) (where v can be short or long) to C1C2aCv(C) if C2 is a so-called ‘guttural’ consonant (/x, ġ, ḥ, ˁ, h/), so: nxala < naxla ‘palm-tree’, gḥama < gaḥma ‘shift of divers’, mˁarūf < maˁrūf ‘known’. In Bahrain, this kind of resyllabication is now typical only of the speech of the elderly Bahraini ˁArab. The Baḥārna never had this feature, and nor did many of the Ḥwala—they say naxla, gaḥma, maˁrūf, as also now do the Najdi-descended ˁArab of the younger generation. (5) CCvCv(C) syllable structure Words with this syllable structure occur in the Najdi and Bahraini ˁArab dialects as a result of short-vowel deletion in cases where CvCvCv(C) occurs, as sequences of more than two short open syllables are not acceptable.132 This has an especially noticeable effect on the form of the basic s-stem strong verb, in which form like ktibat ‘she wrote’, ktibaw ‘they wrote’ are typical. Such forms are still heard in Bahrain, but they are not found in any Baḥārna dialect, which have only katabat or kitbat-type forms, nor in that of the Ḥwala, which tends to favour the kitbat-type. The end result is that kitbat is now becoming a kind of homogenised ‘norm’ for all speakers, including the Najdi elements of the population. These five features give some idea of the effect of homogenisation in Bahrain over the long-term: several saliently Najdi features, still current in central Arabia, have been/ are being levelled out. On the other hand, the distinctively Baḥārna features we listed earlier in this chapter, typical of the pre-Najdi ‘peripheral’ dialects of western and southern Arabia, have been, if anything, even more prone to levelling, even to total disappearance on account of the local social stigma which, in Bahrain, attaches to them (as shall see in Chapter 7).133 The fate of the s-stem verbs which have the /ē/ infix, a feature which is neither part of the dialect of the Najdi ˁArab nor of that of the Baḥārna, is similarly precarious: with the absorption of the Ḥwala into the mainstream 131  See 2.6.4 and ING 19. Ingham calls this the Guttural Resyllabication rule. 132  See 2.2.1.1.1 and ING 18. Ingham calls this the Short Vowel Raising Rule, as there is a restriction on the occurrence of /a/ in the forms which result from vowel-deletion and resyllabication. 133  In Oman, another link in the chain of old ‘peripheral’ sedentary dialects, a similar process of levelling and homogenisation towards an emerging ‘Gulf standard’ dialect is rapidly gathering pace. It started there much later than in the northern Gulf because of the relative isolation of the country from the outside world until the beginning of the 1970s. See HOL14 134–135.

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41

Najdi-descended Sunnī population, it too is being levelled out and disappearing fast. 1.5

Eastern Arabia and Central Asia

We return now to dialect history. In section 1.3.1.2 we noted some of the more striking features shared by what we have termed the ‘peripheral’ Arabian dialects spoken by communities with a historically ‘sedentary’ lifestyle in southern Yemen, Oman, parts of the UAE and Bahrain. We suggested firstly that they have a common south Arabian origin, and secondly that they may be of great age. Unexpected supporting evidence for this comes from the surviving Arabic dialects of central Asia: small Sprachinseln in the region of Bukhara, Uzbekistan;134 a group of villages in north-eastern Iran near the Turkmenistan border;135 and villages in the region of Mazār-i-Sharīf in northern Afghanistan.136 It is well known that the Arabs first arrived in Bukhara in the early 8th century and that the first congregational mosque there dates from 713 CE. This is also when the traditions of the present Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the area claim their ancestors arrived, and of all the versions of their history in circulation locally, this one, according to Zimmermann,137 is likely to be the most accurate. Reliable accounts of their subsequent dispersal and spread, however, do not exist; but all these modern communities of Arabic speakers now live far apart from one another and on the edge of, or in, the vast basin of the Amu Darya (Oxus) River. The central Asian Arabic dialects are still readily recognisable as varieties of Arabic, but the strong influence that the dominant languages of the area have had on them, not only on their vocabulary but on every level of their structure—phonology, morphology and syntax—is evident. Comparing them suggests that the most radical changes in morphology and grammatical structures have occurred in Uzbekistan, where the host language is of the Turkic family; the changes seem less radical where it has been a member of the Persian family (Farsi in Khorasan). In the Afghan case, both Persian and Turkic have played a role, as the Afghan Arabic dialects spoken near Mazāri-Sharīf, where the host languages are Dari and Pashto, are a relatively recent splinter group from those of Uzbekistan, where the original influence must

134  ZIM. 135  SEEG. 136  ING4. 137  ZIM 612.

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have been Turkic.138 But when one strips away the Turkic and Persian elements and influences, what is most fascinating about these dialects is that they obviously share many features—phonological, morphological and lexical—with the modern Arabic dialects of Iraq and eastern Arabia. This is remarkable because these dialects have, in all probability, been cut off from the influence of Iraq and Arabia for around fourteen centuries.139 The Arabic elements in them have, as it were, been ‘frozen’ in the state in which their original speakers took them to central Asia. The changes which have occurred in them since that time originate from languages of a different phylum, so are easy to distinguish. The dialectal features they share with Iraq and Arabia can be classified in four main ‘bundles’ according to their correspondences.140 Taking Seeger’s description of the dialects from north-eastern Iran as a basis of comparison, we find: Bundle 1. Features shared with Iraqi dialects which do not commonly occur in eastern Arabia: 1. the indefinite article fat < fard 2. vocabulary: rād as the basic verb ‘to want’ (eastern Arabia = baġa); baḥḥar ‘to look at’ (eastern Arabia = na#ḏar/ naḍar); anta ‘to give’ (eastern Arabia ˁaṭa),141 k/čital ‘to kill’ (eastern Arabia = gital) Bundle 2. Features shared with southern Iraqi and eastern Arabian ‘bedouin’ dialects: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

/g/ < /q/ and /ǧ/ < /g/ in front vowel environments, e.g. ǧidīm ‘old’, diǧīǧ ‘flour’, ǧaṯṯam ‘to divide up’ (< ǧassam) /č/ < /k/ in front vowel environments, e.g. čibīr ‘big’, čalb ‘dog’, čān ‘he was’ 2fsng enc pron -(i)č, e.g. ubū-č ‘your(2fsng) father’ 3pers prons uhū, ihī, uhumm (cf eastern Arabian bedouin dialects ǝhuwwǝ, ǝhiyyǝ, ǝhummǝ) the ghawa-syndrome, e.g. yiˁarif ‘he knows’, yaḥalib ‘he milks’, axaḍar ‘green’

138  ING4 28 states that they came to Afghanistan in the 1870s. 139  Arabic ceased to be the official language in Bukhara, in present-day Uzbekistan, at the end of the Sāmānid dynasty (end of the 10th century CE) and was probably never the language of everyday life for the ethnically non-Arab majority population (BART 240, 291). 140  HOL6 88–90 is an earlier version of this classification. 141  But naṭa, yinṭi was recorded for some Baḥārna communities: 16, Manāma 1, Manāma 2.

Communities, Histories, and Dialects in Bahrain

6.

43

gutt mā ‘never’, e.g. gutt minḏil mā šifne ‘we have never saw any (important) places’ (cf. eastern Arabian bedouin dialect mā/ lā gaṭ ‘never’)

Bundle 3. Features shared with southern Iraqi and all eastern Arabian dialects, ‘bedouin’ or ‘sedentary’: 1. final -n on the 2fsng and 2/3pl p-stem verbs, e.g. tuḏurbīn ‘you (fsng) hit’, yiḏurbūn ‘they (mpl) hit’ 2. s-stem 3pl ending -ow, e.g. čitibow ‘they wrote’ (cf. general eastern Arabian suffix -aw) 3 resyllabication of suffixed p-stem verbs, e.g. yičitbūn ‘they write’ 4. vocabulary: ṯava (=sawwa) ‘to do’, vadda (=wadda) ‘to take, bring’, ṯāyal (=sāyal) ‘to ask (s’one)’, trayyag (= idem) ‘to have breakfast’, ḏēn (=zēn) ‘good’; hast ‘there is’; ham ‘also’. Bundle 4. Features shared with the Arabian ‘peripheral’ dialects as described earlier, and not with the eastern Arabian ‘bedouin’ dialects (features 1, 3 and 4. below); or features shared with the eastern Arabian ‘bedouin’ dialects, but having the phrasal distribution more typical of the ‘peripheral’ dialects (feature 2): 1. the -in(n)- infix on the ap before obj pron enclitics, e.g. āxiḏtinnah ‘I (f) have married him’ (as in the Baḥārna, some UAE, Omani, and Yemeni dialects) 2. dialectal tanwīn: the indefinite noun-phrase types on which tanwīn most commonly occurs are virtually the same limited set as in the ‘peripheral’ Arabian dialects (and different to the phrase-types on which it occurs in the eastern Arabian ‘bedouin’ dialects, such as that of the Bahraini ˁArab), e.g. (a) N + Adj: beneyt-in ḏēne ‘a pretty girl’, lafd-in ˁarabiyye ‘an Arabic dialect’142

142  SEEG 637–638 also records a couple of examples where the adj also carries tanwīn, e.g. labāṯ-in ḏēn-in ‘nice clothes’, which is not the norm on the Gulf coast and is more reminiscent of central Arabian bedouin usage.

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(b) N + other modifying adjunct: xalg-in hongāmat-hum etebāre yikūn ˁind-he ‘people whose speeches carry weight’ (c) on N when phrase-final (i.e. with no modifier):143 il ḥālt-in yinahi ‘He arrives at a situation’ agar gāḥt-in yikūn ‘If it is stony ground . . .’ riḏīˁ-in il ad-dinye yiǧi ‘A child comes into the world’ (d) distributive Ns: xalg-in minnah eṯtifāde yiṯūn ‘some people profit from it’ (e) adverbs: baˁd-an ‘after, later’ 3.

šīt-in as a multi-functional particle, cognate with Arabian ‘peripheral dialects’ ši/ šay:

(a) existential: ġōḏe šīt-in ‘something to eat’ čān ˁind-um diǧīǧ-in šīt-in ‘They a had a little flour’ (b) negative: šīt-in marīd ‘I don’t want anything’ 143  In these and many other examples, the verb comes at the end of the sentence because of the influence of Persian word-order.

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45

(c) interrogative: no data. 4.

vocabulary: several high frequency but unusual central Asian Arabic lexical items, e.g. ġide/ yoġodi the normal verb for ‘to go’, gubaḏ/ yugbuḏ the normal verb for ‘to obtain, receive’; yā + pron enclitic ‘(together) with’. Analogue forms of all these exist in the ‘peripheral’ dialects: ġada/ yiġdi ‘to go’ is a stereotypically village Baḥārna usage in Bahrain not used by the ˁArab, who use rāḥ, and is also common in northern Oman, where there is also the pattern II derivative form ġadda bi ‘to send’.144 The verb kabaḍ (or gabaḍ) is the normal verb for ‘to get, receive’ in Baḥārna usage, and is again not used by the ˁArab, who use ḥaṣṣal. The preposition iyyā + pron enc ‘together with’ is also stereotypically Baḥārna usage in contrast to wiyyā which is typical of the ˁArab and eastern Arabian bedouin usage more generally.

It is apparent from this review of some of the features of the north-eastern Iranian Arabic (NEIA) dialect described by Seeger that it is not isomorphic with any single modern dialect of southern Iraq or eastern Arabia: it looks like an amalgam of several. There are elements in it which are clearly of Iraqi and not of Arabian origin at all (bundle 1) but equally, at the other end of the range, there are others that are non-Iraqi and identical with a group of unusual features shared by the ‘peripheral’ sedentary dialects of eastern and south-eastern Arabia (bundle 4), in particular the -in(n)- infix on the suffixed ap. Bundle 2 is a set of features shared by the NEIA dialect and the eastern Arabian bedouin dialects as a group (the dialect of the ˁArab of Bahrain is a typical example), and bundle 3 is the most all-inclusive set of features, shared by NEIA dialect and all those of eastern Arabia, bedouin or sedentary, but excluding the main group of northern Oman ‘sedentary’ dialects which do not share any of the phonological or morphological features of bundles 2 and 3. These Omani dialects are exceptional in other ways: they preserve gender distinctions in the 2 and 3 pl of the pronoun and verb (like Najd and NEIA, unlike most of eastern Arabia); they make extensive use of the ‘internal’ passive (like Najd, but 144  The map for ġada ‘to go’ (BEHN & WOI Vol. III 14) shows clearly the ‘peripheral’ distribution of this verb in Arabia—it occurs in Baḥrain, al-Ḥasa, northern Oman, south western Yemen and south-western Saudi Arabia. Ingham (ING2 38) notes it in the imperative form iġid! ‘go!’ in the ‘nomadic’ dialects of Khūzistān. It is the principal verb for ‘to go’ in the Arabic dialects of central Asia.

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unlike eastern Arabia and NEIA); they have yō- as the p-stem prefix of verbs which historically had an initial glottal (like NEIA, but unlike any other eastern Arabian dialects, which all have yā-). The correspondences of the Afghanistan Arabic (AA) and Uzbekistan Arabic dialects (UA) to those of Iraq and eastern Arabia are similar to the correspondences noted above for NEIA, though with some small differences. Ingham’s summarising comment on the lexicon of AA: ‘(it) shows a perceptible resemblance to that of Iraq and eastern Arabia, though not exclusively to either’145 could be applied not just to the lexicon of AA but to many features of its phonology and morphology, and also to the analogous features of UA. For example: *UA has both voiceless (/q/) and voiced (/g/) reflexes of historical /q/, but in AA the reflex is voiceless (/q/) only. *Neither UA nor AA has the affricate reflexes /č/ < /k/ and /ǧ/< /g/ in front-vowel environments. This makes UA and AA resemble ‘sedentary’ dialects, whether of Iraq or of eastern Arabia (Baḥārna, northern Oman), whereas the NEIA affricate reflexes make it resemble typologically ‘bedouin’ dialects. A couple of morphological features will further illustrate the complexity of the correspondences: *UA and AA, like NEIA, both have the quintessentially Iraqi, non-eastern Arabian, indefinite article fat/ fad (< fard ‘individual’). This shows an indisputable Iraqi connection in all three. But on another key morphological variable, the 2fsng enclitic pronoun: *UA and AA have -ki, which is typologically ‘sedentary’ Iraqi,146 whereas NEIA has -(i)č, which is ‘bedouin’, and typical of both southern Iraq and eastern Arabia. 145  ING4 34. 146  In modern Iraq, 2fsng -ki is typical only of the so-called qǝltu-dialects of the north and the Christian dialects of Baghdad and Basra. But this may not have been true in Iraq before the Mongol devastations of the mid-13th century, when, if Blanc is correct (BLA 169–170), what we now think of as the ‘sedentary’ qǝltu-dialects, or something akin to them, were spoken throughout Iraq. In other words, the speakers of Iraqi Arabic who formed part of the population of central Asia in the 8th century and after would have brought with them a qǝltu-dialect.

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47

A number of other features stand out as linking all three central Asian dialects—AA, UA, and NEIA—to what we have been terming the ‘peripheral’ dialects of eastern and south eastern Arabia: (1) the -in(n)- infix between the ap and enc prons147 (2) dialectal tanwīn is mainly limited to indefinite N + Adj phrases (3) vocabulary: local variants of ġada/ yiġdi ‘to go’ It seems from this set of cross-cutting and overlapping dialect correspondences that the central Asian Arabic dialects each represents a koiné formed out of the variety of related Iraqi and eastern Arabian dialects that the Arab force which conquered Transoxania in the 8th century must have spoken: Iraqi dialects; east Arabian bedouin dialects; east and south-east Arabian ‘peripheral’ sedentary dialects. They are not now, and probably never were identical with one another—each seems to have drawn on a slightly different mix of features—but they all seem to have drawn on the same Iraqi and eastern Arabian dialect sources.148 We know from Tabari that this force was made up of various tribes, including a large number of troops (about one-third of the total) from the ˁAbd al-Qays and Azd149 from which, as noted earlier, the Baḥārna 147  Of the three central Asian dialects, it appears from currently available descriptions that NEIA preserves the original eastern Arabian form of this feature most exactly, and UA has innovated the most radically, possibly on account of its long exposure to the agglutinating morphology of Turkic. In UA the pronoun enclitic attached to the infix typically refers to the subject and the object pronoun follows it, e.g. zorb-in-ak-āh ‘you have hit him’ (ZIM 620). 148  It is noteworthy that all the central Asian dialects have preserved gender distinctions in the 2nd and 3rd persons of the verb. In eastern Arabia, this feature has only been preserved completely intact in Oman. Further north, in Kuwait and Bahrain virtually categorically, and in many communities in Qatar and the UAE, it has been lost, probably as a result of the ‘levelling’ these dialects underwent after the areas where they are spoken were taken over by the Najdi incomers from the late 18th century. The Arabs who migrated from eastern and south-eastern Arabia to central Asia in the 8th century, a thousand years before the Najdis arrived, must still have had this feature in their dialects; only the Omanis, who were not subject to ‘invasion’ from Najd, still have it without exception. 149  According to Wellhausen (WELL 427–428 n.3), there were c. 10,000 Azd and 4,000 ˁAbd alQays out of a total of 40,000 troops in Greater Khorasān at the beginning of the 8th century. The total Arab population at that point was c. 200,000. In Tabari’s account of the year 96 AH (= 714–715 CE), Qutayba ibn Muslim, the commander of the Arab armies in Bukhara, addresses his ˁAbd al-Qays and Azd troops and describes them, respectively, as having, because of him, exchanged ‘pollination of palm-trees for horses’ reins’, and ‘riding on cows and donkeys for fleet stallions’ (POW 10–11, with some adjustment to the translation).

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claim ancient descent. There is further evidence of a significant south east Arabian element in the Arab force not mentioned by Tabari: in a 11th century CE local Omani history, there is an account of a very early (c. 694 CE) migration of ˁAbd al-Qays and Azd tribesmen numbering 3,000, this time directly across the Gulf by sea from Julfār (= modern Rās al-Khayma) to the Persian coast opposite.150 1.6

Summary and Conclusions

I have adduced evidence in this introductory chapter to show that the Gulf dialects as we know them today were formed out of several distinct historical strata: 1.

2.

3.

an ancient substratum of Mesopotamian Semitic but non-Arabic vocabulary (including some functional items), the remnants of which are found from Kuwait to Oman and are associated with certain occupations, especially crop cultivation, fishing and sea-faring. These elements may date from a period when the Gulf was multilingual and under Meso­ potamian control. an ancient group of related Arabic dialects which stretched in an arc around the eastern, south-eastern and southern periphery of Arabia, and were spoken by a sedentary population of cultivators and fishermen. This group of dialects is represented in the modern Gulf by those of the Baḥārna of Bahrain and eastern Saudi Arabia, and the ‘sedentary’ coastal and mountain populations of northern Oman and the UAE. The Arabic dialects of some populations of coastal south-western Arabia are obviously closely related to these Gulf dialects, and may have given rise to them via ancient migrations. old, pre-Najdi north-eastern Arabian coastal Arabic dialects of indeterminate type, now largely merged with the typologically bedouin dialects of the recent Najdi incomers, but vestiges of which are still found in the speech of some communities in southern Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and northern Qatar. These vestiges may be original features of Ḥwala Arabic.

This seems to be a bedouin commander’s disparagement of their sedentary origins—a prejudice that continued until almost the present day. Until very recently farming and fishing were still the mainstay of the livelihood of their descendants who remained in eastern and south eastern Arabia. 150  HIN1; HIN2 14–15.

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4.

49

A number of common function words of Persian origin may also be part of this old coastal stratum. typologically ‘bedouin’ dialects of Najdi origin which arrived in the Gulf in the 18th century CE and have been to some degree levelled by contact with the pre-existing strata described in 2. and 3. above, but at the same time have gradually come to assume, and continue to enjoy, the status of the prestigious and socially dominant dialect-type in the whole region. In Bahrain, this dialect type is represented by the speech of the ˁArab.

Evidence for what the eastern and south-eastern Arabian dialects must have been like in the late antique/ early mediaeval period is available in the descriptions we now have of a several Arabic dialects of central Asia, some of which appear to have partially originated in Arabia some fourteen centuries ago, and whose speakers have been cut off for at least a millennium from contact with ‘heartland’ Arabic-speaking areas and have not been exposed to the potentially modifying effects of literary Arabic.151 So much for history; in Chapters 2–6, I will describe the dialects of Bahrain as they were in the mid-1970s, based on data gathered from the least educated classes of people. Chapter 7 sketches how the situation described in those chapters has evolved in the last thirty years, as evidenced by another scholar’s recent study of some of the key variables which emerged from my study.

151  It is very striking that some of the unusual features typical of these Central Asian Arabic dialects and shared with the ‘peripheral’ sedentary dialects of Arabia in Yemen, Oman and Bahrain also occur in African Arabic dialects, and in Andalusian Arabic. The -in(n)participial infix is attested in East Sudanic (REICH 284) and Nigerian Arabic (O1 102); and the dialectal form of tanwīn in these same locations also (REICH 190, O2 111, 140, 144) as well as in early Andalusian Arabic (CORR 121–122). Owens (O 102–106, 160–162) argues for a common, very early, and eastern Arabian dialectal origin for all these features, which were then ‘exported’ via migrations over many centuries.

CHAPTER 2

Phonology This chapter and the next two give, in a traditional descriptive format, the phonological and morphological facts of the Bahraini dialects as they were in 1977–78. Some consideration will be given in Chapter 7, on the basis of others’ and my own observations, as to how the speech communities of Bahrain have evolved over the more than thirty years since the original fieldwork on which this study was based. In what follows, the short-hand designation OA (‘Old Arabic’) refers to the presumed ancestor of the modern dialects, without it being assumed (a) that we know how the ancestral form was pronounced, still less (b) that its sounds were homophonous with their corresponding forms in CLA (‘Classical Arabic’) as it is pronounced now, or as the early grammarians describe it. It may have been—but we simply don’t know. So, for example, the formulation “OA /q/” should not be taken as a claim that the grapheme qāf was pronounced in the conventional way in which it is pronounced in CLA today (viz a voiceless uvular plosive), but simply that OA /q/, whatever that was, was the ultimate ancestor of the various modern spoken realizations of that sound. It is possible that /q/ may have had a voiced realization in the ancient dialects, and/ or a more fronted position, at least in some phonological environments and in some ancient dialects. There is a similar difficulty in knowing what the ancient pronunciation was of OA /ǧ/, /ḍ/ and /#ḏ/, among other problems. Sections 2.1 and 2.2 deal with segmental features—consonants and the quality and distribution of vowels. In each section, the particularities of the A and B dialects are described in turn. Suprasegmental features are then dealt with: in 2.3 allowable syllable types; in 2.4 consonant clusters; in 2.5 word stress; in 2.6 various phonotactic processes: assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis, the so-called ghawa-syndrome, the spread of emphatisation. 2.1

Phoneme Inventory: Consonants

Plosives: (p), b, t, d, ṭ, ḍ, k, g, q, ˀ Affricates: č, ǧ Fricatives: f, ṯ, ḏ, ḏ# , x, ġ, ḥ, ˁ, h Sibilants: s, ṣ, z, š Liquids: l, r © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004302631_003

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Nasals: m, n Semivowels/glides: w, y While all of these phonemes occur in one or other of the Bahraini dialects, not all them occur in any one of them, and some are distributed differently across the shared lexical stock. These distributional differences are in part a consequence of the different linguistic and demographic histories of the communities of A and B dialect speakers that make up Bahraini society today. A number of suprasegmental processes involving vowel distribution and syllable structure changes are best explained by grouping segments which have similar effects together, notably sonorants (/l, n, r/) and ‘gutturals’, a term which groups five post-velar consonants (/x, ġ, ḥ, ˁ, h/). There has been large-scale borrowing from foreign languages into Bahraini Arabic over a long period, and the degree of assimilation of these borrowings into the phonological system is variable. /p/, which is placed in brackets in the phonemic inventory, has a marginal status. It is not native to any variety of Bahraini Arabic, and occurs only in borrowings. A few speakers preserve it, possibly because they are aware of its pronunciation in the donating language, e.g. panka (< H) ‘(ceiling) fan’, but the majority replace /p/ with /b/, e.g. bāča (< Pers pāča) ‘stew made of sheep offal’, bīb (< Port pipa ‘cask’) ‘five gallon drum’. /č/ and /g/ are also common in borrowings, e.g. čāra (< Pers) ‘ruse’, čayyak (< Eng) ‘to check’, kačra (< H) ‘rubbish’, gāri (< H) ‘donkey cart’, glāṣ (< Eng) ‘glass, tumbler’, bagsam (< T) ‘dry biscuit, rusk’, rang ‘colour, type’ (< Pers) and are indistinguishable phonetically from the /č/ and /g/ which have resulted from internal phonological changes (see below). 2.1.1 The A dialects The A dialects of Bahrain show a number of phonological developments, notably of OA/q/, /k/, /ġ/ and /ǧ/, and probable OA retentions, notably of the interdentals, which they have in common with other bedouin-descended dialects of the region to which they are closely related: eastern Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE. 2.1.1.1 The OA interdentals The A dialects, like most bedouin-descended dialects in the wider Arab World, have retained the interdental fricative reflexes of OA, ṯ, ḏ, #ḏ. Words which have etymological /ḍ/ in OA words are pronounced with fricative /#ḏ/ in all positions, e.g. ḏ# iḥa ‘late morning’, xaḏ# ar ‘green’, abyaḏ# ‘white’. In the word ṯintēn ‘two (f)’, some elderly uneducated speakers from some AV locations (e.g. Budayyaˁ) have /h/ for /ṯ/, e.g.

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yisawwi is-sāˁa hintēn ‘It would be about two o’clock’ 2.1.1.2 OA /q/ and /k/ In contiguity with back vowels, the A dialects normally have /g/ < OA /q/: gāl ‘he said’, bugar ‘cows’, bāg ‘he stole’. In front vowel environments, short or long, and in all positions, this /g/ was historically prone to affrication. It was most likely to happen in contiguity with high vowels, but also where low vowels had a fronted realisation, e.g. ǧīma ‘value’, firīǧ ‘neighbourhood’, mǧābil ‘opposite’. Even if /g/ was not in direct contiguity with a front vowel, it was still often affricated if the consonant separating it was a front and non-emphatic consonant, e.g. ḥalǧ ‘throat, mouth’, ˁirǧ ‘vein’, ṣidǧ ‘truth’. This /ǧ/ < OA /q/ is a saliently A feature. In the same front-vowel environments, OA /k/ was fronted and affricated to /č/, e.g. čibīr ‘great, old’, čiṯīr ‘many’, čalṯam ‘Kalṯam (girl’s name)’, čammal ‘to complete’, ḥači ‘talk, gossip’, milča ‘betrothal (of a girl)’, warč ‘thigh’, simič ‘fish’, bēt-ič ‘your (2fsng) house’, ˁilč ‘chewing gum’, sammāč ‘fisherman’, ḏīč ‘this(f)’.1 However, affrication did not historically operate in all the cases in which it could have done: compare ǧidir ‘cooking pot’, with affrication, and gidar ‘he was able’, without; čibd ‘liver’ with affrication, with kitir ‘corner’ without. In a few cases, the result of the partial operation of the rule was a minimal pair, e.g. kitab ‘he wrote’, but čitab ‘gold pendants attached to women’s plaits’. By contrast, in a few words, /ǧ/ < OA /q/ and /č/ < OA /k/ occur in backvowel environments, e.g. ḥlūǧ ‘throats, mouths’, ˁurūǧ ‘veins’, smūč ‘fishes’ dyūč ‘cocks’, čūd ‘perhaps, maybe’. In the case of all the nouns, there are alternative plurals ḥlūg, ˁurūg, etc. The plural forms with the anomalous affricate may be the result of the generalisation of the regular plural pattern after the affricate phoneme in the singular had become lexicalised, i.e. after the original phonological rule had ceased to be operative. The stop/affricate contrast has come to have a secondary morphological role analogous to ablaut, as a marker of morphological categories such as tense in verbs,2 e.g.

1  A peculiarity of the A dialects is that /š/ in the verb /šāf/ ‘to see’, and only in this verb, is invariably pronounced as /č/: čift ‘I saw’, čāf ‘he saw’, ačūf ‘I see’ etc. This probably arose via a reanalysis of the prefix [t] and first radical [∫] of [ʧʊ:f] ‘you see’ as a radical /č/, which was then generalised to all parts of the verb. 2  CANT 39 makes a similar observation about the bedouin dialects of the Syrian desert: ‘on doit se demander si l’opposition phonétique affriquée/ occlusive ne sert pas dans ces parlers

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s-stem p-stem siga yisǧi ‘to water; come in (tide)’ saggam yisaǧǧim ‘to give an advance payment (pearling)’ nagga yinaǧǧi ‘to choose’ ˁallag yiˁalliǧ ‘to suspend, hang’ wāhag yiwāhiǧ ‘to bother, vex’ and number in nouns and adjectives, e.g. sng pl firīǧ firgān ‘neighbourhood’ rifīǧ rifgān ‘friend’ ṯiǧīl ṯgāl ‘heavy’ riǧīǧ rgāg ‘thin, delicate’ In the speech of some A speakers, MSA /q/ in neologisms is pronounced [ɤ] or [ɢ] as well as the expected [q], e.g. [taɤaddʊm]/ [taɢaddʊm]/ [taqaddʊm] are all possible for ‘progress’. This is apparently a consequence of the fact that the normal [q] realisation of /q/ in MSA neologisms is identical with one of the dialectal realisations—[q]—of /ġ/ (see 2.1.1.3 below). A full merger of the two phonemes seems to have ensued, so that /q/ in MSA neologisms, like /ġ/ in dialectal words, has three allophones seemingly in free variation: [q], [ɢ] and [ɤ]. One result of this development is that there are minimal pairs in the A dialect such as ǧirīb ‘near’, close, soon’, via the historical fronting and affrication of the /q/ in OA qarīb described earlier, and qarīb meaning ‘stranger’ (< OA ġarīb), even though the latter sounds exactly like the MSA pronunciation of qarīb ‘near, close, soon’ but actually means the opposite in the A dialect. Another result is several lexical pairs which have a concrete meaning when pronounced with the A dialectal phoneme and an abstract one with the MSA reflex in what is etymologically the same word, e.g. tǧaddam ‘to step forward, walk ahead’ and taqaddam ‘to make (social, economic, etc.) progress’, ṭābaǧ ‘to go alongside (one boat to another)’ and ṭābaq ‘to correspond to’. 2.1.1.3 OA /ġ/ In the A dialects (never in the B dialects), words containing OA /ġ/ initially or medially have [ɤ], [ɢ] or [q] in apparent free variation, e.g. /ġēr/ ‘other’ may be

à souligner des oppositions morphologiques (singulier/ pluriel; accompli/ inaccompli), à les renforcer, à les rendre plus sensibles et plus nettes.’

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realised in the A dialect as [ɤe:r], [ɢe:r] or [qe:r]. It would seem that this situation came about in two stages: Stage 1: by the loss, at some point in the past, of the spirant release of [ɤ], still observable in the speech of the least educated section of the A population, who normally pronounce any /ġ/ as /q/ (= [ɢ] or [q]), not as [ɤ]. These speakers’ phonological system simply opposes /g/ and /ǧ/ < OA /q/ to /q/ < OA /ġ/. Stage 2: educated A speakers, aware of MSA norms, ‘corrected’ these dialectal reflexes [ɢ] or [q] of /ġ/ to [ɤ], but did so variably, so that all three realisation became current for /ġ/. Their uvular stop realisation of /q/ as [q] in MSA neologisms was thus identical with one of the dialectal reflexes, [q], of /ġ/, and in the long-term this led to a complete merger of the two phonemes.3 An alternative explanation has sometimes been proposed: given the fact that Persian is widely spoken in Bahrain, this /ġ/-/q/ merger may be the influence of Persian, in which these two sounds are not distinguished, both being pronounced either as a voiceless uvular plosive [q] or, when between two back vowels, as a voiced uvular plosive [ɢ].4 However, the fact that the /q/-/ġ/ merger occurs in the dialects of Najdi-descended AV communities in Bahrain which were not widely exposed, unlike the AU communities, to Persian influence— in the public speeches of the late ruler Sheikh Isa bin Salman, this quirk of pronunciation was very noticeable—and that it also occurs elsewhere in the Gulf 5 and areas of the wider Arabic-speaking world where Persian influence could not have been a factor,6 suggests that Persian influence is probably not the correct explanation. 3  See HOL2 36–37. 4  LAMB xviii. 5  Prochazka (PRO 15) states that [q] as a reflex of /ġ/ occurs ‘often’ in the dialect of Hufūf, one of al-Ḥasa’s biggest towns (and in which the population is largely of ˁArab rather than Baḥārna descent). Examples of [ɤ] as a reflex of /q/, and/or of [q] as a reflex of /ġ/ in initial and medial position are noted by Johnstone for Kuwait and for the Hājiri dialect of Qatar (EADS 20, 36 respectively), and for the dialects of the UAE by Ḥanḏ ̣ al (HANZii 483, 517) and Qafisheh (QAF 48–49). 6  The reflex /q/ of OA /ġ/ occurs in many geographically dispersed dialects: ING 15, describing modern central Najdi, notes that [ɢ], a voiced uvular, ‘sometimes’ occurs for /ġ/ when in initial position; BEHN 11 notes it in Ṣaˁdah, north Yemen; CANT 39 notes it for the bedouin of northern Syria; GRA 4 for the bedouin of all of central and southern Algeria; and for the dialects of eastern Sudan REICH 46–47 describes a merger seemingly identical to that in the A dialects of Bahrain and the wider Gulf region. It is possible that the passage of OA /ġ/ to /q/ was a change ‘exported’ to Sudan and north Africa from eastern and south-eastern Arabia at an early date, as there are also some unusual morphological features shared by the Gulf dia-

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2.1.1.4 OA /ǧ/ OA /ǧ/ became /y/ in all positions, e.g. yār ‘neighbour’, wāyid ‘much, a lot’, šiyara ‘tree’, daray ‘steps’. Medially, when in CvCC syllables, the resulting diphthongs became pure long vowels by general rule, e.g. wēh ‘face’ (< wayh < waǧh), rīl ‘foot, leg’ (< riyl < riǧl). Words borrowed from other languages, however, did not (in the majority of cases) undergo this change, and retained /ǧ/, e.g. ǧēg ‘jug’, enǧin ‘engine’, ˁaranǧ ‘orange-tree’ (all < Eng); ǧām, ‘pane of glass’, xinǧ ‘eye of a needle’, ǧinǧāl ‘uproar, commotion’ (all < Pers) Even in cases where the borrowings appear to be relatively old, e.g. ǧūti ‘shoes’, biǧli ‘lamp’, ǧālbūt ‘type of small boat’ (all < H/U), most did not undergo this change.7 Similarly, neologisms from MSA or borrowed from other Arabic dialects have retained /ǧ/, e.g. ǧāmiˁa ‘university’ (but contrast dialectal yimaˁ ‘to collect’ from the same root), ǧarīda ‘newspaper’ (but contrast dialectal yirīda ‘a palm frond’ from the same root), zawāǧ ‘marriage’, but contrast yawāz < ǧawāz, the dialectal form with the same meaning.8 /ǧ/ derived from /g/ < OA /q/ via the historical fronting and affrication process (2.1.1.2) did not undergo this change either, except in a small number of items and then not in all speakers’ dialects. Among the few examples are yassam ‘to divide up’ < ǧassam < gassam < OA qassam. There is one example apparently derived from an ancient Semitic borrowing: yifrān ‘palm-leaf shopping baskets’ < ǧifrān < gifrān, the pl of ǧafīr/gafīr < Akk/Aram qapīru ‘container for fish, dates’. 2.1.1.5 OA /ˀ/ In the Bahraini dialects (both A and B) there are a few cases of what the mediaeval grammarians, describing the tribal dialects of their time, termed ˁanˁana, that is the OA glottal stop becoming a voiced pharyngeal fricative. This occurs in Bahrain not only in a few high-frequency Arabic words such as ˁayal (< OA ˀaǧal) ‘well, so, then’, but also in recent vowel-initial foreign borrowings, e.g. ˁaskrīm (< Eng) ‘ice-cream’, ˁaranǧ (< Eng) ‘orange-tree’, ˁananās or even ḥananās (< Fr) ‘pineapple’. Other than these cases of ˁanˁana,

lects and Sudan and other African Arabic dialects which are difficult to explain as examples of polygenesis (see Chapter 1). 7  There are a few exception: trinay ‘type of citrus fruit’ (< Pers turunǧ ‘orange’); barastay < barastaǧ ‘house built of palm fronds’ (poss < Pers bīrāsta ‘village abounding in palms’). 8  See HOL1 for full details of /y/-/ǧ/ variation in Bahrain.

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the treatment of OA /ˀ/ in Bahrain is similar to that in the generality of Arabic dialects, as described below. /ˀ/ generally became weakened and was lost in all positions. As a nonradical consonant, it generally disappeared without any phonological trace in conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and other invariable function words, e.g. inn(a), an ‘that’, in ‘if’, ay/ ayy ‘which?’ wara ‘behind’, ḥiḏa ‘beside’ and in compounds formed from them such as činn- (< OA kaˀanna) ‘(it looks) as if . . .’. lēn/ ilēn (< ˀila ˀan) ‘until’, hāḏinta . . . (< hāḏa ˀinta) ‘now you’re . . .’. In a few cases, it became /w/, e.g. wēn (< ˀ-y-n) ‘where?’ As a radical consonant involved in derivational and inflectional morphology, it developed in a number of ways. 2.1.1.5.1 1.

2.

In initial position

in a few words it was lost along with its vowel, e.g. kal (< root ˀ-k-l) ‘to eat’ xaḏ (< ˀ-x-ḏ) ‘to take’, sās ‘base, foundation’ (< ˀ-s-s). Other examples of an apparently similar type of loss, such as hal (ˀ-h-l) < ˀahl ‘family, kin’, ḥamar (ḥ-m-r) < ˀaḥmar ‘red’ are the knock-on result of the resyllabication known as the ‘ghawa-syndrome’ (see 2.6.4 below); it was lost but its vowel remained, e.g. abad (< ˀ-b-d) ‘always’, aṣil (< ˀ-ṣ-l) ‘origin’, akil (ˀ-k-l) ‘food’, amar (ˀ-m-r) ‘order’;

In others cases, it left a trace, or led to other changes: 3. 4.

it was replaced by vowel length, e.g. āman, yāmin (< ˀ-m-n) ‘to be safe’, āmar, yāmur (< ˀ-m-r) ‘to order’; it was replaced by a glide, in most cases /w/, in a few cases /y/, e.g. wann, yiwinn (< ˀ-n-n) ‘to moan’, wāsa, yiwāsi (< ˀ-s-y) ‘to console’, wannas, yiwannis (< ˀ-n-s) ‘to amuse, entertain’, wadda, yiwaddi ‘to take, convey’ (< ˀ-d-y),9 waxxar, yiwaxxir (< ˀ-x-r) ‘to get out of the way’, yaddam, iyaddim (< ˀ-d-m) ‘to partake of a meal’.10 The glide is conserved in derivates where they exist, e.g. verbal nouns winsa ‘fun, amusement’, tiwdā ‘taking, conveying’.

9   There is also the verb adda, yaddi ‘to come, arrive (a time, season)’, apparently a separate development from the same root (but also possibly < OA ˀ-t-y ‘to come’). In the B dialects (see 2.1.2.3 below), the glottal is preserved medially (= yiˀaddi). 10  Occasional cases of metathesis were noted: wālam ‘to be suitable’ seems to be a development of pattern III of OA l-ˀ-m with /w/ replacing /ˀ/.

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2.1.1.5.2 In medial position The glottal was lost in all environments. The consequence was often compensatory vowel lengthening, e.g. fār ‘rat’, yākil ‘he eats’, yisāl ‘he asks’, rās ‘head’, istānas ‘to be content’,11 yīt ‘I came’, fīrān ‘rats’, or reduction if the glottal loss produced over-long vowels, e.g. rūs (< ruˀūs) ‘heads’. In other cases, the glottal was replaced by a glide, most often /y/, e.g. riya ‘lung’, rayy ‘opinion’, gariyya ‘reading’, ˁabāya ‘women’s black outer garment’, gabāyil ‘tribes’. It was normally replaced with /w/ in verb forms where its loss would have collapsed meaning distinctions, e.g. pattern II rawwa (< r-ˀ-y) ‘to show’, fawwal (< f-ˀ-l) ‘to make gloomy predictions’, pattern VI tiwāxaḏ ‘to argue, fight, with one another’ (ˀ-x-ḏ), but note pattern III sāyal (< s-ˀ-l) with medial /y/ ‘to ask s’one a question’. In the speech of those influenced by MSA norms, the glottal stop is returning as an ‘educated’ pronunciation in words in which the dialectal form does not have them, e.g. in the verb saˀal, yisˀal ‘to ask’, which is sāl, yisāl in the dialect. 2.1.1.5.3 In final position The glottal also generally disappeared. Thus, after short vowels: #ḏuwa (< #ḏ-w-ˀ) ‘it shone, radiated’, yigra ‘he reads’, muxba (< x-b-ˀ) ‘pocket’. In forms where a final long vowel resulted from its disappearance, this long vowel was shortened, e.g. ḥamra ‘red (f)’, sōda ‘black (f)’ (and so with all the colour adjectives), šiga ‘hardship’, ašya ‘things’, yitrāwa ‘it appears’, kufu ‘capable’, iyi ‘he comes’.12 On suffixation, by regular rule in verb forms and plural nouns, these shortened final vowels regain their length: yigrā-ha ‘he reads it’, yitrāwā lī ‘it seems to me’, iyī-hum ‘he comes to them’, ašyā-hum ‘their things’; but in singular nouns and adjectives they are treated as if they have the feminine short /a/ ending, i.e. as if there were an underlying /t/, so, e.g. yā sōdat il-wēh ‘you little horror!’ (lit ‘o black of face!’). After diphthongs, the deletion of the final glottal triggered strengthening of the glide, e.g. #ḏaww (< ḍawˀ) ‘fire’, #ḏayy (< ḍayˀ) ‘brilliance’, šayy (< šayˀ) ‘thing’, fayy (< fayˀ) ‘shadow’, though, again, this doubling

11  In other verbs (and nouns) derived from the same root where the historical glottal was in initial position, the glottal was, as we have noted, replaced by /w/: wannas ‘to amuse’, wānas ‘to accompany’, winsa ‘fun, amusement’. 12  An exception to this was the common participial form CaCCāC, in which final /ˀ/ left a ‘trace’ in the form of a /y/ in order to maintain isomorphy with other members of this class of words like gaṣṣāb ‘butcher’, xabbāz ‘baker’, ḥayyāč ‘weaver’: bannāy ‘builder’, saggāy ‘water-seller’, šarrāy ‘buyer’, čawwāy ‘persons who brands (traditional medicine)’, maššāy ‘peripatetic, itinerant’. These forms with final -āy also occur in the B dialects.

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is apparent only on suffixation, e.g. #ḏaww-ik ‘your fire’, šayy-in fa šayy-in ‘little by little’, fayyat iš-šams ‘the shadow cast by the sun’. Note also šayyatēn ‘two things’, recorded in the phrase iṣīr šayyatēn ‘two things may happen’, with both glide-doubling and insertion of /t/ when the dual ending is suffixed. 2.1.2 The B dialects The B dialects as a group share many features at all linguistic levels, but the development of the OA consonants in these dialects was rather more complex than in the A dialects. There are clear dialectal sub-divisions in the B dialects, even within what is a very small area. These differences, many of which are phonological, may be the surviving evidence of different geographical origins, just as the similarities between them may in part be original, but in part also be the homogenizing result of long-term in-group contact. However that may be, the B dialects are clearly very similar whatever their differences of detail— all belong to a single linguistic type, just as all their speakers share the same religious affiliation. As far as the B urban dialects are concerned, contact with A speakers and others from outside the B community in the more mixed urban milieu seems to have been a differentiating influence in their formation, even if, at the time of fieldwork, they still retained most of the shared, salient features of all the B dialects. There is evidence, however, that this is now (in the 21st century) changing (see Chapter 7). For the purposes of exposition here, the linguistic sub-divisions of the B dialects in the mid-1970s were as below: (B= Baḥārna; U = urban; V = village) Map 1: The B village sub-divisions (refer to the map and key): BV1: Northern villages, major group = 1, 4, 5, 6, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 35, 38, 39, 40, 42 BV2: Northern villages, minor group = 9, 11, 33 BV3: Eastern villages = 14, 21, 27, 28, 34, 41 BV4: Central villages = 3, 7 BV5: Southwestern villages = 8, 12, 20, 22, 36, 37 BV6: Muḥarrag Island villages = 2, 10, 3213 13  It is worth noting that, at the time of the field-work in the mid-1970s, one neighbourhood ( firīǧ) of the completely A-dialect speaking town of Muḥarrag, called al-Ḥayāyīč (‘the sailmakers’), consisted of a Baḥārna community of weavers and their families who had moved there about fifty years before and had originally manufactured the sails for the

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Map 2: Manāma town, B quarters BU1: 1, 2, 3, 4, BU2: 5 (Manāma 6 and 7 are old quarters which have always been confessionally mixed; 8,9,10 are more recently established neighbourhoods and also have mixed populations of A and B speakers) 2.1.2.1 The OA interdentals All B dialects have /f/ for OA /ṯ/, e.g. ifnēn ‘two’, falāfa ‘three’, fōr ‘bull’, kufr ‘amount’ and /ḍ/ for both OA /ḍ/and /#ḏ/, e.g. ḍarab ‘he hit’, ḍuhur ‘noon’ naḍra view, opinion’, ḥaḍīḍ ‘lucky’. This is a highly salient (and now stigmatized) feature of the B dialects as a whole. Most also have /d/ for OA /ḏ/, as in hāda ‘this’ and čidi ‘like this’, but use of /ḏ/, especially in high frequency words like these, is widespread in BU1 and two out of the three villages (Sanābis (33), and ad-Dēh (9)) of BV2—that is, the largest urban centre and two of the B villages nearest to it. In some roots, /ḏ/ lost its spirant release and become emphatised, especially in the presence of velars, e.g. in all B dialects, one notes examples like: aḍākir ‘I am revising (my lessons)’, yiḍḍakkar ‘he remembers’, ḍākra ‘memory’, ḍōg ‘taste’.14 2.1.2.2 OA /q/, /k/ and /ǧ/ For these three key variables, four basic B systems can be distinguished, and one subsidiary one:

town’s pearling fleet. At the time of the fieldwork, their dialect was to my ears indistinguishable from that of the A dialect speakers of Muḥarrag town who surrounded them. For this reason they are excluded from the description of the B dialects presented here and in subsequent chapters. They were the one major exception to the rule that Baḥārna communities spoke a B dialect and ˁArab ones an A, although individual Baḥārna were encountered elsewhere in Bahrain whose personal circumstances had led to them being brought up in ˁArab communities and working closely with ˁArab, and who also consequently spoke an A dialect. The converse situation, of ˁArab speaking a B dialect, was not encountered at all. The sociolinguistic significance of this apparent asymmetry will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 7. 14  Noted also for the B dialects of al-Qaṭīf, eastern Saudi Arabia (see QAS issue 22).

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2.1.2.2.1 System B1 Used in the eastern (BV3), south-western (BV5), and Muḥarrag island (BV6) villages. From many points of view, the communities where the B1 system is used are the most dialectally conservative of the B areas in the most general sense, and the evidence suggests that their treatment of these three variables may have once been more widespread in the other B rural communities than it was at the time of the fieldwork. It seems to have been, in other words, the ‘original’ B system. In these B1 locations, OA /q/ is normally15 realised as voiceless velar plosive /k/, e.g. kāl, yikūl ‘to say’, bakara ‘cow’, ḥalk ‘mouth’. The eastern villages of Sitra and its adjacent areas are renowned among Bahrainis themselves for this pronunciation. In these same locations, OA /k/ may be realised as a voiceless alveolar affricate /č/ (= [ʧ]) in any environment, front vowel or back, unlike in the A dialects where it is restricted, with one or two exceptions, to front vowel ones. Consequently, /č/ in dialects which have system B1 is heard much more frequently than in other B dialects or the A dialects, both in the sense that it is used in a wider variety of lexical items, and in the sense that it was, at the time of the fieldwork, more resistant to replacement with /k/. However, even in these B1 dialects, /č/ does not occur now, and may never have occurred, in all the lexical items where it theoretically could have, for example in hundreds of examples, one only ever heard kint ‘I was’, never *čint, and always yikūn, never *yičūn. But /č/ in examples like čill ‘all’, ačal, yāčil ‘to eat’, mičān ‘place’, ačbar ‘older’, ačfar ‘more’, diččān ‘shop’, as well as the many examples of /č/ in back-vowel environments, e.g. čubr ‘size, age’, čūda ‘heap’, mōčla ‘food’, dōč ‘shell-fish’, šōč ‘palm-tree thorns’, ḍuḥč ‘laughter’, in none of which other Bahraini dialects have /č/, is what marks out the system B1 dialects. In short, it may be that historically the affrication of OA /k/ in system B1 was quasi-categorical,16 and subsequently there has been a contact-induced loss of /č/ in some items. In the A dialects, by contrast, as already noted, it appears that affrication was historically conditioned. 15  ‘normally’: but even uneducated speakers showed a variable tendency to use the urban variant /g/. 16  In the ‘sedentary’ mountain dialects of Oman (Wādi Saḥtān), which have very many points of similarity with the B1 dialects, the shift to /č/ goes even further, and is seemingly categorical with forms like čwēt ‘Kuwait’, yčūn ‘it will be’, čimā ‘like’, ḥāčim ‘ruler’, marčaz ‘centre’, asčin ‘I live’, and čātib ‘writer’, items in which /č/ never occurs in the B1 dialects.

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In system B1 dialects, OA /ǧ/ is always a voiced alveolar affricate /ǧ/ (= [ʤ]). 2.1.2.2.2 System B1a Used in the largest group of northern villages (BV1) This is a variant of system B1, the differences probably the result of closer contact with the urban B dialect of Manāma. Characteristic of system B1a is the reduced use of /k/< OA /q/ compared to system B1, and its variable replacement by /g/, the urban Bahraini, and dominant reflex in the wider region. Similarly, there is less use of /č/ in those lexical items in which it does not occur in the urban B and A dialects, and its replacement in these items with /k/. As in system B1, the reflex of OA /ǧ/ is a voiced alveolar affricate /ǧ/ (= [ʤ]). 2.1.2.2.3 System B2 Used in a few central villages (BV4) This system is confined to a very small area—two villages in central Bahrain—but is highly distinctive. Here, the reflex of OA /q/ was also voiceless, as in system B1, but did not move so far forward, becoming a retracted velar [ḳ], sometimes so retracted as to be difficult to distinguish from a uvular [q]. The reflexes of OA /k/ and /ǧ/ developed differently from the dialects of the rest of Bahrain, and became a pair of strongly palatalised, fronted velar stops, [ky] and [gy]. These phonological developments as a system closely resemble those of the main group of sedentary dialects in northern Oman, which have [q] < OA /q/, [k] < OA /k/ and [g] < OA /ǧ/, but without the palatalisation of the latter two phonemes. 2.1.2.2.4 System B3 Used in most of the B neighbourhoods of Manāma town (BU1) This system has /g/ < OA /q/ (like the A dialects, but, unlike the A dialects, with no affrication to /ǧ/), and /k/ < OA /k/ with affrication to /č/ only in front-vowel environments in a restricted set of high frequency lexical items such as čam ‘how much?’, čidi ‘like this’, bāčir ‘tomorrow’, in čān ‘if’, tḥačča ‘to talk’. System B3 maintains the alveolar affricate realisation of /ǧ/ < OA /ǧ/. There is some evidence that system B3, like system B1a, may also be a historical development of system B1: in the speech of some elderly and uneducated speakers from Manāma, /k/ occasionally still surfaced as a reflex of OA /q/, as did occasional instances of /č/ in back-vowel environments, variants which also occur, but to a much greater extent, in system B1a. System B3, in other words, could be an urbanised development of B1 in which the changes

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are older and more far reaching than has so far occurred in system B1a. On this view, the Manāma B1 dialect is the historically leveled, homogenized result of contact with neighbouring Manāma A dialects. It seems as if Manāma, like many cities, was originally a collection of villages which coalesced. Some of these were B in character and some were A, as was still the case when the fieldwork for this study was done. 2.1.2.2.5 System B4 This system is used in one neighbourhood of Manāma (BU2) and three exceptional northern villages (BV2). System B4 is similar to system B3 as far as the development of OA /q/ and /k/ are concerned, but with the significant difference that, exactly like all the A, but alone among the B dialects, it has /y/ < OA /ǧ/ categorically.17 The reasons for this exception are not completely clear. /y/ < OA /ǧ/ was, of course, a widespread change in the dialects of eastern Arabia as a whole18 including those of the Bahraini ˁArab, but its occurrence as the normal dialectal reflex in four out of around fifty B settlements in Bahrain stands out, and requires an explanation. One possibility is that the populations of BU2 and BV2 may originate from the B community of neighbouring eastern Saudi Arabia, which is concentrated in and around the large town of al-Qaṭīf. Here, the /y/ reflex of OA is also the norm in the local B dialects,19 and it is the case that there has been a good deal of intermarriage between these particular Bahraini B communities and their co-religionists in eastern Saudi Arabia. Intriguingly, and probably not fortuitously, one of the B neighbourhoods of al-Qaṭīf is called ‘Sanābis’, the same name as one of the three B villages where /y/ occurs as the dialectal reflex of OA /ǧ/ in Bahrain. The table below summarises the reflexes of these three OA phonemes in the B dialects, with the A reflexes presented for comparison.

17  Occasional occurrences of /ǧ/ < /g/ also occurred in system B4 dialects and even of /y/ < /ǧ/ < /g/, e.g. tanyīl ‘carrying, transporting’ (etymological OA root n-q-l) in BV2 village 33. 18  See EADS 10 for a map which gives an idea of its regional distribution from southern Iraq to Oman. 19  SME 24, describing the B dialect of al-Ḥasa, the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, notes that /ǧ/ exhibits a ‘complete merger with /y/ in those Baḥārna patois which merge /ṯ/ with /f/’; QAS issue 23 also notes that /y/ < OA /ǧ/ is typical of the B dialect of al-Qaṭīf; PRO2 59–60 also notes it for the B dialect of Abū Ṯōr in al-Ḥasa.

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OA /q/

OA /k/

OA /ǧ/

/k/

/ǧ/

as in B1, but some /k/ replaced by /g/

/č/ in all environments as in B1, but some /č/ replaced by /k/

retracted /ḳ/ or /q/

/ky/

/gy/

/g/

/ǧ/

System B4 (minor urban and rural system)

/g/

/k/ with back vowels, /č/ with some front vowels /k/ with back vowels, /č/ with some front vowels

A system

/g/ with back vowels, /k/ with back vowels, /ǧ/ with front vowels /č/ with some front vowels

/y/

B systems System B1 (original B system?) System B1a (now main rural system) System B2 (minor rural system) System B3 (main urban system)

/ǧ/

/y/

A local detail to be added here is that in B village 5 (Banī Jamra), the majority of whose speakers have system B1, some older female speakers variably realised /ǧ/ in front-vowel environments as /d/ and /č/ as /t/, i.e. both sounds are despirantised. This was particularly noticeable in high-frequency verbs such as ǧa ‘to come’, ǧāb ‘to bring’, e.g. in a story told by a seventy-year-old woman: intabb u lā da (for inčabb u lā ǧa ) ‘he cleared off and didn’t come back’; . . . u ḍallat tiġdi u iddi (< iǧǧi) u la ġadat u dat . . . ‘. . . she kept going away and coming back, and when she went away and came back . . . ’; dāybīn (< ǧāybīn) lič min wēn-ə? ‘where did they bring (it) to you(m) from?’ 2.1.2.3 OA /ˀ/ As in the A dialects, /ˁ/ < OA /ˀ/ in initial position occurs in a few words, e.g. ˁaǧal < OA ˀaǧal), ‘well, then, so’, ila ˁēn (< OA ila ˀan) ‘until’, ˁafar, ˁafarāt (< OA ˀaṯar) ‘probably, I should think . . .’, ˁarēf (< Eng) ‘R.A.F.’, ˁangrēz (< Eng) ‘English people; westerners in general’. The principles according to which the OA glottal stop developed in the A dialects in initial position, exemplified in (1)–(4) in 2.1.1.5, and in medial position, also apply in the B dialects, but with some detail differences. The lexemes to which they apply are not always the same ones, and in some cases a

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different development affected a shared lexeme. So, for example, where in the A dialects principle (1) applied to words such as ˀakal and ˀaxaḏ, and these words lost not just the glottal but the vowel too ( = kal, xaḏ), in the B dialects it was principle (2) that applied and only the glottal was lost (= akal or (village) ačal, axad); and where, by principle (4), the initial glottal was replaced by a glide, it was not always the same glide, so A dialects yaddam, B dialects waddam (both < OA ˀ-d-m) meaning ‘to partake of a meal’. However, in some verbs, the glottal is absent when in initial position, but reappears in medial position in morphological derivates, e.g. the following from the B villages: s-stem ammal (< ˀ-m-l) amman (< ˀ-m-n) adda (ˀ-d-y)

p-stem/ap yiˀammil/imˀammil yiˀammin/imˀammin yiˀaddi 20

ānas (< ˀ-n-s) āwa (ˀ-w-y) ata (ˀ-t-y) amar

yiˀānis/imˀānis yiˀāwi/imˀāwi21 yaˀti/— yiˀmur/—22

‘to hope for’ ‘to trust’ ‘to come (of a time, a season)’ ‘to keep s’one company’ ‘to find shelter’ ‘to come’ ‘to order’

As in the A case, there are examples of metathesis coupled with the replacement of /ˀ/ by a glide. So, as well as, for some speakers (see table above) retaining the original radicals and their order, for others the OA root ˀ-n-s was metathesised to n-w-s and developed several derivatives. In the central B village dialects 3 and 7, for example, we have pattern I niwis ‘to be happy, confident’, pattern III nāwas ‘to accompany (s’one)’. This did not occur in these, and other derivatives, in the A dialects, where /ˀ/ was simply replaced with /w/ without metathesis: winsa ‘pleasure, conviviality’, pattern II wannas ‘to amuse (s’one)’, pattern V twannas ‘to enjoy oneself’, and in yet others it was replaced by vowel length: istānas ‘to feel happy’. 20  When used of time, this verb is always f in the B dialects, whatever the gender of its subject, e.g. lēn addat iṣ-ṣēf . . . ‘when summer came . . .’, lēn tiˀaddi ṣ-ṣubḥ . . . ‘when morning came . . .’ and the glottal is preserved in the p-stem (see 2.1.1.5. above). In the A dialects, the verb is used in the same sense, but is always m, regardless of the gender of the subject, and the medial glottal has been lost, ladda (< lē adda) lēlat il-ˁirs . . . ‘when the wedding night came . . .’, min yaddi ṣ-ṣibḥ . . . ‘when morning came . . .’. 21  In OA, this was not a derived pattern verb; in the B dialects, apparently by analogy with verbs like ānas, it has become one, and behaves like a pattern III verb. 22  In the A dialects, the forms are āmar, yāmir.

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65

/ˀ/ in final position disappeared in the B dialects as it did in the A, but there was one development particular to the B village dialects: in one form of the verbal noun, tvCCāC, of pattern II, final OA /āˀ/ became /āy/, e.g. tabnāy (< b-n-y) ‘soil preparation’, tisnāy (< s-n-y) ‘transplantation’. This parallels the behaviour of the CaCCāC form (bannāy, saggāy, etc.) noted earlier and common to both the A and B dialects. In the A dialects the verbal noun forms, where they were recorded, lacked this final /y/: tiˀdā (ˀ-d-y) ‘fulfilment’, etc. 2.1.2.4 OA /š/ A feature of some B village dialects23 is the substitution of /s/ for /š/ in words where /š/ is followed directly, or even if there is an intervening consonant, by an alveolar affricate, /ǧ/ or /č/, e.g. saǧara for šaǧara ‘tree’, masbūč for mašbūč ‘connected, interwoven’. This is possibly a case of dissimilation (see 2.6.2. below). However, šābič ‘adjacent’ is also heard from some B speakers. 2.1.2.5 OA /m/ and /b/ In the B village dialects, in some lexical items, there is mutability of /m/ and /b/, e.g. zamar and zabar both ‘to scold’, ḥamal and ḥibal both ‘to become pregnant’, ḥamāla and ˁabāla both ‘trouble, effort’. Furthermore, the verbal prefix b- signifying ‘proximate intent’ often assimilates to the n- preformative of 1pl of the p-stem verb to become m-, e.g. m-inrūḥ ‘we’ll go’. Conversely, p-stem forms of the verb baġa ‘to want’, which lose the ġ to a doubling of the b in all Bahraini dialects, i.e. (A or B) yabġi → yabbi and (B only) yibġa → yibba, then undergo apparent dissimilation in some of the B dialects yabbi → yambi or yibba → yimba.24 2.2

Phoneme Inventory: Vowels

All Bahraini dialects have three short vowel phonemes /a, i, u/), though they are differently distributed in the A and B dialects, as is how the consonantal environment affects them. Unstressed short /i/ in non-final open syllable is routinely deleted in all dialects, but the scope of this rule is wider in the A dialects as /i/ occurs more often in this environment than it does in the B dialects. As for long vowels, the A and BU dialects all have five long vowels /ā, ē, ī, ō, ū/, as do most of the BV dialects, though there are differences in vowel quality 23  Noted also for the B dialects of al-Qatif, eastern Saudi Arabia (see QAS issue 22). 24  The same developments noted also for the B dialects of al-Qaṭīf, eastern Saudi Arabia (see QAS issue 22).

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between the A and B dialects (see below). But this is not true of the central and eastern B villages, where elderly and uneducated speakers typically have the diphthongs /ay/ and /aw/ rather than the mid-vowels /ē/ and /ō/ (see 2.2.2.2 below). 2.2.1 The A dialects 2.2.1.1 Distribution and quality of short vowels 2.2.1.1.1 /a/ and /i/ in open syllable A basic distributional rule of the A dialects which differentiates it from the B is that /i/ occurs to the exclusion of /a/ in open, non-final syllables, except in the contiguity of guttural consonants, /x, ġ, ḥ, ˁ, h/, or where the following consonant is /l/, /n/ or /r/ when at the same time the vowel of the following syllable is /a/ or /ā, ē, ō/.25 Thus kitab ‘he wrote’, simač ‘fish’, but taras ‘he filled’, malač ‘he betrothed’, gaˁad ‘he sat’, ḥamal ‘he carried’, tyawwizaw ‘they agreed’ (but tyawwaz ‘he agreed’). Where, as a result of this rule, /i/ occurs in initial open syllable, it may be deleted, and usually is in certain types of form, notably past tense verbs and unit nouns in which there is a succession of short open syllables Cv-Cv-Cv(C), e.g. ktibat ‘she wrote’ (via kitab + at → ktabat → ktibat), smiča ‘a fish’ (via simač + a → smiča). This rule of resyllabication applies even where the consonant in C1 position is a guttural and the vowel is /a/, e.g. contrast xašab ‘(wooden) ships’ with xšiba ‘a (wooden) ship’ where the /a/ vowel in the initial open syllable is deleted because suffixation gives rise to a Cv-Cv-Cv sequence.26 2.2.1.1.2 The effect of the labials A second salient vocalic feature of the A dialects is that labials have a rounding and backing effect on /i/ (→ /u/ = [ʊ]) in open syllable, whether the /i/ is historically original or arose via the raising of /a/ (see immediately above) provided a velar or emphatic is also in contiguity, e.g. mukān ‘place’, wugaf 27 ‘to stand’, wuṣal ‘to arrive’, ṣubar ‘to be patient’, gumar ‘moon’, gufaṣ ‘cage, coop’, bugar ‘cows’, buxānig ‘girl’s head-dresses’, buṣal ‘onions’, muṭar ‘rain’, #ḏuma ‘thirst’, but bina ‘to build’, bičir ‘first-born child’, bišit ‘man’s cloak’, mita ‘when?’, wilid ‘to give birth’ where a labial is present but neither of the other factors. The liquids /l/ and /r/ have a similar effect if one of them precedes /i/ and a labial follows e.g. šrubat ‘she drank’, ṭlubat ‘she demanded’. In non-final syllables where /a/ 25  EADS 27. 26  EADS 7. 27  Some AV speakers had wiǧif, with affrication, for the s-stem of this verb.

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cannot occur in open syllable (see paragraph above), /i/ and /u/ are virtually in complementary distribution, /u/ in ‘labialised’ contexts, /i/ in the others. In final syllables, short /u/ occurs in a few words as a reflex of the OA radical /w/, e.g. abu ‘father’, ḥilu ‘sweet’, ṣaḥu ‘clear, cloudless weather’. 2.2.1.1.3 /a/ Short /a/ is realized: as [æ] or [ɛ] where gutturals (excluding /h/) and emphatics are absent, e.g. hal-i = [hæli] ‘my family’, dašš = [dɛʃʃ] ‘he entered’; as [a] in guttural environments, e.g. baˁad = [baʕad] ‘after’, xallēt = [xalle:t] ‘I/you allowed’; as [ɑ] with an emphatic, e.g. ṭall = [ṭɑḷḷ] ‘mist’, and also often with labials and velars, e.g. xamar = [xɑṃɑṛ] ‘alcohol’, gabil = [gɑḅıḷ] with emphasis spread; where labials and emphatics are involved, /a/ is backed and rounded to [ɒ], again with emphasis spread, e.g. ṭabb = [ṭɒḅḅ] ‘he entered’. In non-guttural, non-emphatic environments, some older A speakers raise final /a/ e.g. bridi ‘hail’ (< barada), gumni (< gumna) ‘we got up’. 2.2.1.1.4 /i/ Medial short /i/ is retracted, e.g. bint = [bınt] ‘girl’, and in emphatic contexts lowered, e.g. ṭibb = [ṭɘḅḅ] ‘(art of) medicine’. In utterance-final position, whether it is the reflex of OA short /i/, in e.g. inti ‘you (fem)’ or 2fsng s-stem verbs, e.g. riḥti ‘you went’, or the result of the shortening of OA final long /ī/, e.g. uxt-i ‘my sister’, or 2fsng imperatives, e.g. rūḥī! ‘go (f)!’, or any other historically final /ī/ which was shortened to /i/, e.g. tadri ‘she knows’, final short /i/ is lowered and diphthongized, e.g. wēn-ič, inti? = [we:nič, intɛy] ‘where are you?!’, wēn riḥti? = [we:n rıḥtɛy] ‘where did you go?’, gūmi, yā xt-i! [gʊ:mɛy ya:xtɛy] ‘come on, sister!’, wal-bint mā tadri?! = [wal-bınt ma: tɛdrɛy] ‘and the girl didn’t even know?!’ This diphthongization of utterance-final /i/ is very noticeable in the speech of female A speakers, but it is now being replaced by ‘normative’ [i], in ‘more educated’ speech.28 2.2.1.2 Quality of long vowels Generally in the A dialects, but particularly in Muḥarrag and al-Ḥidd, and especially in the speech of women from these towns, /ā/ has a backed and rounded quality in any phonetic environment, e.g. lā = [lɒ:] ‘no’, hāḏi = [hɒ:ḏi] or even [hɔ:ḏi] ‘this’, āna = [ɒ:næ] ‘I’, in čān = [in tʃɒ:n] ‘if’, bāsal-ič = [bɒ:sælitʃ] ‘I’ll ask you’, māy = [mɔ:y] ‘water’. /ī/ is a close, front vowel, but with the emphatics is more centralized and diphthongised, e.g. bīṣ = [bɨ:ɘṣ] ‘keel of a boat’. /ē/ and /ō/ 28  Lowering and diphthongization of final /ī/ is also typical of many Najdi dialects.

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correspond to the OA diphthongs /ay, aw/ and occur medially, e.g. sēf ‘sword’, bōg ‘theft’. Where /aw/ or /āw/ occurs medially in multisyllabic forms, they are often reduced to /ā/, e.g. mithāš < mithāwiš ‘arguing’, hān < hāwin ‘mortar’. Final /ay/ and /aw/ → /ē/ and /ō/ when suffixed, e.g. kalaw ‘they ate’, kalō-h ‘they ate it’, fitḥay (< fitḥi) ‘open (f)!’, fitḥē-h ‘open(f) it!’ 2.2.2 The B dialects 2.2.2.1 Distribution and quality of short vowels The B dialects do not have the distributional restrictions the A dialects have on the occurrence of /a/ in open syllable, so B katab, samač rather than A kitab, simač/ simič, and nor do the labials have the same backing and rounding effects, so, e.g. BV makān/ mičān, baṣal, bagar/ bakar, maṭar, kamar.29 As in the A dialects, when /i/ and /u/ occur in non-final open syllables, the B dialects tend to delete them, so BV smiˁ ‘he heard’ < simiˁ, čbur ‘he got old’ < čubur. Compare smaˁ < simaˁ, kbar < kubar in the corresponding A dialect forms. But unlike in the A dialects, concatenations of short open syllables like katabat ‘she wrote’ and katab-ah ‘he wrote it’ are normal in the B dialects. In terms of its quality, /a/ has a phonetic value similar to its value in the A dialects in the same consonantal environments. The same applies to /i/ and /u/. In one specific item, imm ‘mother’, however, fronting of OA /u/ occurred in the eastern BV dialects and seemingly nowhere else (elsewhere umm), but the process occurred more widely in the B village dialects in a few other high-frequency instances of OA /u/ in closed syllable: in the enclitic pronouns -kim or -čim ‘you (pl)’, and -him ‘them, their’ (the A and BU dialects have -kum, -hum). 2.2.2.2 Quality of long vowels In most B dialects, /ā/ in non-emphatic environments is front and lacks the lip-rounding typical of the A dialects. In the eastern B dialects of Sitra (locations 41), however, it has a more backed realisation, but not to the degree of the A dialects: compare A dialects [hɒ:ḏi], B northern dialects in general, [ha:di], B eastern dialects [hɑ:di] ‘this’. In a few specific items and B village locations medial /ā/ is raised (imāla), e.g. ktība < kitāba ‘writing’, giriyya < girāya. Final /ā/ and /āˀ/ are shortened in pause to /a/ but not generally raised as they are in the A dialects in non-emphatic contexts (compare A simi, B sama ‘sky’). One excep29  An exception here, as with several other aspects of phonology, is Manāma 5, the B neighbourhood of Rās Rummān, in whose dialect labial consonants have a pronounced rounding, backing and raising effect on short /a/ and /i/ as they do in the A dialects.

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69

tion to this is mā ‘water’ ‘water’, which is [mɛ] or even [mi] in some B village dialects, especially those of the east (BV3), in contrast to [mɔ:y] of the A dialects. As for the other long vowels, in the BU dialects and the main body of BV dialects /ē/, /ī/, /ō/ and /ū/ are realised similarly to the way they are in the A dialects. However, in the eastern and central B village dialects (BV3, BV4), the OA diphthongs have been preserved, and did not become /ē/ and /ō/. Thus one typically hears from older speakers from these areas forms such as fawk ‘above’, ˁawk ‘pain, indisposition’, kawl ‘saying’, fawb ‘dress’, ˁawd ‘large, old’, yawm ‘day’, nawl ‘fare, hire-charge’, nawba ‘time, occasion’, bawka ‘theft’ hādawla/hādawlāk ‘these/ those’ etc., rather than fōg, ˁōg, gōl, etc; and one hears bayt ‘house’, layl ‘night, kayf/ čayf ‘how?’, xayša ‘sack’, rwayd ‘radishes’ rather than bēt, lēl, etc. Particularly salient, because of their high frequency, are the reflexes of the OA prepositions which end in -a(y), when suffixed with any pronominal enclitic, e.g. ˀila and ˀala. These give diphthongised forms such as ilayč/š/čim (= [ileič], [ileiš], etc.) ‘to you (m/f/pl)’ and so on through the whole paradigm, rather than ilēk, etc. with a pure mid-vowel. This development is general, and affects other prep + pron forms with a similar meaning, e.g. from li ‘to’, we get, e.g. layč/š/ čim ‘to you (m/f/pl)’ etc. In the same eastern and northern BV dialects where these forms occur, historical /ī/ and /ū/ are also often diphthongized, the first element being a mid-front vowel, so, instead of ǧidīd ‘new’, we ǧidayd ‘new’ (= [dʒɘdeid]), and similarly with nxayl ‘palm trees’, snayn ‘years’, tankayt ‘joking’, etc. and instead of yibġūn ‘they want’ we get yibġawn (= [yɘbɣaʊn]),30 yikrawn ‘they read’, mawǧawd ‘existent’, etc. but among the younger generation such pronunciations are disappearing under the pressure of the homogenised Gulf koine based on the A dialects. 2.3

The Syllable

2.3.1 Basic syllable types Cv and CvC These syllables are the most common types, and can occur in any position in the word, e.g. kitab ‘he wrote’ (Cv-CvC), čilma ‘word’ (CvC-Cv), darrisat ‘she taught’ (CvC-Cv-CvC), taḥačča ‘he spoke’ (Cv-CvC-Cv). In absolutely initial 30  It may be that these forms, particularly common in verbs with a final weak radical, were originally limited to one subset of these weak verbs, as they were in OA, viz those with stem vowel /a/, e.g. OA yarḍawna > B dialects yirḍawn ‘they agree, are content’. They may then have spread from there in the BV dialects to forms which in OA had -/ūn/, in a general process of diphthongization of which we today see the vestiges.

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position, words which are vowel-initial have a glottal onset, so iklu ‘eat(pl)’ is realised as ˀiklu (CvC-Cv) but in juncture there is no glottal, so d + iklu → d-iklu! ‘please eat’ (B dialects). Cv̄ Cv̄ may occur initially, e.g. sōlaf ‘he chatted’ (Cv̄ -CvC), or medially, e.g. sawālif ‘stories’ (Cv-Cv̄ -CvC), but in final position (underlying) long vowels are normally shortened: iklū-ha ‘eat (pl) it!’ but iklu ‘eat (pl)!’31 Cv̄C Cv̄C can occur in all positions, most commonly by itself, e.g. bāg ‘he stole’, but also initially and finally, e.g. rāddīn ‘returning (pl)’ (Cv̄C-Cv̄C), or as a result of short vowel deletion rules, e.g. (A dialects) ǧābla ‘the following night’, (BV dialects) kābla ‘midwife’ (both Cv̄ C-Cv); and medially in some plural forms, e.g. naxālwa ‘date-farmers’ (Cv-Cv̄ C-Cv), ǧawālbīt ‘wooden boats’ (CvCv̄C-Cv̄C). CvCC CvCC normally occurs as the sole, or the final syllable in a word, e.g. galb ‘heart’, maġarb (A dialect example) ‘evening’ (Cv-CvCC), ḍarab-k (B dialect example) ‘he hit you’ (Cv-CvCC). Cv̄CC occurs, but only in one type of form, the ap of geminate verbs, e.g. ḥāṭṭ ‘putting’. The above are the basic types. The following also arise as a consequence of various vowel-elision rules, or via borrowing, all in initial position only:

31  The only exception to this seems to be hypocoristic name forms such as xalīlō, maryamō, (cf English ‘Jimmy’, Johnny’ etc.), and other terms applied to people in which the form has a negative connotation, e.g. yā baˁrō! ‘you shit!’. The ending was occasionally heard with objects, e.g. a farmer referring to his pumpkin (bōbar) crops as il-bōbarō. There are also a few technical terms of one kind or another, now obsolescent, which have this -ō ending, e.g. ḥalwāyō ‘type of fish ( jack pomfret)’, čaftō ‘keelson’, ḥbābō ‘date in the first stage of ripening’, ndēndō ‘type of drumming’.

Phonology

2.3.2

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Syllable types resulting from vowel elision/ resyllabication rules

CCv e.g. drisat (< da + ra + sat), ‘she studied’, ghawa < gah + wa ‘coffee’ (A dialect examples), rṭaba (< ru + ṭa + ba) ‘fresh date’, (all dialects) (all → CCv-Cv(C)) CCvC e.g. (B example) mˁalm-inn-ah ‘he has taught him’ (CCvC-CvC-CvC) CCv̄C e.g. smūč ‘fishes’, smīt ‘cement’, flīt ‘insecticide spray’ (both borrowings < Eng cement, Flit) CCvCC e.g. fhimt ‘I understand’, trinj ‘citron’ (< Pers turunǧ). 2.4

Consonant Clusters

2.4.1 CCC CCC can arise as a result of suffixation by enclitic pronouns. There are dialectal differences in how such clusters are treated. 2.4.1.1 Geminate verbs and nouns Where CC+C arises via the suffixation of geminate verbs with consonantinitial enclitics, some A dialect speakers insert a schwa, e.g. šaggə-ha ‘he cut it open’, ṭaggə-ha ṭagg ‘he gave her a slap’, tixuṣṣə-hum bi t-taḥiya ‘you give them (my) greetings.’ Some speakers of BU dialects (especially that of Manāma 5, Rās Rummān, but other B neighbourhoods of Manāma also) insert a long, stressed /ā/ in s-stem forms of this type, e.g. šaggā-ha ‘he cut it open’, ṣaffā-ha ‘he placed them in rows’.32 In all other forms of suffixed geminate verbs— p-stems, imperatives—the solution to the treatment of CCC for all speakers, A or B, is consonant reduction, e.g. yiḥuṭ-ha < yiḥuṭṭ-ha ‘he places it’, nbil-him

32  In the dialect of Manāma 5, Rās Rummān, ā- insertion also regularly occurs in the suffixation of other verb types and is not limited to doubled verbs. This may mean that it is not purely motivated, as ə-insertion seems to be in the A dialects, by a cluster-reduction rule. This is discussed further in 2.6.7 and 4.4.1.3.4.

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< nbill-him ‘we soak them’, ˁid-na < ˁidd-na ‘count us!’, fič-nī < fičč-ni ‘release me!’ The process of schwa-insertion was also occasionally noted, again in the A dialects, with geminate nouns, e.g. raddat raddə-ha ‘she gave her answer’. But by far the commonest site for this was suffixed reflexes of OA kull ‘all, every’, which is kill in the A, BU dialects, kill or kull in some BV dialects, but usually čill in the BV3, BV4 and BV6 groups, though čill occurs occasionally in the other BV groups also. In A dialects, there was categorical use of schwa-insertion before consonant-initial suffixes: killə-ha, killə-hum, killə-kum, killə-na.33 In the BV villages, on the other hand, with the exception of the BV2 group which is also exceptional in other ways, forms without schwa-insertion and with cluster reduction predominated, viz čil-ha or kil-ha, etc. Manāma A speakers strongly favoured schwa-insertion, while BU speakers from all neighbourhoods showed a mixture of the two solutions: schwa-insertion and cluster reduction. Apart from this differential treatment of the high frequency word kill/čill, the treatment by all speakers of all other instances of CCC resulting from the suffixation of geminate nouns was consonant reduction, e.g. ḥagn-na < ḥagg-na ‘for us’, um-hum < umm-hum ‘their mother’, sir-ha < sirr-ha ‘her umbilical cord’.34 This treatment obviously cannot apply to words in which the second and third consonants are different, since it would involve loss of the identity of the form and therefore meaning (see 2.4.1.2 below). 2.4.1.2 Non-geminates We are concerned here with what happens when a consonant-initial pronoun enclitic is suffixed to words of the general form CvCC35 in which the final two consonants are different, potentially resulting in a CCC cluster. Two processes are again in evidence: vowel epenthesis and cluster reduction. Epenthesis can occur at one of two positions in C1vC2C3 + Cv(C) forms: between C2 and C3 or after C3. Both are attested, but are not freely variable one with another. 33  Speakers who have this schwa-insertion after kill and before Cv(C) suffixes also invariably have killə yōm ‘every day’ and killə šay ‘everything’. It would appear that these collocations are so frequent that they are seen as a single item in which yōm and šay behave like suffixes—hence schwa-insertion operates here too. 34  In Volumes 1 and 2 of the present work, and in the syntax section of this volume, such cluster reductions have not been reflected in the transcription in order not to obscure meanings for readers unfamiliar with these dialects. 35  Excluded from consideration here are OA CvCC words whose unsuffixed form in the Bahraini dialects is CvCvC, e.g. OA baḥr ‘sea’ which is all Bahraini dialects is baḥar. Words of this type are dealt with in 2.4.2 below.

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2.4.1.2.1 Between C2 and C3 Examples in nominal forms: galib-ha < galb + ha ‘her heart’, binit-kum < bint + kum ‘your daughter’, wakit-na < wakt + na ‘our time’, libis-na < libs + na ‘our clothes’, ˁari#ḏ-na < ˁar#ḏ + na ‘our girth’. Most such examples were produced by A speakers, some by BU speakers (notably from Rās Rummān), but none by BV speakers, who retained the CCC cluster: galb-ha, bint-kum, etc. Occasional examples of epenthesised forms in suffixed hollow verbs, such as yibit-hum ‘I brought them’ and šifit-kum ‘I saw you’ were attested, but only in the speech of A dialect speakers, and then only in a small sub-set of them;36 yibt-kum, šiftkum etc. was overwhelmingly the most common type of form for all speakers. 2.4.1.2.2 After C3 There was only one item where this occurred, but it was an extremely common one: ˁind, as in ˁində-ha, ˁində-na, ˁində-kum, ˁində-hum ‘she/we/you (pl)/they have’. All A speakers had the epenthesised form and some BU speakers also. The BV speakers, apart from the BV2 group (which is also exceptional in many other ways), hardly showed it at all, and either kept the cluster, i.e., ˁind-ha, ˁind-na etc. or reduced it (see below). The communal distribution of schwainsertion with suffixed ˁind was thus very similar to that of schwa-insertion with suffixed kill: largely an A, but also increasingly an urban phenomenon which was affecting the BU group. 2.4.1.2.3 Cluster reduction Though many BV speakers maintained ˁind when it was suffixed by consonantinitial pronoun enclitics, it was reduced by many via the deletion of the /n/ in C2 position: ˁid-ha, ˁid-na etc. The same process was noticeable in the BV treatment of the word bint: bit-ha ‘her daughter’, bit-na ‘our daughter’, etc. were typical, particularly in women’s speech.37 2.4.2 CC 2.4.2.1 Initial CC clusters These occur in all dialects as a result of short-vowel deletion processes (see 2.3.1 for examples, 2.6.6 for rules).

36  One Bahraini informant said he thought these forms were a peculiarity of the black (that is, ex-slave) A population. 37  In all Bahraini dialects, not just those of the B community, /l/ and /n/ are liable to deletion in C2 position in this type of form, as in git < gilt ‘I/you(m)’ said’, kit < kint ‘I/you(m) were’.

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2.4.2.2 Final non-homophonous CC clusters These occur in words which had the structure CvCC in OA. Their treatment depends both on the preceding vowel and the consonants which comprise the cluster: 2.4.2.2.1

2.4.2.2.1.1

OA C1aC2C3

If C2 is a sonorant (/l, n, r/)

The form is stable, e.g. galb ‘heart’, ḥalǧ (B ḥalg, ḥalk) ‘throat, mouth’, ṭalg (BV ṭalk) ‘parturition’, galṣ ‘rowing boat’, ḏanb (B danb) ‘sin’, warč ‘thigh’, farg (BV fark) ‘difference’, ˁarṣ ‘fooling around, joking’. 2.4.2.2.1.2

If C2 is a ‘guttural’ (/x, ġ, ḥ, ˁ, ˀ, h/)

2.4.2.2.1.3

If C3 is a ‘guttural’ (/x, ġ, ḥ, ˁ, ˀ, h/)

2.4.2.2.1.4

In other cases

CaCaC is normal, e.g. baḥar ‘sea’, taḥat ‘below’, laḥam ‘meat’, baˁad ‘after’, naxal ‘palm-trees’, šahar ‘month’, saham ‘share’, waham ‘fantasy’. The form is stable, e.g. samˁ ‘sense of hearing’, šamˁ ‘candles’, zarˁ ‘crops’, galˁ ‘uprooting’, saṭḥ ‘roof’, baṭḥ ‘land alternately covered and uncovered by the tide’, farx ‘shoot, sprig’, šarx ‘type of fishing net’, ṭabx (B only) ‘cooking’. The A and B dialects differ: if C3 is a sonorant, the A dialects have CaCvC, in which the v is a midvowel /ə/, but the B retain CaCC, e.g. A ḥabəl ‘rope’, ġazəl ‘net’, raməl ‘sand’, nasəl ‘progeny’, tamər ‘date’, gaṣər ‘fort, palace’, gabər ‘grave’, ṣabər ‘patience’; baṭən ‘stomach, womb, guts’, the B dialects have ḥabl, ġazl, raml, etc. In the remaining cases, the A dialects also tend to break up the cluster, whereas the B dialects do not, e.g. A čabəd ‘liver’, ġaṣəb ‘duress’, B čabd (or čibd), ġaṣb, but there are a few exceptions to this in the A dialects, e.g. wagt/ wakt ‘time, weather, climate’, šams ‘sun’. 2.4.2.2.2 OA C1iC2C3 and C1uC2C3

2.4.2.2.2.1

If C2 is a sonorant (/l, n, r/)

CvCC is always stable, e.g. ˁilč ‘chewing gum’, ḥilm ‘dream’, silm ‘core, pith (of fruit)’, bild ‘sounding lead’, silg ‘chard’, milḥ ‘salt’, bunk (some B binč) ‘essence, high point’, bint ‘girl’, ˁirs ‘marriage’, ˁirg ‘root, vein’, širb ‘seed-bed’.

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If C3 is a velar (/k, g/) or a ‘guttural’ (/x, ġ, ḥ, ˁ, ˀ, h/)

2.4.2.2.2.3

If C3 is a sonorant (/l, n, r/)

2.4.2.2.2.4

In other cases

CvCC is stable, e.g. A ṣidǧ (via ṣidg < OA ṣ-d-q), B ṣidk ‘truth(-telling)’, rizg ‘sustenance’, ṣibḥ/ ṣubḥ ‘morning’, sidḥ ‘roof’, bilḥ ‘fresh dates’, ǧidˁ/yiḏˁ ‘palmtrunk’, ṣibġ ‘paint’. CvCvC is the norm, usually with vowel harmony, e.g. ṣiṭil ‘pail’, miṯil (B mifil) ‘like’, šikil ‘shape, type’, nigil ‘candies, snacks’, ḥimil ‘load’, dihin ‘oil, fat’, ǧibin ‘cheese’, mitin ‘thickness’, siǧin ‘prison’, ǧidir (BU gidir, BV kidir) ‘cooking pot’, ḥibir ‘ink’, ġizir ‘depth’, ǧisir ‘bridge, causeway’, čiṯir (BV kufur) ‘amount’, kubur (BV čubur) ‘age, size’, ˁumur ‘life-span; self’, #ḏuhur (B dialects ḍuhur) ‘noon’, šuġul ‘work’. There is seemingly free variation, e.g. A xubiz/ xubz ‘bread’, bišit/ bišt ‘man’s cloak’, isim/ism ‘name’, ǧisim/ǧism ‘body’. 2.4.2.2.2.5 v1 deletion in CvCvC forms where v is a high vowel

The initial v of resulting CvCvC forms where the first v is /i/ or /u/ (e.g. in dihin, ḍuhur) is deleted by B speakers (and especially BV speakers) when such forms are preceded by the definite article, and a prosthetic schwa inserted, e.g. dihin ‘oil’ → l-ədhin, ḍuhur ‘noon’ → l-əḍhur, giṭin ‘cotton’ → l-əgṭin, čubur ‘size, age’→ l-əčbur.38 In the A equivalents of these forms, the article behaves as normal, viz id-dihin, iḏ# -ḏ# uhur, etc. In all dialects, CvCvC forms which arise via cluster reduction revert to CvCC when they have a vowel-initial suffix, e.g. xubz-ah ‘his bread’, šahr-i ‘my month’, dihn-ik ‘your oil’. 2.4.2.3 Medial homophonous CC clusters A CC cluster in medial position when the consonants are identical and followed by an unstressed high vowel is reduced as a result of elision, very common in normal-speed speech, of this vowel, e.g. yigassimūn → yigasmūn (see 2.6.6 below).

38  The northern Omani sedentary dialects are similar in this respect.

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2.5 Stress In all Bahraini dialects, stress falls on the last syllable of a word of two or more ́ syllables if that syllable is long (Cv̄ C, CvCC), e.g. #ḏrubṓ-h, kitábt, ǧālb,ūt, duwālī�b; otherwise, the penultimate syllable is stressed e.g. g,ālat, mg,ābil, yith,āwaš, mistášfa. This rule also applies to verb phrases consisting of verbs plus prepositional adjuncts, which are treated in normal speed delivery as single words, phonologically speaking, e.g. gālat li → gālát-li ‘she said to me’. It should be noted that these stress rules apply after the vowel deletion rule that disallows sequences of more than two Cv short vowels (see 2.3.2). In the B dialects, but not in the A dialects, syllable structure rules allow sequences of short vowels (Cv-Cv-Cv) provided v1 is /a/, e.g. katabat ‘she wrote’ waraga ‘leaf’, (but A dialects ktibat, wriga). In such forms the B dialects stress the antepenultimate: kátabat, wáraga. Stress is non-distinctive. 2.6 Phonotactics 2.6.1 Assimilation The following are major loci: 2.6.1.1 The definite article The letters that trigger assimilation are the same as those in cla. However, if the defined noun begins with an unstressed high vowel, this is very often deleted and a prosthetic vowel inserted. The definite article is then simply /l/, whatever consonant begins the defined word, so, e.g. ričāb ‘riding animals’ becomes ərčāb and l-ərčāb39 ‘the riding animals’, not *ir-ričāb. In some cases, as in the one quoted, the form with the prosthetic vowel has become lexically fixed to the point where the asterisked alternative is never heard. Primarily, the form which normally occurs in any given case depends loosely on whether the word is part of the ‘core’ dialect in a cultural sense, and secondarily, if it is not part of that core, on the relative formality of the speech context. So examples of words in the first category are l-əṣbāḥa ‘present given by the groom to the bride the night after consummation’,40 l-əgmāš ‘natural pearls’ (the term universally 39  There seems to be no linguistically principled way of deciding whether the prosthetic vowel should be considered, and written, as a part of the definite article or of the noun, i.e. lə-rčāb or l-ərčāb. 40  By the mid-1970s this custom was already more or less obsolete.

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used in the local traditional industry by divers and merchants alike), and l-əhnūd ‘the Indians’ (referring to the long-established Indian population of Bahrain). But in cases of non-core words, there was, as a rule, variability, e.g. l-əṣġayra or iṣ-ṣuġayra ‘the youngest one’, both used by a woman in a conversation when referring to a sister of hers. These observations apply to both the A and the B dialects. However, some types of form are exceptional: as we saw in 2.4.2.2 above, CuCuC/CiCiC forms in the B dialects tend to undergo this deletion and prosthesis, whereas they do not in the A dialects, e.g. B l-əḍhur, A i#ḏ-#ḏuhur ‘noon-time’. 2.6.1.2 /b/ → /m/ In the BV dialects, the b-prefix signifying future/proximal intent becomes /m/ with 1pl p-stem verbs with a CvCv̄ (C) structure. The unstressed short vowel is deleted before the long vowel (see 2.6.6 below) and a prosthetic vowel is prefixed. The b- prefix then takes on the nasal quality of the 1pl prefix e.g. nirūḥ → inrūḥ → b-inrūḥ → m-inrūḥ ‘we’ll go’,41 and similarly m-inšūf ‘we’ll see’, m-ingūl ‘we’ll say’, etc. 2.6.1.3 /l/ before /n/ In the imperative xall ‘let’ /l/ → /n/ before -ni and -na enclitic pronouns, e.g. xall-na→ xal-na (via geminate cluster reduction, see 2.4.1.1) → xan-na . . . ‘let’s . . .’ For some speakers, this assimilation of /l/ to /n/ occurs in some other commonly occurring instances of juxtaposition, e.g. gilna → ginna ‘we said’ and similar forms like ištagalna → ištaġanna ‘we worked’, ˁaddalnā-h → ˁaddannā-h ‘we smoothed it out’. 2.6.1.4 /ġ/ → /b/ In the p-stem forms of the verb baġa ‘to want, need’/ġ/ → /b/, e.g. abbi, tabbi, etc. rather than abġi, tabġi, etc. (A speakers); abba, tubba, etc. (B speakers) rather than abġa, tabġa (see also 2.6.2 below). 2.6.1.5 /h/ in 3rd person enclitic pronouns In the A dialects, the enclitics -ha and -hum are assimilated to the -t of the 3fsng s-stem verb and f noun forms, e.g. šrubat-ta ‘she drank it (f)’, rgubat-tum ‘their neck’. A similar process of /h/-assimilation occurs in the B dialects when -hu and -hi are suffixed to the demonstrative hāk → hāk-ku, hāk-ki (see 3.1.5).

41  This process also occurs in the northern Omani sedentary dialects.

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2.6.1.6 /t/ in ti- verbal prefixes of various kinds /t/is assimilated to /ṭ, ṯ, d, ḏ, ḍ, ḏ# , č, ǧ, s, ṣ, š, z/ as a consequence of the deletion unstressed /i/ in open syllable (see 2.6.6), e.g. tiṣīr → (i)ṣṣīr ‘she becomes’, tiṭawwar → (i)ṭṭawwar ‘it developed’, tičiddūn → (i)ččiddūn ‘you earn money (by working)’. 2.6.2 Dissimilation There are a few obvious cases (2.1.2.4), such as saǧara < šaǧara ‘tree, bush’, masbūč < mašbūč ‘connected, interwoven’ (BV dialects), and xast < xass ‘lettuce’ (all dialects). Some B speakers have dissimilated the first /b/ in forms of the abba, tubba-type (themselves the result of the general assimilation of ġ in the p-stem of the verb baġa—see 2.6.1.4) to /m/ → amba, tumba, yumba, etc. for ‘I /you/he wants’. Certain quadriliteral verbs may have arisen historically via dissimilation, e.g. karfas ‘to knock to the ground’ < kaffas ‘to crease, bend over’.42 2.6.3 Metathesis Clear examples are pattern III nāwas ‘to keep s’one company’, and pattern I nawas ‘to be happy’, both < OA ˀ-n-s; ǧawāz /yawāz (< z-w-ǧ) ‘marriage’, raṣaˁ (< ˁ-ṣ-r) ‘to squeeze’, šamax (< x-m-š) ‘to scratch, snatch, grab’, pattern II bakkar/ baččar ‘to prepare food, a smoking-pipe’ (< r-k-b), pattern III wālam ‘to be suitable, fitting’ (< l-ˀ-m). 2.6.4 The ghawa-syndrome The so-called ghawa-syndrome, common to the bedouin-descended dialects the length of the Gulf, occurs in Bahrain in the A dialects only. It involves the deletion of /a/ in C1aC2 non-final syllables where C2 is a ‘guttural’, and epenthesis and stressing of /a/ after C2, so, e.g. naxla → nxála ‘palm-tree’, maġrub → mġárb ‘sunset’, yaˁrif → yˁárf ‘he knows’, ˀaḥmar → ḥámar ‘red’, gahwa → ghawa ‘coffee’. This process no longer seems to be productive; in fact in some words, gahwa/ghawa itself being one, the resyllabicated form seems to be dropping out of use, especially in the A dialects of Manāma. 2.6.5 Spread of emphatisation Emphatisation may spread beyond the syllable, especially to the sonorants and labials /l/, /r/, /b/, /m/, e.g. ṣabi ‘boy’ (= [ṣɒḅi]), ṭabil ‘drum’ (= [ṭɒḅıḷ], ṣabur ‘patience’ (= [ṣɒḅʊṛ]. In a few roots, an originally non-emphatic consonant has become emphatised, and the process (sometimes termed ‘prosody’) has then spread, e.g. (B dialects) ḏakar → ḍakar ‘to remember, mention’ (= [ḍɑḳɑṛ]). 42  See final paragraph of 4.3.3.

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Combinations of velars, labials and sonorants may also become emphatised even when an emphatic consonant is not present, e.g. gabil ‘before’ (= [gɑḅıḷ] (A example), txammar ‘to ferment’ (= [ṭxɑṃṃɑṛ], xtarab ‘to go rotten’ (= [xṭɑṛɑḅ] (both B examples). 2.6.6 Elision of vowels /i/ (and /u/ in labial environments) in unstressed non-final open syllable is deleted, and a prosthetic vowel /i/ is inserted if the deleted vowel is in the first syllable and a consonant-final word precedes. So typical forms in all dialects are: (i)ngūl ‘we say’, (i)ktāb ‘book’. If the unstressed /i/ is in a medial syllable, it is deleted and an epenthetic vowel breaks up the resulting cluster, e.g. yitrisūn → yitrsūn → yitirsūn ‘they fill’ The unstressed /i/ that results from this process may also be deleted as a result of the cyclical reapplication of the /i/-deletion rule: yitirsūn → ytirsūn Medially doubled consonants are reduced, e.g. (i)tˁallim ‘you (m) teach’ but (i)tˁalmūn ‘you (pl) teach’, labbisaw ‘they dressed’ but in rapid speech, labsō-ha ‘they dressed her’. In the A dialects, not only /i/ and /u/, but also /a/ is deleted in the initial syllable of a succession of short syllables (CvCvC(v/ v̄)), e.g. šarab ‘he drank’→ (i)šrub-ah ‘he drank it’ and šrubat ‘she drank’. In the B dialects, the equivalents forms are of the CvCvCvC or CvCCvC-type (see 2.2.2.1). 2.6.7 Shortening and lengthening of  vowels As in other Arabic dialects, the final vowels of all finally-weak verb form are short in their unsuffixed form and lengthened and stressed when suffixed, e.g. ́ ‘he lets me’, báġa ‘he wanted’, baġ/ā-h ‘he wanted him’. yxálli ‘he lets’, yxallī�-ni Final diphthongs become long vowels on suffixation, with the same shift of stress to the final long syllable e.g. (A dialect examples) iftáḥaw ‘they opened’, iftaḥṓ-h ‘they opened it’, fítḥay! ‘open (f)!’ fitḥḗ-h ‘open (f) it!’ This process appears to have been analogically extended in some BU dialects (especially that of Rās Rummān (Manāma 5)), the vowel of the 3msng enclitic pronoun -ah being lengthened and stressed when attached to the 3msng of s-stem simple strong verbs, e.g. dibḥ/ā-h ‘he slaughtered it’, čaffit/ā-h ‘he bound him’, šagg/ā-h ‘he tore it’ and even hollow verbs, e.g. čāfā-k ‘he saw you’. Here, the long /ā/ vowel cannot be the reappearance of an underlying /ā/ in the verb form when suffixed, as it is in baġā-h. A parallel case in the A

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dialects is the insertion of a short /a/ vowel between the active participle of strong and finally-weak simple verbs and enclitic pronouns, e.g. xāṭba-ha ‘he has become engaged to her’, bānya-ha ‘he has built it’.43 As in many Arabic dialects, long vowels may be shortened in rapid delivery. Where two or more long vowels occur in a word, the unstressed first (and second, if there is one) long vowel may be shortened, e.g. ǧālbūt = [ʤalbʊ:t] ‘type of small boat’, hāḏēlēn = [haḏɛle:n] ‘these’.

43  Such forms were already obsolescent in the A dialects in the 1970s, and being replaced by xāṭib-ha and bānī-ha-type forms. See 4.6.1.

CHAPTER 3

Morphology (I) This chapter covers the morphology of pronouns, adverbs, particles, nouns, adjectives, and numerals.1 3.1 Pronouns 3.1.1 1msng 1fsng 2msng 2fsng 3msng 3fsng 1pl 2pl 3pl

Personal independent A dialects āna āna inta intay and inti əhuwwə and əhwə əhiyyə and əhyə iḥna intaw/intu əhummə and əhmə

BV ana ani inta intīn(a)/inti hu hi iḥna intūn(a)/intu hum

BU ana ani/ana inta intīn/inti hu and əhuwwə/huwwa hi and əhiyyə/hiyya iḥna intūn/intu hum and əhummə/humma

As can be seen from the table, there is variation in all dialect types. In each cell, the form(s) which appear(s) to the left of a slash are the basic dialectal ones, whether original or (in some cells, in the BU case) probably borrowed from the A dialect. Forms to the right of a slash is/are the ones used by more ‘educated’ speakers of each community. Notes on the A dialect forms The 1sg has a long, backed, and in some areas (Muḥarrag) rounded, ā. This pronunciation was stable as the A dialect norm at the time of the fieldwork. The 3msng/fsng/pl ‘original’ forms come in two basic shapes: the apocopated əhwə/ əhyə/əhmə type occurred in more rapid speech, and the full forms əhuwwə, etc. in slower delivery, especially in utterance-final position or where emphasis was

1  The bracketed number after each example refers to the exact village location, or, in the case of the urban area of Manāma, the quarter (see the maps) where it was recorded.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004302631_004

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placed on the pronoun. Again, these forms were stable. The 2fsng form intay is heard only in utterance-final position (2.2.1.1.4), but in juncture inti is used. Notes on the BV dialects The BV dialects consistently distinguished gender in the 1sng (as also in some Iraqi dialects and the B dialects of eastern Saudi Arabia). The 2fsng and 2pl B forms are similarly salient, not only in Bahrain, but in the region as a whole: again, the only other places in the Gulf region where they occur is in the B dialects of neighbouring eastern Saudi Arabia,2 but similar forms have been recorded for the Tihāma region of south-western Saudi Arabia, and various locations in Yemen3 as well as in the Shiḥḥi dialects of the Musandam peninsula, Oman.4 The variants intīna, intūna with final -a were occasionally recorded as a BV variants, but did not seem to be restricted to specific villages. The variants inti and intu, which occurred sometimes in ‘educated’ B speech, appear to be shifts in the direction of the regional dialectal standard. Notes on the BU dialects As can be seen from an inspection of the table, the BU dialects represent a further shift in the direction of levelling and homogenisation. The ani 1fsng form occurred often enough in the least well-educated speakers’ speech (such as those attending illiteracy-eradication programmes) but even among them it was mixed with the ‘neutral’ form ana. The 2nd person forms exhibited the same kind of variability as noted in the BV dialects, viz away from the saliently B forms and towards regionally more widespread ones. In the case of the 3rd person B forms, hu, hi and hum, these were stable in the speech of illiterates and the less well-educated, but occasionally replaced by the overtly A forms among the better educated, as well as by a medial set of forms which were neither B nor A but a compromise—huwwa, hiyya, and humma. These were also quite common.

2  See QAS issue 23, which gives ˀintīn and ˀintūn for al-Qaṭīf and many of the villages in the vicinity. 3  PRO 125 gives ˀintīn and ˀintōn and PRO 27 the corresponding s-stem verb forms in -tīn and -tōn for the village of Ṣabyā in the extreme south west of Saudi Arabia. A variety of similar 2fsng and 2pl forms with the final -n and a preceding long vowel are also recorded for various locations in south-western Yemen (BEHN2 73, 76). 4  SHAH 252.

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Recent research, done more than thirty years after my own, has shown a quickening acceleration of the loss of overtly B pronoun forms and a continuing switch to A or neutral forms among the B population.5 3.1.2 Possessive/object suffixes 1sng poss 1sng obj 2msng 2fsng 3msng 3fsng 1pl 2pl 3pl

A dialects -i -ni -ik -ič -ah -ha -na -kum -hum

BV -i -ni -č/-k -š -uh or -ah -ha -na -kim or čim/-kum -hum or him

BU -i -ni -k -š -ah -ha -na -kum -hum

Notes The A dialect forms are shared with all of the other A-type dialects of the Gulf, from Kuwait to the UAE. After nouns which end in a long vowel, which is short in unsuffixed forms but which reappears on suffixation, the 1sng suffix is realised in the A, BU and most BV dialects as -y: axū-y ‘my brother’, abū-y ‘my father’, irdā-y ‘my cloak’. In some BV dialects, however, the ending is -yi: e.g. axū-yi, abū-yi, rdā-yi. The BV 2nd person system for pronominal reference is regionally anomalous in every respect: -č rather than -ik for the 2msng; -š rather then -ič for the 2fsng, and -čim or kim rather than -kum for the 2pl.6 The 2msng in particular is highly salient, since in the A dialect and the rest of the Gulf it is the normal form for the 2fsng! Unsurprisingly, this form, which was only heard in the BV dialect, was becoming marginal even there, and confined to the speech of the oldest speakers and those least exposed to outside influences.7 The 2fsng form, 5  QOUZ 239–261, 271–272. See 7.2. 6  In Oman, in a few mountain villages of the Jabal Shams and in the Wādi Saḥtān, the same regionally rare system for 2person enclitic pronouns, of -č (msg), -š (fsg) and -čim (pl) was recorded. 7  The data in CF suggests that the 2msng -č and 2pl -čim forms were more likely to be used in relatively ‘ritualised’ language, such as that of cursing formulas, and were becoming less likely to be heard in non-formulaic contexts.

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however, was stable and seemingly not so vulnerable to replacement.8 The fact that the BV 2sng person enclitics consist of a consonant only, without a preceding vowel, when suffixed to consonant-final noun or verb receded by a short vowel9 is also highly salient, since this gives a distinctive cluster ending which never occurs in any A dialect, e.g. galam-k ‘your (m) pen’, ǧiddat-š ‘your (f) grandmother’, ḍarab-k ‘he hit you’ in contrast with A dialect equivalent forms galam-ik, yiddat-ič, ḏ̣rub-ik. The 2pl BV form -čim, like -č for the 2msng form, is also a highly marked BV feature, and again most often found in the speech of the least exposed to outside influences, in this case mainly in the BV3 and BV4 groups of villages: it is disappearing fast. The -kim variant, like -čim, is being replaced by the communally neutral -kum. In the 3rd person forms, there is a geographical distinction: the -uh and -him forms were found in the eastern and central B villages, and the -ah and -hum forms elsewhere. The BU forms, compared to the BV ones, are closer to those of the A dialects, the major difference being the maintenance of 2fsng form -š, and the fact that like the BV dialects the BU dialect has final cluster forms of the type galamk, ǧiddat-š. More recent research suggests that these features too are being levelled out.10 There is some variation in the form of preposition + pronouns compounds. Where the preposition is li ‘to’, we get: 1sng 2fsng 2msng 3msng 3fsng 1pl 2pl 3pl

A lī lič lik lih liha lina likum lihum

BV liyyi/liyya lēš/layš lēk/layč lēh/layh lēha/layha lēna/layna lēkum/layčim lēhum/layhim

BU liyyi liš lik lēh/lih lēha/liha lina likum lēhum/lihum

8  It is also used by the B speakers of eastern Saudi Arabia, and is the norm for some dialects of the UAE, and for virtually the whole of Oman and Yemen. 9  In the case of some BV speakers, even forms in which the final consonant was preceded by a long vowel, or where the final consonant is doubled also occurred with -k suffixed, e.g. xāl-k ‘your maternal uncle’ (example from (25)), and ˁam-k ‘your paternal uncle’ (via consonant reduction of ˁamm-k) (example from (3)). 10  See QOUZ 179–183 and section 7.2.

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The main communal difference here is the long vowel /ē/ which is typical of the B dialects, but which is a diphthong in the speech of many older BV speakers from all over the country, in particular in that of speakers from the BV3 and BV4 groups of villages. The BU forms show variation: the /ē/ 3rd person forms are like those of the BV dialects, but in other persons forms similar to those of the A dialects predominate. Again, this seems to be a case of levelling by the BU dialects in the direction of the A. With ila and ˁala the main 1sng forms are respectively: ilī and ˁalay (A); iliyyi and ˁaliyyi or ˁaliyya (BV); BU iliyyi/ and ˁaliyyi. In all other persons, the BV3 and BV4 dialects diphthongize, e.g. ilayč, ˁalayh etc. whereas the A and main body of B dialects have ilēk, ˁalēh-type forms with long vowels. A salient difference in the treatment of fī is the 1sng form fiyyi in all the B dialects and fīni in the A dialects. Another is wiyyāyi 11 ‘with me’ in the B dialects, wiyyāy in the A. 3.1.3 Indirect and direct object suffixes Some verbs allow the indirect object to be suffixed directly to the verb and the direct object carried by the particle iyya, e.g. ˁaṭ-ni iyyā-h ‘give it to me!’, aǧǧirū-na iyyā-ha ‘rent it (= house) to us!’, b-arawwī-k iyyā-ha ‘I’ll show it to you’, sammaˁnā-k iyyāh ‘we let you hear it’. But in most cases of such double object constructions, it is the direct object which is suffixed to the verb and the indirect object to iyya-, e.g. xarribō-ha iyyā-y ‘they’ve ruined it for me’, faṣṣaxnā-h iyyā-ha ‘we took it (= dress) off her’. 3.1.4 Demonstratives The basic system of demonstrative pronouns and adjectives is shared and is as follows: proximal m proximal f proximal pl distal m distal f distal pl

A dialects (hā)ḏa (hā)ḏi (hā)ḏēlēn/(hā)ḏēla (hā)ḏāk (hā)ḏīč (hā)ḏēlāk

B dialects (hā)da (hā)di (hā)dēlēn/(hā)dēla (hā)dāk (hā)dīk (hā)dēlāk/(hā)dōl/(hā)dōla12

11  Or iyyāy/iyyāyi in some B dialects. 12  As noted in the description of their phonology, the BV3 and BV4 dialects diphthongize the long mid-vowels, so their forms here are: (hā)daylayn/(hā)dayla ‘these’ and (hā)dawl/ (hā)dawla ‘those’.

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Notes All dialects When used as a pronoun, the demonstrative normally has the hā- element, but not necessarily: A examples: ḏāk əb rūḥ-ah (Manāma 7) ‘That (part of the house) is separate’ ifṭām-ah, ḏī lli yiḥuṭṭ-ah fi l-xašim (48) ‘His nose-clip, that which he puts on his nose’ rkubaw ḏēlāk, tabbaw ḏelēn (48) ‘Those ones came up on board, these ones dived’ B examples: min wēn iǧībūn da? (16) ‘Where do they get that from?’ dēlāk mumtāzīn baˁad (6) ‘Those ones are excellent too’ The f distal form ḏīk was often used in the BU dialects with the m noun yōm: ḏīk il-yōm ‘that day’. The f form of the proximal demonstrative was also often used with m nouns, especially when post-posed, e.g. il-bēṯ hāḏi ‘this house’, and also when used as a pronoun of vague reference, e.g. A examples: šinhu ḏi? (51) ‘What’s this?’ ila yā-kum il-maṭar u ḏi . . . (45) ‘When it rained on you, and that sort of thing . . .’

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B example: al-ḥīn id-dinya taġayyarat u day13 (Manāma 5) ‘These days the world has changed, and all that’ When the demonstrative is used as an adjective preceding the noun, the hāelement is normally present, but, again, not necessarily, e.g. A example: hādāk muhub min ḏi l-bēt (Manāma 7) ‘That (part) doesn’t belong to this house’ B example: xud da d-dawa (Manāma 2) ‘Take this medicine’ The demonstrative as an adjective can also follow the noun, especially when used for emphasis or contrastively, and in this case it often lacks the hā- element, e.g. A examples: šinhi l-mara ḏi? (51) ‘And what (exactly) was this (thing called) “woman”?’ mā miš illa t-tamra ḏī (48) ‘All there was (to eat) was these dates.’ B examples: raǧāyil-ah day (Manāma 2) ‘Those legs of his’ dēlēn in-naṣāra yitˁabun ˁala rūḥ-hum, il-kuffār dēlēn! (5) ‘Those Christians do work themselves hard, those unbelievers!’ 13  Equivalent to A dialect ḏi—in some BU dialects, notably that of Rās Rummān, the final /i/ is diphthongized in pause.

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The proximal set of demonstrative forms can also be reduced in a different way, to a clitic ha- prefixed to a defined noun of any gender and number, e.g. ha-l-bēt ‘this house’, ha-l-mara ‘this woman’, ha-r-raǧāǧīl ‘these men’. This reduced type of construction is particularly common in high-frequency adverbial phrases which have virtually become unitary elements, such as ha-l-lōn ‘of that type’, ha-n-namūna ‘like that’, ha-l-gadd ‘this much’, ha-l-kubur ‘this big’, ha-l-ḥīn ‘these days’. Another ‘abbreviated’ form of the demonstrative used in all Bahraini dialects is hāy, which may be used adjectivally (before or after the head noun) or pronominally as a proximal demonstrative instead of hāḏa, hāḏi, etc. e.g. hāy l-əmḥammar ‘this mḥammar (dish of rice cooked with molasses)’, il-bēt hāy ‘this house’, hāy māl sināya ‘these are for making seedlings from’. B dialects There are special demonstrative forms (sng forms only recorded) whose use is confined to the BV dialects, recorded mainly in the speech of the elderly: proximal m proximal f distal m distal f

hāk hēk hāka hēka

Examples: hāk il-bēt (5) ‘This house here’ hēk il-falāfa baṣal (6) ‘These three (= seed-beds) here are (planted with) onions’ lā, mu hāka! (3) ‘No, not him over there!’ amman hēka, b-aˁṭī-ha wald ˁamm-ha (5) ‘As for that one there (= daughter), I’ll give her to her cousin’ As was also noted for the main set of forms, the f proximal demonstrative form can seemingly be used indiscriminately with m, f and dual/pl nouns, as in hēk il-yōm ‘this day’, hēk il-lēla ‘this night’, hēk il-ǧaḥlatēn ‘these two water-pots’.

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3.1.5 Presentatives Demonstratives can be used as a means of foregrounding a fact or an event as pragmatically or discoursally new, especially if unexpected or contrary to expectation. Examples: The B dialects The B dialects use mixed systems: hāk- + the independent pronouns was recorded only with the 3rd person -hu, -hi, -hum. For some speakers, hāk- with singular pronouns was used indiscriminately with a -hu or -hi suffix, but for others, there was a gender distinction, with hāk-hu for reference to grammatically masculine nouns and hēk-hi for feminine, in either case with optional assimilation of the /h/ → /k/.14 Examples: hāk-ku naǧāǧīr, lā? lil-ḥīn yinaǧrūn (16) (foregrounding a fact seemingly unknown to the interlocutor) ‘There were carpenters, weren’t there?—and there still are.’ hāk-hi bagāya arḍ miˁaṭṭala (6) (at the same time physically pointing them out) ‘These here are bits of land left uncultivated’ trinǧāt falāf sanawāt mazrūˁa, hāk-hi yābsa (1) (unexpected development) ‘The citrons were planted three years ago, and now they’ve gone and shrivelled up’ hēk-hi uxt-i fiḍḍō wildat! (41) (unexpected event) ‘This sister of mine Fiḍḍa has gone and had a child!’

14  Examples were recorded in the B data of ākku without the initial /h/, and it was sometimes difficult to decide whether its function was presentative or existential, as the two are pragmatically close to another (cf. the expression of presentative/existential meaning in French in both of which voici and voilà can figure). As is well known, aku ‘there is/ are . . .’ is the normal way of expressing ‘existence’ in the Kuwaiti and southern Iraqi dialects and is also used by a minority of B speakers in Bahrain. As already noted, the origin of aku is disputed, a popular theory being that it is derived from yakūn (HAN 22), though Barthélemy (BART 776) states that it is derived from hāk-hu, a proposal which Blanc (BLA 147) describes as an ‘ingenious conjecture’. It was argued in Ch1 that aku ‘there is’ could well be an inherited substrate feature of Akkadian or Old Aramaic origin (see 1.3.1.1). See also 3.3.6 below on existential particles.

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hēk-ki waddētīn-ha ziyāra! (41) (unexpected event) ‘And now you’ve gone and sent her on a visit (to the Shīˁī shrines in Iraq and Iran)!’ hāk-hum yiṭlaˁūn, mā yixāfūn (33) (contrasting with today’s generation) ‘They would go out (of the house), they weren’t scared to.’ A second system is used in a similar way to hāk-/hēk- but mainly with 1st and 2nd person pronouns, less often with 3rd person, involving hāda- or hādāk- as the presentative, e.g. illa aġdi n-naxīl! hādā-ni akūl liš la?! (28) ‘Of course I used to go (and work) in the palm-gardens! I’ve just told you so, haven’t I?’ (reiteration of what the speaker thought had been understood) hāda-nta taḥči ˁarabi tamām! (7)15 ‘You speak Arabic perfectly!’ (implied: ‘you haven’t been here very long but . . .’) hāda-ntūn tikāsamtūn tiǧārat-kum (5) ‘(I see) you’ve divided up (the profits of) your business!’ (foregrounding newly relevant information) hāḏa-ḥna ṣirna niswān (33) ‘(Look!) now we’ve become (grown-up) women’ (implied: ‘things have changed, we’re no longer children’) hād-u16 al-ḥīn tišābak ˁaliyyi (28) ‘Just now he had an argument with me.’ (implied: ‘He hasn’t stopped arguing with me—he’s just done it again’) sarḥat-hum ǧidīda, hādāk-hum yibayyinūn (9) ‘They have a new look about them, that’s how they appear!’ (contradicting interlocutor)

15  hanta was also occasionally recorded, apparently < hāda-nta, e.g. hanta tšūf . . . hāda zaraˁ-na (11) ‘Look here . . . this is our planting’. 16  < hāda-hu

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This construction also occurs in reduced form without the hā- prefix, e.g. d-rūḥi! arūḥ? dā-ni riḥt! (9) ‘Just go!’ ‘Go? I’ve already been!’ (correcting the first speaker’s wrong assumption) Note also B village ayya- which is used in a similar ‘presentative’ fashion, e.g. ayyā-hu samād ˁind-i mawǧūd! (1) ‘Look here! I’ve got some manure already’. The A dialects The system in the A dialects is similar, but with some differences: k(a)- may be prefixed to any independent pronoun, e.g. k-āna yāya! (48) ‘I(f) am just coming!’ siktay, al-ḥīn! ka-hwə ya! (Manāma 6) ‘Be quiet now! He’s come!’ Very occasional examples were recorded of ka- prefixed to other parts of speech: ka-ygūl ˁAli! (Manāma 6) ‘Now he’s saying it’s ˁAli (who stole the shoes)!’ (implied: contrary to what he said before). A few A speakers were recorded using hāk + 3rd person independent pronouns, which is the norm in the BV dialects (see above). The /h/ of the pronoun may be assimilated to the /k/, e.g. hāk-ku ya, rafīǧ-na! (Manāma 10) ‘Here he comes, our friend!’ (new event) hāk-ku giṭˁa yisammūn-ha “mītma” . . . (44) ‘Now, there’s an area (of the sea) they call Mītma . . .’ (introducing a fresh topic in the conversation)

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Forms involving hāḏa + independent pronouns also occurred less commonly in the A dialects than in the B. Examples: hāḏa-ḥna yihhāl! (45) ‘We were just kids!’ (explaining mischief) In both the A and B dialects, a separate type of presentative, in which the speaker is physically presenting something to the interlocutor, involves hā- + 2nd person enclitic pronouns, e.g. hā-k! hādi s-siččīn mālat-na, əḥmil-ha! (5) ‘Here you (m) are! This knife of ours—carry it with you!’ (physically handing over a knife) “hā-č!” nitlaḥḥaf əb xēša (51) ‘ “Here you (f) are!” And we’d cover ourselves with a sack (sc as bedclothes)!’ (quoting what was actually said to children as they were given sacks to sleep on) The particle (w)ila, which is also the main conditional particle used to introduce non-hypothetical conditions (see 5.11.1.1), can be used in all Gulf and central Arabian dialects as a presentative to introduce sudden or unexpected events. It can be used by itself or with bi and have pronouns attached to it. It thus appears to be a development in all these uses of CLA ˀiḏā ‘if’ and ˀiḏā bi ‘lo and behold’.17 Examples: čakk! ila ṭabb ˁalēh (6) ‘Smack! It (= a pigeon) landed on it’ ilā-hu ǧāy-in-ni yōm wāḥid, yigūl lī . . . (30) ‘Then one day, he suddenly comes to me, telling me . . .’ min xōf-ī min umm-i ilā-ni mā anwas arūḥ (3) ‘From fear of my mother, I just didn’t dare go’

17  brav 291–294 notes the occurrence of ilā an . . . ‘suddenly . . .’ in early Classical historical texts for describing sudden, unexpected events.

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tāli, ilā-hum fālgīn dāna! (33) ‘Then, lo and behold, they opened a clam and found a large, perfect pearl!’ ila bi ǧīˀat lāri maktūb ˁalēh “ǧalīl at-turk” (4) ‘Then all of a sudden a lorry arrives with “Jalīl al-Turk” written on the side’ 3.1.6 Relative pronouns As in many other Arabic dialects, the commonest form of the relative pronoun in all Bahraini dialects is illi. However, in the BV (and occasionally the BU) dialects there are a number of other dialectal forms which remain in use and vary with it: illaḏi, illadi, iladi, illi di. All of these are used to refer to antecedent nouns of any gender or number, and were recorded in several locations: illaḏi: 30 illadī: 28, 30, 41, Manāma 2 iladi: 6, 7 illi di: 6 Notwithstanding their superficial similarity to the CLA/MSA msng relative pronoun, these forms are authentically dialectal, and only occurred in the speech of the elderly and uneducated. See section 5.7 for examples of use. 3.1.7 Interrogative pronouns All dialects make use of the following items: šlōn ‘how?’, ‘what kind?’, kēf/čēf ‘how?’, čam ‘how much/many?’, wēn ‘where?’ mita ‘when?’, min and minhu/ minhi (f) ‘who?’ Gender distinction in the last form listed was noted only occasionally, and only in the BV dialects. Specific to the A dialects are: šinhu/(m)/šinhi (f) ‘what?’, šingāyil ‘what sort?’, š- formations: š- + verb or dummy verb, ‘what . . . ?’, e.g. š-iygūl? ‘what’s he saying?’, š-hast18 ‘what’s going on, what’s the matter?’; š- + prep + pron suffix: š-ḥagg-ah, š-ˁalēh, š-lēh, š-minn-ah? all meaning ‘why, because of what?’ (lit ‘what-on-account-of-it?’), š-fī + pron ‘what’s wrong with . . . ?; š- + noun: š-kiṯir, š-gadd ‘how much/many?’; š- + noun also has the exclamatory sense of ‘how . . . !’, e.g. š-ḥalāwat-ha! ‘how lovely she is!’, š-kubur-ah! ‘how big it is!’; wara + pron enclitic ‘why?’, e.g. warā-h gāl čiḏi? ‘why did he say that?’; yahu (m)/ yahi (f) ‘which one?’ 18  < Pers ‘is’

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Specific to the B dialects are: wēš (BU and BV), wēšhu (m)/wēšhi (f), wēš-in, wē, ay šo (all BV only) ‘what?’, (wē)š-rang ‘what sort?’, prep + wēš formations, e.g. ˁala wēš, li wēš, ḥagg wēš all meaning ‘why?’, ayhu (m)/ayhi (f) ‘which one?’, anu (BV only) ‘who, which?’19 Many of the forms which are noted here as A forms, even at the time of my fieldwork, were also being ‘borrowed’ by educated B speakers, especially educated BU speakers. Interrogatives have no fixed sentence position: pragmatic factors determine, as illustrated in the following examples. The default position of question-words is sentence-initial in cases where, in the course of a conversation, they open a new field of enquiry. Examples: čam ġuṣtūn? (Manāma 2) ‘How deep did you dive?’ š-gadd yaˁṭūn-hum? (45) ‘How much did they used to give them?’ š-minn-ah tifakkirīn il-maraḏ̣? (51) ‘What do you think illnesses were caused by?’ šingāyil il-yōm ġadā-č? (45) ‘What sort of lunch did you have today?’ čēf baˁad il-budūr čil šay ˁind-hum illa l-katt? (14) ‘How is it that they stock all kinds of seeds except lucerne-grass?’ minhu yirzik-š yā bint-i? (5) ‘Who provides your sustenance, o daughter?’ The question word is also normally sentence-initial when it focusses attention on a specific element of the preceding discourse, e.g. šinhu mgaṣṣar? (48) ‘What’s been omitted?’ (in reply to the comment gaṣṣart wāyid ‘you have omitted a lot’) ay zēnab ḏi? (48) ‘Which Zaynab is that (to whom you are referring)?’ 19  Noted also in the form anhu/anhi for Cairo (H&B 42).

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wēš-in agūl lik? (6) ‘What can I say to you?’ (exasperated answer in reply to kēf zirāˁat-kum? ‘how is your farm doing?’) wēš ˁalēh min imm-ǝh?! (30) ‘Why should he care about his mother?!’ (in reply to another speaker’s assertion that ‘what his mother thought’ would have been important to him) A number of pragmatic factors can cause the question word to occupy a later position in the sentence. The most common of these is topical focus-fronting, whereby virtually any sentence element can be shifted to initial position if it becomes the focus of attention (italicised in the translations below, which, as far as possible, reflect the structure of the Arabic sentence): (1) announcing a new topic in a conversation: byūt-kum gabil, kānaw š-minn-ah yisawwūn-ha? (45) ‘Your houses in the old days—what did they make them out of?’ hād illi ˁind-ah famān banāt al-ḥīn, wēš gadd yisallimˁalēha? (3) ‘Now, a man who has eight daughters—how much would he spend on them (when they got married)?’ illi mā ˁind-ah umm, wēn yirūḥ l-ǝmṭawwaˁ? (48) ‘Someone who has no mother—how could such a person attend Qurˀān school?’ (2) to maintain an already-present element in the conversation as its main focus, e.g. w iṭ-ṭabxa illi yisawwūn-ha, šingāyl-ah? (51) ‘And the dish that they cooked (sc and which you just mentioned)—what sort was it?’ “ḥiyya biyya” hādi, mita tsawwūn-ha? (51) ‘This “Ḥiyya biyya” (sc which you just mentioned)—when did you do that?’ ˁiyāl-ič, šinhi asāmī-hum? (45) ‘Your children, what are their names?’

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salaf-na šingāyil? (48) ‘Our loan-advance—how much was that?!’ (rhetorical question implying the answer ‘very little’) it-tāǧir š-yāxḏ-ah bih?! (48) ‘The merchant—what price did he buy it for?!’ (rhetorical question implying a derisorily small amount) hum čam wāḥid? (Manāma 7) ‘Them (= the children you say you had)—how many of them were there?’ mā abġi min wēš? (5) ‘I won’t want to—why not?’ (in answer to an implied: ‘you won’t want to marry him’) (3) for contrastive focus, e.g. iḥna, wēš nākil? (6) ‘And (what about) us—what shall we eat?’ (implied: if the birds carry on eating all our crops) kālat “intīn yumma minhi?” (5) ‘She said, “And you, my dear, are who?” ’ (picking out the addressee from her sisters) bass kil wāḥid, mu maˁrūf zarˁ-ah ayhu? (5) ‘But each ( farmer)—isn’t it understood which crop is his?’ (as opposed to another farmer’s) 3.1.8 Collectives and distributives kil(l) (A, BU, some BV) and čil(l) (mainly BV3, BV4) ‘each, every, all’. A variant is killəbū- which has an alternative form killibā-, both seemingly only used with suffixed pronouns. Johnstone notes killubū- and killibī- as Kuwaiti forms.20 In my data killəbū-21 occurred five times, and killəbā- once, all of them in the speech of A dialect speakers. Examples: 20  EADS 17, 145, for Kuwait, and (154) ‘apparently’ for Muḥarraq, though Johnstone himself did not record these forms in Bahrain. 21  The only other apparent attestation of killəbū- in the dialectology literature I can find is in a verse of bedouin poetry from Sinai (BAI 137): bi daltēn kull abū-hin (written sic) bġādīd

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tyāmaˁaw l-əṣbayān killəbū-hum (45) ‘All the young lads assembled’ ana lāgiṭat-kum min killəbū-h (44) ‘I gathered you up from all and sundry’ gāmaw killəbū-hum, ha-n-niswān li l-baḥar (51) ‘All these women went down to the sea-shore’ killəbū-kum fī ḥiǧra waḥda, targidūn killəbū-kum? (Manāma 6) ‘Were you all in one bedroom, did you all sleep together?’ šlōn dīrat-kum awwal, killibā-ha madfūna? (Manāma 6) ‘What was your neighbourhood like in the old days, was it all on reclaimed land?’ The phrase kilmin is used in the B dialects to mean simply ‘everyone’ (= kil wāḥid) as well as ‘everyone who . . .’ (cf. CLA/MSA kullu man), e.g. tāli kilmin yirūḥ bēt-ah (33) ‘Then everyone would go home’ ilēn ḥazzat il-məġarb, kilmin yirūḥ bēt-ah (Manāma 9) ‘When it was sunset, everyone went home’ The form is also used as an alternative in the BV dialects to kilma ‘every time/ the more . . .’:22 kilmin yimhal, yixtarab (4) ‘The more it is delayed, the more it deteriorates’ The distributional construction hāda min . . . hāda min, again confined to the B dialects, is often used in narratives and descriptions to mean ‘this one . . . that one’:

which Bailey translates ‘in two pots that craftsmen from Baghdad have wrought’. I would translate this as ‘in two coffee-pots, both from (or ‘made in’) Baghdad’. 22  The use of man in various compound phrases to mean ‘what’ rather than ‘who’ is also attested in Khūzistān, southern Iran (ING2 17).

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hāda min yaˁṭī-na āntēn, hāda min yaˁṭī-na arbaˁ ānāt, hāda min mā yaˁṭī-na šay (33) ‘One would give us two annas, one four annas, one nothing’ hāḏi min yiḥaṣṣil xamsat ālāf, hāḏi min yiḥaṣṣil alf, hāḏi min rāddi ˁalēh (20) ‘One would get five thousand, one a thousand, another would still owe money’ A syntactically similar distributive usage, common in all BA dialects and typical of traditional narrative styles, involves the repeated use of the relative pronoun illi . . . illi, e.g. illi yaḥmil fanar, u illi yaḥmil lih šimˁa, u illi yaḥmil lih lēt māl yad (Manāma 7) ‘One would carry a lantern, another a candle, another a hand torch’ illi gtalō-h, igtalō-h, u illi iḏbaḥō-h, iḏbaḥō-h (44) ‘The ones they killed, they killed, the ones they slaughtered, they slaughtered’23 3.1.9 Reflexive pronouns In all Bahraini dialects, the main reflexive pronoun is rūḥ- (‘self’), used for both singular and plural reference, and in idiomatic expressions for ‘separately’, e.g. mā yubġa yilaˁwiz rūḥ-ah bi samād (12) ‘He doesn’t want to dirty himself with manure’ nxišš rūḥ-na min rāˁi l-kandar (Manāma 7) ‘We would hide ourselves from the water-seller’ ḥamal rūḥ-ah u ṭalaˁ (5) ‘He took himself off and left’ baġēt akawwin rūḥ-i (Manāma 2) ‘I wanted to make something of myself’ 23  The verbs gital and ḏabaḥ mean the same. The repetition here is to indicate the extensiveness of the action = ‘a lot of people were killed’.

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yisawwi rūḥ-əh mistanzil (48) ‘He pretended to be possessed’ (lit ‘he made himself . . .’) b-rūḥ-hum yištarūn (14) ‘They do their own buying’ fīhā māy baˁad b-rūḥ-ha? (5) Does it (= piece of land) also have its own water supply?’ mā yisawwūn ḥagg il-madāris b-rūḥ-ha libs (48) ‘They didn’t make a (special) uniform just for school’ ˁumr, in addition to its normal meaning of ‘age, life-span’ was also recorded in the sense of ‘self’ in both A and B dialects: xaḏēna l-mihaffa u gaˁadna nhiff ˁumur-na (45) ‘We would take our hand-fans and continuously fan ourselves’ yišīl ˁumr-ah fōg! (Manāma 6) ‘It (= shark) reared up!’ šilt ˁumr-i minnāk u ǧīt ihni (1) ‘I took myself off from there and came (to work) here’ nafs also occurs, mainly in the B dialects: mā-na ḥāsib nafs-i (19) ‘I’m not counting myself’ awaxxir ˁala nafis-na, azayyid-hum (4) ‘I stint on ourselves, and give them more’ Sporadic occurrences were recorded of ḥāl used as a quasi-reflexive pronoun, e.g. yimašši ḥāl-ah (Manāma 6) ‘He gets on with his life’

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or as a substitute for another actor other than the self, e.g. yilaˁbūn bi ḥāl-ič liˁib (1) ‘They mess you around’ 3.2 Adverbs Adverbs are classified by function below, but there are a number which have a range of discoursal and modal functions, some of which are difficult to classify, notably: ˁād which can equate to ‘just, so, then, again’ and with the negative, mā ˁād ‘no longer’; xōb ‘then, but, probably’; atarāṯ (BU) and ˁafar/ˁafarāt (BV only) ‘it may be the case that . . .’; gad/ǧid/kid/čid (all dialectal developments of CLA qad), gaṭ (< CLA qaṭ) and čūd (< CLA yikūd), are used in partially overlapping senses to indicate meanings of possibility, epistemic modality, and the ‘experiential’ perfect. See section 5.2.9.1 for detailed exemplification of the use of all these adverbs/particles. 3.2.1 Temporal All dialects (except where variants noted) il-ḥīn/al-ḥīn ‘now’; ḥadd il-ḥīn ‘up to now’; garīb/ˁala garīb ‘soon, in a short while’; sīda ‘immediately’; taw(w)- + pron enclitics ‘just, already’, e.g. tawna naymīn ‘we’d just gone to bed’; ha-l-ḥazza ‘at that time’; ḥazzat ḥāḍir ‘at the present time’; il-yōm ‘today’; bāčir ‘tomorrow’; ˁugub bāčir ‘the day after tomorrow’; il-ǧābla (A) ‘tomorrow night’; il-lābla (A), ‘the night after tomorrow night’; il-bārḥa ‘yesterday’; ams ‘yesterday’; awwal ams ‘the day before yesterday’; il-yōm ṯāni (B il-yōm fāni) ‘the next day’; dōm ‘always’; kill-ǝh (A, BU)/ čill-ǝh (BV) ‘always’; min waqt ‘early, before its due time’; min wahal (A) ‘early’; min mahal (A) ‘late’; mitˀaxxir ‘late’; il-ġubša ‘at daybreak’; (min) iṣ-ṣibḥ ‘in the early morning’; iḏ̣-ḏ̣iḥa/iḍ-ḍəḥēwa (B) ‘in the forenoon’; iḏ̣-ḏ̣uhur ‘at noon’; il-gāyla ‘in the early afternoon’; il-ˁaṣir ‘in the late afternoon’; il-məġarb (A)/ il-muġrub (B) ‘at sunset’; msayyān ‘in the late afternoon/early evening’; bi l-lēl ‘at night’; il-lēla ‘tonight’; lēl u nahār ‘day and night’; l-awwal ‘in the old days’; ayyām zamān ‘in the old days’; dor il-awwal ‘in the old days’; baˁad ‘still, yet, also’; mā ˁād ‘no longer’; (min) gabil ‘beforehand’; (min) ˁugub ‘afterwards’; baˁadēn ‘afterwards’; abd-an ‘totally’, ‘ever’, ‘never’; ḥāl-an/bi l-ḥāl ‘on the spot’; aṣl-an ‘originally’; tāli ‘then, next’; min ǧidda ‘again’; āxir ‘finally’; awqāt ‘sometimes’; sāˁāt and nōbāt ‘occasionally’; rāyiḥ ‘continuously’; yōmiyya ‘every day’; ġēr kil . . . ‘every other . . .’, e.g. ġēr kil sana ‘every other year’; gabil . . . ‘. . . ago’, e.g. gabil yōmēn ‘two days ago’; il. . . . il-ǧāy/yāy ‘next. . . .’; il- . . . il-māḏ̣i ‘last. . . .’.

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B dialects only baˁad-an tāli ‘afterwards’; abad ‘always’; ha-n-nōba ‘this time’; fi nōba, nōba waḥda ‘in one go’; marr-in . . . marr-in . . . ‘sometimes. . . . , other times. . . .’; ġādi ‘continuously, directly’; gaˁadiyya/kuˁdiyya ‘permanently, full-time, without interruption’; kill-əh u lā bidd ‘always and inevitably’; ˁumr- + pron enclitic mā . . . ‘never’. In the B dialects there are many time words to which the -iyya suffix may be added without a change in meaning, e.g. (awwal) amsiyya ‘(the day before) yesterday’, ˁaṣriyya ‘in the late afternoon’, ṣubḥiyya ‘in the early morning’, arbaˁāniyya ‘on a Wednesday’, xamīsiyya ‘on a Thursday’, etc. Other notes lēlat + noun always refers to the ‘night before’ the named day in the same way as ‘eve’ is used in ‘Christmas Eve’, so lēlat il-ǧumˁa ‘Thursday night’, lēlat ṯāmin ‘on the night before the 8th (of the month)’, lēlat il-ˁīd ‘the night before/the eve of the Eid’. As in other Arabic dialects, a suffixed -ha of vague reference on words expressing time has an anaphoric deictic sense of ‘in those . . .’, ‘at that . . .’, e.g. lēlat-ha ‘on that night’; sāˁat-ha ‘at that moment’; yōm-ha ‘on that day’; ayyām-ha ‘in those days’. The phrase lē/lēn/ilēn/ila adda(t) + time of day/season is very frequently used to signal adverbial clauses of time, e.g. lē adda ṣ-ṣibh . . . ‘when morning came . . .’, ilēn addat l-əḍhər ‘at noon . . .’, lēn adda l-išta ‘in winter . . .’. It may also be used without a conjunction, e.g. adda l-məġarb, . . . ‘at sunset . . .’. awān is used with periods of the year, e.g. awān in-nafāḍ ‘at date-picking time’; awān id-darz ‘in spring-time’; awān il-ġōṣ ‘in the pearl-diving season’. 3.2.2 Local ihni ‘here’, ihna (B only), ihnāha (B only) ‘here’; ihnāk ‘there’; minni ‘over here’; minnāk, ‘over there’; minnāha (B only) ‘over there’; minni u minni ‘here and there, all over the place’; taḥt ‘underneath; below’; ḥadir ‘beneath, below’; fōg ‘above, on top’; ḥadir fōg ‘upside down’; dāyir madār ‘surrounding, around’; ḥiḏa ḥiḏa ‘side-by-side’; barra ‘outside’; dāxil ‘inside’; sīda ‘straight ahead, directly’; ha-ṣ-ṣōb ‘over here’; ḏāk iṣ-ṣōb ‘over there, that way’. 3.2.3 Manner All dialects: ham ‘also’; bass ‘only’; čiḏi (B čidi) ‘thus’; ha-š-sakil, ha-n-namūna, ha-l-lōn ‘like this’; wāǧid/wāyid ‘much, very’; zēn ‘well’; šēn ‘badly’; zāyid and zōd ‘again, (even) more’; šway ‘slightly, a little’; šway šway ‘slowly, gradually’; killiš ‘completely’; čabka ‘all together, all in one go’; iǧi/iyi ‘approximately’; ˁadil ‘correctly, properly’; mūl/mūliyya and marra, bi l-marra (all with neg) ‘completely,

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at all’; marra ‘immediately, on the spot’ e.g. tiḥmil marra! ‘she conceived there and then!’; zitāt ‘quickly’; ḥāmi ‘quickly, urgently’; falla ‘well, excellently’; zēn u mā zēn ‘willy-nilly, come what may’; bi ṭ-ṭīb lō bi l-ġaṣub ‘by hook or by crook’; ˁala ṭūl ‘continually, uninterruptedly’; marra waḥda ‘suddenly, just like that, all in one go’; b-rūḥ- + pronoun enclitic ‘by . . . self’, independently’; ˁasā- + enclitic pronoun ‘hopefully’; fi/ˁala ġafla ‘suddenly, without warning’; fāǧa ‘suddenly, unexpectedly’; miṯil (B mifil, miflāt) ‘for example’; xuṣūṣ and xāṣṣa ‘especially, particularly’;ˁala s-sawa ‘equally’; ˁala rās ‘in succession, in addition’; ˁala rās-+ pron ‘for . . . self’ e.g. yikidd ˁala rās-ah ‘he is earning just for himself (i.e. with no dependants)’. B dialects only: čidi-ha, ha-l-čidi ‘like this’; ḥirwa, miḥāri, ‘approximately’; dīdīh ‘quickly, directly’; bōš ‘in vain’; akallat-an (sic) ‘at least’; bi l-ˁamd-an (sic) ‘deliberately’. Many adverbial phrases are formed, as in other dialects, with bi, e.g. bi l-ġalaṭ ‘wrongly, mistakenly’; bi l-xašš ‘surreptitiously’; bi l-ˁadāl ‘slowly, sedately’; bi l-karwa ‘for payment’. Some verbal nouns are also frequently used adverbially, e.g. maši ‘on foot’; xōf ‘out of fear’; wakād ‘for certain’; and certain types of adjective also, e.g. sammūt ‘tightly’; waggāfi ‘in a standing position’; gaˁˁādi ‘in a sitting position’; rawwāsi ‘head-first’. In all dialects, mā may be inserted between the repetition of a word to indicate ‘and such like things’, e.g. fār mā fār ‘rats and things like that’; xast mā xast ‘lettuce and that’. It may even be used with verbs, e.g. mā fīh tixūššīn mā tixuššīn, lā! ‘There was no putting aside (food for another day) or anything like that, no!’ A related usage, in which m- is substituted for the first letter of the repeated noun, is also common, e.g. xalāgīn malāgīn ‘rags and such like’, kačra mačra ‘rubbish and such like’.24 The word bani (‘sons of’) can be used in the same way, e.g. samād u bani samād ‘manure and such like’, ˁēš u bani ˁēš ‘rice and that kind of thing’.

24  Apparently this is a Gulf-wide usage, cf. the Kuwaiti šātir mātir, a command given by the captain of a dhow to the crew to ‘tack’ into a head wind (TAG Vol II: 449). As far as I know, this construction does not occur in any other Arabic dialects outside those of the Gulf. However, there is an intriguing parallel to it in Turkish, which works in exactly the same way, e.g. dergi ‘journals’, dergi mergi ‘journals and such like’; sonu yok ‘it has no end’, sonu monu yok ‘it has no end or anything like it’ (for more examples see LEW 237–238). It may be pure coincidence, as direct influence from Turkey did not occur, and what Turkish influences on Gulf Arabic as exist were lexical and mediated either via Persian or Arabic dialects heavily influenced by Turkish, such as those of Iraq. However, as far as I know, the echoic construction with m- is not attested in the literature on Persian or the Arabic dialects of Iraq.

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3.3 Particles 3.3.1 The definite article The article is (i)l-, and the /l/ is assimilated by the sun-letters as in CLA. In a few common phrases it is al-, e.g. al-ḥīn ‘now’. When prefixed to nouns whose first syllable is an open, unstressed /i/ or /u/, especially if the following vowel is long, it normally becomes l-, and a prosthetic schwa is inserted, e.g. l-əktāb. 3.3.2 The indefinite article wāḥid ‘one’ has some of the functions of an indefinite article. It may follow or precede the noun, e.g. ˁində-na wāḥid ˁabd yigāl lih . . . (44) ‘We once had a black man here called . . .’ wafā-ni yōm wāḥid fi sitra (14) ‘He came up to me one day in Sitra’ šay/šī is used for an unspecified amount, e.g. baˁadēn ḥaṣal fīh šay taṭawwur (Manama 2) ‘Later on there was some development’ šī aṣīd-ah, šī yiṭīr (14) ‘Some (birds) I catch, some fly away’. šay yixurrūn, šay mā yixurrūn (45) ‘Some (houses) leaked, some didn’t’ In some formulaic phrases, dialectal tanwīn fulfils the ‘generic’ function of the indefinite article, e.g. bint-in zēna ‘a(n unspecified) nice girl (sc for marriage)’. See 3.7 and 5.1.2 for more details. 3.3.3 Genitive particles Two particles are used, both basically nouns, māl(at) and ḥagg, meaning respectively ‘property’ and ‘right’. As linkers in noun phrases, both have a wide range of senses other than that of genitive.25 Both are used by A and B dialect 25  See DCSEA1 120–121 (for ḥagg), 508–509 (for māl). As a linker between nouns, māl has more than a dozen different senses.

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speakers, though, where the sense is genitive, there seems to be a strong preference among the B speakers for the use of māl over ḥagg. As genitive particles, both are basically used for alienable possession, but occasional examples were recorded in the B dialects of māl being used for inalienable possession, e.g. ir-raǧāyil māl-ah ‘his feet’. Both can be suffixed with pronoun enclitics. Typical examples of usage: hāfāt ḥagg iṣbayān (14) ‘Boys’ underpants’ il-miftāḥ ḥagg is-sayyāra (48) ‘The car-key’ mā hu liyyi, ḥagg-hum (4) ‘It’s not mine, it’s theirs’ samād māl ṭyūr (1) ‘Chicken manure’ il-kisāfa mālt il-ġōṣ (48) ‘The squalor of pearl-diving’ l-iyḥāla mālat-na (Manāma 7) ‘Our water-pots’ For further detail on the syntax and semantics of these genitive particles within the noun phase, see 5.1.6. 3.3.4 Negative particles With indicative verbs in all dialects, mā is normally the negative particle. mā . . . šay (var ši) may be used for emphasis, e.g. mā yiḍirr-hum šay ‘it does them no harm at all’. mā is also used to negate prepositions expressing possession (ˁind, li) and ‘dummy’ verbs expressing existence: mā fīh/bih, mā miš, mā hast, mā šay, mā min (all dialects) and (B dialects) māku ‘there isn’t any . . .’, e.g. mā b-hum šay (5) ‘There was nothing wrong with them’ čāh mā miš (Manāma 7) ‘Tea didn’t exist’

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dīra mā šay (48) ‘There was no (built-up) town’ mā min šarika, wi lā min šay (20) ‘There was no (oil)-company, or anything’ māku hādi l-garāṭīs, aṣl-an mā miš (Manāma 2) ‘These bank-notes didn’t exist, originally there weren’t any’ maḥḥad or mā. . . . aḥad is ‘no one’, e.g. maḥḥad lih ši bəġiya, bəġiyat allah (19) ‘It was not the desire of any person, it was what God desired’ mā aḥad yixṭub aḥad (33) ‘No one betrothed anyone’ mā yābat ˁugb-i aḥad (48) ‘She had no more (children) after me’ With other parts of speech: The B dialects have mā hu, mu, or muhu (m), mā hi, mi, or mihi (f), mā hum, or muhum/mihim (pl). The gender distinction in the sng seems to be no longer operative in the BU dialects, mu having been generalised to both genders; only in the BV dialects was this distinction still observed. Examples: mā hu ani, mā hu inta tirzik-na (5) ‘It’s not me, and it’s not you, that sustains us’ il-awwal mu miflāt al-ḥīn (28) ‘The old days weren’t like now’ mu inta, wāḥid ġēr-ak (5) ‘Not you, somebody else’ tisˁa rubbiya mā hi ši il-yōm (19) ‘Nine rupees is nothing these days’ lā, hādīk mihi ḍamān (1) ‘No, that (land) is not lease-hold’

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il-bībān wi d-darāyiš rakkabō-hum mi zēna26 (25) ‘They put the doors and windows in askew’ ḥakka al-ˁaǧāyiz, muhum rāḍīn (7) ‘Even the old women won’t agree (to take me on as a husband)’ banāt-i mihim fī īd-i ani (28) ‘I have no say with my daughters (= on whether they go to school)’ mu is used to deny a general proposition, including negative ones, e.g. kinna fī madrasa, mu mā kinna fī madrasa (Manāma 5) ‘We went to school, it wasn’t that we didn’t go to school’ The A dialects: two differences between the A and B dialects are that the A negative particle in all its variants normally incorporates a /b/ element— mub, muhub, hub, humb—and, although there are also feminine forms mahīb, hīb attested, the masculine forms mub, muhub are in widespread use with both genders. Examples: bint il-madrasa mub šay (Manāma 6) ‘Girls who went to school were (considered) worth nothing’ hāḏāk muhub min ḏī l-bēt (Manāma 7) ‘That part doesn’t belong to this house’ il-xaṭaˀ hub min hāḏi (44) ‘The fault was not this man’s’ mā tčūf-ha, killiš mā tčūf-ha, mā tibayyin—humb al-ḥīn (Manāma 6) ‘You didn’t see her, you never saw her, she never appeared—not like now’ l-ǝflūs mahīb liˁba (radio play) ‘Money is not a game’

26  Note the mixed agreement of hum (pl) and mi zēna (fsng). See 5.3.3.

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mub/muhub is used to deny a proposition, e.g. ˁa-bāl-i b-itbardīn galb-i, muhub tigūlīn lī rayyāl yiˁāwin murt-ih! (radio play) ‘I thought you’d reassure me, and not tell me that a man should help his wife!’ In the BV dialects only, in nominal sentences, mā + independent pronoun is an alternative construction to that with mu etc., e.g. ma-ni kārya (3) ‘I can’t read’ ma-nta baḥrēni-yə? (12) ‘Aren’t you a Bahraini?’ ma-ḥna kufu ništiri ˁala xams imya (6) ‘We can’t afford to buy at (a price of) five-hundred’ The other negative particle used in all dialects is lā. This is used for neg imperatives and optatives, e.g. lā tišrab māy sāˁa waḥda čidi (6) ‘Don’t (m) drink water for an hour or so!’ lā tinsēn tibandīn il-lētāt (48) ‘Don’t (f) forget to turn off the lights’ lā yiṭra l-mōt ˁala bāl-ik! (dialect poem) ‘Don’t let the thought of death cross your mind!’ lā aḥad yitḥačča! (33) ‘Let no one speak!’ and for all co-ordinated negs, e.g. mā min ǧabal wi lā min šay (20) ‘There was no oil-company,27 nor anything else’ 27  The Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO) was referred to as il-ǧabal/il-yibal ‘the mountain’ because of its proximity to Jabal Dukhān.

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mā miš ašya wi lā miš kabar wi lā miš tannūr willa lā miš čaff saˁaf (33) ‘There were no (decent) things, no stone-walled houses, no ovens, nor even a handful of palm-fronds’. l-awwal mā miš amrāḏ ̣  ha-l-kiṯir. . . . wi lāku maraḏ ̣  il-kila, wi lāku iltihāb (Manāma 7) ‘In the old days, there’s weren’t that many illnesses . . . or any kidney disease or arthritis’ (wi) lā is used for categorical negation, e.g. wi lā xalaka ˁalēha (5) ‘She hadn’t got a stitch of clothing on her’ yazīd wi lā lih ḏičir wi lā lih asam (48) ‘Yazid isn’t remembered or mentioned at all’ It is often used in an emphatic sense, equivalent to ‘whatsoever’: ahl-i mā gālō li wi lā šay (Manāma 9) ‘My family told me nothing whatsoever’ lā and ˁan lā are used in subordinate clauses in the sense of ‘lest’, e.g. iltifti lih lā yirčab ˁan lā yiṭīḥ (41) ‘Be careful (f) that he doesn’t get on (the bicycle) lest he falls off’ . . . nawāṭīr ˁan lā yibūg aḥad l-əgmāš (48) ‘. . . (they employed) watchmen so that no-one could steal the pearls’ Both lā and mā are used, seemingly interchangeably, as the negative elements in phrases equivalent to ‘no sooner . . . than’, ‘as soon as . . .’, or sudden events = ‘the next thing you knew . . .’, e.g. wi lā simiˁt illa l-čalb ˁind-ah wakˁa (41) ‘Suddenly I heard the dog barking’ (lit ‘I didn’t hear except . . .’) mā tuˁa illa iṯnaˁšar, ṯalāṯtaˁšar, ha-l-lōn yiṣīr (48) ‘The next thing you knew (you were) twelve, thirteen (fathoms down), that’s how it was’ (lit ‘You weren’t aware except . . .’)

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One community-specific use of lā is that it is used by B dialect speakers, especially in the villages, as an attention-checking device similar to modern spoken British English ‘innit’, or, with imperatives, as an encouragement, e.g. nḥuṭṭ fīh šakkar, lā? u čay, lā? nišrab u nākl-ah wiyya xubz, lā? iyya kamāč . . . (16) ‘We put sugar in, right? And tea, right? And we’d drink, and eat it with bread, right? With toasted flat bread . . .’ lā intīn kāṣṣa lisān-iš, lā?! (5) ‘Won’t you keep your mouth shut, eh?!’ iklu, lā? (6) ‘Eat (pl), why don’t you?! 3.3.5 Question particles The B dialects also attach a clitic suffix -ə to any word to create a yes-no question about that word,28 e.g. awlād-iš mšattatīn-ə? (Manāma 5) ‘Have your children been split up?’ (sc between different fathers, after a divorce) If the word ends in a vowel or a glide, the clitic becomes -yə or -hə, e.g. intīn bitt-i flāna-hə? (5) ‘Are you my daughter so-and-so?’ lā taḥrig-kum ir-ramḍa-yə? (11) ‘. . . so that the hot ground wouldn’t burn you?’ “wēš asawwi?”- yə? (34) ‘ “What am I doing?” ’ (= is that what you’re asking me?)

28  REIN 34 noted the same question-forming clitic for the sedentary dialect of the Omani Zanzibari tribe the Banī Kharūṣ which he described in 1894. I found it still in common use in Omani sedentary dialects in the mid-1980s, e.g. bassək-ə? ‘Have you had enough?’; fīh ˁūq šay-hə? ‘Do you have any pain?’

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As noted immediately above, the B dialects attach the negative particle lā with a rising intonation to the end of sentences as an attention-maintaining device, e.g. nḥuṭṭ fīh šakkar, lā? (16) ‘We put sugar in it, right?’29 The tag mu čiḏi/čidi ‘isn’t that so?’ is used in all Bahraini dialects for a similar purpose, e.g. sāfar il-ˁām mu čiḏi? (5) ‘He travelled abroad last year, didn’t he?’ šay/ši may also be used as a question particle in the B dialects,30 e.g. fī wēn zaraˁtūn? xawāfīr šay? (5) ‘Where have you planted (them)? In seed-beds?’ il-čīs māl-ah wēš rang-ah? xēš šay, lō naylōn? (5) ‘What kind of the bag was it in? Sacking material, or plastic?’ 3.3.6 Existential particles There are several particles in common use: fīh (and its variants), hast, miš, aku, and šay: fīh (= fī ‘in’ + h ‘it’) may be used as a invariable existential as it is in many other Arabic dialects; but in the speech of Bahrainis less exposed to outside influences it is often used with other 3rd person pronouns in an existential sense, e.g. mā fīha šay (5) ‘It’s no trouble at all (to do that)’ mā fīh illa bāčir aṭbax nafs iṭ-ṭabxa (radio play) ‘There is nothing for it but for me to cook the same dish tomorrow’ 29  This usage is also very common in the Omani sedentary dialects, e.g. yaˁml-uh bi rigl-uh, yikanz-uh lā? ‘He does it with his foot, he compresses it, right?’ 30  Again, as with the clitic -ə, and postposed lā, the Omani sedentary dialects also use šay as a question particle in the same way as the B dialects, e.g. ilamma tšīlī ḥāga maṯalan, igi l-wagaˁ akṯar šay? ‘When you lift something for example, does the pain get worse, at all?’; wagaˁ šay fī īdē-š? ‘Is there any pain in your hands, at all?’

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fīhum nās yigūlūn . . . (Manāma 7) ‘There are some people who say . . .’ fīhum yindallūn min kufur yirūh u iǧi (Manāma 1) ‘There are some people who know the way from going and coming back so often’ mā fīhum wāḥid ṭaggat ḥasāt-ah (Manāma 7) ‘There was not one among them whose stone hit (the sea-bed)’ hast is a Persian borrowing (‘is, exists, remains’)31 which is commonly used by all uneducated Bahrainis in the sense ‘there is’, ‘there exists’ and allied senses. It is negated by mā. Examples: li sabˁat l-ayyām hast ṭagg, hast ˁaraḏ̣āt, hast ḥafalāt (51) ‘For the seven days (of the wedding) there would be drumming, war dances, celebrations’ šift afar makīna hast (3) ‘I saw that there were (tyre) tracks of a tractor’ lō kān hast əmsāˁid . . . (1) ‘If there were someone to help . . .’ sanat il-wakˁa mālat ˁĀli, ana hast, lākin wald sanatēn (3) ‘At the time of the battle of ˁĀlī, I was alive, but only two years old’ The phrase illi hast u illi mā hast means ‘whatever there was’ (lit ‘what there was and what there wasn’t). miš ‘there is/are’ is interesting, as it appears to involve the uniquely BV removal of the negative mā from mā miš < mā min šay ‘there is nothing’, common in the rest of the Gulf.32 This ‘positive’ use of miš was not attested for the A dialect, only the negative mā miš. Examples: 31  The same borrowing occurs in various forms in other Gulf dialects with related meanings: as hassit ‘there is’ in parts of southern Iraq (ING2 35); as hast ‘there is’, ‘in existence’ on the island of Failaka off the coast of Kuwait (HAN 398) and in the UAE (HANZ 713); and in Oman Brockett (BRO 211) interprets it as an adverb with the meaning ‘very’, e.g. hest ḥilu ‘very sweet’ and ‘many, a lot’, e.g. ġalāṭāt hest ‘many mistakes’. 32  EADS 17 gives only the negative mā mīš for Bahrain and Qatar, but not mīš in a positive sense; ING2 34 gives only māmiš for some areas of southern Iraq; HANZ 618 for the UAE

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fwār al-ḥīn mā miš . . . miš ġanam (19) ‘There aren’t any bulls now . . . there are goats’ mā adri ˁād miš, bašūf . . . lēn miš u baġēt aǧīb, aǧīb lik (5) ‘I don’t know if there are any still left, I’ll have a look . . . if there are some, and you want me to, I’ll bring you some.’ mā miš ḍaww! miš ḍaww! (34) –‘There’s no fire!’ –‘There is fire!’ The following example involves an interesting alternative method of negating miš, in which it seems to be operating independently of mā: mā kān il-awwal miš maḥw il-ummiyya (11) ‘In the old days there wasn’t any illiteracy eradication (programme)’ mā miš can negate whole clauses, as well as individual nouns: al-ḥīn mā miš yiṭalligūn niswān-hum (Manāma 6) ‘These days there’s no (quick) divorcing of wives’ aku and its negative māku/lāku are often thought of as stereotypically Kuwaiti and southern Iraqi, but they are also used natively in Bahrain, if not as frequently as fīh, hast and miš. A couple of examples were recorded from A dialect speakers, but the great majority were produced by B dialect speakers, urban and rural, e.g. aku hast mustašfa, lākin mā yaˁtaqid bi l-mustašfa (Manāma 1) ‘There was indeed a hospital, but he didn’t believe in (using) it.’ ḏīč is-sāˁa māku čidi ǧisir mā ǧisir (Manāma 3) ‘At that time there was no causeway or anything like that’

similarly gives only the negative form; for Oman, REIN 111 and 230 (example) also only gives mā mīš.

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l-awwal mā miš amrāḏ ̣  ha-l-kiṯir. . . . wi lāku maraḏ ̣  il-kila, wi lāku iltihāb (Manāma 7) ‘In the old days, there’s weren’t that many illnesses . . . or any kidney disease or any arthritis’ māku fayda, mā ṣārat anāsa (34) ‘It’s no good, it hasn’t been any fun’ šay was occasionally used as a negative existential with mā or lā, e.g. dīra mā šay (48) ‘There was no (built-up) town’ lā šay irgād! (Manāma 6) ‘There was no (time for) sleeping’ but examples of šay as a positive existential were difficult to distinguish from the distributive use of šay. . . . šay ‘some . . . others’, e.g. šay yixurrūn, šay mā yixurrūn (45)33 ‘Some (houses) leaked, some didn’t’ 3.3.7 Prepositions li ‘to, for’; bi (or əb) ‘with, by means of’; fi (or əf ) ‘in, on’; ḥagg ‘to, for’; māl ‘for, belonging to, appertaining to’; ila ‘to, towards’;ˁala ‘on, against’; min and (some B) əmmin ‘from’; wiyya and (B) iyya ‘with’; maˁa ‘with’; ˁan ‘away from, instead of’; fōg ‘on top of, above’; taḥt ‘under, near, next to, compared with’; ḥadir ‘under, below’; ṣōb ‘towards’; ḥadd ‘as far as, up until’; wara ‘behind’; ǧiddām/ giddām ‘in front of’; igbāl (BV only) ‘in front of’; mǧābil/mgābil ‘opposite’; bēn and bēnāt ‘between’; ( fi) wusṭ/wasṭ ‘inside, in the middle of’; gabil ‘before’; baˁad, ˁugub, and xalf (B only), ‘after’; bilā and bilayyā ‘without’; ˁind ‘at, with, according to’; māl(at) ‘of, relating to’; ǧanb and yamm ‘beside’; ḥiḏa ‘beside’; ḥawāl ‘next to’; ḥawālī ‘around’; dūn ‘in contrast with, different from, without’; gufa ‘dependent upon, incumbent on’; dāyir madār ‘around, surrounding’; 33  See 1.3.1.2 feature (5). Similar constructions occur in south Yemen and northern Omani Arabic, e.g. (sedentary Omani dialect) šay yūšib u šay taw ṯāmir ‘some (buds) are fattening out, some are just fruiting’; and (bedouin dialect) šay fīha nagˁatēn u šay fīha nagˁa waḥda ‘some (guns) would fire two shots, some only one’.

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miṯil/miṯlāt (B mifil, miflāt), and šikil/šiklāt ‘like’; ṭaggat ‘like’; min bidd/biddat ‘rather than, in preference to’; ˁalašān ‘for the sake of’; min ǧihat . . . ‘because of’, for the sake of’, bi wāsaṭ/wāsṭat . . . ‘because of . . .’ 3.3.8 Conjunctions wi/u ‘and’; willa, aw, and lō (B only) ‘or’; umma . . . aw, and aw . . . aw, ‘either . . . or’; lākin (BV balākin, falākin) ‘but’; bass ‘only, but’; innamā ‘only, except that’; in(n)/ an(n) ‘that’; inn(a) particle introducing a subject-initial clause; činn-/kann-/ kinn- ‘as if, it looks like, it seems to be the case that’; amma, umma, amman34 topicalising particles = ‘as for . . .’; yōm, min, lamma, lamman, ila min, ilēn mā, ilēn immā, waqt(in) mā ‘(at the time) when’; awwal(in) mā ‘when first . . .’; (i)lēn, ilamma ‘whenever; until’; liǧil (in), liˀann, and (BV dialects) čēfan, (B dialects) sibab and asbāb, (A dialects) š-minnah ‘because’; ḥatta, ḥatta in, ḥagg/(BV dialects) ḥakk ‘so that’; ˁalašān ‘so that’; (ˁan) lā ‘lest’; gabil lā, gabil mā ‘before’; baˁad(in) mā, xalf (in) mā, ˁugub(in) mā ‘after’; miṯil(in) mā, miṯlāt(in) mā, šikil mā ‘like’; wēn mā ‘wherever’; kil mā, kil min ‘the more . . . the more; whenever’, mā dām/im dām ‘as long as’, illa ‘otherwise, if not’, mā/lā . . . illa ‘as soon as, no sooner than . . .’; conditional conjunctions: in, iḏa, ila, (i)lēn, ilan, ilān, ila ˁēn, lō, yō, (in) čān. Examples of the use of these conjunctions may be found in the sections on the syntax of temporal, conditional and other clauses types (sections 5.6–11). 3.3.9 Vocative particles yā is used when addressing people by name, or with a descriptive adjective/ phrase, e.g. (humorously) yā ˁali, yā badr il-budūr! ‘Hey, ‘Ali, you who is as beautiful as the full moon!’ yā xanfā (B) ‘you bastard!’ (lit ‘catamite’). It is also used for exclamations of happiness, sorrow, etc. e.g. yā lēla dāna! ‘O pearl-like night!’ There is a complex system of so-called ‘bi-polar’ address forms, e.g. yābū-k, yāxū-k, yāxt-ič, yumma-k, yā nasīb-ik etc. as well as (yā) yubba, (yā) yumma. See 6.1.3. 3.3.10 Exclamations Particles of affirmation and denial are: ē! ē naˁam! ˁaǧal/ˁayal! ‘Yes’ lā! ‘No’ 34  Possibly < amma an.

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When agreeing with a negative proposition, or denying the negative assumption in a question, bala/mbala may be used, e.g. mā yiṣarrif al-ḥīn iz-zarˁ bala! (14) ‘Farming doesn’t pay these days’ ‘Too true!’ mā tāˁruf čam ˁumr-ik? mbala, ana aˁruf (7) ‘Don’t you know how old you are?’ ‘Yes I do know’ When emphatically denying a negative assumption,35 illa (= ‘on the contrary’) can be used as an alternative to bala/mbala, e.g. mā trūḥīn l-ənxīl willa šay? illa aġdi! hāda-na akūl liš lā?! (28) ‘Didn’t you use to go to the palm-gardens or anything?’ ‘Indeed I did! I’ve just told you so, haven’t I?’ hāy kill-ah ḥašīš baˁad, lō yaḥtāǧ ṣaxxīn? lā, illa yaḥtāǧ (19) ‘Is the rest of this all weeds too, or does it need (to be dug over with) a spade?’ ‘No (sc ‘it isn’t just all weeds’), it does need a spade.’ Occasionally the particle mā is used in an emphatic fashion, e.g. ē, yā ˁēn-i, mā tirḏ̣a ˁalēha! ana ādri inn-ak ˁaduw-i! (radio play) ‘Yes, my dear, you certainly would be happy with her (doing that), wouldn’t you? I know you are my enemy!’36

35  ING 125 gives the sense carried by the same particle in similar examples in Najdi as deontic modality—‘it is obligatory’. In my Bahraini examples, however, this use of illa always implied the negation of a false assumption on the part of an interlocutor. 36  This usage in also common in Palestinian Arabic, and is recorded for Baghdad (BLA 117).

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Other exclamations: yallah! ‘come on!’; yā rēt! ‘would that . . . !’; bass! ‘stop! that’s enough!’; ˁaǧal/ˁayal ‘well . . .’; nzēn ‘OK, alright . . .’; xōb (B dialects)  . . . ‘very well, . . .’; hā . . . ‘well, . . .’; ila bi . . . ‘lo and behold!’ (see 3.1.5); ˁād, which has many uses, e.g. mild reproach, e.g. ismaˁ ˁād! = ‘just listen, will you!’, cajoling, e.g. rūḥi š-ˁād! ‘go, why don’t you?’; ya! = ‘What?!’ for incredulity, often coupled with the dismissal of a proposition; yū! used by women only, to express fear or anxiety; ax! used to express pain; wēl! to express woe, sorrow; bēl or bwēl! to express surprise; čabb! = ‘shut up!’ afa! used to express disgust; š- (A) and wēš (B) + noun are used to express admiration/surprise, e.g. š-ḥalāwat-ha! ‘how pretty she is!’ Also amma, e.g. amma xōš! ‘how nice!’ and yā . . . e.g. yā zīn ha-š-šaˁar! ‘how beautiful your hair is!’, yā min ˁind-ah migaṣṣ al-ḥīn! ‘o for someone with a pair of scissors right now!’ 3.4 Nouns 3.4.1 Gender Nouns may be feminine by form or by usage. Feminine by form: nouns ending in -a which is a reflex of the feminine (tāˀ marbūṭa) ending of OA, and may refer to female beings, inanimate objects or abstractions, e.g. ˁaččāfa ‘woman who plaits bride’s hair’, ǧaḥla/yḥala ‘large water pot’, rōḥa ‘act of going, departing’. Some in this category may be foreign borrowings, e.g. xāšūga ‘spoon’. Formally feminine also are certain plural classes which often refer to male beings (see 3.4.4.2 below). As in CLA and many other dialects, the following are feminine by convention: parts of the body that occur in pairs, e.g. yad(A)/īd (B) ‘hand’, rīl (A)/ riǧl (B) ‘foot, leg’, rikba ‘knee’, dēs ‘breast’; nouns necessarily denoting female beings, e.g. umm ‘mother’, ˁarūs ‘bride’; most names of countries; a few common nouns, e.g. šams ‘sun’, arḍ/arḏ ̣  ‘earth, land’, nār ‘fire’, rūḥ and nafs ‘soul, spirit, self’, siččīn ‘knife’, dār ‘(mud-brick) house, ground-floor room’, ˁēn ‘well, spring’, ˁaṣa ‘stick’ and words which are reflexes of words ending in -āˀ in CLA (regardless of whether they are feminine in CLA), e.g. kahraba ‘electricity’. A few foreign borrowings are also conventionally feminine, e.g. ǧām (Pers) ‘piece of glass, window pane’, and some nouns are unpredictably treated as feminine by some speakers, e.g. dayyīn ‘pearl-diver’s clam basket’, ṯōb/fōb37 ‘dress, (long) shirt’. 37  ṯōb/fōb is treated by most B speakers as f, especially in reference to a woman’s dress.

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Some nouns may be of either gender, e.g. yāhil/ǧāhil 38 ‘child’, mā/mi/māy ‘water’ (but māya ‘tide’ is always f). ˁālam ‘people, crowd of people’ is most often fsng in its agreement patterns, but not always, some speakers choosing mpl agreement. Similarly, nās ‘people’ and several other human collective nouns (e.g. rayāyīl ‘men’) may attract fsng or mpl agreement, but here the determining factor is partly whether the noun is used generically, in which case agreement is fsng, or specifically, in which case it is treated as mpl,39 e.g. note the following exchange which illustrates this point: bass nās muˁayyanīn ˁind-hum rawādu? wallah, kānat nās wāǧid ˁind-ha rawādu (Manāma 1) ‘Did only certain people have radios?’ ‘By God, lots of people had them’ The question of gender and number agreement is complex, and is discussed in detail in 5.3. 3.4.2 Productive noun patterns The main patterns of the singular noun are exemplified below. Adjectival patterns are dealt with in 3.5. Participial forms and verbal nouns which have not developed specialised meanings are covered in 4.6–4.7 and quadriliteral noun forms derived by regular rule are dealt with in 4.7.3. Some foreign borrowings have been assimilated into the nominal patterns, and a few examples are included in the sample list (marked (F)) below; other foreign patterns, of which there are no indigenous examples, are exemplified separately in 3.4.3. Needless to say, most monolingual users are unaware that the examples marked F are not of Arab origin. As already noted, unstressed non-final /i/ and /u/ when in open syllable are usually deleted in connected speech, but words in which this occurs are given in their full form here, e.g. simāṭ, turāb, ǧifīr (rather than smāṭ, trāb, etc.). Words in which final clusters are routinely resolved in BA dialects when compared to the equivalent form in OA are listed in their dialectal form, thus baḥar 38  The f form yāhla/ǧāhla also exists in some speakers’ idiolects. 39  The same tendency has been noted in many other Arabic dialects, including Cairene and Damascene. However, this is only a tendency, and there are plenty of counter-examples. In Bahrain, it is my impression that pl agreement with nouns like nās is becoming the norm in all contexts among the more educated, and that the f agreement for generic usage is becoming a feature of the speech of those less exposed to MSA influence, and typical of traditional forms of diction like dialect poetry.

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(all ­dialects) = CaCaC not CaCC, ḥabil (A dialects) = CaCiC, not CaCC, ḏ̣uhur/ ḍuhur ‘noon’ = CuCuC not CuCC. Similarly, actual dialectal rather than etymological OA forms are given in cases where vowels are normally coloured by the consonantal environment, so, for example where OA CaCaC forms are actually realised as CuCaC because of the effect of a labial consonant in C1 or C2 position, they are noted as such. CaCC  ḥalǧ ‘mouth’; farx ‘shoot, sprig’; ġēṣ ‘diver’; ˁarṣ ‘fooling around, joking’; rang (F) ‘colour’ CaCaC  baḥar ‘sea’; ġanam ‘small cattle’ (= goats, sheep); balam (F) ‘type of small boat’ CaCiC  ḥabil (B ḥabl) ‘rope’; ramil (B raml) ‘sand’; xašim ‘nose’ CaCCi  darzi (F) ‘tailor’ CiCC  bilḥ ‘fresh dates’, ˁirš ‘palm-branch huts’; sils ‘sea-eel’; xišf ‘fired clay pots’; bišt (F) ‘man’s cloak’ CiCiC  ǧidir (B gidir, BV kidir) ‘cooking pot’; ˁiḏir ‘excuse, apology’; ḥizin ‘sorrow’; sibiˁ ‘lion’; ġizir ‘depth (of sea)’; kičin (F) ‘(works) canteen’ CuCC  ṣubḥ ‘morning’; sūr ‘wall’; ṣull ‘shark-oil’; xūṣ ‘palm fronds’; kūb (F) ‘cup’ CuCaC  gufaṣ ‘cage’; fugaš ‘type of small nut’; buṣal ‘onions’; muṭar ‘rain’; gumar ‘moon’ CuCu/iC  ḏ̣uhur ‘noon’; gufil ‘padlock’ CuCCa  ṣubˁa ‘finger’; luxma ‘sting-ray’; ṣurra ‘bundle, bunch’; nūra ‘quicklime’; čūla (F) ‘primus stove’ CaCCa  šagḥa ‘jump’; ġalṭa ‘error’; farša ‘bridal chamber’; ḥazza ‘time, occasion’ CCaCa  bġala ‘clay pot’; ghawa ‘coffee’; nxala ‘palm-tree’ (A forms; B = baġla, gahwa, naxla) CCi/uCa  ḥṭiba ‘piece of wood’; rguba ‘neck’; xšiba ‘(wooden) ship’; ġnima ‘goat’ CiCCa  xišna ‘rough, untilled soil’; milča ‘marriage contract’; sikka ‘street’; ḏ̣īfa ‘hospitality’ CiCaC  risan ‘halter’; fišal ‘failure’; simač ‘fish’ CāCiC  yāhil/ǧāhil ‘child’; bāyig ‘thief’; ṭāriš ‘messenger’ CāCiCa  čāwiya (F) ‘16-inch nail used in ship-building’ CāCCa  sālfa ‘matter, business’; kābla (BV) ‘midwife’; lāzga ‘sticking plaster’ CaCāC  fanār ‘kerosene lamp’; ṣarām ‘harvested fruit’; ġarās ‘planting, planted crop’; ḏ̣amān ‘(farming) contract’ CaCāCa  barāḥa ‘open sandy space between houses’; ġamāma ‘cloudiness, blurriness’; ḥarāra ‘heat-rash’

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CiCāC  simāṭ ‘eating mat’; ḥirām ‘dividing curtain’; ḥizā ‘story, tale’ CiCāCa  sināya ‘seedling’; kišāḥa ‘state of being cursed with bad luck’; ziyāra ‘visit’ (to Shīˁī shrines) CuCāC  turāb ‘soil’; ḏ̣ubāb ‘fog’; ḏubāb ‘flies’; zukām ‘head-cold’ CaCīC  ˁaṣīd ‘savoury porridge’; xabīṣ ‘sweet porridge’; ˁarīs ‘bride­ groom’; gaṣīr ‘next-door neighbour’; ḥawīl ‘dates stored for beyond a year’; hafīz (F) ‘office’ CiCīC  ǧifīr ‘basket’; firīǧ ‘quarter, neighbourhood’; sifīf ‘woven utensils (baskets, etc.)’ Ca/iCīCa  fitīla ‘wick’; sibīča ‘girl’s name’; dalīča ‘poultice’; ˁačīsa ‘hovel’; dirīša (F) ‘window’ CaCūC  ˁayūz/ˁaǧūz ‘elderly person’; xarūf ‘sheep’; madūd ‘dolls made out of domestic refuse’; sabūs (F) ‘chicken feed’ CaCūCa  namūna (F) ‘way, type, method’; gayūla ‘siesta’ CCiCi  ṣfiri ‘autumn’ CiCCi  šiˁri ‘type of fish (similar to sea-bream)’ CaCCaC  čanˁad ‘king-mackerel’; šalġam ‘turnip’, naxxay/naxxaǧ (F) ‘chick-pea’; sangal (F) ‘chain’; čandal/dančal (F) ‘wooden roof beam’; bandar (F) ‘port’ CaCCa/u/iCa  xardala ‘mustard seed; speck’; xarbuṭa ‘nonsense’; zaˁnifa ‘fin’ CiCCiC  ˁišrig ‘type of purgative’ CuCCuC  buxnug ‘girl’s head-dress’; burguˁ ‘woman’s face-mask’ CaCCāC  raǧǧāl/rayyāl ‘man’; sammāč ‘fisherman’; ḥayyāč ‘weaver’; ṣaffār ‘tinker’; ˁakkās ‘photographer’; ṭarrār ‘beggar’; ġawwāṣ ‘pearl-diver’; xannāg ‘diphtheria’ CiCCūC  findūs ‘handful of food’; šimlūl ‘diver’s loin cloth’;40 bindūl (F) ‘area of a ship’s deck’ CCūC  slūm ‘sunset’; frūš ‘type of sea-stone used in building’ CCūCa  ybūsa ‘dry period of the year’; mṭūra ‘period of rainy weather’; ḥrūra ‘hot weather’; rṭūba ‘humidity, humid weather’; sgūba ‘mast, flag-pole’; rǧūla (B only) ‘foot, leg’ CiCCāC  čillāb ‘pin, hook’; ġirbāl ‘sieve; bother, confusion’; xišxāš ‘poppies’; sirkāl (F) ‘piece of agricultural land’; čingāl (F) ‘eating fork’ CaCCīC  dayyīn ‘diver’s basket’; battīl ‘type of large sailing boat’; barbīr ‘purslane’; darbīl/darbīn (F) ‘binoculars’; ṣaxxīn (F) ‘digging spade’ CiCCīC  siččīn ‘knife’; zirrīˁ ‘farmer’; siḥtīt ‘small pearls’ 40  In the UAE šimšūl.

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Ca/iCCāCa  ḥaffāla ‘professional female singer/dancer’; saḥḥāra ‘box; record player’; millāla (B) ‘food storage hoist’; dawwāma ‘children’s spinning top’; maḥḥāra ‘pearl oyster’; dirwāza (F) ‘gate’ Cu/iCCāC  rummān ‘pomegranates (coll)’; hindāl ‘sweet potatoes (coll)’ CuCCāCa  xuzzāma ‘woman’s nose-ring’; rummāna ‘pomegranate; glitter ball used to decorate bridal bed-chamber’ CaCCūC  ṣalbūx ‘shingle’; sarsūf ‘stomach’; yaryūr/ǧarǧūr ‘shark’; zamrūr ‘type of (yellow and black striped) fish’; gargūr ‘bee-hive fishtrap’; dastūr ‘bow-sprit (on a boat)’; sandūs (F) ‘lavatory’; sannūr (F) ‘cat’ CaCCūCa  battūla ‘woman’s face-mask’ CāCāC  sāmān (F) ‘stuff, gear’ CāCūC  hāmūr ‘grouper (fish)’; sārūd ‘tray’; nāṭūr ‘watchman’; xāfūr ‘bed for tomato seedlings’; dāˁūs ‘narrow alley’; ˁāfūr ‘whirlwind’; bānūš (F) ‘canoe’; sātūl (F) ‘queue’ CāCūCa  bālūˁa ‘sewer, cess-pit’; xāšūga (F) ‘spoon’; ṣālūna (F) ‘curry, stew’ CīCāC  sībāl ‘monkey’; nīšān (F) ‘target’; čībāl (F) ‘buoy, float’; ǧīwān (F) ‘large high quality pearl’ CūCāC  ṭūfān ‘typhoon’; dūlāb (F) ‘allotment farm’ CōCa/iC  čōčab ‘undersea fresh-water spring’; lōlab ‘tap’; bōbar ‘pumpkin’; mōtir (F) ‘car’ CēCa/iC  lēsan (F) ‘driving licence’; šēwil (F) ‘shovel’ CāCīCa  fānīla (F) ‘undervest’ CāCCāC  rāsmāl ‘property, possession’ CāCCūC  ǧālbūt (F) ‘small cargo/fishing boat’ CāCCīC  bādgīr/bāgdīr (F) ‘wind-tower’ maCCaC  maˁāš ‘salary’; maḏ̣ˁan ‘summer camping ground’; magṣab ‘abattoir’ maCCiC  muġrib/mġarb ‘sunset’ maCCaCa  maḏ̣lama ‘injustice’; maṭyana ‘clay-pit’; madbasa ‘device for squeezing juice from dates’; māčla ‘food, victuals’ maCCiCa  maryila/marǧila ‘brave, heroic deed’; maṣbina ‘gang of men’; maḥrima ‘crotch of women’s under-trousers’ miCCaC  mišxal ‘sieve’; miḥrag ‘kiln’; miḥzam ‘belt worn by bride’; minǧal ‘large sickle’; miḥašš ‘small sickle’ miCa/iCa  mirfaˁa (A) ‘food storage hoist’; mingala ‘wire stand for warming coffee pots’; mifliga ‘oyster-knife’ miCCāC  mīdār ‘fish-hook’; mišgāb ‘dish of fruit, nuts, sweets offered on contraction of a marriage’; misḥāb ‘wide shallow bed for transplanting seedlings’

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maCCūC(a)  mamrūs ‘type of date mash’; mačbūs ‘dish of rice and meat/fish’; maḏ̣rūba ‘dish of savoury rice’ mCaCCiC  mˁallim (B) ‘Qurˀān teacher’; mḥassin ‘barber’; mnaǧǧi ‘main drainage channel’ mCaCCiCi  mǧaddimi ‘ship’s bo’sun’ mCaCCaC  mḥammar ‘dish of rice and date molasses’; mxaḍḍar ‘green vegetables’; mṭawwaˁ (A) ‘Qurˀān teacher’ miCCiC  miˁris ‘bridegroom’ mistaCCaC  mistašfa ‘hospital’; mistašār ‘(government) advisor’ Additional notes A few nouns of local reference end in the suffix -ō,41 e.g. ḥalwayō ‘a type of fish’, ḥbābō ‘date in the first stage of ripening’, čāftō ‘keelson’; ǧrimbō ‘style of wearing the ġutra with one end hanging loose and the other wound around the head’, ndēndō ‘type of (African) dance with drum accompaniment’;42 ḏ̣lālō ‘children’s game’. The -iyya suffix is highly productive in the BA dialects, and not only as a means of forming abstract nouns. In many cases the ‘relational’ meaning of the suffix is obvious, e.g. yōmiyya ‘day’s wage’ (< yōm ‘day’), gaḥfiyya ‘skull-cap’ (< gaḥf ‘skull’), ṣifriyya ‘large copper cooking pot’ (< ṣifir ‘copper’), ṣabāḥiyyat il-ˁirs ‘gift to bride from groom in the morning after the wedding night’ (< ṣabāḥ ‘morning’). But in many other cases the forms with and without -iyya seem to be synonymous, or nearly so.43 For example, ṭall and ṭalliyya are both used for ‘mist’. Possibly the relationship here is akin to that between ‘mist’ and ‘mistiness’ in English. There are many other such formations where any real difference between the basic word and the same word with the -iyya suffix is not obvious, e.g. barr/barriyya ‘uncultivated land’, arḍ/arḍiyya ‘(arable) soil, land’, fahm/fahmiyya ‘understanding’, maˁlūm/maˁlūmiyya ‘knowledge’, ahl/ ahliyya ‘family’, ṣiḥḥa/ṣiḥḥiyya ‘health’, badan/badaniyya ‘body’, ṣubḥ/ṣubḥiyya ‘morning’, ˁaṣr/ˁaṣriyya ‘afternoon’, ams/amsiyya ‘yesterday’, and even il-falāfa/ falafāniyya ‘Tuesday’, il-arbaˁa/il-arbaˁāni or il-arbaˁāniyya ‘Wednesday’ and il-xamīs/il-xamīsiyya ‘Thursday’. 41  This unusual form is widely attested elsewhere in the Gulf: see EADS 84, HAN 99, SHAM 112 for Kuwait; HANZ 155, 172 for the UAE; BRO 77, DON 1 527 for Oman where some of the same words are noted. 42  Given as mdendō for the UAE in HANZ 629. The -ō suffix has a hypocoristic function when added to given names, with which these usages may be connected—see 3.4.5 below and 6.4.2. 43  REIN 53–54 lists a large number of similar coinages in -iyya for Omani Arabic.

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3.4.3 Foreign borrowings As can be seen from the list already given, there are a large number of foreign borrowings (F) in the BA dialects. These are mainly from Persian, Hindi/Urdu and English,44 with a smaller number from Turkish. Not all such borrowings have been assimilated to the native nominal patterns listed earlier, e.g. CāC  ǧām ‘pane of glass’ (< Pers idem); hāf ‘short-trousers’ (< Eng half ); gāz ‘petroleum; kerosene’ (< Eng gas); lās ‘silk’ (< prob Pers idem ‘coarse silk’) Cā/ēCi  ǧāli ‘hold-cover (on a boat)’ (< U idem); ǧēli ‘jelly’ (< Eng jelly); gāri ‘donkey-cart’45 (< U idem) CāCū/ō  kāzū ‘cashew nuts’ (< Port < Tupi caju); tābū ‘title-deed; land registry’ (< T tapu idem); ālū ‘potato’ (< U idem); sāgū ‘sago’ < Eng idem); bākō ‘back-hoe’ (tractor accessory) (< Eng idem) Cū/ōCi  gūṭi ‘packet, tin’ (< T kutu ‘box’); ġūri ‘tea-kettle’ (< Pers qūri ‘tea-pot’); ǧūti ‘shoes’ (< U idem); dūbi ‘laundryman’(< U idem); hūri ‘dug-out canoe’ (< U idem); būri ‘(gramophone) horn’ (< T boru idem); lūmi ‘lime’ (< U līmū idem); gōni ‘set-square’ (< Pers gūnyā idem) CīC  ǧīb ‘jeep; jib (sail)’ (both < Eng jeep, jib); hīb ‘crow-bar’ (poss < Eng ‘heave!’) CiCCu  činku ‘corrugted iron’ (< Eng zinc) CiCCi  sifti ‘safety-helmet’ (< Eng safety); biǧli ‘torch’ (< U idem ‘electricity’) CiCCiCi  binǧiri ‘bangle’ (< U bangri ‘bangle’) CCīC/CCēC  trīb ‘lorry-load’ (< Eng trip); smīt ‘cement’ (< Eng cement); krēn ‘crane; mechanical hoist; mechanical digger’ (< Eng crane); čwīt ‘bluing agent for washing’ (origin unknown); slīb ‘slope’ (< Eng idem); slēs ‘type of cake’ (< Eng ‘(cream) slice’) CCiCC  trinǧ ‘citron’ (< Pers turunj ‘orange’); sling ‘hoist’ (< Eng slinghoist (for raising loads)) CvCCēC  čaklēt ‘chocolate’; burmēt ‘boiled (hard) sweets’; namlēt ‘lemonade’;46 gōlgēt ‘toothpaste’ (all < Eng chocolate, peppermint, lemonade, Colgate (proprietary brand of toothpaste)); wartēm ‘over-time’ (< Eng idem) 44  See DCSEA I xxx–xxxvii. 45  In Kuwaiti dialect gāri used also to mean ‘bicycle’, but this meaning is now obsolete. 46  It almost seems as if the ‘radicals’ (l-m-n) of English lemonade have been reversed in the Arabic, as if the label on the bottle was being read right-to-left.

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CvCCēCvC  laytēnar ‘retainer’ (< Eng idem (machine part); kabrētar ‘carburettor’ (Eng idem) CiCCāC  midgār ‘mudguard’ (< Eng mudguard); firgār ‘dividers’ (< Pers pargār ‘dividers’); gišbār ‘wood-shavings, chippings’ (< poss Pers xāš + bār ‘chips + load’47) CaCCūC  ˀagzūz ‘exhaust’ (< Eng idem) CaCCaCūC  ˁanzarūt ‘sarcocolla, flesh-glue’ (Pers < idem) CCēCi/aC  drēwil ‘driver’ (< Eng driver), sbētar ‘hospital’ (< Eng idem). CēCCīCa  bēbfīta ‘plumber’ (< Eng pipefitter) CaCCC(C)ē/īC  ˀayskrīm ‘ice-cream’; ˁangrēz ‘English people’ (< Eng idem) 3.4.4 Number Internal and external plural Phonological processes which affect the shape of citation forms are left out of account here, e.g. ašya ‘things’ is counted as an example of aCCāC which has lost its final radical (the glottal stop) because of the general loss of the glottal, and whose ā is shortened in pause, reappearing on suffixation, e.g. ašyā-hum ‘their things’. As in other varieties of Arabic, certain plural patterns are often used to pluralise certain singular patterns, but in other cases the relationship is unpredictable. Many nouns have more than one plural form. 3.4.4.1

Internal plural forms

aCCāC  aġrāš < ġarša ‘bottle’; azwām < zām ‘watch (on a boat); shift (factory)’; aḥwāš < ḥōš ‘interior courtyard of a house’; ašya (from ašyāˀ ) < šayy ‘thing’ aCCiCa  amṯila < maṯal ‘proverb’; adwiya < dawa ‘medicine’; atniba< timba ‘ball’ aCCuC  ašhur < šahar ‘month’; awḍuḥ < waḍaḥ ‘twelve hour period of crop irrigation’ aCāCiC  arāyil/arāǧil < riǧl/rīl ‘leg, foot’; ašāyi < šayy ‘thing’; asāmi < isim/ asam ‘name’ aCCāCa  akyāsa < čīs (F) ‘(paper, plastic) bag, sack’ CaCC  zall < zūliyya ‘rug’ CaCCa  fazˁa < fāziˁ ‘helpmates, supporters in time of need or war’ C(u)CaC  čwad < čūda ‘pile, heap’; buram < burma ‘clay drinking vessel’; bugaš < bugša (F) ‘envelope’; ḥufar < ḥufra ‘hole’ 47  There are alternative possibilities for the origin of this word; giš-bar-kin2 is ‘beech-tree bark’ in Sumerian.

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C(i)CaC  rkab < rikba ‘knee’; tyal < tīla ‘(child’s) marble’; ftan < fitna ‘trouble, calamity’ C(i)CiC  sṭir < saṭir ‘line’; ktib< ktāb ‘book’; ḥiṣin < ḥṣān ‘horse’; ṣxin < ṣaxxīn (F) ‘digging spade with blade at right-angles to the shaft’ C(u)CuC  ḥṣur < ḥaṣīr ‘mat’; busuṭ < bsāṭ ‘rug’ CaCāC  banāt < bint ‘girl’ C(i)CāC  yihāl/ǧihāl < yāhil/ǧāhil ‘child’, xnān< xinn ‘hold (of a ship)’; skār < sukra ‘irrigation channel stopper’; dbāb < dabba ‘belly’ CaCaCa  nasaba < nasīb ‘kin, relative’ CaCaCāt  rafagāt < rafīga ‘(female) friend’ CuCā(t)  ruˁā < rāˁi ‘owner, denizen’ CūC  rūs < rās ‘head’; fūs < fās ‘axe’ C(u)CūC  ḥbūb < ḥibb ‘large earthenware vessel for cooling water’; < ḥabb ‘pill, grain’; bṭūn < baṭin ‘pregnancy’; slūs < sils ‘sea-eel’; syūb < sēb ‘rope-puller (in a pearling crew)’ C(u)CūCa  dyūsa < dēs ‘breast’; rǧūla/ryūla < rīǧl/rīl (some BV) ‘leg, foot’ CaCīC  ḥarīm < ḥurma ‘woman, wife’; ḥamīr < ḥmār ‘donkey’; ˁašīš < ˁišša ‘palm-branch hut’; gaḥīḥ < gaḥḥa ‘land alternately covered and uncovered by the tide’ C(i/u)CīC  sikīk < sikka ‘alley, street’; bitīt < bitt ‘subsidiary drainage channel’; gufīf < guffa ‘palm-leaf plant-pot’ CuCC  ġurb < ġarīb ‘stranger’ CuCCaC  ubbar < ibra/ubra ‘needle’ CCaCān  ṣbayān < ṣabi ‘boy’ CiCCān  firgān < firīǧ ‘neighbourhood’; ṣidgān < ṣadīǧ ‘friend’; ǧifrān < gafīr ‘type of basket’; dimmān < damm ‘blood’ Ci/uCCāC  yihhāl/ǧihhāl < yāhil/ǧāhil48 ‘child’; tiǧǧār < tāǧir ‘merchant’; ḥukkām < ḥākim ‘ruler’; bittāt < bitt (< bint) ‘subsidiary (‘daughter’) drainage channels’ CuCCān  ṣuxlān < ṣxala ‘young goat’ CīCān  yīrān/ǧīrān < yār/ǧār ‘neighbour’; zīrān < zār ‘demon’; bībān < bāb ‘door’; līhān < lōh ‘cormorant’; xīlān < xāl ‘maternal uncle’; sībān < sāb ‘irrigation channel’ C(i)CāCa  digāla < digla ‘mast’; kbāra < kabar ‘stone-built house with palmfrond roof’; gṣāra < gaṣīr ‘next-door neighbour’ CaCāCa  ǧamāra < ǧamri ‘person from Banī Jamra (Baḥārna village)’; gṭāfa < gaṭīfi ‘person from al-Qaṭīf (Saudi Arabia)’; bṭāla < buṭil (F) ‘bottle’; gṭāwa laxbaṭ. 98  Not recorded in Bahrain in this form, but common in many Arabic dialects and in CLA.

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sarhad- ‘to nod off, fall asleep’ (< sahda ‘quiet, silence’):99 šrib-əh u sarhad (41) ‘(The child) drank it and nodded off.’ darˁam- ‘barge in, push through (a crowd)’ (< daˁam ‘to collide with’) awwal iyūn yidarˁamūn, mā yadrūn (Manāma 10) ‘In the old days they would just come bursting in, they were ignorant.’ rangaṭ- ‘to make a chequered pattern’100 (cf. CLA raqqaṭa ‘to speckle, spot’; ruqṭa ‘white and black spots’): ġuṭra mrangaṭa (30) ‘A chequered head-cloth’ tḥanda- ‘to complain, moan and groan’ (< (?) CLA ḥada ‘to urge on, goad’): yitimm sāˁa yitḥanda (dialect poetry) ‘He would carry on moaning and groaning for an hour.’ A number of other verbs fit this pattern, many of them occurring in the same or similar form in other parts of the region, but which do not seem to be the result either of consonant insertion, or denominative derivation,101 e.g. ṭarbag‘to skive, back-slide’, ṭargaˁ- ‘to crack, pop, jump about’ and tgarṭaˁ- ‘to crack, pop, burst’,102 tˁarzam- ‘to be stunted in growth’,103 čandas- ‘to bow the head, 99  In CLA this root has the opposite meaning, of ‘sleeplessness, wakefulness’. 100  For the southern Gulf, HANZ 56 gives mrangaṭ ‘spotted’, and for Oman BRO 113 gives muranqaṭ ‘dappled’ and REIN 253 tranqaṭ- ‘to be many coloured’. 101  On the other hand, denominative derivation is the obvious source of ġarbal- ‘to confuse’ (< ġirbāl ‘sieve’ (a means of crushing and sifting)), tbarṭam- ‘to pout’ (< barṭūm ‘lip’ (of a camel)). 102  W&B 289 also note ṭargaˁ- in the sense ‘to clatter, bang’ for Baghdad. In Bahrain, ṭargaˁ- is used to describe the ‘popping and jumping’ of coffee beans being roasted in a pan, and tgarṭaˁ- the ‘popping’ of a vein after manipulation by a traditional doctor. One verb may simply be a metathesis of the other. 103  The participle mitˁarzim, which in the context I recorded seemed to mean ‘stunted’ was used to describe the poor growth of radishes. FLE 437 notes the phonetically similar muˁaǧram ‘knotty (of, e.g., a branch)’ for CLA, which he regards as a denominative of ˁuǧruma ‘type of large spiny tree with knots’.

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lean over’,104 fandas- ‘to grab handfuls (of food)’,105 sandar- ‘to vex, annoy’,106 ġandam- ‘to frown, look worried’,107 tṭangar- ‘to sulk’. The manifold difficulties which can attend tracing the etymology of quadriliteral verbs is illustrated by another in this category, karfas-/čarfas-, which in Bahrain and the southern Gulf means ‘to knock to the ground’ but in Najd means ‘to crumple up, crease’.108 Prima facie, the Najdi meaning looks like a plausible extension of the meaning of CLA karfasa ‘to walk with a limp’ itself apparently a secondary derivation from kafisa ‘to have crooked feet’. These CLA meanings would also seem to lie at the origin of the Gulf equivalent of Najdi karfas-, which is kaffas- ‘to bend over, crease, fold over’. But what is the origin of Gulf karfas-/čarfas- ‘to knock to the ground’? One possibility is to view it as the result of the dissimilation of the doubled consonant in dialectal kaffas-.109 However, there also exists a CLA verb ǧarfasa ‘to throw, knock to the ground’110 with exactly the meaning of karfas-/čarfas- in the Gulf dialects. So is this the origin of the modern dialectal form? Are we dealing here with a phonetic shift—albeit an unusual and ad hoc one, as CLA /ǧ/ does not normally have /k/ or /č/ as a reflex in Gulf Arabic? Or is Gulf karfas-/čarfasa case of the contamination of two roots? In CLA one also notes karfata ‘to drop’, and in dialects as far removed from one another as southern Yemen and Christian Baghdadi, there is a successor form karfat- meaning ‘to dump, throw down from above’. Could then Gulf karfas-/čarfas- be historically the result of a contamination of CLA ǧarfasa (or rather a (now lost) dialectal form of it, 104  SOW 294 notes kanhas- with the similar sense of ‘to stoop, lower one’s head (to avoid being seen)’ for Najd. 105  The noun findūs ‘handful of food squeezed into a ball’, from which the verb is possibly derived, is also noted for Kuwait in HAN 282 and DUL 24 for Basra. Cf. CLA findīr ‘lump of dates’. 106  Recorded by ING 179 with the same meaning for Najd, and by HANZ 306 for the southern Gulf, where it is used especially in the context of someone annoying his listeners by excessive talking. HANZ claims a CLA origin: sandara ‘large measure’. 107  ING 182 gives muġaldim ‘upset, unhappy, sulking’ for Najd, with /l/ instead of /n/, but otherwise with the same set of consonants, and AH 53 notes ḍalġam- ‘to frown’ for Christian Baghdadi, with the same set of consonants re-ordered. All these words would seem to have a common origin. 108  HANZ 508 for the southern Gulf, ING 183 also gives the synonyms karbat- and karbaǧ-. 109  Dissimilation of the doubled consonants in pattern II verbs is put forward in FLE 428–430 as the possible source of some CLA quadriliterals, in all of which the result is /r, l, n/ in place of the first of the doubled consonants. 110  FLE 444 derives this from CLA ǧarafa ‘to sweep away, shovel away’ by the addition of an /s/ as C4.

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*ǧarfas-), and karfat-, to give karfas- (and later čarfas- by affrication of the k)? It is impossible to answer such questions with certainty, but this looks a more phonetically plausible explanation than deriving karfas-/čarfas- directly from CLA ǧarfasa, or proposing dissimilation from dialectal kaffas-, given the very different meanings of kaffas- and karfas-/čarfas- in the Gulf dialects. 4.3.4 C1C2C3C4 in which C3 = /w/ This is a small group of verbs, of various morphological origins. In the case of two verbs, haǧwal- ‘get rid of, throw out’ and daˁwal- ‘to throw away’ which were recorded only in certain BV dialects, one possible explanation of their origin is that they are delocutive naḥt formations somewhat similar to CLA examples like ḥawqala, hallala, ḥayˁala, in this case possibly formed from imperatives: daˁ ‘leave (it)!’ + wall ‘go away!’ → daˁwal- ‘throw away’:111 čān mā daˁwalō-h, nistaˁmil hādāk (25) ‘If they hadn’t thrown it away, we’d have used it’ haǧ < hiǧǧ ‘leave!’ + wall ‘go away!’ → haǧwal- ‘get rid of, throw out’: istamallētūn minnəh u haǧwaltūn-əh (41) ‘You got fed up with him and threw him out (into the street)’ In the case of haǧwal-, there is an alternative possibility for its derivation: haǧǧal- is a synonym used in the same dialects, which might lead one to suppose that the two forms arose as variant ways of ‘strengthening’ an original simpler form, CLA haǧala ‘to throw (a stick)’.112 Other forms of this type recorded were tnaġwaš- ‘to quiver, show signs of life’, tnahwaṣ- ‘to cry, sob’113 (in the expression dazz-ni atinahwaṣ ‘cry baby’, (lit ‘push me, I’ll cry’) and tṣarwaˁ‘to be thunderstruck, have the jitters’. The first of these verbs has a dialect (and CLA) synonym naġaš-, which suggests that the inserted /w/, as was suggested for haǧwal-, might be a ‘strengthening’ of the verb for descriptive effect. The 111  Cf. the English compound verb ‘leave go’. 112  This explanation of the insertion of /w/ is the same as that advanced in FLE 434 to explain the CLA verbs of this form, such as harwala: ‘pour effectuer un renforcement’. The doubling of the second radical, as we have already noted, is another common means in the dialects of giving an extensive or intensive amplification to the meaning of triliteral pattern I. 113  Cf. GLOS 2826 tanhūsa ‘sigh’ for southern Yemen.

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verb tnahwaṣ- again looks like an elaborated form of a triliteral: compare CLA nahaša ‘to tear the face with grief’. The verb tṣarwaˁ- was used to describe someone being woken up in the middle of the night by a groaning noise and getting up to investigate feeling mitṣarwiˁ ‘scared stiff, having the jitters’. This seems to be a denominative from ṣarˁ ‘epileptic fit’. 4.3.5 Other types of quadriliteral 4.3.5.1 Blends Examples have already been given of denominative verbs which fall into the quadriliteral categories in which the radicals in C1C2C3C4 are all different, and which were not derived from triliteral roots by reduplication and affixation. There are a couple of other categories which deserve mention for what they suggest about the ways in which quadriliterals can arise. One is via the blending of triliteral roots which have a similar meaning, which is also traditionally claimed to be one source of CLA quadriliterals. Most languages can furnish examples of blends: in English, for example ‘smog’ is a blend of ‘smoke’ and ‘fog’, ‘motel’ of ‘motor’ and ‘hotel’, ‘Chunnel’ of ‘Channel tunnel’. Such words can be a kind of shorthand abbreviation, like ‘Chunnel’ or denote a novel concept, like ‘motel’. CLA had many such formations in the ‘shorthand abbreviation’ category, such as basmala, and it has already been suggested that haǧwal- and daˁwal- may be examples of dialectal ‘blends’.114 The verbs saḥlab- ‘to drag’ and kaḥlaf- ‘to dry out’ may be examples of the coalescence of separate roots. The first of these verbs, in the example: saḥlabt il-mišṭ ˁala rās-i (dialect poetry) ‘I dragged the comb through my hair’ seems to be a combination of the roots s-ḥ-l and s-ḥ-b. One of the senses of s-ḥ-l in CLA is ‘to scrape, pare, peel’, and in Bahraini Arabic siḥa- has the sense ‘to become smoothed, flattened down; saḥab- in virtually all varieties of Arabic is ‘to pull, drag’. The verb saḥlab- precisely conveys a combination of these semantic elements: in the example, the man was combing and flattening his hair before meeting the parents of a prospective bride. The verb kaḥlaf- occurred in one BV farmer’s description of another’s land ‘drying out’ and being useless for cultivation. qalhaf- is ‘to dry out’ in southern Yemen.115 In CLA one notes in the lexica qahafa ‘to drink all of’, qaḥila 114  Another, a pattern II verb, is ḥaggal- which in the BV dialects means ‘to get, obtain’. This appears to be a blend of ḥaṣṣal- ‘to get, obtain’ and ḥagg ‘right, due, property’. 115  GLOS 2522.

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‘to become dry, arid’, and qahala ‘to become dry (hide)’. On the face of it, the Bahraini and Yemeni forms kaḥlaf- and qalhaf- look like phonetic variants of one another (with metathesis of C2 and C3), both seemingly sharing with the CLA verbs’ phonology and their basic senses: the metaphor of the land ‘drinking’ ( yišrab) (i.e. being irrigated from) a source of water is normal parlance among present-day BV farmers, and perhaps helps explain how a verb like qahafa ‘to drink all of’ might (historically) have contributed to the formation of kaḥlaf-/qalhaf-. 4.3.5.2 Denominatives Denominative quadriliterals formed from secondary nominal forms are common in all varieties of Arabic and Bahraini is no exception. The following exemplify this large category: tmalfaˁ- ‘to wear a black filigree face-veil (= malfaˁ )’, tgahwa- ‘to have coffee’ (< gahwa), tˁafrat- ‘to behave naughtily’ (< ifrīt), tmaṣlaḥ- ‘to derive benefit’ (< maṣlaḥa). 4.4

Inflectional Morphology

4.4.1 The strong verb: s-stem 4.4.1.1 A dialects As noted in 4.1.1.1, the vowel pattern of the stem in the strong pattern I verb is either C1aC2aC3- or C1iC2aC3-/C1uC2aC3-, depending on the type of consonant occupying the C1 and C2 slots. If either C1 or C2 is a ‘guttural’, or if C2 is /l, r or n/, the first vowel is low, e.g. ḥamal-, xasar-, ġasal-, ˁaraf-, gaˁad-, šaġal-, taras-, balaˁ-, kanas-; if neither of these two conditions applies, the first vowel is high, CiCaC- or CuCaC-, and a labial consonant in C1 or C2 favours /u/ if the other is an emphatic or /g/ or /r/ or, in a few cases, /n/, e.g. kitab-, simaˁ-, misak-, yibas-, sikat-, nigal-, rigad-, but rubaṭ-, wuṣal-, ṭubaˁ-. The majority of pattern I verbs are in the second category, illustrated here: k(i)tab- ‘to write’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

sng k(i)tabt k(i)tabt k(i)tabti/k(i)tabtay k(i)tab ktibat

pl k(i)tabna k(i)tabtaw ktibaw/ktibo

The bracketed /i/ vowel may be, and often is, omitted in normal speech, e.g. əhuwwə lli ktab ha-l-əktāb ‘It was he who wrote this book’. Where the first vowel

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is /a/, however, it is not dropped, e.g. əhuwwə lli šarab ha-l-kās ‘It was he who drank that glassful’. The alternative 2fsng forms in this chart are positionally determined: k(i)tabti is used in juncture and k(i)tabtay phrase-finally, as we have already seen with the corresponding independent pronoun inti and intay. Alternative forms also exist for the 2pl and 3pl in kitabtu and ktibu respectively, but these seem to be ‘educated’ forms, and are not positionally determined. For some parts of the A s-stem paradigm, however, there are sociolinguistically interesting sets of alternative dialectal forms. Between the verb stem and any consonant-initial suffix, a mid-vowel /ē/ can be inserted, resulting in the deletion of the short unstressed vowel in the syllable preceding it, to give the following alternative set of forms: k(i)tab- ‘to write’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

sng kitbēt kitbēt kitbēti/kitbētay k(i)tab ktibat

pl kitbēna kitbētaw ktibaw/ktibo

In the example given, the stem has become kitb- (CvCC-) before consonant initial suffixes. But in some verbs, speakers vacillate between this CvCC- and CCvC-, viz fitḥ- and ftaḥ- ‘to open’, simˁ- and smaˁ- ‘to hear’. The pattern I verb with a CCvC- stem looks like this: s(i)maˁ- ‘to hear’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

sng smaˁēt smaˁēt smaˁēti/smaˁētay s(i)maˁ smaˁat

pl smaˁēna smaˁētaw smaˁaw/smaˁo

As already noted and exemplified in 1.4, this paradigm in /ē/ can be generalised to any type of s-stem verb of any pattern. The operative morphological principle seems to be to take the 3msng form, whatever the verb type, and simply add the personal inflections formed with /ē/ to it. This gives the most strikingly deviant results in the hollow verb, where forms like gālēt ‘I said’ occur alongside the expected gilt. The A dialect speakers who use this type of form do not do so on all the occasions when they could, and these forms in /ē/ occurred more in ­women’s

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speech than in men’s, and more often in the speech of older women than younger ones. There did not seem to be any discernible difference in the syntactic contexts in which the /ē/ and non-/ē/ s-stem forms were used, and examples of both types would sometimes occur in the same sentence, sometimes with the same verb showing the alternative forms, e.g. šrubēt u istānasēt u gayyalt ˁind-ha (45) ‘I drank (tea), enjoyed myself and had a nap at her house’ baˁad čam min yōm ˁaraft anna l-ˁirs lī . . . ē! ˁirfēt! (Manāma 8) ‘After a few days, I realised that the wedding (which was being prepared) was for me . . . Yes! I realised!’ Outside Bahrain, as noted in 1.4, the speech communities that have been recorded using these forms, starting with Meissner’s observations on the marsh-men of southern Iraq in the early 20th century, also seem to be members of long-sedentarised, non-tribal, farming and coastal populations. In his study of north-eastern Arabia, Ingham includes the /ē/ verb forms in a list of ‘reductional’ morphological features that he considers typify the Mesopotamian and Gulf dialects as a whole, in contrast to the more conservative, non-reductional, ‘retaining system’ of the central Arabia dialects.116 The regional distribution of the /ē/ s-stem forms and of many other features—phonological, morphological, lexical—suggests that they were once shared by a relatively homogeneous set of dialects spoken on or near the Gulf littoral. But this coastal area has for centuries, if not millennia, been subject to immigration from central Arabia. All of the ruling families of the Gulf States were originally from there, and, as noted above in the discussion in 1.4 of the composition of the ˁArab population 116  ING 339. However, Ingham is incorrect in attributing the /ē/ s-stem forms to the ‘Shīˁī’ dialects of Bahrain. Quite to the contrary, in Bahrain, they are sociolinguistic markers of the Sunni (here termed the ˁArab or ‘A’) dialect. Ingham’s incorrect attribution seems to be based on an assumption deriving from the fact that, in the Khūzistānī and southern Iraqi contexts that he investigated, these /ē/ forms are indeed typical of dialects spoken by Shīˁīs. As a matter of fact, as noted above, the /ē/ s-stem has also been noted by al-Qaṣṣāb (QAS issue 23) for some (but not all) of the B village dialects of eastern Saudi Arabia, no more than ten miles from Bahrain—a fact which indicates that its status within Bahrain as a stereotypical A feature is of purely local relevance: in neighbouring eastern Saudi Arabia it is a B marker! This is an excellent example of what Ingham himself terms the “multivalency” of Gulf linguistic features, viz the social significance of a given feature in one area of the Gulf is not necessarily the same in other areas, even when they are close by.

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of Bahrain, elements of this historical ‘incomer’ tribal Najdi population are still socially distinct. In other words, it may be that that the /ē/ s-stem paradigm is a survival of an original eastern Arabian coastal dialect (itself possibly simplified as a result of linguistic contact with non-Arabs?) which became recessive under pressure from the Najdi dialects of the immigrants from which the present Gulf ruling families and their followers were drawn, which did not have this linguistic feature. At all events, the /ē/ s-stem form, already stigmatised fifty years ago as ‘vulgar’, now appears to be disappearing fast. 4.4.1.2 B dialects 4.4.1.2.1 The BV dialects The basic paradigm for the main group of s-stem verbs, viz, which have the a-a vowel pattern, is as follows for all the BV dialects: katab- ‘to write’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

sng katabt katabt katabtīn(a) katab katabat

pl katabna katabtūn(a) katabaw/katabo

The 2nd person -tīn(a) and -tūn(a) forms are highly unusual, attested elsewhere in the Arabian peninsula only in four other locations so far: (1) in and around the town of al-Qaṭīf, in neighbouring eastern Saudi Arabia,117 where the local Baḥārna dialects are, in their basic features, very similar to the B dialects of Bahrain; (2) in the so-called Shiḥḥī dialects118 of the Musandam peninsula, Oman; (3) in the Tihāma, in the extreme south-west of Saudi Arabia;119 (4) in several dialects of south western Yemen (including the port city of Hodaida).120 In all these locations the corresponding independent pronouns are intīn and intūn. The bracketed 2fsng and 2pl forms -tīna and -tūna in the paradigm above are occasionally heard in the B dialects as variants of the main forms -tīn and -tūn. The original form of the 3pl has the -aw ending as the A dialect does, but many BV speakers also have forms in -o, viz katabo. 117  QAS issue 23. 118  SHAH 255. 119  In the village of Ṣabyā, see PRO 27. 120  BEHN2 73, 76; MAT 75–76. Maṭar suggests that these 2nd person endings, both in Yemen and Bahrain, are part of an Aramaic substrate.

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Beyond this, there are a number of divergences within the BV group. In the main group of BV dialects, verbs with the (i)-i or (u)-u vowel pattern have the following paradigms:121 s(i)miˁ- ‘to hear’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

sng s(i)miˁt s(i)miˁt s(i)miˁtīn(a) s(i)miˁ simˁat

pl s(i)miˁna s(i)miˁtūn(a)

č(u)bur- ‘to grow big’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

sng č(u)burt č(u)burt č(u)burtīn(a) č(u)bur čubrat

pl č(u)burna č(u)burtūn(a)

simˁaw/simˁo

čubraw/čubro

One noteworthy anomaly is the dialect of ad-Dēr (10), one the three B villages on Muḥarrag island. In this B village and nowhere else in the B communities of the whole country, speakers have s-stem forms which show occasional /ē/ forms (though here often pronounced with /ī/ ), otherwise typical of A communities, in combination with the saliently B -tīn and -tūn 2nd person inflections. Typical of the examples recorded was istafādītīn ‘you benefitted’. Such apparent ‘blends’ are possibly to be explained as the result of dialect contact with nearby Muḥarrag town, one of the localities where the /ē/ perfect is commonly used. However, the other two B villages on Muḥarrag island, ˁArād (2) and Samāhīǧ (32), are just as close to Muḥarrag town, and one would presume, potentially just as influenced by its dialect, yet their dialects do not show such ‘blended’ forms—if that is indeed what they are, and not very localised original forms. The situation in the BU dialects is more complex. The dialect of the old central B neighbourhoods of Manāma 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7 differs both from that of the geographically peripheral but equally old Manāma B neighbourhood 5 (Rās Rummān), on the one hand, and from the (at the time of the field-work) relatively new ‘mixed’ neighbourhoods of Manāma 8, 9 and 10.

121  This paradigm is as heard in the dialect of the Muḥarrag island village of ˁArād (2), but it is shared by the main group of BV villages.

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Morphology (ii)

4.4.1.2.2 Manāma 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7: the ‘core’ BU dialect 122 As with the BV dialects, the core BU dialects follow CLA in having the a-a vowel pattern for the biggest category of verbs. The non-a-a group is verbs describing ‘(semi-permanent) states’ (which have a-u in CLA, such as kaṯura ‘to be/ become many’, ṣaġura ‘to be/become small’, kabura ‘to be/become big/old’). In the ‘core’ BU dialect this category has the (u)-a vowel pattern and a CuCCstem in the 3fsng and 3pl. This is similar to the situation in the main group of BV dialects, of which the core BU dialect is probably a historical off-shoot. The main difference between Manāma 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 and the BV dialects is that the (i)-i category of BV verbs has been shifted to the a-a category in Manāma. Example paradigms: CLA a-a: katab- ‘to write’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

sng katabt katabt katabtīn katab katabat

pl katabna katabtūn

sng samaˁt samaˁt samaˁtīn samaˁ samaˁat

pl samaˁna samaˁtūn

sng k(u)bart k(u)bart k(u)bartīn k(u)bar kubrat

pl k(u)barna k(u)bartūn

katabaw/katabo

CLA a-i: samaˁ- ‘to hear’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

samaˁaw/samaˁo

CLA a-u: k(u)bar- ‘to grow big’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

kubraw/kubro

122  Manāma 6 (al-Ḥūra) is marked on the map as a mixed A and B quarter; Manāma 7 is marked as an A quarter, but there are also members of the B community who live there. The description given here is of the speech of the B speakers in these areas.

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It should however be noted that these paradigms are somewhat unstable, particularly in Manāma 7, al-Fāḍil, whose population was more mixed at the time of field-work than that of the other inner-city Manāma quarters. BU speakers from al-Fāḍil often had 3rd person CiCaC/CiCCat/CiCCaw-type forms in the main categories (e.g. kitab/kitbat/kitbaw/o) in free variation with CaCaC/ CaCaCat/CaCaCaw (katab/katabat/katabaw/o). This may be the result of contact with A speakers, who have a high vowel in the stem of most pattern I verbs, as already noted in 4.1.1.1. 4.4.1.2.3 Manāma 5 (Rās Rummān) The Manama 5 dialect paradigms are the same as Manāma 1,2,3,4,6,7 except in one main respect:123 the 3fsng and 3pl forms are invariably of the CvCC- stem type in all verb categories: so kitbat/kitbaw ‘she/they wrote’, simˁat/simˁaw ‘she/they heard’, kubrat/kubraw ‘she/they grew old/big’: katab- ‘to write’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

sng katabt katabt katabtīn katab kitbat

pl katabna katabtūn

samaˁ- ‘to hear’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

sng samaˁt samaˁt samaˁtīn samaˁ simˁat

pl samaˁna samaˁtūn

k(u)bar- ‘to grow big’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

sng k(u)bart k(u)bart k(u)bartīn k(u)bar kubrat

pl k(u)barna k(u)bartūn

kitbaw/kitbo

simˁaw/simˁo

kubraw/kubro

123  But see 4.4.1.3.4 below for a further difference.

Morphology (ii)

191

4.4.1.2.4 Manāma 8–10: the outer ring At the time of field-work, these relatively new suburbs of Manāma were populated by a mix of A and B dialect-speakers, born in other locations, with an admixture of expatriate workers from other Arab countries, Europe and further afield. Unlike the central neighbourhoods of Manāma, they lacked the sense of communal identity (and sectarian affiliation) that comes from settlement by a particular set of families, or long-term association with a particular occupation.124 As a consequence, speakers from these areas still spoke the dialects of the places they had been born in, and it was not possible to distinguish a particular set of forms for Salmāniyya, al-Gufūl and Guḍaybiyya. 4.4.1.3 Suffixation of certain s-stem verb forms The focus here is on the behaviour of certain verb forms when they have object pronoun suffixes. 4.4.1.3.1 The A dialects The following set of changes is stereotypically associated with the A dialects (stress is marked by a super-script accent): (a) The 3msng of all pattern I strong verbs, when suffixed by a vowel-initial object pronoun, results in an unallowable succession of three short open syllables. This is reduced by the deletion of the vowel in the first syllable. This resyllabified form is then vowelled according to the phonological principles set out in 2.2.1.1.1, e.g. šárab ‘he drank’ + -ah → šrúb-ah ‘he drank it’, simaˁ ‘he heard) + -ah → smáˁ-ah ‘he heard him’. (b) The 3fsng, when followed by a vowel-initial object pronoun, also results in an unallowable succession of short syllables, e.g. šrúbat ‘she drank’ + ah → šrúbt-ah ‘she drank it (m)’ < *šru-bi-tah, the /a/ vowel of the 3fsng inflection changing by a general rule of the A dialects to /i/ in the unstressed open syllable which results from suffixation, and then, again by general rule, being deleted. (c) The /h/ of the -ha and -hum suffixes assimilates to the suffix /t/ of 3fsng s-stem forms. So (i)šrúbat ‘she drank’ + -ha → (i)šrubát-ta ‘she drank it’. 124  For instance, Manāma 2 is called (Farīǧ) al-Makhārga, meaning ‘(the quarter of ) the (pearl)-borers’ because this was formerly the occupation of many who lived there; Manāma 4 is still called (Farīǧ) al-Ḥammām ‘(the quarter of ) the (public) baths’ though the eponymous baths have long since disappeared; Manāma 7 is called (Farīǧ) al-Fāḍil, or by some (Farīǧ) Kānō, both the names of prominent merchant families who once lived there.

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4.4.1.3.2 The BV dialects The shape of the 3msng, when suffixed by an object pronoun, depends on whether the vowel pattern of the stem is high or low. If it is low, the form does not change, e.g. ḍarab ‘he hit’ + -uh → ḍarab-uh ‘he hit him’, ḍarab ‘he hit’ + -ha → ḍarab-ha ‘he hit her’. But if the vowel pattern is high ((i)-i or (u)-u), the first vowel is deleted in the 3msng, e.g. š(u)rub + -uh → šrúb-uh ‘he drank it(m)’, and the form resembles that of the suffixed pattern I verb in the A dialects (i.e. šrúb-ah). This resyllabication does not happen with the 3fsng at all: ḍarabat-uh ‘she hit him’, ḍarabat-ha ‘she hit her’, širbat-uh ‘she drank it(m)’, širbat-ha ‘she drank it(f)’. 4.4.1.3.3 The BU dialects The main group of BU dialects (Manāma 1,2,3,4,6,7) follow the BV dialects in the 3msng suffixed forms in simply adding the suffix to the stem form of verbs which have the low vowel pattern a-a, e.g. ḍarab ‘he hit’ + -ah125 → ḍarab-ah ‘he hit him’, ḍarab + -ha → ḍarab-ha ‘he hit her’. In the 3fsng, we get, as expected, ḍarabat-ah ‘she hit him’, ḍarabat-ha ‘she hit her’. However, in these BU dialects, as already noted, many verbs which have the (i)-i vowel pattern in the BV dialects have been shifted to the a-a pattern, with the result that this syllabic pattern is more prevalent in the verb system, e.g. šarab + -ah → šarab-ah ‘he drank it (m)’. There is also a difference between the BU and BV dialects in 3fsng suffixed forms. In the main BU dialect group, pairs of variants like šarabat-ah/širbat-ah ‘she drank it (m)’ and šarabat-ha/širbat-ha ‘she drank it (f)’ are in free variation. This kind of variation was especially prevalent in the speech of speakers from Manāma 7, al-Fāḍil. Even resyllabicated forms of the šrub-ah ‘he drank it (m)’ and šrubt-ah ‘she drank it (m)’ type, seemingly contact-induced ‘borrowings’ from the A dialect, were sporadically noted there, especially in the speech of women. So forms of the three different types: šarabat-ah, širbat-ah and šrubt-ah ‘she drank it (m)’ all occurred in the B conversational data from this quarter of Manāma. B residents of the area, when asked directly what they thought the ‘local’ forms were, hesitated, vacillated, and often disagreed with each other. Al-Fāḍil thus appears to be a ‘border’ area in which B speakers freely borrow and mix. The borrowing seems to be unidirectional however, by the B community from the A; there was no movement in the opposite direction. This asymmetry was a pattern repeated everywhere: B speakers adopt A forms, but never the converse. 125  In all the BU dialects, the vowel of the 3sng object is generally -ah rather than -uh, which is its form is most of the BV dialects.

Morphology (ii)

193

4.4.1.3.4 Manāma 5 (Rās Rummān) This dialect, which differs in several other important respects from the other BU dialects,126 has a unique form for the suffixed 3msng, which is, sociolinguistically, a highly salient marker of this dialect:127 When, in the Rās Rummān dialect the 3msng is suffixed with an object pronoun, it inserts a long /ā/ vowel between the stem and the enclitic pronoun, so, e.g. ḍarab ‘he hit’ + -ah → ḍirbā́-h ‘he hit him’ ḍarab ‘he hit’ + -ha → ḍirbā́-ha ‘he hit her’ šarab ‘he drank’ + -ah → širbā́-h ‘he drank it(m)’ šarab ‘he drank’ + -ha → širbā́-ha ‘he drank it(f)’ This form with a long stressed ā́ is not limited to pattern I verbs, but occurs with other verb types in this dialect, e.g. doubled verbs: šagg ‘he split’ + -ah → šaggā́-h ‘he split it(m)’, šagg + -ha → šaggā́-ha ‘he split it(f)’; pattern II: čaffat ‘he tied up’ +-ah → čaffitā́-h ‘he tied him up’. On the face of it, it looks as if this may be a case of analogical reduction, possibly originating in finally-weak verbs: the syllabic shape of the suffixed forms of commonly occurring pattern II finalweak verb forms like sawwā́-h/sawwā́-ha ‘he did/made it’, xallā́-h/xallā́-ha ‘he let it/allowed it to . . .’ may have been generalised to other verb classes.128 4.4.1.3.5 All dialects In all suffixed plural forms, the final -aw/o of the 3pl (and in the A dialects of the 2pl) becomes ō and is stressed, e.g.

126  Notably in having /y/as its normal reflex of OA /ǧ/. 127  Rās Rummān used to be a notorious area, noted for the rumbustiousness of its men, who were employed virtually exclusively as seamen and heavy labourers of one kind or another. At the time of field-work, features of its dialect (notably the one highlighted here) were being exploited for comical effect in Bahrain radio comedies. 128  In support of this explanation, we have already noted the generalisation of other parts of the pattern II final-weak paradigm to other verb classes: the 1st and 2nd persons of pattern II final weak forms like sawwēt and xallēt gave rise to similar forms in geminate verbs like ḥabbēt, raddēt (as they did in all Arabic dialects) and in some Bahraini and Gulf dialects this was extended to hollow verbs (gālēt, rāḥēt etc.) and pattern I and derived pattern verbs of all types (kitbēt, tzawwiǧēt, etc.). In Bahrain, these two sets of changes did not always occur in the same dialects, but QAS issue 23 describes some B villages in eastern Saudi Arabia where the generalisation of both the xallā-h-type forms and the xallēt-type forms does occur across the board.

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A dialects: šrúbaw ‘they drank’ + -ah → (i)šrubṓ-h ‘they drank it(m)’ B dialects: šarabaw/o + -ah → šarabṓ-h or širbaw/o + -ah → širbṓ-h ‘they drank it(m)’ 4.4.2 The strong verb: p-stem 4.4.2.1 A dialects We saw in 4.1.1.2.1 that in the basic unsuffixed 3msng form of the p-stem, the A dialects show a three-way split between stems which have (i) a guttural in C1 (ii) a guttural in C2 or C3 and (iii) all others, as follows: (i) yiCaCC or yiCaCiC e.g. yiˁarf ‘he knows’, yiġasil ‘he washed’ (ii) yiCCaC e.g. yismaˁ ‘he hears’ (iii) yaCCiC e.g. yadris ‘he studies’ The full p-stem paradigms of these sample verbs are: yiġasil-129 ‘he washes’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

sng āġasil tiġasil tiġaslīn yiġasil tiġasil

pl niġasil tiġaslūn

yismaˁ- ‘he hears’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

sng āsmaˁ tismaˁ tisimˁīn yismaˁ tismaˁ

pl nismaˁ tisimˁūn

yadris- ‘he writes’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

sng ādris tadris tidirsīn yadris tadris

pl nadris tidirsūn

yiġaslūn

yisimˁūn

yidirsūn

129  As noted earlier, etymological /ġ/ is often pronounced /q/ in the A dialects, so one often hears yqasil. Some speakers double this /s/ → yqassil without, in this particular verb, any apparent change in the meaning. This doubling has then been generalised to the s-stem, giving, e.g. qassalt or qassilēt ‘I washed’ as an alternative to qasalt.

Morphology (ii)

195

The 1sng prefix in the A dialects is normally a long /ā/ in all verb classes—an A dialect ‘marker’. It can be seen from these paradigms that, in all verb classes, in the forms of the verb which have a suffixed inflection for gender/number (2fsng and 2 and 3pl), the syllabic shape and vowel pattern are reorganised as below: yiCaCiC or yvCCvC + ūn → yiCvCCūn ‘they. . . .’ The 3pl form is used as an example here, but the syllabic reorganisation applies to any suffixed form, including those in which the suffix is a vowel-initial object pronoun, e.g. āġasil + ah → āġasl-ah ‘I wash it(m)’ āsmaˁ + ič→ āsimˁ-ič ‘I hear you (f)’ What happens is that the stem vowel, which, as a result of the suffixation, is now in a short open syllable sandwiched between two CvC syllables, is deleted and a vowel is inserted between C1 and C2 to break the consonant cluster which results. The height of the inserted short vowel in the resyllabicated form depends on two things: primarily, on the need to maintain semantic distinctions within the verb root should different verbs forms become isomorphic as a consequence of phonological rules (see 4.4.2.1.1 below); secondarily, if there is no such risk, on the consonantal environment. So āsimˁ-ič ‘I hear you’ contrasts with āġasl-ah ‘I wash it’, where in each case the nature of the inserted short vowel is governed by the surrounding consonantal environment alone. The prefix vowel of the 2nd and 3rd person forms, whatever it is in the unsuffixed forms, is also as a result of suffixation in an unstressed open syllable and becomes /i/ 130 e.g. yidirs-ah ‘he studies it’, yiġasl-ah ‘he washes it’. In juncture and in rapid speech, this short unstressed /i/ is often deleted: ydirs-ah, yġasl-ah, and in the case of 2nd person and 3f prefixes the t- is assimilated to any dental and alveolar consonant which follows and a prosthetic vowel is prefixed, e.g. tidirs-ah → iddirs-ah ‘she/you (m) study it’, etc. In what follows, the 130  As we have already noted, there is a preference in the Bahraini A dialects for /i/ rather than /a/ to occur in short, open, non-final syllables except in a limited set of well-defined phonetic contexts (see 2.2.1.1.1). Johnstone (EADS 27) claims this to be a characteristic of the Gulf dialects as a group, though in the light of subsequent research it has become clear that it applies in the form proposed in EADS only to the bedouin-descended dialects of recent (c. the last 250 years) central Arabian provenance but not to dialects which had a different origin, such as the B dialects of Bahrain.

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suffixed forms are exemplified with their /i/ prefix vowel intact for the sake of clear presentation, but this vowel in very often dropped in the ways described in this paragraph in all Bahraini dialects, A and B. 4.4.2.1.1 Maintenance of semantic distinctions in suffixed forms In many roots, there exist pairs of pattern I and pattern II verbs, the latter, as we have already seen (4.1.2.1), adding a causative, intensive, extensive or ascriptive sense (among others) to the pattern I meaning. The basic form of the p-stem of the pattern II verb is yiCaCCiC-. When gender or plural inflections are suffixed to this stem to give (e.g. in the 3pl) yiCaCCiCūn, the short unstressed high vowel /i/ in open syllable which results is often131 deleted and the resulting unallowable three-consonant cluster reduced to give the form yiCaCCūn. So, for example, yidarris ‘he teaches’ + -ūn → yidarsūn ‘they teach’; yisammiˁ ‘he causes (s’one) to hear’ + -ūn → yisamˁūn. Compare these forms with their pattern I equivalents: yadris ‘he studies’ + -ūn → yidirsūn ‘they study’, and yismaˁ ‘he hears’ + -ūn → yisimˁūn ‘they hear’. It can be seen from these two examples that the difference in meaning between the 3pl pattern I form and the 3pl pattern II form (and other suffixed forms) depends entirely on the nature of the stem vowel, /i/ for pattern I and /a/ for pattern II. In all roots containing three strong radicals which have both patterns (which is a large number of roots), regardless of the consonants which fill the slots, and whatever the vowel is in the unsuffixed form of the pattern I verb, the openness/closeness of the stem vowel carries the meaning distinction between these suffixed forms. This resyllabication of all suffixed pattern I and II forms, in tandem with ablaut as the feature distinguishing the difference in meaning between them, are salient sociolinguistic markers of the A dialects as opposed to the B. Further examples from the A dialects: Pattern I unsuffixed yiCaCiC-type yiḥamil ‘he carries’

Pattern I suffixed

yiḥimlūn ‘they carry’, etc yixasir ‘he loses’ yixisrūn yixaliṣ ‘it ends, runs out’ yixilṣūn yiġarig ‘he drowns (intr.)’ yiġirgūn yixabir ‘he knows’

yixubrūn

Pattern II suffixed yiḥamlūn ‘they load’ yixasrūn ‘they cause a loss’ yixalṣūn ‘they complete’ yiġargūn ‘they drown (trans)’ yixabrūn ‘they inform’

131  This deletion and the subsequently triggered phonological changes are not obligatory in pattern II forms, but they occur often, especially in rapid speech.

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yiˁayiz ‘he is unable’ yiˁazim ‘he invites’

yiˁīzūn (< yiˁiyzūn) yiˁizmūn

yiˁayzūn ‘they disable’ yiˁazmūn ‘they host’

yiCCaC-type yilbas ‘he wears’ yirčab ‘he rides, mounts’ yikbar ‘he grows older’

yilibsūn yiričbūn yikubrūn

yišrab ‘he drinks’ yitˁab ‘he gets tired’ yigˁad ‘he sits’ yidxal ‘he enters’ yizˁal ‘he gets angry’ yiṭlaˁ ‘he comes out’ yirǧaˁ ‘he returns’ yigṭaˁ ‘he cuts’ yiḏ̣har ‘he goes out’

yiširbūn yitiˁbūn yigiˁdūn yidixlūn yiziˁlūn yiṭilˁūn yiriǧˁūn yigiṭˁūn yiḏ̣ihrūn

yilabsūn ‘they dress (s’one)’ yiračbūn ‘they fix’ yikabrūn ‘they enlarge/ deem great’ yišarbūn ‘they give to drink’ yitaˁbūn ‘they exhaust’ yigaˁdūn ‘they make to sit’ yidaxlūn ‘they send in’ yizaˁlūn ‘they annoy’ yiṭalˁūn ‘they expel’ yiraǧˁūn ‘they bring back’ yigaṭˁūn ‘they chop up’ yiḏ̣ahrūn ‘they cause to go out’

yaCCiC-type yargid ‘he goes to bed’

yirigdūn

yabriz ‘he gets ready’

yibirzūn

yabrid ‘he gets cool’ yačḏib ‘he lies’ yašrid ‘he runs away’ yafṭis ‘he dies (vulg)’ yaksir ‘he breaks’ yaflit ‘he throws’

yibirdūn yičiḏbūn yiširdūn yifiṭsūn yikisrūn yifiltūn

yatris ‘he fills’

yitirsūn

yatrik ‘he leaves’

yitirkūn

yiragdūn ‘they put (s’one) to bed’ yibarzūn ‘they prepare (s’thing)’ yibardūn ‘they make cool’ yičaḏbūn ‘they disbelieve’ yišardūn ‘they chase away’ yifaṭsūn ‘they kill (vulg.)’ yikasrūn ‘they smash’ yifaltūn ‘they throw everywhere’ yitarsūn ‘they fill to the brim’ yitarkūn ‘the leave en masse’

To this basic ablaut system, the following notes need to be appended: (i) In roots which have both pattern I and pattern II verbs and where C1 is a guttural, the pattern I suffixed forms have an /i/ stem vowel, as in the

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chart above, and the suffixed forms of pattern II have an /a/ stem vowel. So, for example, the root ḥ-m-l has the pattern I 3msng yiḥamil ‘he carries’ (cf. yiġasil) but its plural, 3pl ‘they carry’ is yiḥimlūn, not yiḥamlūn. It is the pattern II 3msng yiḥammil ‘he loads’ which has the plural yiḥamlūn.132 However, as we noted earlier, in roots with C1 guttural where there is no pattern II, e.g. ġ-s-l ‘to wash’, the pattern I 3pl maintains the /a/ of the singular form → yiġaslūn, there being no need to make a distinction with a non-existent pattern II. Other examples of this type are yixaṭbūn ‘they betrothe’, yiġaṣbūn ‘they force’, yiˁargūn ‘they sweat’, yiḥabsūn ‘they imprison’, yihalkūn ‘they die’. (ii) In other roots where there is no pattern II, and where the C1 is not a guttural, the vowel of the suffixed form is governed by consonantal environment, as already noted. If a guttural occurs as C2, the stem vowel is usually /a/, e.g. yinahbūn‘they plunder’, yiḏ̣aˁfūn ‘they get weak’, yisahrūn ‘they stay up at night’, yinaḥrūn ‘they slaughter (an animal)’. There is also a preference for /a/ where one contiguous consonant is one of /l, r, n, m/ and the other is a velar or emphatic, e.g. yiragṣūn ‘they dance’, yirakḏ̣ūn ‘they run’, yiganṣūn ‘they hunt’, yigarṣūn ‘they sting’, yikarhūn ‘they hate’, yiṭalbūn ‘they demand’, yinaḏ̣yūn133 ‘they ripen’. Otherwise, the stem vowel of suffixed pattern I forms is usually /i/, e.g. yisilbūn ‘they steal’, yifilsūn ‘they go bankrupt’, yiminˁūn ‘they prevent’, yiḏibḥūn ‘they kill’, or/u/if the surrounding consonants are a labial and a velar or /r/, e.g. yikubrūn ‘they grow older/bigger’, yirubṭūn ‘they tie’. (iii) Some roots have a pattern I and a pattern II which have similar meanings—often, but not exclusively, where the pattern II adds a sense of ‘intensiveness’ or ‘extensiveness’. In such cases, for some speakers at least, the suffixed form with /a/ is seemingly used to the exclusion of the form with /i/. So, for example, from the list of verbs above, it is sometimes difficult to tell whether yitarkūn is being used to mean ‘they leave en masse’ rather than simply ‘they leave’, and whether yikasrūn 132  The one major exception to this rule noted in the data was one of the commonest verbs, ‘to know’. In the A dialect, pattern I ‘he knows’ is invariably yiˁarf. Pattern II ‘he makes (s’thing) known’ is yiˁarrif. Both have the same suffixed plural form yiˁarfūn. Both plural forms, as far as I could see, were normally pronounced in this way (though the examples of the pattern II as suffixed p-stem were few). The reason may simply be that context and the complementation of the verb make it clear what the meaning is, so there is no need to create a distinction. Also, of course, in the case of pattern II, there is an alternative form available without deletion of the short vowel and consonant reduction if there is the risk of ambiguity: yiˁarrifūn. 133  < n-ḍ-ǧ ‘to ripen’ via /ǧ/ → /y/

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means ‘they smash’ or simply ‘they break’. There are alternative, lexical ways of indicating extensiveness or intensiveness apart from the morpho-phonological which speakers can and do use. For such speakers it may be that there is no distinction between pattern I and II verbs which have similar meanings. But in roots where the meanings of pattern I and the pattern II diverge sharply (when the latter has a causative/factitive or ascriptive sense), the difference in the stem vowel is generally maintained. 4.4.2.2 B dialects The BV dialects as a group are ‘differentiating’ in terms of their syllable structure: that is, if the p-stem vowel is /a/, the syllabic structure of suffixed forms is preserved; if it is a high vowel, the forms are resyllabicated in the same way as in the A dialects. Stem vowel /a/: yismaˁ- ‘he hears’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

sng asmaˁ tismaˁ tismaˁīn yismaˁ tismaˁ

pl nismaˁ tismaˁūn

sng aktib tiktib tikitbīn yiktib tiktib

pl niktib tikitbūn

yismaˁūn

Stem vowel /i/,/u/: yiktib- ‘he writes’ 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

yikitbūn

In the BU dialects, as a group, there is a good deal of free variation, with speakers varying between resyllabicated and non-resyllabicated forms where the stem vowel is /a/, probably as a result of A dialect contact. The forms of verbs with a high stem vowel are always resyllabicated, as in the BV and A dialects. The rule for the resyllabication of forms suffixed by a consonant-initial pronoun suffix work in the same way, e.g. (BV examples) yismaˁ-uh ‘he hears him’, but yikitb-uh ‘he writes it’.

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4.4.3 p-stem prefix of patterns V and VI The A dialect form of the prefix in pattern V and VI is yti-, tti-, nti- whereas the B dialects have have yit-, tit-, nit-,134 e.g. A dialects ytiḥaččā ttiḥačča ntiḥačča

B dialects yitḥačča titḥačča nitḥačča

‘he speaks’ ‘you(m)/she speaks’ ‘we speak’

4.4.4 Syllable structure of p-stem pattern VIII A further point of A–B difference is in the syllable structure of verbs of pattern VIII which have a guttural in C1 position. In the A dialects, which, it will be remembered, historically underwent ‘the ghawa syndrome’ (see 2.6.4), the 1sng form is a candidate for resyllabication by this rule, e.g. āḥtarmah ‘I respect him’, āḥtariš ‘I do odd jobs’. Such forms are sometimes pronounced āḥatirmah, āḥatriš though even at the time of field-work, this tendency was becoming obsolescent.135 4.4.5 Aspectual/modal particles In common with all Gulf dialects, all Bahraini dialects have a b- prefix136 which is attached to p-stem verbs to express immediate future, volition, or proximal intent, e.g. lēn b-yiṭlaˁ, mā yigdar yiṭlaˁ (5) ‘When it tried to get out, it couldn’t’. ramat əb rūḥ-ha, b-itmūt (5) ‘It threw itself down, it was about to die’. 134  This is one of a number of two-choice variables also found in southern Iraq (ING2 1–13) in which the Bahraini A dialect variant is the same as the ‘R’ (‘rural’) variant in S. Iraq, and the B dialect variant is the same as the ‘U’ (‘urban’) variant. However, the correspondence is not perfect: the alternative forms of the s-stem verb in -ēt etc. e.g. kitbēt ‘I wrote’, gālēt ‘I said’ is one feature in which the Bahraini A dialect variant corresponds to the southern Iraqi ‘U’, not the ‘R’ variant. 135  A similar but more widespread process of syllabic rejigging affecting all pattern VIII verbs, e.g. yišitġil for yištaġil, is noted for the dialects of the Omani Bāṭina Coast in BRO 22–24. 136  See 5.2.9.2.1.

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Morphology (ii)

Some BV dialects (but no A dialect) use the d- prefix for continuous/habitual aspect,137 e.g. kil mā bēn ṯalāṯat šuhūr d-yišrab-ha (Manāma 1) ‘He would drink it (= purgative) over a period of three months’. gāˁid is also used as a verbal prefix particle in all Bahraini dialects, as in many others, to express continuous or iterative processes,138 e.g. gāˁid yimrax-ni u abūy yirūḥ il-manāma (19) ‘He kept on massaging me while my father went off to Manāma (sc to find a doctor)’. 4.5

The Strong Verb: Imperative

The imperative of the strong verb is formed as follows in the A dialects: m iktib!

f kitbay! or kitbi!

pl kitbaw! or kitbu!

The forms in -ay and -aw139 are pre-pausal, whereas the forms in -i and -u are used by all speakers in juncture (but also now in pre-pausal position by many ‘educated’ speakers). In the B dialects: m iktib!

f iktibi!

pl iktibu!

In the speech of BA speakers unaffected by dialects from outside the Gulf, the negative imperative retains the final -n of the 2fsng and 2pl indicative forms (even with a suffixed object pronoun).

137  See also 5.2.9.2.3. It is similarly used in the Muslim Baghdadi dialect (BLA 115–116; ERW 139–140). 138  See 5.2.9.3.13 for more detail. 139  These forms are also noted as typical for Najd in SOW2 75.

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The negative forms are the same in all dialects for verbs with stem vowel /i/: m lā tiktib!

f lā tikitbīn!

pl lā tikitbūn!

In verbs with stem vowel /a/, the suffixed forms also follow the syllabication pattern of the indicative forms, viz A: lā tisimˁūn! ‘Don’t (pl) hear!’, lā tisimˁ-ah! ‘Don’t (m) hear him!’, etc. but B: lā tismaˁūn! lā tismaˁ-ah! etc. In some BV dialects (but no A dialect) a d- prefix can be used with the positive imperative for emphasis,140 e.g. d-rūḥi yumma trayyagi! (11) ‘Off you go (f), my dear, and have (f) your breakfast!’ d-igdaˁ! (14) ‘Do eat (m)!’ 4.6

The Strong Verb: Participles

The active and passive participles are formally similar to those of other dialects, e.g. active: ḥāmil/ḥāmla/ḥāmlīn passive: maḥmūl/maḥmūla/maḥmūlīn 4.6.1 The active participle The ap occurs frequently in the Bahraini dialects. It can be used as a verb, most often with present continuous or perfective meaning,141 or it can function as a noun. So in the above example ḥāmil etc. can mean ‘carrying’, ‘has/having carried’ or ‘carrier’. Like any verb or noun, the active participle can have object and possessive pronouns suffixed to it. When it does, the A and B dialects differ morphologically in their treatment of the two constructions. In the A dialects they are identical, but in the B dialects the verbal and nominal functions of active participles are differentiated by the presence or absence of an infix 140  Also used in all Baghdadi dialects, Muslim, Christian and Jewish with this function (BLA 117; ERW 140). 141  See 5.2.4 for a discussion of the tense-colouring of the ap, which depends partly on context and partly on verb type.

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between the ap and the suffixed pronoun. This is one of the most salient differences, sociolinguistically speaking, between the A and B dialects. The A dialectal paradigm for both the nominal and verbal uses of the participle is as follows, with ḥāmil the ap of ḥamal ‘to carry, bear’:

m f pl

+ vowel-initial pronoun (e.g. -ah) ḥāml-ah ḥāmlit-ah ḥāmlīn-ah

+ consonant-initial pronoun (e.g. -ha) ḥāmil-ha or ḥāmla-ha ḥāmlat-ta142 ḥāmlīn-ha

Out of any context, the exemplified singular forms can either mean ‘(X) is ­carrying/has carried it/him/her’ or ‘its/his/her carrier’, but the plural form would be more likely to be interpreted as a verb ‘(Xs) are carrying/have carried them’. Where the suffixed pronoun is consonant-initial, there are alternative forms, as in the chart, but the m ḥāmil-ha type forms are supplanting ḥāmla-ha-type forms.143 This change seems to be occurring in all pattern I finally-weak and hollow verbs: bānya-ha ‘. . . (m) has built it’ is being replaced by bānī-ha, and čāyfa-ha ‘. . . (m) has seen it’ by čāyif-ha. The f forms are as in the strong verb, bānyit-ah, bānyat-ta, and čāyfit-ah, čāyfat-ta, etc. In the B dialects, when the ap has verbal force, but never when it is a noun, there is an obligatory -in(n)- infix between the ap and any object pronoun suffix.144 The infix has a single /n/ where the suffix is consonant-initial, a doubled/nn/ where it is vowel-initial. In the pl, as in the A dialects, the suffix is simply added directly to the pl form in -īn. So ‘. . . is/are carrying/has/have carried it/him her’ in the B dialects (using data from a BV dialect as an example) is:

m f pl

+ vowel-initial pronoun (e.g. -uh) ḥāml-inn-uh ḥāmlat-inn-uh ḥāmlīn-uh

+ consonant-initial (e.g. -ha) ḥāml-in-ha ḥāmlat-in-ha ḥāml-īn-ha

142  Via assimilation of the /h/ to the /t/ of the ending (the /h/ does not otherwise assimilate). 143  It is unclear whether the alternative m forms are from what were originally different A dialects, or whether the ḥāmla-ha type form was the ‘original’, which is now being replaced by the regionally more standard ḥāmil-ha type. 144  See 1.3.1.2 and 1.5 for a discussion of the origin and regional geographical distribution of the infixed ap forms.

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Weak and hollow roots follow the same pattern, e.g. bān-inn-uh/bān-in-ha, ‘. . . is building/has built it’, etc. But where the ap has nominal meaning, it always lacks the infix, so (BU examples): ḥasan mˁallim-inn-ah ‘Hasan has taught him’ contrasts with ḥasan mˁallim-ah ‘Hasan is his teacher’. 4.6.2 The passive participle This is formed as in other Arabic dialects and CLA. Pattern I hollow verbs are treated like strong ones, however, so that ‘sold’ is mabyūˁ not mabīˁ < bāˁ/yibīˁ ‘to sell’ (see 4.9.3 below for further details). 4.7

The Verbal Noun

4.7.1 Pattern I The forms are exemplified below. Certain root-types are associated with certain nominal forms: geminate and hollow roots normally have CaCC, CaCCa and CaCāC, sometimes all three; CaCaCān is also a common form for the verbal noun of hollow verbs. In other cases there is a meaning-type associated with certain verbal noun forms: C(i)CāCa for occupations, CaCāCa and C(u) CūCa abstract qualities, as in other varieties of Arabic. CaC(i)C CiC(i)C CuC(u)C CaCaC CaCCa C(u)CiCa CiCCa CaCāC

ṭabx, ṭabix ‘cooking’; falt ‘throwing, scattering’; tars ‘filling’; rafˁ ‘raising’; fačč ‘opening’; šōf ‘seeing’; čōl (BV) ‘eating’; maši ‘walking’ čiṯr, čiṯir, kufr (B) ‘amount’; ṣidǧ (A), ṣidg, ṣidk (BV) ‘telling the truth’; širb ‘drinking’; ḥiss ‘sensing, feeling’ kubr, kubur, čubr (B) ‘growth’; ḥufḏ ̣  ‘preservation, protection’; ḥukm ‘ruling, controlling’; ḏ̣ulm ‘oppression’; kufr ‘blaspheming, disbelief in Islam’; ruxṣ ‘cheapness’ sahar ‘staying up at night’; kahar (B) ‘vexation’; gabaḍ ‘getting, obtaining’; malal ‘boredom’ šabˁa ‘satiation’; dašša ‘entering’; dazza ‘pushing, giving a present’; ǧēba/ǧāba ‘bringing’; rōḥa ‘going’; ǧayya ‘coming’; nōma ‘sleeping’; ḥadwa ‘urging on, encouraging (by singing)’ bġiya ‘desire’ bilša ‘mess, calamity’; ǧiyya ‘coming’ čalāf ‘turning over of soil’; ġarās ‘planting’; ṣarām ‘harvesting (fruit)’; ḥašāš ‘cutting (grass, crops)’; ḥadāg ‘fishing with a line’; ġašāš ‘cheating’; rawāḥ ‘going’

Morphology (ii)

CaCūC(a) C(u)CūC CaCāCa C(i)CāC C(i)CāCa C(a/i)CīC C(a/i)CīCa C(u)CūCa C(a/i)CCān CaCaCān maCCaC maCCiC maCCaCa

205

akūl (BV) ‘eating’; sabūḥ ‘swimming, bathing’; gayūla/gaylūla145 ‘siesta’ blūġ ‘attaining puberty’; ġrūr ‘behaving conceitedly’; slūm ‘setting (of the sun)’ ġašāma ‘naivety’; fawāra (B) (< ṯawāra) ‘clumsiness’, ‘stupidity’; ṭarāra ‘begging’, ṭarāša ‘delivering messages, running errands’; kalāfa ‘trouble, hassle’ rgād ‘sleeping’; ṣyām ‘fasting’; bināy ‘(act of) building’ ḥiyāča ‘weaving’; ṣyāġa ‘gold-smithing’; bḥāra ‘sea-faring’; bgāla ‘selling vegetables’ barīx ‘pulling a boat in on a rope’; wanīn ‘moaning’; ḥarīč ‘movement’; sfīf ‘plaiting, braiding (palm-fronds)’ nizīfa ‘baling (water) out’; brīxa ‘pulling a boat in on a rope’; ġalība ‘defeat’; ḥarīǧa ‘fire, conflagration’ rṭūba ‘humidity’; ybūsa ‘dry weather’; ḥurūra ‘period of hot weather’; ḍrūra ‘harm, hurt; possession by ǧinn’ dikrān (B) ‘remembrance’; ṣīḥān ‘screaming’; ḥilfān ‘swearing an oath’; šaddān ‘work, effort’ šayalān ‘removal’; ṭawafān ‘going around, passing through’; xawarān ‘stirring’ (hollow verb pattern) mabāt ‘spending the night’ mabīt ‘spending the night’ maḥabba ‘love’

4.7.2 Derived pattern verbal nouns Derived pattern verbal nouns that are original to the Bahraini and other EA dialects, and not commonly found in other Arabic dialects are exemplified below. Typically, these patterns are used for technical terms associated with pearl-diving, fishing and farming, and other aspects of the pre-industrial culture now obsolescent or obsolete. With the disappearance of these aspects of traditional Bahraini culture, the morphological patterns that carried the words that described them have also virtually disappeared; in other cases, neologisms have replaced the older forms of common non-technical terms e.g. ˁināya for tiˁnā, bidāya for tibdā, ḥalāqa for taḥsūn.

145  Formally this is a pattern I verbal noun, but no pattern I verb was recorded for it, only the pattern II gayyal ‘to take a mid-day nap’. Similarly bgāla ‘selling vegetables’ corresponds to a pattern II verb only, baggal.

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For patterns II, in addition to the now dominant pattern taCCīC, there are: II

tvCCūC(a):

tiCCāC:

taCCiCa taCCīCa147

II/III

CvCCāC148

taˁlūm ‘teaching’; tasbūḥ ‘washing, bathing’; tasyūr ‘visiting’; tasmūˁ ‘listening’;146 taḥsūn ‘barbering, shaving’; taslūma ‘(delivering of) bride’s dowry’; taklūf ‘burdening, causing a nuisance’ tisyār lit ‘despatching’ (type of financial arrangement for funding pearl-diving); tislāḥ ‘repair’; tirdād ‘movement to and fro, repetitive movement’; tiswā ‘doing, deed’; tisgām ‘payment made to divers at the end of the pearling season to tide them over to the next’; tiḥlā ‘decorating’; tibrā ‘collecting of fish or clams from a fish-trap’: tirbā ‘raising (of children)’; tiˀdā’ ‘covering, repaying of a debt’; tibnā ‘weeding and soil-preparation for planting’; tisnā ‘transplanting (of seedlings)’; tibdā ‘beginning’; tiˁnā ‘care’ tasgiya ‘watering, irrigating’; tasniya ‘transplanting (of seedlings)’, taḥliya ‘sweetening (soil with manure)’; taklifa ‘expense’ taǧlisa ‘seating of a bride while she is painted and hennaed in preparation for her wedding’; taḥmīda ‘thanks-giving prayer recited by child on completing memorisation of the Qurˀān’; taˁčīfa ‘curling and plaiting of a woman’s hair’; tarwīḥa ‘regular visiting’; talbīsa ‘covering up (of women)’; taslīma ‘delivery of a dowry’ (variant of taslūma) giffāl/ǧiffāl ‘ending of the pearling season’; nissāl ‘washing and coiffing of (a woman’s) hair’; ḥuwwāl ‘removal of a new bride from her father’s to her husband’s family’s house’; liyyān ‘slackening away (of an anchor rope)’; ˁubbāṭ ‘idleness, unemployment; running out (of a commodity)’; ˀammār ‘giving of an order’; ǧabbāb/yabbāb ‘ululation’; ṣaffāg ‘rhythmic clapping’

146  Recorded only in the sense of ‘listening to Shīˁī hagiographies’ at the mātam. The associated verb is a pattern V, tsammaˁ. 147  This pattern appears to be the ‘unitary’ variant of taCCīC. However, the words exemplified with the particular meaning given seemed only to exist in the form with a final -a. 148  The verb pattern associated with this verbal noun pattern is normally II, e.g. gaffal, nassal, etc., but in one case, ˀammār, seemingly < pattern III: āmar ‘to order’ (a common A dialect variant of pattern I amar, and also meaning ‘to order’).

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Interestingly, some of these obsolescent dialectal forms—tvCCūC, tiCCāC, CvCCāC—are noted in grammars of CLA as Classical forms which were ‘original’ but were supplanted over time.149 Some pattern II verbs have more than one verbal noun, each with different ranges of use e.g. tisyār and tasyūr, tiḥlā and taḥliya (see above for meanings). III

m(u)CāCaC

mrāmaḥ ‘kicking, struggling’; mˁābal ‘caring for’; mḥāfaz ‘pushing and shoving’; msāˁad ‘helping’; mbādal ‘exchanging’ mṣāba ‘pitching, rolling (of a boat)’; mbārak ‘blessing’

This pattern III verbal noun, which lacks the final -a of the CLA form, and is identical with the pattern III passive participle, was common at the time of field-work in the speech of the uneducated, and seems to be a local innovation. Some pattern III verbs were, however, recorded with the final -a, e.g. msāsara ‘whispering’ mǧāwaba ‘correspondence, letter-exchange’. Another form recorded was CvCāC used with verbs for which it is not the normal pattern III verbal noun in CLA/MSA, e.g. ḥiwāl ‘attempt, try’ (not muḥāwala) < ḥāwal. Contrast this with the pattern II verbal noun from the same root ḥuwwāl < ḥawwal (see above) ‘to remove a bride to her new husband’s house’. Pattern IV has been almost entirely lost in Gulf Arabic (see 4.1.2.3) but a few verbal nouns survive and not, apparently, as ‘learned borrowings’, e.g. IV

iCCāC

ifrāǧ ‘relaxation, relief from work’; imlā ‘dictation’150

As with pattern II, unusual pattern V verbal noun forms occur in the Arabian dialects that also occur in early CLA texts, such as tiCvCCāC,151 e.g. tiwissāˁ ‘room, means’, timinnāˁ ‘protection, strength’, tiṭirrāˁ ‘hospitable reception’, timittāˁ ‘consumption of food’, all attested for Najd,152 taˁallām ‘learning’, taˁakkāl ‘hopping’ for Ṣanˁāˀ.153 Similar forms are also recorded for S. Yemen,

149  WR Vol I 115–116. 150  This is basically a term only used in school lessons, and marginal as a native form. However, it does occur in the speech of those educated only to a basic level, and so is included here. 151  WR Vol. I 116. 152  KURP 349, 308, 187, 300 respectively. 153  WAT 234.

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e.g. tiqirrāb ‘being carried’,154 and northern Oman, e.g. tilibbīsa155 ‘dressing up’. None of these pattern V forms, however, was recorded in Bahrain. VIII: A verbal noun pattern muCtaCaC, identical with the normal passive participle of pattern VIII, was recorded in many BV villages in one particular verb, ištara ‘to buy’, e.g. mištarā-h baˁad mu ǧāli (41) ‘Buying it isn’t expensive’ ˁašra dīnār mištarā-h, mu ǧābat-ah (22) ‘It’s ten dinars to buy it, not (including) transporting it here’ MSA-type verbal nouns of pattern V, VI, VII, VIII, X do occur in Bahrain, but were not recorded in uneducated speech. A pattern I verbal noun tends to be used instead, so, e.g. from V taḥačča ‘to talk’ we get ḥači ‘talk, gossip’, from VI tahāwāš ‘to argue’, hōša and hawāš, from VI taḥābab ‘to love one another’ we get maḥabba and from X istaǧann ‘to go mad’ we get ǧnūn ‘madness’. 4.7.3 Quadriliteral verbal nouns The default quadriliteral verbal noun pattern is CaCCvCa, e.g. xarbuṭa ‘nonsense’, tartara ‘idle words, chattering’, dandara ‘bickering, arguing’, ṭarbuga ‘skiving, backsliding’, ḥarḥaša ‘persistent cough’, gašmara ‘playing tricks, joking’, čandisa ‘bowing the head, leaning over’, and xamxama ‘gobbling up (food); sweeping and clearing’. There are a few different and rarer forms, e.g. from fandas ‘to grab, dig into’ (food)’, we get findūs ‘handful, large lump’, and from the verb ǧarbal ‘to confuse’, ġirbāl ‘confusion’. Verbs of the form CēCaC/CōCaC, which are treated here as quadriliterals in which C2 is /y/ or /w/, form their verbal noun on the pattern mCēCaC/mCōCaC, similar to that of pattern III, e.g. mṭērab/mṭōrab ‘type of dance performed by women at weddings’, mdēram/mdōram ‘application of lipstick’, mdōxal ‘interweaving (of threads, palm fronds, etc.)’. The verbs gargaˁ and gargaš both mean ‘to shake, clatter, rattle’ and are used to describe a popular Gulf custom similar to children’s Hallowe’en ‘trick or treating’. They have the unusual verbal nouns (among others) of gargaˁūn and grēgšūn, but only in reference to this popular custom, and these nouns have 154  GLOS 2471. 155  Recorded by me in Sanaw, northern Oman, with very pronounced imāla of the/ā/; REIN 169 records the same word as tlübbāsa along with a dozen or so other examples of this form.

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come to designate the sweets the children receive as a treat as they go around the neighbourhood rattling and banging their drums. 4.8

The Geminate Verb

S-stem forms with consonant-initial suffixes are on the usual dialectal pattern CaCCēC, e.g. raddēt, ḥabbēna, tammētaw,156 etc. Those with vowel-initial suffixes are as for the strong verb. There is elision of the short vowel between the doubled consonant in the ap of pattern I, e.g. hābb rīḥ ‘dextrous, expert’ (< habb ‘to blow’), ṣāxxa l-bilād ‘the village was quiet’ (< ṣaxx ‘to be silent’). But in patterns III and VI, there is no vowel elision, e.g. nfārir min bēt ila bēt (Manāma 7) ‘We would go around from one house to another’ ḥāǧaǧō-ni, gālaw mā nsaǧǧil-ha (Manāma 10) ‘They argued with me and said they wouldn’t register her’ bass čidi yitḥāǧaǧ ˁala kās māy (28) ‘He’ll argue the toss about a glass of water’ hāda l-baṣal mšādid ˁala l-mā (29) ‘These onions are resistant to the (salty) water’ 4.9

The Weak Verb

In this section, it can be assumed that the Bahraini weak verb behaves in the same way as the strong verb unless otherwise described. 4.9.1 Initial /ˀ/ In the s-stem of pattern I, two common verbs lose the initial /ˀ/ in both the A and B dialects, and in the A dialects lose the initial vowel as well: A dialects kal ‘he ate’, xaḏ ‘he took’ in contrast to B akal, axad. In the A dialects, these verbs behave in the s-stem like finally-weak verbs, viz kalēt ‘I/you (m) ate’, kalēti ‘you(f) ate’, etc; in the B dialects like normal strong verbs. In other verbs, the lost /ˀ/ is replaced by vowel length, e.g. āman ‘to be safe’, āmar ‘to order’. In all 156  With the special forms noted for the B dialects, e.g. tammētūn, etc.

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cases, the p-stem is of the form yāCCvC, e.g. yākil (BV yāčil), yāmin and the ap mākil (māčil), māxiḏ, māmin, māmir. In patterns II and III, /ˀ/ has either been (a) lost, e.g. aḏḏan ‘to call to prayer’ or (b) replaced by a semi-vowel, e.g. ­waddam (B)/yaddam (A) ‘to eat a meal; catch (a fish)’, wānas ‘to keep s’one company’. In case (a), in the p-stem, /ˀ/ reappears intervocalically: yiˀaḏḏin, yiˀakkil. In pattern VII it is preserved, e.g. inˀaxaḏ, inˀakal, but in X, where it is preceded by a vowel, it is lost, e.g. istānas ‘to be content’. In pattern I imperatives, the main forms are: A dialects ikil, ikli, iklaw; B kil, ikli, iklu (but with č, not k in the BV dialects). 4.9.2 Initial /w/ The /w/ is preserved in the pattern I p-stem in all dialects, becoming yō- or yū- e.g. yōguf, yōṣal, yūˁa, and in the imperative, e.g. ōguf! ‘stop!’ One verb of pattern VIII fails to assimilate it: iwtaˁa ‘to become aware of’ (see 4.1.2.7). 4.9.3 Medial /w/, /y/ The vowel of the pattern I imperative is always long: gūl ‘say’, etc. In the passive participle, /y/ and /w/ are treated as strong consonants (with /w/→/y/), e.g. madyūs ‘trodden on’, mabyūˁ ‘sold’, maǧyūb ‘brought’, mašyūf ‘seen’, mabyūg ‘stolen’, mafyūḥ, ‘cooked’, matyūḥ ‘thrown down’. The s-stem forms of patterns VIII and X behave as pattern I, e.g. iḥtiǧt ‘I needed’, istafadt ‘I benefitted’ are like gilt ‘I said’; but see 4.4.1.1 for alternative A forms of the type iḥtāǧēt, istafādēt, gālēt. 4.9.4 Final /w/, /y/ There are two types: the /a/-stem-vowel type, e.g. nisa, yinsa and the /i/-stemvowel type, e.g. miša, yimši. Verbs which in CLA have a final glottal stop lose it and are treated as /a/-stem-vowel type, e.g. gara, yigra ‘to read’, ṭara, yiṭra ‘to occur to’ and CLA final-/w/ verbs are treated like the /i/-stem-vowel type, e.g. ḥaba, yaḥbi ‘to crawl’, daˁa, yidˁi ‘to invite, call for’. One verb is differently classified by the A and B dialects: A baġa, yabġi/yabbi, B baġa, yibġa (and variants yibba, yubba, yumba) ‘to want’. A peculiarity of the B dialects is that, in the s-stem of verbs the /a/-type, the radical /y/ shows up in 3rd person forms, e.g. nisyat, nisyaw.157 In the p-stem, the endings of the suffixed forms have the mid-vowels -ēn and -ōn, e.g. tinsēn, yinsōn, tigrēn, yigrōn, tibbēn, yibbōn.

157  This is typical also of the sedentary dialects of northern Oman, to which the Bahraini B dialects are historically related.

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Morphology (ii)

In common with the generality of Gulf dialects, all Bahraini dialects have m imperatives of derived pattern final weak forms which lack a final -i,158 e.g. pattern II: wall! ‘clear off!’, saww! ‘do!’, ḥimm! ‘heat!’, waṣṣ! ‘order!’; pattern III: nād! ‘call!’, pattern VI: taˁāl ‘come here!’; pattern VIII: ištik ‘complain!’ ištir! ‘buy!’. Pattern I verbs insert an epenthetic vowel, e.g. imiš (variant miš) ‘go!’, igir ‘read!’, irim ‘throw!’, ibin ‘build!’, išiw ‘roast!’,159 ġid! 160 (BV example) ‘go!’, but the A dialects only (like Najdi dialects) allow iCC imperative forms in pattern I finally weak verbs, e.g. ibg ‘stay!’, imš ‘go!’. All these apocopated forms are now becoming obsolete, replaced by the ibga/igra/irmi-type common to most Arabic dialects. The ap forms of these verbs are formed in the normal way, but on suffixation, as already noted in 4.6.1, the A dialects have alternative forms, e.g. bānī-h ‘he has built it (m)’, which is now the normal type of form, versus the bānya-h type, in which the /y/ of the root functions as a strong consonant, a type of form which is now more or less obsolete. In the B dialects, the final -i of the ap of final weak verbs, as in bāni, which is underlyingly long (bāniy), is kept short when the infixation, peculiar to the B dialects when the ap has verbal force, occurs: bāni-nn-ah ‘he has built it’. In plural participles, the final /y/ is retained, exactly like a strong consonant e.g. miltihiyīn ‘busy, distracted (pl)’. 4.10

Irregular Verbs

The verb ya (A)/ǧa (B) ‘to come’: sng 1 2m 2f 3m 3f

s-stem A yīt yīt yīti ya yat/yāt

B ǧīt ǧīt ǧītīn ǧa ǧat

p-stem A ayi tyi tyīn iyi tyi

B aǧi iǧǧi iǧǧīn iǧi iǧǧi

158  Imperative m forms lacking the final -i are also typical of Ingham’s southern Iraqi/ Khūzistāni ‘nomadic’ forms (ING2 38). 159  Note also ˁaṭ ‘give!’ This verb is a pattern I verb in BA. 160  In Bahrain, the verb ġada in the sense ‘to go’ is a stereotypical marker of the BV dialects— I never recorded it in BU speech (and not, of course, in the A dialects). Interestingly, Ingham (ING2 38) notes it in the imperative form iġid! ‘go!’ in the ‘nomadic’ dialects of Khūzistān.

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yīna yītaw yaw

ǧīna ǧītūn ǧaw

nyi tyūn iyūn

inǧi iǧǧūn iǧūn

In the A dialect, the s-stem 3pl, when suffixed, has forms of the type yawwō-k ‘they came to you’ as a variant of yō-k. The ap forms are (A) yāy/yāya/yāyīn, B ǧāy, etc. There is no imperative form: taˁāl etc. is used instead.

CHAPTER 5

Syntax 5.1

The Noun Phrase (NP)

5.1.1 Definiteness The definite article is normally (i)l-, in a few cases (a)l-, e.g. al-ḥīn ‘now’. Before nouns and adjectives whose first syllable is unstressed and open, and hence often deleted by regular rule (2.6.6), an epenthetic schwa is inserted, e.g. l-əsmiča ‘the (single) fish’, l-əkwēt ‘Kuwait’ (2.6.1.1). As well as to textually ‘known’ entities, the definite article is normally used when referring to general concepts, e.g. il-ḥadāg ‘fishing with a line’, il-ġōṣ ‘pearl-diving’. As in other varieties of Arabic, proper names in BA are ipso facto grammatically definite whether or not they have the definite article prefixed to them, so, e.g. ˁimān il-ǧinūbi ‘southern Oman’, əḥsēn il-maḍlūm ‘Hussein the Oppressed’ (in B hagiography) and ˁīsa l-kabīr ‘Isa the Great’ (in sheikhly honorifics), in which the attributive adjective must be marked with the definite article. Again, as in other varieties, common nouns in BA are made into grammatically definite NPs in three ways: (a) by having the definite article prefixed to them, e.g. il-bēt ‘the house’; (b) by having a possessive pronoun enclitic suffixed to them, e.g. bēt-ha ‘her house’; (c) by being the first element in an annexation structure in which the final element is definite, e.g. bēt il-bint ‘the girl’s/daughter’s house’, bēt bint-i ‘my daughter’s house’, bēt bint iš-šēx ‘the sheikh’s daughter’s house’, maḥall dagāg l-ərwēd ‘the place where the radishes are planted’ (lit ‘(the) place (of the) planting (of the) radishes’). As we shall see below, however, BA has some types of definite noun phrase that are not found in CLA/MSA but which are also attested in other Arabic dialects. Attributive adjectives follow their nouns and generally agree with them in definiteness, e.g. dūlāb ˁatīg ‘an old farm’, id-dūlāb il-ˁatīg ‘the old farm’. However, a distinguishing feature of BA and some neighbouring dialects (all those of Baghdad)1 is that the definite article may optionally be omitted on the noun of the NP in such constructions. Some selected examples from the BA data:

1  ERW 365, 367; BLA 126–127; and ALT 79.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004302631_006

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M head noun: waḍaḥ iṯ-ṯāni ‘the second watering’ (17) ṭābik il-fāni ‘the second floor’ (41) yōm il-fāni ‘the next day’ (28) yild il-fālif ‘the third layer of skin’ (1) ṣōb l-əǧnūbi ‘the southern side’ (1) wagf l-əǧnūbi ‘the endowment land to the south’ (17) bēt iš-šarki ‘the eastern house’ (41) bāb iš-šargi2 ‘the eastern gate’ (30) yōm il-flāni ‘such-and-such day’ (48) mēl il-flāni ‘such-and-such nautical bearing’ (48) ġōṣ il-ˁōd ‘the main pearl-diving season’ (48) kamb il-ǧidīd ‘the new camp’ (28) ḥōḏ ̣ il-ǧāff ‘the dry dock’ (48) ṣatt il-faṭīr ‘the fresh lead powder’ (Manāma 7) ḥaǧar iṣ-ṣamm ‘the solid stone’ (15) ṣandūg l-əmbayyaḍ ‘the tin-plated chest’ (48) F head noun: galbat il-fānya ‘the other side (of the coin)’ (Manāma 2) guffat il-fānya ‘the other basket’ (16) ˁaṣā-t3 il-fānya ‘the other stick’ (20) nōbat iṯ-ṯānya ‘the second time’ (48) sint il-ǧāya ‘next year’ (Manāma 10) sāˁat l-əmbāraka ‘the blessed hour’ (Manāma 8) Pl head noun: banāt l-əkbār ‘the older girls’ (45) fanāǧīl l-əkbār ‘large-size cups’ (5) 2  Used in the idiom ṭallaˁ-ni min bāb iš-šargi ‘he left me penniless, in the lurch’ (lit ‘he threw me out of the eastern gate’). 3  If the noun ends in -a but has no underlying -t, it is treated in the same way as the f nouns which do have it. This epenthetic -t on all nouns ending in -a/-ā in such noun-adj constructions makes them resemble another category of the definite NP in which it occurs, viz (b) above, noun + possessive pronoun enclitic constructions, e.g. š-maˁnā-t-ha? (44) ‘what does it mean?’; mitġarbilīn fi dinyā-t-hum (Manāma 6) ‘at their wits end in that life of theirs’.

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hāfāt l-əmṭarbalīn ‘elasticated pants (for babies)’ (14) ṯyāb il-bīḏ ̣ ‘white clothes’ (Manāma 8) This construction closely resembles the annexation structure (category (c) above—see 5.1.4 below). Ordinal modifiers such as ṯāni, ṯāliṯ, etc. and those of direction and time, e.g. šargi, ǧinūbi, ǧāy, etc. (what might be generically termed basic relational or deictic modifiers) are especially likely to appear in the adjectival position in this construction, as is the case also in the Baghdadi dialects.4 A further point of similarity with annexation structures is the phonological marking of head nouns with the -t ending, e.g. sint il-ǧāya ‘next year’: this underlying -t is pronounced in the juncture between the noun and the definite adjective, as it is in annexation structures between two nouns, e.g. madrasat il-banāt ‘the girls’ school’. As well as in Baghdadi Arabic, this construction is also quite widely attested in geographically and chronologically distant Arabic dialects (e.g. Palestinian,5 Lebanese,6 Andalusian7), which suggests that it may be an old feature which speakers of BA shared with speakers of these dialects in the period before they reached their present locations.8 5.1.2 Indefiniteness Indefinite nouns are those which lack the formal features of definite ones (i.e. (a), (b) or (c) above): so bēt ‘a house’, bēt tāǧir ‘a merchant’s house’, bēt wāsiˁ ‘a large house’ are all indefinite NPs. The BA dialects, like others in eastern, south-eastern, south and central Arabia, have a dialectal form of tanwīn—that is, the optional suffixation of -in (or simply -n if the noun ends in an underlyingly long vowel) to an indefinite noun, whether singular or plural, and irrespective of whether that noun was a diptote or a triptote in CLA. The scope of this feature differs geographically—Najdi dialects9 make more use of it and in a wider variety of constructions than do the Gulf dialects—and stylistically—it occurs more often in dialect poetry, riddles, adages and other formulaic utterances than it does in unprepared speech. In the everyday speech of the most elderly and uneducated speakers of BA it is not very common—I 4  ERW 365, 367, BLA 126. 5  BAU 105–6. 6  FEGH 134–136. 7  CORR 123. 8  This is the position espoused in FEGH 135, who notes the contortions the mediaeval grammarians went through to try and explain the examples they found of it in the CLA of that period and before—even in the language of the Qurˀān. 9  ING 47–52.

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recorded 50–60 instances of it in over a hundred hours of speech. The commonest construction in which it appeared in my data was the N-Adj phrase, in which it is suffixed to the noun as what Owens10 has dubbed an ‘adnominal linker’, e.g. bint-in zēna ‘a nice girl’, māy-in bārda ‘cold water’, rayyāl-in ˁayūz ‘an old man’. Collocations of this type with zēn in the adjectival position are the single most common context of its occurrence. See section 3.7 for extensive examples, which will not be repeated here. Like the absence of the definite article on the noun in definite NPs with attributive adjectives, this too would seem to be an ancient feature, as it occurs in the Arabic dialects of many of the earliest areas of the Islamic Empire to be conquered and settled—Andalusia, Central Asia—and in very much the same form and with the same syntactic distribution as it has in the dialects of contemporary Arabia, whose ancient populations were the source of the conquerors/settlers.11 The ordinal number/modifier wāḥid/waḥda can be used both pronominally and in adjectival position to denote an unspecified indefinite noun (see also 3.3.2), e.g. As a pronoun: ˁind-i waḥda ḥaggalna min-ha wāḥid yingāl lih . . . (1) ‘I have a wife (lit ‘one (f)’) from whom I sired a son (lit ‘one (m)’) called . . . .’ wāḥid ism-əh dōxati (44) ‘A man (lit ‘one (m)’) named Docherty’ As an adjective: ˁaṭṭaltū-ni sāˁa wāḥid12 (13) ‘You’ve delayed me by an hour’ But it can also occur before the noun, when it functions as an indefinite article, e.g. wāḥid ṯāni (Manāma 6) ‘Someone else/another (one)’ (lit ‘a second’)

10  O 102ff. 11  See HOL6 and section 1.5 above for Central Asian examples. 12  sāˁa waḥda would mean ‘one o’clock’.

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il-fōrman wāḥid ˁaǧmi ism-ah əmḥammad (44) ‘The foreman was a Persian called Muhammad’ ˁində-na wāḥid ˁabd yigāl lih . . . (44) ‘We had a black man called . . .’ wāḥid nōxaḏa ṭallag ˁalēhum inna-hum yiḥawlūn killə-hum čiḏi mā ˁalēhum libs (48) ‘A (certain) captain swore that he would divorce his wife unless they all dived without (protective) clothing’ fīh wāḥid bāyig rāḥ yibba yirkub ǧidār . . . (Manāma 2) ‘There was a robber who went off, intending to climb up on top of a wall . . .’ This usage is reminiscent of Iraqi fadd/fard,13 and in fact fadd did occur in this sense, but only (A dialect) in the phrase fadd is-siḥḥa ‘a dried date’ (sc ‘a date or two’): ḥaṭṭō li-hum fadd is-siḥḥa u kalō-ha (48) ‘They served them a date (or two), and they ate them’ wāḥid/waḥda has a related use in quantifications, where it means ‘unit’, as in; – čam wāḥid tabġi? – fnaˁšar waḥda (28) ‘How many do you want?’ (lit ‘how many ones . . . ?’) ‘Twelve’ (lit ‘twelve ones’) 5.1.3 Gender and number Singular nouns can be f gender by form, meaning or convention (see 3.4.1 for details). With very few exceptions, attributive adjectives agree with their head noun in gender and number, though various semantic factors have an influence on whether this agreement is ‘strict’ or ‘deflected’—for details, see 5.3. The exceptions, which are invariable, are a few adjectives which can apply to females only, e.g. ḥāmil (pl ḥimmil) ‘pregnant’ ḥāyil ‘barren’, sāfir (pl sufur) ‘unveiled’, some intensive adjectives such as ḥasūd ‘envious’ (il-ˁēn il-ḥasūd 13  W&B 347.

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‘the evil eye’), and a mixed bag of others, such as wāǧid/wāyid14 ‘numerous’, falla ‘excellent’, xirmis ‘dark (of night)’, midfin ‘full to bursting’, xām ‘crude, raw’, xōš ‘nice good’. Uniquely, this last item always precedes its head noun, e.g. xōš imsōlif ‘a good raconteur’, xōš inšān ‘a nice person’, xōš nās ‘nice people’. 5.1.4 Annexation structures (‘the construct state’) See 3.6 for basic information on the annexation structure in BA, which will not be repeated here. Here we will confine ourselves to remarks on certain local developments. ‘Analytic’ NPs which have replaced the annexation structure in the expression of certain types of semantic relationship are dealt with in 5.1.6. In BA, as in other Arabic dialects and MSA, indefinite N +N structures are treated as compound nouns for the purposes of pronoun suffixation, e.g. [NP] + pron enc: [gallat tamr] ‘a sack of dates’ → [gallat tamər]-hum ‘their sack of dates’ (Manāma 5) [yūniyyat ˁēš] ‘a sack of rice’ → [yūniyyat ˁēš]-hum ‘their sack of rice’ (Manāma 5) [nitfat arḍ] ‘a piece of land’ → [nitfat arḍə]-na ‘our bit of land’ (Manāma 5) So, for example, nitfat arḍə-na is not construed as meaning ‘a piece of our land’, but ‘our [piece of land]’. The partitive meaning would be rendered nitfa min arḍə-na or by the analytic periphrasis nitfa min il-arḍ mālat-na (lit ‘a piece of the land belonging-to-us’) (see 5.1.6 below). If N +N annexation structures need to be made grammatically definite by the use of the definite article, some speakers treat them as if they were compounds, and the article is prefixed to the whole NP,15 e.g.:

14  wāǧid/wāyid is anomalous in several ways: it was occasionally recorded as an adjective with pl agreement (nās wāyidīn) but never with fsng agreement. It can also function as a noun (e.g. ha-l-wāǧid ‘this large amount’) and very frequently as an adverb (wāyid zēn ‘very good’). 15  The same phenomenon is also noted in CORR 124 for Andalusian Arabic, e.g. al-[kās fiḍḍa] ‘the silver cup’.

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Def art + [NP]: [trīb lōri]16 ‘a lorry-load’ → l-[ətrīb lōri] ‘the lorry-load’ (19) [ finǧān gahwa] ‘a cup of coffee’→ il-[ finǧān gahwa] ‘the cup of coffee’ (7) [mart abu] ‘a step-mother’17 → il-[mart abu] ‘the step-mother’ (48, 28) It should be noted in passing that the English translations of these definite NPs, out of context, are potentially misleading: in Arabic, unlike in English, grammatical definiteness is used to mark generic as well as contextually specific meaning. In fact, the second example above typically occurred in sentences like this: ḥakka l-finǧān gahwa mā aˁruf asawwī-h (7) ‘I can’t even make a (lit ‘the’) cup of coffee’ The reference here is generic and the Arabic NP is therefore definite—it refers to the elderly speaker’s physical inability to make any cup of coffee, and not to some actual cup of coffee. But in English ‘the’ is not used if the meaning is generic rather than contextually specific, as in the quoted example. Most speakers, however, prefix the definite article to the second noun in the normal way, and not to the first, viz gallat it-tamr ‘the sack of dates’, finǧān il-gahwa ‘the cup of coffee’ etc. However, there are BA speakers who seem to treat such definite NPs as if they were indefinite, and prefix another definite article to them before the head noun.18 This often occurs when the first noun is a quantifier of some kind, e.g. [rubˁat il-ˁēš] ‘a rubˁa of rice’ → ir-[rubˁat il-ˁēš] ‘the rubˁa19 of rice’(16) [rubˁatēn ir-rubyān] ‘two rubˁas of prawns’ → hādāk ir-[rubˁatēn ir-rubyān] ‘those two rubˁas of prawns’ (16)

16  Both words are borrowings from Eng trip and lorry. 17  Lit ‘a father’s wife’, this term is used by a child to refer to the wife of its father who is not its mother. 18  CORR 124 notes the same phenomenon of ‘double definition’ in Andalusian Arabic, e.g. al-[ḥabb al-mulūk] ‘the cherries’. 19  A measure of dry weight = 4lbs or approx. 2kg

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Non-quantifying examples also occurred, e.g. [brīǧ il-māy] ‘a water-jug’→ il-[brīǧ il-māy] ‘the water-jug’ (48) For this group of speakers, the NPs within the square brackets have this fixed internal form, but arguably for different reasons in each case: (a) brīǧ il-māy ‘a water-jug’ is also a regular N + Def Art + N structure, but by itself is generic in reference: it refers to the domestic item which, at a certain period, every household possessed, not to any actual jug. Furthermore, it refers to the function of the jug—for drinking water—rather than to its contents: ‘a jug of water’ would be brīǧ māy. Similarly ġaršat ilbabsi is ‘a Pepsi-Cola bottle’, whereas ġaršat babsi is ‘a bottle of Pepsi Cola’; (b) the case of rubˁat il-ˁēš is slightly different, but again, the notion of generic v specific meaning comes into play: ‘a/the 2 kg lot of rice’ was in former times a standard measure for the Gulf staple of rice, similar to English generic expressions like ‘a loaf of bread’ or ‘a sack of coal’, whose price would stand as an indication of the cost of living. Here, the speaker was talking in a scandalized voice about the scarcity and consequent astronomic price of rice, the basic Gulf staple, during World War II and for about five years after it, and its replacement by much cheaper milled wheat. It seems here that the ‘double definition’ of the NP is a mark of emphasis—how could it have come to pass that such a basic item of daily life cost so much? The speaker specifies it as evidence of the effect of the war on the cost of living: mā adri, gāl əb xamstaˁšar rubbiya, ir-rubˁat il-ˁēš, awān il-ǧarīš (16) ‘I don’t know, they say it cost fifteen rupees—a (lit ‘the’) 2kg lot of rice!— during the time (when we ate) bulgur wheat’ The other example, hādāk ir-[rubˁatēn ir-rubyān] ‘those two rubˁas of prawns’ occurs in an anecdote told by the same female speaker. The reference is again specific, here indicated by the demonstrative hādāk, and the ‘doubly definite’ NP is foregrounded syntactically (and here dramatically) as evidence of the skillful kleptomania of one of the village girls: mā ǧīna u ǧābat ˁallām illa hu hādāk ir-rubˁatēn ir-rubyān!—illa mā miš imminn-əh šay! (16) ‘No sooner had we got back, and ˁAllām brought (them with her), than those two rubˁas of prawns!—there was nothing left of them!’

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Finally, there was one other, bur rarer, anomalous NP structure: N + Adj phrases which were treated by some speakers as a type of compound noun. One token of this was formulaic and used by almost everyone: yōm ṯāni ‘the next day’. This could be used in this indefinite form, or in either of the anomalous definite forms (a) yōm il-ṯāni (see 5.1.1 above) or as a ‘compound’ il-[yōm ṯāni]. A couple of similar non-formulaic examples also occurred: in-[nafar wāḥid] yiḍīˁ (11) ‘The person working on his own (lit ‘the [one person]’) is lost’ waddō-h il-[mičān fulāni] (5) ‘They took him to such-and-such place (lit ‘the [such-and-such place]’)’ These examples20 also break normal rules, but in the opposite way to the more numerous examples given in 5.1.1 like yōm il-flāni. Such constructions are not entirely absent even from MSA in certain contexts.21 5.1.5 Annexation structures involving numerals Quantitative NPs involving the cardinal numbers work as they do in most Arabic dialects (see section 3.8). Here we highlight some unusual features of BA. Where the numbers 3–10 are involved, and the expression is definite, some speakers treat the whole phrase as an indivisible compound, e.g. [ṯalāṯat ašhur] ‘three months’ → iṯ-[ṯalāṯat ašhur] ‘the three months’ (48) [ˁašrat ayyām] ‘ten days’→ il-[ˁašrat ayyām] ‘the ten days’ (Manāma 7) And there are examples of even longer strings treated in the same way, e.g. [sabaˁ layāli ṭagg] ‘seven days of drumming’ → is-[sabaˁ layāli ṭagg] ‘the seven days of drumming’ (51)

20  Many examples of this type of structure are attested for Andalusian Arabic—see CORR 122–123. 21  One frequently hears, for example, ˀamīn ˁāmm al-ˀumam al-muttaḥida ‘the General Secretary of the UN’ which also offends against the Arabic syntactic rules for NP construction. Here ˀamīn ˁāmm ‘general secretary’, a N + Adj phrase, is treated as if it were a compound N forming the head noun in an annexation structure—unsurprising as ‘general secretary’ is a unitary concept.

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Compare this with some speakers’ similar treatment of other types of quantifying expression (il-finǧān gahwa, l-ətrīb lāri) in 5.1.4 above. This again contrasts with the CLA/MSA system, ˁašratu l-ˀayyām ‘the ten days’ etc. Yet other speakers have ‘doubly definite’ structures similar to the ir-rubˁat il-ˁēš example in 5.1.4. For such speakers, the Number + Def Art +Noun construction (ˁašrat il-ayyām) seems to be an alternative indefinite structure to the regular Number + Noun construction (ˁašrat ayyām), both meaning ‘ten days’: [sabˁat ayyam] or [sabˁat il-ayyām] ‘seven days’ → is-[sabˁat il-ayyām]22 ‘the seven days’ (Manāma 8) [ˁašrat ayyām] or [ˁašrat il-ayyām] ‘ten days’ → il-[ˁašrat il-ayyām] ‘the ten days’ (44) Similar ‘doubly definite’ structures with numbers do occur even in MSA, e.g. alongside the normal sittatu l-asābīˁ ‘the six weeks’ or appositional alternatives like al-asābiˁ as-sitta, forms like as-[sittatu l-asābīˁ ] ‘the six weeks’, and al-[ˁašrat al-ˀaqdām] ‘the ten feet’ are recorded by Cantarino for MSA literary texts,23 but only, it seems, occasionally and only with the numbers three to ten, not with twenty, thirty, etc. With twenty, thirty, etc. the MSA structure is normally of the type al-ˁišrūn sanat-an ‘the twenty years’. With the numbers beyond 10, some uneducated speakers had NPs of the form Number + Def Art + Noun: [ṯalāṯīn il-yizaw] ‘the thirty parts’ (48) hāḏēla [ṯalāṯīn il-ġēṣ] ‘those thirty divers’ (48) These phrases were used by two different A speakers to refer, respectively, to culturally and contextually definite entities, yet which did not have, unlike is-sabˁat il-ayyām, a second il- prefixed to the whole phrase. In the first example the reference was to the conventional division of the Qurˀān into thirty parts for recitation and memorization, and in the second to the size of the diving crew on a pearling dhow which the speaker had already mentioned. It seems from these examples that in BA there is more than one set of norms for expressing different types of construct phrase, and in particular when they express quantification. Apart from in certain fixed expressions, there seemed 22  is-sabˁat il-ayyām in the vocabulary of women in traditional society, and seemingly only in this form, means ‘the seven day period after a marriage which is reserved for visiting the new bride’. 23  CANTAR II 375–376.

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to be free variation between these systems, communally and in the speech of individuals. It was hence no longer possible to distinguish what the original systems were and which communities they were specific to. 5.1.6 ‘Analytic’ NPs with ḥagg and māl As in most Arabic dialects, in BA the ‘synthetic’ annexation structure has been partially replaced by an ‘analytic’ one in which two nouns are linked by a particle (see 3.3.3). The particles in use in BA are ḥagg and māl, both of which are basically nouns with a range of meanings related to the notion of possession: ḥagg means ‘right, due, entitlement’ and is also used as a preposition meaning ‘for, to, towards, for the benefit of’;24 māl (which has a f form mālat) means ‘property’ but, like ḥagg, can express a wide range of semantic relations between two nouns which goes well beyond possession,25 just as the annexation structure of CLA/MSA does. Types of relationship: some of the examples below are difficult to classify, and could appear under more than one heading. In almost all cases, the example given could, and often did (by different speakers or the same speaker) vary with an annexation structure formed of the same two elements and usually with little or no discernible difference in meaning, e.g. ḥalīb bugar or ḥalīb māl bugar ‘cows’ milk’, hāfāt əṣbayān or hāfāt ḥagg əṣbayān ‘boys’ underpants/ shorts’, ṣubuġ aḏ̣āfīr or ṣubuġ ḥagg aḏ̣āfīr ‘nail varnish’. However there are differences when the relationship is one of a container versus the same word used as a measure of quantity: bīb māl dihin is ‘an (empty) cooking-oil drum’ whereas bīb dihin, without the māl, is ‘a drum (full) of cooking oil’; finǧān māl gahwa is ‘an (empty) coffee cup’ when used as a measure (e.g. of fertilizer) whereas finǧān gahwa/fingān il-gahwa is ‘a cup of coffee’. There was a difference in how ḥagg and māl were used in the A and B communities in these analytic NPs: ḥagg and māl could both be used in the A and BU communities, but ḥagg was used only where the relationship was one of part-whole or purpose, and not always in these cases; in the BV communities, māl overwhelmingly predominated as the linker in all types of relationship, with ḥagg/ḥakk hardly used at all in the genitival complex (though it was commonly used as a preposition and in other syntactic structures). In a discussion of the NP in Najdi, Ingham notes that ḥagg is ‘heard only in Najd and the Gulf, while māl is also used in Iraq’.26 In Bahrain, it does seem to hold true that ḥagg

24  For examples, see DCSEA I 120–121. 25  For examples, see DCSEA I 508. 26  ING 58.

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as a linking particle in NPs is more or less limited to the Najdi-descended A (and A-influenced BU dialects), whereas māl is the preferred choice in the BV dialects (probably their original form) for this function, the BV dialects having strong historical links with those of the largely Shīˁī south of Iraq. Generally speaking, and irrespective of the type of semantic relationship, indefinite analytic NPs are of the form N + māl/ḥagg + N, e.g. qisim māl banāt ‘a section reserved for girls’, girṭāṣ māl milča ‘a marriage contract’, ḥbūb māl baṭan ‘stomach pills’, unless the second N is a verbal noun referring to a general activity or concept, e.g. ašġāl māl il-ġōṣ ‘pearl-diving equipment’, ḏikrayāt māl il-awwal ‘memories of the old days’, xaraz ḥagg iz-zīna ‘decorative beads’ (lit beads for decoration’). All such phrases are normally made definite simply by prefixing the definite article to the first N. However, as will be seen from the examples below, there is some variation in whether the second N is also so prefixed, depending on meaning and usage, so ‘a car-key’ is miftāḥ ḥagg/māl sayyāra and ‘the car-key’ is always il-miftāḥ ḥagg/māl is-sayyāra since it will always refer to a specific (already named) car. In cases of unique reference, like ‘the passport office’, the tendency is towards the structure [[id-dāyra] māl ǧawāzāt]], where the definition seems to apply to ‘the office’ and māl ǧawāzāt is a modifying adjunct specifying the type of that office—similarly id-dāyra māl murūr ‘the traffic office’, id-dāyra māl hiǧra ‘the immigration office’ etc. It should be pointed out however, that speakers’ usage is not stable, and there is sometimes variation even for the same item.27 Examples: Part-whole: il-miftāḥ ḥagg is-sayyāra (48) ‘the car-key’; maġāṭi māl gdūr (3) ‘lids of cooking pots’; il-ˁaḏ̣am māl l-lōha (51) ‘the (tail) bone of the cormorant’; l-əˁgūṣ māl id-digal (48) ‘the mast-wedges’; il-yidˁ māl in-naxla ‘the palm-tree trunk’ Possession: il-bēt māl ˁamm-i (Manāma 2) ‘my uncles’ house’ Association/belonging: l-əṣbayān māl il-madrasa (45) ‘the boys from the school’; maṣbina māl mukānāt (48) ‘helpers from different places’; daxtar māl

27  BLA 125–6 notes that the Christian dialect of Baghdad always omits the definite article from the first noun in constructions with māl when they are definite, noting that he knew of no other Arabic dialect where this was so. However, this construction does occur quite commonly in both the A and B dialects of BA, but variably with constructions which do have the definite article. A clear example of this in the list below is kisāfa mālt il-ġōṣ (48) ‘the squalor of pearl-diving’.

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ḥukūma (33) ‘a government doctor’; ḏikrayāt māl il-awwal (Manāma 7) ‘memories of the past’ Constituents: qisim māl əṣbayān¸ qisim māl banāt (Manāma 5) ‘a boys’ group, a girls’ group’ Quality/property: kisāfa mālt il-ġōṣ (48) ‘the squalor of pearl-diving’ Source: māy māl barada (Manāma 7) ‘water from hail-stones’ Type: makīna māl māy (4) ‘a water pump’; zarˁ māl išta (5) ‘a winter crop’; arḍ mālat burtugāl (1) ‘orange-growing land’ (viz ‘suitable for growing . . .’); samād māl əḥla (14) ‘dried-fish manure’; dukkān māl bazz (16) ‘a draper’s shop’; hāfāt ḥagg əṣbayān (14) ‘boys’ shorts’; fōb mālat ḥarīm (20) ‘a woman’s dress’; fōb mālat ˁiris (33) ‘a wedding dress’; lēt māl yad (Manāma 7) ‘a hand-torch’; ˁilāǧ māl bēt (33) ‘medical treatment at home’; warag māl ərwēd (41) ‘radish leaves’ Purpose/function: xaraz ḥagg iz-zīna (51) ‘decorative beads’; gudūˁ ḥagg iṭ-ṭabāx (Manāma 8) ‘a snack for cooking’; flūs ḥagg il-ġōṣ (48) ‘money for the pearling season’; garāgīr ḥagg is-simič (48) ‘bee-hive fish-traps’; ašġāl māl il-ġōṣ (48) ‘pearl-diving equipment’; ḥbūb māl baṭan (Manāma 2) ‘stomach pills’; xubz māl isfar (Manāma 7) ‘(flat) dining bread’ (viz ‘(flat) bread for (serving on) eating mats’); raṣāyid māl samād (5) ‘fertilizer vouchers’; girtāṣ māl milča (48) ‘marriage contract’; id-dayra māl ǧawāzāt (6) ‘the passport office’ Material: naˁal māl tāyir (Manāma 6) ‘rubber flip-flops’; fanāǧīl māl naylūn (5) ‘plastic coffee-cups’; bēb māl raṣāṣ (Manāma 6) ‘lead piping’; mxadda mālat rīš in-naˁām (5) ‘an ostrich-feather pillow’; ḥaǧar mālat raṣāṣ (20) ‘lead weights (lit ‘stones’)’ Brand: ḥalīb māl “rēnbō” ‘ ‘Rainbow’ milk’ (5); ǧigāyir māl “abu gaṭu” (Manāma 7) ‘Craven A’ cigarettes’ (lit ‘the one with the cat’—so-called because the packet had on it an image of a black cat) Place: il-wakˁa mālat ˁāli (3) ‘the battle of ʿĀlī’; ġinya māl manāma (5) ‘rich people from Manāma’; sayyid hāšim māl kadam (19) ‘Sayyid Hashim of Qadam’; sūk il-ǧazzārīn mālat il-kaṭīf (3) ‘the butchers’ market of al-Qaṭīf’ Object: il-mištiri māl ridya (5) ‘the buyer of cloaks’; miˁāmlat ir-rayāyīl ḥagg in-niswān (51) ‘men’s treatment of women’

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Benefit: ˁawaḍ māl gaṣāṣ-ah (30) ‘a reward for cutting it’ Multiple relationships: [[sarāwil māl nagša] mālat al-qaṭīf ] (Manāma 7) ‘trousers with a spotted pattern from al-Qaṭīf’; [[trīb samād] māl bīkāb] (25) ‘a pick-up truck load of manure’; [mudīr [il-qisim māl ǧawāzāt]] (Manama 2) ‘the director of the passport office’ Some examples of more complex māl-structures involving adjectival modification and pronominal suffixation are given below. The position of the adjective is flexible, e.g. With indefinite head noun: [[ǧūti abyaḍ] māl riyāḍa] (Manāma 2) ‘white gym shoes’ With definite head noun: [[il-finǧān māl gahwa] iṣ-ṣaġīr] (5) ‘the small-size coffee-cup’ [[iṯ-ṯyāb māl il-bēt] il-ˁādiyyīn] (Manāma 7) ‘ordinary domestic clothes’; Prounoun suffixes are attached to the whole complex, as they are in N+N annexation structures (see examples in 5.1.4): [ fōb mālat ˁiris]-ha ‘her wedding-dress’ (33) The syntax of the noun phrase complex with māl can be very fluid, and the tokens which fill the N-slot in the basic N-māl-N structure are flexible. Other word classes may occur as either element in such complexes, e.g. (adjective) samād māl ˁādi (11) ‘ordinary manure’ and the ‘possessive’ relationship between the nouns carried by māl can become so attenuated that it disappears, e.g. min tiksir māl in-nuˁēm . . . (4) ‘when you take the turning to Nuˁēm . . .’, where māl links a verb to a place-name; minta māl awwal (5) ‘you are not like you used to be’, where it links a pronoun to a noun; yibayyin ˁalēh mu māl akil hāda (5) ‘that

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man doesn’t look like one for food’ (i.e. he is very thin), linking a demonstrative to a noun. māl is also heavily used in periphrastic possessive constructions as a substitute for possessive suffixation, e.g. il-čīs māl-ah (14) ‘its packaging’; iz-zād māl-ah ‘his food supply’; l-iyḥala mālat-na (Manāma 6) ‘our large water-pot’; iṣ-ṣāḥib māl-na (44) ‘our boss’. It is used even in cases of inalienable possession, e.g. ir-raǧāyil māl-ah (Manāma 2) ‘his feet’, and, arguably, in-nūr māl-ič (Manāma 8) ‘your (inner) radiance’. 5.1.7 NPs with demonstratives The forms of the demonstrative pronouns and adjectives are presented, and their use fully exemplified, in section 3.1.4 (and in the related section on presentatives, 3.1.5.) and will not be repeated here. Section 5.3 deals in detail with agreement patterns, including demonstrative use with different types of head-noun. 5.1.8 Negation of NPs The negation of the noun phrase is dealt with in section 3.3.4 on negation in general, and the reader is referred to it. 5.2

The Verb Phrase (VP)

In this section we present an analysis of certain features of the syntax of the verb-phrase, concentrating on tense, aspect, modality, and how these are mapped onto the available morphological resources: the p-stem and s-stem verb forms, the ap, and the pp. We also look at a number of unusual verb usages specific to BA and the Gulf and Arabian dialects more generally. This is not intended to be a comprehensive presentation of all that could be said about the verb, but rather highlights unusual features of verbal syntax or ones peculiar to the BA dialects and its neighbours. 5.2.1 Tense or aspect? Some general remarks There is a long-standing debate in Arabic linguistics, and Semitic linguistics more generally, about the nature of the verb system—is it basically aspectual, basically a tense system, or does it have elements of both? The answer to this question depends partly on individual researchers’ definitions of the very terms ‘tense’ and ‘aspect’, which are by no means always shared, and partly on the

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Arabic data, diachronic and/or synchronic, on which they base their analyses. Bernard Comrie, a well-known theoretical linguist, concluded that the Arabic system was partly tense-based, partly aspectual.28 However, he based this conclusion on data drawn entirely from written CLA. Researchers whose work focuses on the modern urban dialects of the Arab World—an example here is John Eisele’s study of Cairene29—have often concluded that the system is basically one of tense, but with aspectual elements. On the other hand, those who work on Arabic dialects sometimes characterised as ‘conservative’, by which is usually meant that they retain distinctions present in Classical Arabic but lost in the modern urban dialects, e.g. gender in the plural forms of the verb, have reached the opposite conclusion, that the system in these dialects is basically aspectual. Cases in point here, and relevant to this study, are the dialects of Najd, central Arabia. Bruce Ingham, one of the foremost experts on this dialect-type puts it this way: ‘The Najdi dialects still preserve the original Aspect-centred system of Classical Arabic, although it can be shown that structures involving a new tense-based system can occasionally be found within the macrostructure’.30 The modern Gulf dialects in general probably started out as being of the general Najdi type, since Najd has been a major source of Gulf population since at least the mid-18th century. However, they are now very obviously distinct from them, with, e.g. a verb system which makes use of verbal prefixes and the auxiliary verb kān to mark tense distinctions—features still absent from Najdi dialects at the conservative end of the spectrum as described by Ingham. Seen on a bigger canvas, the Gulf dialects are moving typologically in the same direction as the urban dialects of countries like Iraq, Syria, and Egypt moved centuries ago. At the time of my field-work, these tendencies were more evident in some Bahraini social groups than in others: educated younger speakers in general and young women in particular. What we will be describing here is based on the usage of the older, more conservative elements of the population, as is the case in the rest of this study. The sections which follow show how the ‘division of labour’ is organised by the BA verb system between its four major components: the s-stem verb, p-stem verb, the ap and the pp. Subordinate to this system of morphologicallydefined categories, the sub-systems of verbal/modal prefixed particles, imperatives, auxiliary verbs, and voice distinctions (active/passive/middle) will be dealt with. Some of these categories are partly expressed through the derivational verbal morphology (for which see Chapter 4) and will only be referred to where relevant to the presentation and discussion. 28  COM 78–80. 29  EIS. 30  ING 87.

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The neutral morphological labels ‘s-stem’ and ‘p-stem’ are preferred here to the more traditional pairings of perfect/imperfect or past/non-past, since the latter seem to prejudge the issue in one way or the other of what type of system it is. The time-reference of s-stem and p-stem verbs will be shown to be highly context-related, as will how their aspect is to be interpreted. For the same reason—the avoidance of labels which prejudge the issue—the traditional terms ‘active participle (ap)’ and ‘passive participle (pp)’ are retained, as designations like ‘perfective’ for the ap are misleading. Although the perfective is one of its uses, it has several others, and which is operational in a particular case can depend on a number of factors—the semantic class of the verb, its lexical aspect, and its sentential and pragmatic context. These factors will be illustrated via the presentation of a large number of examples in which the context is described, sometimes in considerable detail. In the sub-sections of 5.2 which follow, the focus is on the VP in the main clause only; the VP in various types of subordinate clause is dealt with separately in sections 5.6–5.11. 5.2.2 The suffix-stem (s-stem) verb The most common use of the s-stem verb is in the description of events and states which are past and completed relative to the time of utterance. By using the s-stem the speaker is not drawing attention to any continuing relevance this completed past event/state might have to the current situation. So, for example, in the context of a personal narrative, the difference between the two statements: (a) umm-i ṭallag-ha abū-y ‘My father divorced my mother’ where the s-stem verb of ‘divorce’ is used, and (b) umm-i mṭalg-in-ha abū-y ‘My father has/had divorced my mother’ where the ap is used, is suggested by their English translations. Statement (a) might occur in a narrative and be one on a list of events that happened to the speaker over the course of her life, and continue with: ‘my father then remarried, I left school, got married, had children’, etc. Statement (b), on the other hand, implies that the divorce still has (or had) relevance to the ongoing situation, or the current conversational context, whether that situation is the here and now, or the past. So (b) might be said, for example, to explain why the speaker is no longer in regular touch with her father—at all events,

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the implications would be that both are still alive. If, on the other hand, the reference is not to the time of utterance but to a past time, (b) would mean ‘my father had (at that time, already) divorced my mother’, which implies that the divorce had a relevance at that point in the unfolding narrative, but no longer (necessarily) has, and it carries no implication of whether either or both of the mother and father are still alive or dead. 5.2.2.1 Narrative past: punctual One of the s-stem’s main uses, then, is as a narrative past tense. Here ([1]) is an extended example,31 in which a BV woman gives an eye-witness account of a conflagration in her home village of Sanābis. The s-stem verbs are are set in boldface: [1] git ila umm-i u xawāt-i u banāt ˁammat-i “gūmu!” gālaw “wēš ṣār?” git ilēhum “mā dri wēš ṣāyir fi s-sanābis . . . gūmu nrūḥ!” ili ḥarīga akalat min farīg iš-šimāli, min il-ġarb ila šimāl, ila l-ǧinūb, ila š-šarg . . . u tarabbaˁat fi wasṭat il-balad tarbīˁ, allah yidfaˁ il-bala . . . u tāli kil min ya b-iṭaffī-ha mā gidar iṭaffī-ha, u ḥatta mawāṭir il-ḥarāyig—waṣalat min mawāṭir yumkin tyi azyad min ˁišrīn mōṭir—wi lā gidraw ˁalēha . . . tāli ṭalaˁ iš-šēx, allāh yirḥam-əh, šēx ˁīsa, min šēx ˁalī . . . u gara fi ḥabbat ətrāb min yamīn-əh, u haff ˁalēha . . . u min haff ˁalēha, subḥān ir-rabb illi xammad-ha ˁala ˁibādəh, u iftakkat il-ˁālam min balāha . . . lākin waḥda ḍāˁat əfyāb-ha, u waḥda mərgad-ha, u waḥda . . . yumkin azyad min miyatēn bēt illi ˁidimat min id-dīra . . . tammo killə-hum masākin, kil wāḥid yilaffi l-fāni . . . min baˁad ha-n-namūna ḥaṭṭō lēhum əxyām . . . min baˁad l-əxyām tāli ǧāzōhum il-ḥukūma . . . kil min hādi, u kašafaw ˁala l-arḍ u gazzō-ha u bano lēhum əbyūt, u tāli tamaskano li l-yōm ila bāčir u allah rafaˁ ḥaḍḍ-hum, al-ḥīn ḥamdillāh rabb il-ˁālamīn, nisyaw š-šī lli ṣadar ˁalēhum. . . . (33) ‘I said to my mother, and my sisters and cousins, ‘Come on, let’s go!’ They said ‘What’s the matter?’ I said to them, ‘I don’t know what’s happening in Sanābis—let’s go and see!’ (And when we got there), lo and behold, a fire had consumed the northern quarter from west to north, to south, to east, and had taken hold right in the middle of the village—may God ward off calamity! And everybody who tried to put it out couldn’t put it out, and even the fire engines—maybe more than twenty fire engines came— even they couldn’t bring it under control . . . Then Sheikh ʿĪsā, God have mercy on him, appeared, Sheikh ʿĪsā, the son of Sheikh ʿAlī . . . And he 31  This excerpt is taken from DCSEA II 303.

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recited (the Qurˀān) over a bit of dust in his right hand, and blew on it. And when he blew on it, all praise to the Lord who put (the fire) out for His servants, and people were relieved of this calamity. But one woman lost her clothes, another her bed, another . . . There were maybe more than two hundred houses which were destroyed in the village. The people remained all utterly wretched, each giving shelter to his neighbour. After that, they put up tents for them, and after the tents, the government compensated them . . . all this, then they inspected the land, surveyed it, and built them houses. In a short time they settled back down in the village and God raised their fortunes. Now, praise be to God, they have forgotten what befell them’ The narrative here describes a dramatic sequence of events all of which are depicted as punctual: ‘this happened, then that happened, then that happened . . .’ All were ‘one-off’ events. The verbs are all s-stem except for p-stems governed by s-stems, e.g. ya b-iṭaffī-ha ‘tried to put it out’, tammo killə-hum masākin, kil wāḥid yilaffi l-fāni ‘they remained all utterly wretched, each giving shelter to his neighbour’ or are fixed elements in optative pious formulae which are not part of the narrative, e.g. allah yidfaˁ il-bala! ‘May God ward off calamity!’ 5.2.2.2 Narrative past: habitual Compare the account of the village fire with [2], in which an ex-pearl-diver describes the end of a typical working day on a pearling dhow.32 The events described, out of any context, could be punctual, but in fact this is not a description of a particular day, but of every day. But s-stem verbs again predominate (boldface): [2] adda l-məġarb, aḏḏan il-məġarb u ṣallaw, u inčibaw il-ˁaša ḥagg il-ˁālam, inčibō-h, tammaw yifandisūn fīh, ha-l-əmḥammar u s-simič . . . lēn gāmaw, əġsilaw yad-hum, nās ġasal manāčib ḥaṭṭ-hum fil-wānis, u nās il-ǧidir əġsilō-h, gaṭṭō-h fi l-wānis, u n-nās ḏi tammaw yisālfūn . . . mrēgdāt-hum taḥat-hum, il-maḥḥār itgūl . . . u nās taḥathum yaˁni kisāfa mālt il-ġōṣ, lēn adda-hum— . . . qaṭṭaw li ṣ-ṣibḥ, aḏḏan l-əmˀaḏḏin, gāmaw . . . ˁind-hum ṣaxāxīn tammaw ṣaxxanaw ḏi u tammaw . . . yābō li-hum gahwa iṣ-ṣibḥ u ḥaṭṭaw il-mafāliǧ . . . kill-in mukān-əh, sitta, sabˁa minnāk, ṯamānya, ˁašra minni, il-bindūl wi l-ˁālya . . . ḥaṭṭaw il-mafāliǧ, masāčīn raddaw . . . ˁugub mā tagahwaw, gāl in-nōxaḏa “əṭlib 32  This excerpt is taken form DCSEA II 14–15.

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allah”, lēn əbziġat iš-šams . . . tammaw yifilǧūn il-maḥḥār . . . iyībūn siḥtīt willi ˁindəh ḥaṣbā baˁad, illi liga lih ḥaṣbā . . . willi ˁindəh ḥaṣbā šālə-ha, willi liga ḏī . . . tammaw yifilǧūn u iyamˁūn siḥtīt u gmāš u ḏī, lēn addahum, tammaw li-hum iyi nuṣṣ sāˁa, gāl “xammil”, xammilaw siḥtīt, kil min ˁindəh yāb māl fils . . . (48) ‘When sunset came, (someone) made the call to prayer and they prayed, and tipped out the dinner for everyone, they tipped it out . . . they kept on getting stuck into it, that sweetened rice and fish . . . when they got up (from eating), they washed their hands . . . some people washed the wooden bowls and put them in the ship’s store, others washed the cooking-pot and chucked it into the store, and others carried on chatting to each other . . . their beds were right underneath them—the clams, you might say . . . and (other) people (lay) on the filth that you get with pearling . . . when it was time for them—they snoozed till morning—the caller called them to (dawn) prayer and they got up . . . they had shovels and they carried on shovelling these (clams) and carried on . . . they brought them coffee in the morning, and put out the clamknives . . . everyone (sat) in his place, six or seven there, eight or ten there, (sitting between) the main mast and the stern half-deck, and the main mast and the bow half-deck . . . they put out the clam-knives, and the poor wretches resumed (opening the clams) . . . after they’d had coffee, (the captain) said, ‘Ask (bounty) of God!’ When the sun came up, they carried on opening clams . . . they would find small pearls, and someone would find a medium-size one, someone found a medium-size one . . . anyone who found a medium-size one took it out, and anyone who found that— . . . they carried on opening clams and collecting small pearls and (larger) ones, and so on . . . when it was time for them, when they had done it about half-an-hour, (the captain) said “collect (them) together (and wrap them)” . . . they collected together the small pearls, and everyone brought what he had in an empty half-clam’ The description here is not of one-off events, as in the earlier extract, but of a regular routine which happened every day. None the less, the s-stem predominates here too. One might have expected the p-stem to be used, since, as we shall see later on, one of its main uses is in the description of habitual actions, whether they happened in the past or in the present. When describing such past routines, examination of a large body of data shows that speakers often fluctuate between the s-stem and the p-stem in the course of the same verbal performance. The same kind of variation is found in other languages in this

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type of description. In English, for example, it is possible to use either the simple past tense, as in the translation above, or the habitual past with ‘would’ or ‘used to’ e.g. ‘When the sun set, someone would make the call the prayer, and they would pray, and they would tip out . . .’ or one can use a combination of the simple past and the habitual past—provided the context makes it clear that what is being described is a routine, a habit or a ritual, the choice of tense makes little difference. The following text, [3], which describes the daily routine of meals ‘in the old days’, and was spoken by a middle-aged woman from Manāma, illustrates this point well. S-stem verbs are in italic boldface, p-stem verbs are in roman boldface : [3] ha-l-awwal, yiṭbaxūn l-ˁaša ˁēš wi il-ġada ˁēš . . . lēn adda fi l-lēl šalaw lihim ligma bayyūta . . . wi xaššō-ha . . . lawwitō-ha b nitfat xalag, ḥaṭṭō-ha fi l-millāla . . . u lēn adda ḏ̣-ḏ̣iḥa, lēn trayyagaw min iṣ-ṣubḥ, išrubaw ilgahwa u rāḥaw il-ˁēn u əġsilaw u xalliṣaw, xammaw . . . yaw iḏ̣-ḏ̣iḥa u nazzilō-ha, mlawwata b xalag . . . ḥawwalō-ha, ḥaṭṭō-ha . . . čān ˁində-hum yaˁni smiča galō-ha wiyyā-ha, ˁində-hum laban, kalō-ha wiyyā-h . . . mā ˁində-hum, matūt hal il-awwal, hast matūt . . .  yāxḏūn-əh, yāklūn-əh wiyya ḥlāya . . .  yiḥuṭṭūn-əh wiyya l-ligma l-bayyūta u yāklūn-ha . . .  yāklūn il-ˁaša ˁēš, u yitrayyagūn u yāklūn il-bayyūta, u yāklūn il-ġada ˁēš . . . mā ṣārat fī-hum idbāb wi lā mtinaw . . . u al-ḥīn, waǧba waḥda, u kil waḥda dabbat-ha wēš kubrə-ha, u kil waḥda tgūl min il-ˁēš matnāna, u kil waḥda tgūl “ani čiḏi u ani čiḏi” u hāḏa, kil šay w il-ˁāfya min allah, subḥān-əh! (Manāma 7) ‘In the old days, they used to cook rice for dinner and rice for lunch . . .  when night fell, they took out a bite of left-over food, and put it away . . .  they wrapped it up in a bit of cloth and put it in the hoist . . . Then when mid-morning came, after they’d had their breakfast, they drank coffee and went to the well and did the washing and finished (their chores) and swept . . . they came back in the late morning and lowered it, wrapped up in a cloth . . . they brought it down, and served it up . . . If they had a (fresh) fish, they fried it with it, if they had butter-milk, they ate it with it . . . if they didn’t have any of that, there were dried sardines, people in the old days, they had sardines . . . they would take that and eat it with a dried fish . . . they would serve it with the left-overs from the night before and eat it—they would eat rice for dinner, and have breakfast, and eat the left-overs . . . they would eat rice for lunch, and they didn’t get fat bellies or put weight on . . . but now, (they only eat) one meal, and every woman’s got a big spare tyre, and every woman says she’s got fat from

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eating rice, and everyone says ‘I’ve got like this, and I’ve got like that’ . . .  but all of this, well, health comes from God, may He be glorified!’ Text [3] opens with a general statement about eating habits in the past: hal-awwal, yiṭbaxūn l-ˁaša ˁēš wi il-ġada ˁēš ‘In the old days, they used to cook rice for dinner and rice for lunch’. Probably because of the adverbial ‘in the old days’, which covers an extended period, the p-stem is chosen, and it is an unadorned simple p-stem verb (no auxiliary kān, as is the norm with uneducated speakers) which here has the value ‘past habitual’. This scene-setting sentence tells the listener that the amplifications which follow are within this framework of ‘what used to happen’. There is then a momentary pause, and a change in verb choice: a run of eighteen consecutive s-stem verbs follows. This run of s-stems is introduced, as is the whole of text [2], by a formulaic clause with an s-stem verb, adda ‘it came’ which always marks a specific time of day: in text [2], it was adda l-məġarb ‘When sunset came . . .’; in text [3], it is lēn adda fi l-lēl ‘When night fell . . .’. It may be that this temporal frame triggers a change in the stance of the speaker towards the description of what follows: in text [3], she switches from the generality of what happened vis-à-vis meals ‘in the old days’ to the specificities on a typical day; in text [2] the ex-pearldiver does the same thing, focusing on the detail of what happened on the boat after sundown. This ‘change of stance’ towards the events described perhaps explains the switch to s-stem verbs, picturing them as punctual events rather than habits, and is maintained, as we hear in detail how left over food was wrapped up, put in a hoist, stored for the night, and brought down and eaten the next day. There is then another ‘change of stance’ in the middle of the text after it is explained, in a section with no verbs, that sometimes things were different—people were obliged to eat matūt (dried sardines) if there was nothing better to have with the left-over rice. There is then a run of seven consecutive p-stem verbs. As in the first half of the text, this is a list of habitual actions, and there seems to be no obvious linguistic reason why these actions per se should have p-stem verbs and the ones in the first half of the text have s-stems. There is then a concluding statement and a switch back to s-stems which provide a comment that people didn’t get as fat in by-gone days as they do these days. An examination of more than thirty short texts describing ‘what typically used to happen’ which begin with the templatic clause lēn adda . . . /lē adda . . . ‘When . . . .’ does not show that it must always be followed by s-stem verbs—p-stems were just as common. So there does not seem to be any linguistic ‘rule’ involved. But the patterning of the data does suggest that the choice of s-stem or p-stem was not random, as p-stems and s-stems did not alternate in what followed in a random fashion, but came in blocks, as illustrated here.

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This does seem to be a case of speaker choice, and speakers taking a ‘stance’ vis-à-vis the description of the action, as suggested. There may also be communal differences in usage here. In Rās Rummān (Manāma 5), several speakers seemed typically to have the p-stem verb for the temporal clause, and the s-stem for verbs in the main clause, e.g. in a description given by one woman of the custom of Ḥiyya Biyya,33 we get the following (note that taddi is the p-stem of adda): taddi min iṣ-ṣubḥ, gabil il-ādān, xaḏō-h ‘When morning came (p-stem), before the call to prayer, they took (s-stem) them out’ taddi ˁugub il-ġada, rāḥaw u rumō-ha fi l-baḥar ‘When it was (p-stem) after lunch, they went (s-stem) and threw (s-stem) them in the sea’ 5.2.2.3 The recent and the ‘experiential’ past The s-stem can also be used to refer to the recent past where it has relevance to the present speech context, and to the ‘experiential’ past, with or without the particles gad/gid/ǧid/kid which are locally variant BA reflexes of CLA qad. (lā/ mā) gaṭ, the dialectal reflex of CLA qaṭṭ, is used in negative and interrogative sentences as the counterpart of gad in positive declarative ones.34 Examples (bold): mā dām ana əsawwi ha-l-ǧadwal hādi, gad ṣanaˁt liyyi arbaˁ faṣlāt, xams faṣlāt (31) ‘Having made this irrigation channel here, I’ve (thereby) made myself four or five seed-beds’ The same construction, in a past-time context, can have an anteriorising, pluperfect sense: əsawwi li yimkin sabˁa snīn ḏīk is-sāˁa, ǧid-ni ḥafaḏṭ   il-qurˀān (44) ‘I was aged about seven at that time, I had just finished Qurˀān school’

33  For details of this apparently ancient custom, see DCSEA II 242–249. 34  ING 104–107 notes similar uses for the reflexes of qad in Najdi. See 5.2.9.1.1 and 5.2.9. 1.2 for a full treatment of gad and gaṭ and their variants in BA, where a sketch of their linguistic history is attempted.

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The speaker here uses ‘having just finished Qurˀān school’ as a way of backing up his rough estimate of how old he was, so ǧid + s-stem here performs an epistemic role, and the sentence could equally well be translated ‘I must have been about seven at the time, as I had just finished Qurˀān school’. Negative and interrogative sentences of this type with gaṭ often have an ‘experiential’ sense, e.g. marratēn tyi ˁində-na, mā gaṭ tigahwēt (radio play) ‘This is the second time you’ve come to our house, and you’ve never had coffee’ mā gaṭ riḥt is-saˁūdiyya (Manāma 7) ‘I’ve never been to Saudi Arabia’ gaṭ āmartī-ha u gālat lič lā ? (48) ‘Have you ever given her an order (to do something), and she’s told you “no”?’ The particle taw(w) + pronoun enclitic with an s-stem verb may be used to indicate the recentness of a completed action, e.g. taw-hum xallaṣaw min šayalān-ah (5) ‘They’ve just finished removing it’ taw(w) is also often used with the ap in a similar sense (see 5.2.4.2.3). 5.2.2.4 The future in the past Examples of the s-stem with future meaning were rare in the data in comparison with the ap with future meaning. Perhaps, as Ingham suggests,35 this is because perfective action (past and complete) viewed from a future reference point is just less common in speech than the state which results from it, which is typically expressed by the ap. Perhaps the commonest use of the s-stem with a future time reference is in main clauses framed by a time or conditional clause (see 5.11.1), e.g. min yiˀaddin, intaha (3) ‘When he makes the call to prayer, it (= work) will cease’ 35  ING 102–103.

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ilēn hi ṣaġīra, mā našat lēha ˁurūg (11) ‘If it is small, it won’t have developed any roots’ ilēn ˁaṭēt-ni sahm-ič, katalt-ni (41) ‘If you give me your share (arrow), you’ll kill me’ (sc play on words: sahm also means ‘arrow’) The s-stem can also have a future meaning when prefixed by the particle čūd (see 5.2.9.1.3) when it is used epistemically, e.g. tistuwi ha-l-kubar, baˁad wēšo? čūd xāsat u rāḥat (4) ‘It grows this big, and then what? It will have rotted and died’ (sc ‘By the time it grows this big, it will have . . .’) 5.2.2.5 ‘Performative’ s-stem verbs In some semantic classes—cognitive/psychological verbs, such as ‘to see (how)’, ‘to understand’, ‘to realise’ and performative verbs which in themselves constitute acts, such as ‘to accept’, ‘to agree’, ‘to swear an oath’, ‘to put one’s trust in God’, s-stem verbs are used to depict these actions as punctual events, rather than, as in some other languages, the state that results from them. In BA they are used, for example, to check that an addressee is paying attention or understands what is being said, or in the ‘performance’ of agreement, acceptance, etc. e.g. šift čēf-ə hə? ‘(Now) d’you see how (it’s done)? simiˁt-ə? ‘D’you hear?’ (in the sense ‘have you heard and understood what I’m saying?’) fhamt! ‘(Now) I get it!’ gibilt! ‘I accept!’ (said when accepting an offer) ittakalna! ‘Let’s go!’ (lit ‘we have put our trust (in God)!’—said when embarking on a journey, or a new enterprise)

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The point is that, at the time of utterance, the s-stem verb depicts an event as having ended, and this applies to all semantic classes of the verb, whether the event took a moment (as in the examples above) or years to reach its end. So ˁirfat-uh (5) ‘She recognised him’ which describes an event that was accomplished instantaneously requires an s-stem verb just as: ṣār il-yibal36 ḏ̣iˁaf il-ġōṣ (48) ‘The oil company grew stronger and the pearling industry grew weaker’ or tikāmalat šuhūrāt-ha (5) ‘Her months (sc of pregnancy) were completed’ also require one, since each of these durative events is also conceived of as completed and in the past. 5.2.2.6 The optative Another frequent use of the s-stem is for optatives, i.e. formulaic wishes for the future, often invoking divine action, and often having a pragmatic conversational function, such as greeting, leave taking, thanking, cursing: aġnā-k allah! (5) ‘May God enrich you!’ (said on taking leave of someone engaged in gainful activity) ṭāl ˁumr-ik! (48) ‘May your life be long!’ (used as a polite address form, or as a courteous interjection when correcting s’one) ṭawwal allah ˁumr il-ǧamīˁ! (19) ‘My God give you all long life’ (valediction said to leave-takers) 36  il-yibal, short for yibal id-duxān, the name of a rocky outcrop near the Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO) headquarters in ˁAwālī, and a common way of referring to BAPCO in former times.

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bayyaḏ ̣ allah wēh-ik! (48) ‘May God whiten your face!’ (said to someone who has done one a favour) karram allah waǧh is-sāmiˁ! ‘May God honour the face of the listener!’ (said to an interlocutor when an unclean thing is mentioned) l-iˁrāq? qabal allah! (3) ‘Iraq? May God accept (it)!’ (said in reaction to the news that an acquaintance had recently been on a visit to the Shīˁī shrines in Iraq) slēma čabbat-ha! (Manāma 5) ‘May an ill wind afflict her!’ (curse) In certain types of optative, however, the p-stem is more common (see 5.2.3.6 below) 5.2.3 The prefix-stem (p-stem) verb The two basic characteristics of p-stem verb usage are that: (a) the events it describes are incomplete: they can be continuous (‘she’s talking on the telephone’, ‘he’s having treatment’); durative (‘he runs a business’, ‘she likes ice-cream’, I (can) speak Arabic’); habitual (‘I play football every Saturday’), or they can be general truths to which the notion of completeness is irrelevant (‘water boils at 100 degrees centigrade’). In conversational material of the sort analysed here, general propositions of this scientific type do not occur, but adages and proverbs, which do occur quite frequently, are perceived by some speakers as having a similar ‘eternal’ truth value. (b) it does not have a default time reference, and can refer to the past, the present or the future, whether viewed from the point of utterance or from some other reference point. The context and the presence of certain sentence elements—adverbial modifiers of time, subordinate clauses and the like—make clear what time relative to the time of utterance or other reference point the p-stem verb is referring to, and generally without the need for auxiliary verbs that explicitly specify time.37 The p-stem is often used to give a sense of drama and immediacy when narrating past events. 37  One of the most noticeable differences between the speech of the uneducated and those who have had exposure to literary Arabic and other Arabic dialects is the virtual absence

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There are bound morphemes which can be prefixed to the p-stem verb to make its time reference explicit (though their use is not obligatory), as well as other prefixable particles and auxiliary verbs which have an aspectual or a modal function. See section 5.2.9 in general, and 5.2.9.2.1 for the most important of these, the future/volitional b/bi-. Here are some typical examples of p-stem usage, covering the present, past and future, without any modifying prefixes or auxiliary verbs, and roughly classified by type of meaning: 5.2.3.1 Continuous Present: yitgašmar wiyyā-k! (24) ‘He’s playing a trick on you!’ hād-ani akūl liš¸ lā! (28) ‘I’m telling you exactly that, aren’t I!’ Past: āḏkir abū-y čam marra yinṣaḥ-ni wi yigūl . . . (Manāma 6) ‘I remember my father, how, many a time, he advised me, saying . . .’ al-ḥīn il-ḥayy, šway fīh yinġaš, tāxḏ-əh, tiḥaml-əh fi l-maḥmal, willi mā fīh, tixalli yirūḥ (48) ‘The ones alive, still showing signs of life, you picked them up (out of the sea), and lifted them up on board . . . but the ones who weren’t, you let them go . . .’ (describing the aftermath of a shipwreck) Future: ana aṭalliˁ falāfīn il-yōm min wēn ə?! min fakḥat-i ana? (7) ‘From where, these days, am I going to produce thirty (thousand rupees)?! From my arse?’ illi rāḥaw¸ mā nitḥačča fī-hum (Manāma 2) ‘The ones who have died, we’re not going to talk about them’ of the auxiliary verb kān as a marker of time in the speech of the former. ING 109 makes the same observation for the dialects of Najd.

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ana azīd-ak xabar baˁad . . . (3) ‘I’ll tell you something else too . . .’ 5.2.3.2 Durative Present: hāda-nta tiḥči ˁarabi tamām (7) ‘You speak Arabic perfectly’ yitlawwat u yimūt (6) ‘It shrivels up and dies’ ytisamrūn ila nuṣṣ il-lēl (Manāma 6) ‘They stay up (talking) until midnight’ mā yiswa fils fi waqt al-ġila (5) ‘He isn’t worth a fils at a time of high prices’ Past: ha-l-bint itḥibb-ah maḥabbat ˁēn-ha (44) ‘That girl loved him with a passion’ tamši tākil fīha (Manāma 1) ‘She walked along, nibbling at it’ Future: inǧi nigˁad ihni, ana u inta . . . nāxud lēna hindiyya, ṭabbāxa tiṭbax lēna mā dām iḥna fi š-šuġil (5) ‘We’ll come and live here, just you and me . . . we’ll get us an Indian girl who’ll cook for us while we’re out at work’ yisammūn-əh “wakˁat wēl min ġāb u wēl min ḥaḍar” . . . inta mifil insān ġāyib titˀawwah ila bēt-ik awwal ila bēt-ik u ˁayāl-ik . . . illi fi bēt-ik . . . lākin mitlabbid fi maḥall yaˁni mˀāmin, yitˀawwah ilēk u inta baˁīd . . . yisammūn-əh “wēl min ġāb u wēl min ḥaḍar” u hādi wakˁa mā yinˁirif ˁan-ha tšibb lēl aw nhār . . . itfūr min ǧabal ḥaylo (3) ‘They call it ‘the calamity where there’ll be woe to those absent and woe to those present’ . . . You’ll be like an absent person, weeping for your

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home and your children . . . who are in your home . . . but you’ll be hiding somewhere, safe and sound . . . and they’ll weep for you because you’re far away. They call it ‘woe to him who is absent and woe to him who is present’. It is not known whether this is a calamity which will start at night or in the day . . . but it will flare up in Mount Haylo’ (from a Shīˁī millenarian account of how Bahrain will end) 5.2.3.3 Habitual Present: hāy bani ˁarrāf illi yiguṣṣūn il-aṯar? (44) ‘Is that the Banī ˁArrāf who are trackers (lit ‘follow tracks’)?’ šalġam, šuwandar, ahāna, xast—kil šay nizraˁ (26) ‘Turnips, beetroot, cabbage, lettuce—we grow everything’ mā yiṭlaˁ min il-bēt illa rubbiya fi yad-ah (48) ‘He never goes out without money in his pocket (lit ‘a rupee in his hand’)’ Past: nigˁad inlāym-ah u nilˁab fīh (Manāma 5) ‘We used to collect them up (= sea-shells) and play with them’ mā ˁid-na ūdām, niṭlaˁ lēna əḥla nitrayyag bih (16) ‘If we had nothing savoury, we would get a salted fish out and breakfast on that’ nrūḥ awwal ˁēn ġarbiyya, u ˁēn mani, u ˁēn il-fasla, u ˁēn atwakkal, wi l-mālḥa, w il-gaṣṣ, wi l-ḥōṭa ..baˁad-im-mā nrūḥ l-əˁyūn, nəġsil, nsawwi ḥawāyiǧ-na (33) ‘In the old days we’d go to the western well, and Mani well, and Fasla well, and Atwakkal well, and Mālha, and Gaṣṣ and al-Ḥōṭa wells . . . after we went to the well, we’d wash (the dirty clothes) and do our chores’ Future: gūl ḥāǧa, ġaraḍ, yinkəḍi (34) ‘Say anything, whatever you need, it will be done’

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5.2.3.4 Historic present The p-stem is sometimes used in recounting dramatic events which are clearly punctual rather than habitual, as in the example below, which is an excerpt of an account of a fatal traffic accident: titˁadda lih sayyāra, tirgaˁ l-mōtirsēkal, u yā ṭēḥat-ah čidi, u lā ˁalēh sifti, u yinbaṭṭ ir-rās (19) ‘A car overtakes him, hits the motorbike, and he falls off, not wearing a crash-helmet, and his skull splits open’ 5.2.3.5 General Propositions This type of sentence occurred in the form of proverbs and adages, e.g. il-čidb mā yinaggi (3) ‘Telling lies does not save (you)’ (≈ ‘Cheats never prosper’) illi yabbi l-ˁāli38 yiṣbur ˁala r-rašš (48) ‘He who wishes to sail north has to put up with the spray’ (≈ ‘If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen’) ˁaḏāri tisgi l-əbˁīd wi txalli l-ǧirīb (proverb) ‘ˁAḏārī (spring) waters the far and abandons the near’39 (≈ ‘Charity begins at home’) 5.2.3.6 The optative The p-stem, like the s-stem, can be used in optative expressions, as in the examples below. For some reason, the p-stem is particularly common in imprecations in the BV dialects (and in the speech of women to each other especially), while the s-stem occurs more commonly in positive exhortations (see 5.2.2.6). Examples: allah yiḥfaḍ-k! (BV) ‘God save you!’ 38  ˁāli ‘north’ in Gulf maritime parlance, sāfil ‘south’. The prevailing wind in the Gulf is from the north, which means sailing north is always more difficult. 39  This spring in the north of Bahrain (now dried up) used to be used to irrigate crops far to its north but not those close by. It is applied critically to those who neglect their own families and favour strangers, hence the idiomatic equivalent meaning given here.

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allāh yisalm-ak! (all) ‘May God keep you safe!’ allah yiġarbil-š! (BV) ‘God confuse you!’ allah yilˁan-š! (BV) ‘God damn you!’ xannāg40 yiḥmil-š! (BV) ‘May you choke to death!’ slēma iččibb-iš! (BV) ‘May an ill-wind destroy you!’ alˁan abū-h ha-š-šuġil! (all) ‘Damn this work!’ (lit ‘I curse its father, this work’) anˁal41 bū-h ha-l-bēt! (all) ‘Damn this house!’ lā yiṭra l-mōt ˁala bāl-ik! (A) ‘Let the thought of death not cross your mind!’ 5.2.4 The active participle (ap) As in other Arabic dialects, if we take MSA/CLA as a yardstick for comparison, the ap in BA has a greatly expanded role as a verb form. In BA it has, like the p-stem, no inherent time reference, taking this, as well as its grammatical aspect (continuous/habitual or perfective) from the pragmatics of the conversational context. So, in the A dialect, əhuwwə ṭāliˁ can mean ‘he will/is going to go out’, ‘he is going out’, ‘he has gone out’/‘he went out’, depending on the context and other ‘framing’ constituents of an utterance, such as adverbial modifiers of time or modality. But in all cases, the ap describes the resultant state in which its subject is, was, has been, or will be. Two other factors play a part in how the ap is to be interpreted: lexical aspect and semantic class. Verbs can be categorised by their lexical aspect (sometimes called Aktionsart) which describes the nature of their temporal flow: punctual 40  The local name for ‘diphtheria’, a common illness in pre-oil Bahrain. 41  With the euphemistic transposition of the radicals, also common in other dialects.

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(e.g. ‘to wake up’, ‘to grab’), durative (‘to look for’, ‘to expect’, ‘to wear’), stative (‘to be silent’, ‘to be/get tired’, ‘to be/get angry’), developmental/change of state (‘to learn’, ‘to get to know’, ‘to die’), inceptive (‘to sit down’, ‘to mount’, ‘to put on (clothes)’), semelfactive (‘to blink’, ‘to sneeze’, ‘to explode’) among other finer distinctions which have been proposed. They can further be categorised by their semantic class, e.g. cognitive/psychological (‘to know’, ‘to understand’, ‘to feel’, ‘to like’), translocative (‘to go’, ‘to come’, ‘to descend’). In BA, as in other Arabic dialects, and depending on context, the same verb can have more than one lexical aspectual value, which in English would require separate verbs. So, for example, rikab can be inceptive = ‘to mount, get on’ or durative = ‘to ride’; similarly libas can mean both ‘to put on’ clothes (inceptive) and ‘to wear’ them (durative). faham can be both durative = ‘to have an understanding of s’thing’ and punctual = ‘to cotton on, realise’. The verb ḍarab ‘to hit; to beat’ can be have both a punctual sense, e.g. ḍarabat is-sayyāra il-ˁamūd ‘the car hit the lamp-post’ and a durative, e.g. ḍarab iš-šurṭi is-siǧīn ‘the policeman beat the prisoner’. The detail of how aspectual values are mapped onto BA verbal forms—the s-stem, the p-stem and the ap—differs from one verb class to another. So, for example, to return to the cognitive verb faham ‘to understand’: the ap in ana fāhim ḥači-h ‘I understand what he is saying’ has a continuous, here-and-now sense. Contrast this with the punctual sense which the s-stem of the same verb typically has: fahamt! ‘I understand!’ (= ‘Eureka! I’ve caught on!’)’ or al-ḥīn fahamat il-ˁarab ‘These days, the Arabs possess know-how’, both of which (regardless of the English translations) denote the accomplishment of ‘understanding’ over a time-span, here respectively very short or relatively long. The p-stem of the same verb, as in in afham īl-lahǧa l-bahrēniyya ‘I understand Bahraini Arabic’ is typically ‘dispositional’,42 i.e. it focuses on a habitual or durative state. The way in which the ap of a verb is to be interpreted depends basically on its lexical aspect, and will generally differ from how it is to be interpreted in its s-stem and p-stem forms. The ap of pattern I verbs is CāCiC, but some pattern I verbs, especially those which involve a change of state or which can have a durative aspect, have an alternative ap of the form CaCCān. In some cognitive verbs, both CāCiC and CaCCān exist and are more or less synonymous, e.g. fahmān (or fāhim) ‘having (acquired) an understanding (of)’, but in others there is a subtle difference, e.g. sāmiˁ al-xabar? ‘Have you heard the news?’ (punctual use); samˁān min wāḥid sāk-in ma? (3) ‘Have you ever heard/Do you ever hear of one (of these clerics) 42  This term is borrowed from COW 277.

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ever so much as offering anyone a glass of water?’43 (dispositional/durative). Some stative verbs, like ziˁil ‘to be/get angry’, tiˁib ‘to be/get tired’, firiḥ ‘to be/ get happy, to rejoice’, have only the CaCCān ap form: zaˁlān, taˁbān, farḥān, etc. To make clear the interaction of these factors—time reference, grammatical aspect, lexical aspect, and semantic type—it will be convenient to supply contextual information about most of the illustrative examples. The working of the system will also become clearer from the examination of a few extended exchanges between speakers, again with an explanatory commentary. The reader is referred to 4.6.1 for details of the morphological differences in the ap between the A and B dialects, specifically the obligatory insertion of an –in(n)– infix between the ap and an enclitic object pronoun in the B dialects. 5.2.4.1 Future time reference As in CLA, the ap can have future reference relative to the time of utterance, though this is not very common. Sometimes futurity is indicated by adverbials like bāčir ‘tomorrow’, is-sana l-yāya ‘next year’, but often it is implicit in the pragmatics of context, e.g. [1] zēn, lō wāḥid gāl “mā-na musaǧǧil wi lā muˁalm-in-kum”, wēš yiṣīr? (15) ‘Right, so if someone said “I’m not going to record (anything), and I’m not going to tell you”, what would happen? (Said defiantly by a farmer in reply to a request from a government employee to keep proper records in future) [2] wa lā intīn kāṣṣa lisān-iš lā? (5) ‘Won’t you hold your tongue?’ (From a folk-tale: the addressee, the Sultan’s daughter, was criticising the Sultan, who interrupted her with this remark in an attempt to cut her short) [3] inta muhub ḏābiḥ lik waḥda ˁumur-ha ˁišrīn sana, ḥatta yisammūn-ha ǧirīma! (radio play) ‘You won’t be killing a woman of twenty, so that they could call it a crime! (implied: the woman to be killed is too old for the police to be able (seriously) to call it a crime)

43  The speaker was criticising the hypocrisy of Shīˁī clerics, who encourage their coreligionists to spend money on all kinds of ‘good works’, but are often miserly themselves.

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All of these uses of the ap are statements or questions about speaker’s/interlocutor’s intentions, but we know this only from the conversational or narrative context. 5.2.4.2 Present time reference 5.2.4.2.1 Continuous/current The ap often describes actions and states which are on-going at the time of speech, e.g: [4] wēn rāyiḥ? (Manāma 2) ‘Where are you going?’ (The context was a man bumping into an acquaintance in the street) [5] ka-hu yāy! (48) ‘Here he comes now!’ (The speaker had seen a neighbour he’s been talking about approaching) [6] git “mā ādri wēš ṣāyir fi s-sanābis” (33) ‘I said “I don’t know what’s happening in Sanābis”’ (The news of a possible major fire was reaching the speaker) [7] hāḏ-ana mara fi l-xamsīn min ˁumr-i šāyla l-bēt ˁala rās-i (radio play) ‘Here I am, a woman of fifty, looking after the whole family on my own’ (Self-explanatory) Examples [8]–[11] are all taken from narratives in which the speakers were describing habits or events from their past lives, which from the past point of reference were, again, on-going. Typically, in a narrative, as here, the ap provides background to the main story-line, but does not take it forward. There is no need to mark pastness with the auxiliary kān because the context has already been established as ‘talking about the past’: [8] hāy mahrat-hum awwal, yaˁni rāyiḥ u rāčib u mḥawwil, hāy l-əgḥāyim (48) ‘That was how they worked in the old days—going down, coming back on board, going down again—that was the rotation system (on a pearling dhow)’ Note that in [8] the ap rāčib is used in the inceptive sense ‘to mount, get on’ (here, a pearling dhow); compare this with example [44] below where the same ap is used but the sense is durative, ‘to fly’ on an aeroplane.

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[9] čidi kāˁda ana wiyya mart walad-i u walad-i . . . (28) ‘I was sitting with my son and his wife . . .  [9] was background description, the prelude to the main events of the narrative (s-stem verbs), in which the speaker’s husband burst in, looked for some money and, not finding it, accused her of stealing it: radd hu u dār ˁala ha-l-bēzāt, yikūl “intīn buktīn il-bēzāt” ‘. . . when he came back and searched for that money, saying “you stole the money” kāˁda in [9] is used in the durative ‘to sit’ sense, rather than inceptive ‘sit down’. [10] ana myawwidat-ha zēn u mā zēn! (Manāma 8) ‘I was clinging onto her for dear life!’ Here, an elderly woman is describing her fear as a new bride, hanging onto a servant as the latter was carrying her to the marriage bedroom. Again, the ap in [10] described the attendant circumstance of the main action. [11] hi kāˁida ˁīnat il-imm ilēha (5) ‘She was playing the role of mother to her’ This was explanatory background information in a folk-tale: an old woman had adopted a princess, who had been orphaned. [12] and [13] exemplify psychological/cognitive verbs: [12] ḥaggalna min-ha wāḥid yingāl lih sayyid kāḍim, mu ˁāǧb-in-ni (1) ‘I got from her a (son) called Sayyid Kāḍim, whom I don’t like’ (lit ‘who does not please me’) [13] hāda-na əmkāsi l-ahwāl min il-ǧimīˁ (1) ‘I’m suffering horrors caused by the lot of them’ In [14], the ap describes the (counterfactual) continuing state which would have ensued if the past action expressed by the s-stem verb had not come to pass:

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[14] il-forma kansal-ha willa hi māšya (30) ‘He cancelled the form, otherwise it would still have been operative’ 5.2.4.2.2 Durative or habitual action/state The ap here describes the state consequent on an event: [15] tlāḥiḏ ̣ il-māy hnāk šlōn wāgif? (5) ‘Do you see how the (irrigation) water over there is stagnant?’ If the s-stem of the same verb were used, the ‘stance’ would be different. Compare [15] (description of state, ap) with [16] (description of event, s-stem): [16] al-ḥin il-māy wguf (3) ‘The (irrigation) water has now stopped (flowing)’ (sc it has been turned off) Similarly, in [17], the ap of the punctual verb ‘to wake up’ describes the state consequent on the act, in a clause of attendant circumstance (ḥāl): [17] lō kān ǧiyat-hum wi l-bilād wāˁya . . . (3) ‘If they had come when the village was wide awake . . .’ Habitual actions are also typically expressed by the ap: [18] awwal gāˁidīn ˁala l-fanar (Manāma 7) ‘In the old days, we would sit by the lantern’ The difference between the ap in this sentence, the same one as is used in [9] above, is that [18] was part of a description of how the women of a by-gone era would typically spend the evening; in [9], the ap provides the setting for the ensuing drama (expressed by the s-stem main verbs). [19] il-liġa illi rāyḥīn ˁalēha (2) ‘The expression which they (habitually) use’ On-going states are also expressed by the ap, typically with durative and ‘developmental’ verbs: [20] ana mitnasya fi l-laḥm (TV play) ‘I have a craving for meat’

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[21] šāyib u ˁāyib (7) ‘(I’m) grey-haired and infirm’ [22] xēr-ik li l-ḥīn bāǧi (44) ‘There still remains good in you’ The corresponding s-stems would entail focus on the action or process: compare [21] ‘I am grey-haired . . .’ with šibt ‘I went/have gone grey’. 5.2.4.2.3 Recent past (with present results/relevance) This is one of the most frequently encountered uses of the ap, and often equates to the English ‘to have just done’ s’thing. The ‘recentness’ of the action is often (but not obligatorily) signalled by the use of taw(w): [23] bōbar taww-ah ṭāliˁ (19) ‘The pumpkin crop has just started to come up’ [24] taww-ak əmġars-inn-ah? (5) ‘Have you just planted it?’ [25] al-ḥīn xamstaˁšar, taw-ha nāḍǧa, taw-ha! (48) ‘Now at fifteen, she has only just reached puberty, only just!’ [26] nāymīn, taw-na nāymīn, taw-na yāyīn u nāymīn (33) ‘We had gone to bed, just gone to bed, just come home and just gone to bed’ Only the context taw-na yāyīn ‘we had just come home’ makes the inceptive interpretation of nāyim in [26] ‘had gone to bed/sleep’ the correct one rather than the durative ‘had been sleeping’. The example is the introductory sentence to an account of a major village fire. 5.2.4.2.4 Past (with present results/relevance) taw always indicates the recentness of a past event, but the more distant past, whether the time is specified or not, is also the province of the ap when the past event still has relevance or is of some interest or consequence to the present situation, e.g. [27] nzēn, ˁaǧal sabaˁ snīn ṭālib? (Manāma 5) ‘Right, so you mean he’s been on the housing waiting list (lit ‘applying’) for seven years?’

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The implication here, and hence the choice of the ap, is that the outcome of his application for a government house is still unknown, even after six or seven years. [28] ana min čam yōm gāṣṣə-hum! (TV play) ‘I cut them (= finger-nails) (only) a few days ago!’ The context here is that the speaker’s finger-nails have been judged too long, so the recent-ness of their being cut (his use of the ap) is adduced by the speaker as a context-relevant way of excusing himself. [29] intūn əmsāfrīn, aḏ̣unn? (5) ‘You have been abroad, I believe?’ The questioner in [29] was seeking an explanation of why the addressee had not been at his farm on several occasions when he had called in to see him during the previous month. It turned out that the questioner’s assumption in his question was correct—the addressee had been away in India for medical treatment. [30] kālaw “il-ˁām misāfir, ha-s-sana mā tsāfir” (41) ‘They said “You travelled abroad last year, so this year you won’t” Here, in [30], it is the fact of having travelled abroad last year which has present relevance: the speaker will therefore not be allowed to travel this year. Note the effect of context on the perfective interpretation of the ap here, and the contrastive futurative use of the p-stem verb, tsāfir in the following clause. The following extended example is particularly striking, as it shows how the ‘present relevance’ of the action conveyed by the ap is a key factor in interpreting what, pragmatically speaking, is going on. The aps are boldface: [31] H: zēn, wēn hāḏ illi ǧibt-ha? (41) A: wēš-hu? H: ha? A: wēš inta gāyil lēna? H: ṭamāṭ A: inta gāyil lēna bi ṭamāṭ? H: yā ˁali, yā ˁali! ams ana baˁad əmṭarriš lēč! A: gāyil lēna bi ṭ-ṭamāṯ? C: mā nisēna, mā ninsa abadan! H: ‘Right, where is the stuff that you’ve brought?’

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A: ‘What stuff?’ H: ‘Ha?’ A: ‘What was it you asked us for?’ H: ‘Tomato (seedlings)’ A: ‘You asked us for tomato (seedlings)?’ H: ‘Ali! Ali! I sent word to you yesterday as well!’ A: ‘Did he ask us for tomato (seedlings)?’ C: ‘We didn’t forget, we never forget!’ At the opening of this exchange, H (a farmer) asks about something that he had asked A (a government agricultural extension officer) for and which he thinks A has definitely brought with him and must be the reason for his visit, hence the s-stem past tense ǧibt ‘you (have) brought’. The reason for the form of H’s opening question ‘where is . . .?’ is that A had parked his jeep in full view of H but was not carrying anything in his arms as he approached him. If H had asked this opening question with the ap ǧāyib, that would imply he already had evidence that A had indeed brought what he was expecting, e.g. that he had already seen it (in which case asking the question in this fashion would have been pointless). A then (as was his wont) plays a game, first implying that H had not asked for anything, and then querying, even if he had, whether it was what H says it was. A’s three questions all use the ap of gāl ‘to say, tell’ which in each case has the effect of highlighting the current relevance (here = the truth value) of what H claims to have previously said about the matter at hand. By using the ap, A is really asking ‘Is it the truth that you (have) previously asked?’ H plays to the same agenda, in that he counters with another ap: ams ana baˁad əmṭarriš lēč! ‘I sent word to you yesterday as well!’ confirming that he had not only (previously) asked A, but gone further than that only the previous day by sending word to A via a third party. Through the repeated use of the ap, the current relevance of this further action of ‘asking’ to the matter in hand is emphasized.44 Further examples: [32] il-harīs wi l-maḍrūba, hāy ḥagg aḥad wālid (Manāma 6) ‘Wheat porridge and savoury rice, that was for anyone who had given birth’

44  The conclusion to this exchange by C (the author) is, of course, contextually inappropriate. I should have used an ap form, iḥna mu nāsīn ‘we haven’t forgotten’ (the form of current relevance) rather than the ‘past historic’ mā nisēna ‘we didn’t forget’, but I was still learning how the tense/aspectual system worked at the time when this recording was made!

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‘Having become a mother’ is the state described by wālid, to which these food items are relevant. An s-stem verb instead of wālid would not mediate this linkage, as it would merely describe a past event. [33] mā adri, gāṭṭ-inn-ah hnāk ˁumāni (34) ‘I don’t know if an Omani chucked it there’ The speaker in [33] is guessing that the reason why some lettuce, which he said he had not planted, had come up in a certain seed-bed was that one of his Omani labourers had carelessly thrown it there. The sense of the ap here is almost epistemic ‘must have chucked it there’, since the speaker has no direct knowledge of who actually was responsible. This is a good example of the use of the ap to mark a past act which has a present result/relevance. [34] iḏa šiftīn āya qurˀāniyya tiˁirf tiqrīn-ha lō bass ˁala galb-iš ḥāfiḏ̣atin-ha? (10) ‘If you see a Qurˀānic verse, can you read it, or have you merely learnt it/ do you merely know it off by heart?’ [35] wāḥid mitˁallim ˁala z-zirāˁa mā yixalli z-zirāˁa (12) ‘Someone who has learnt about/knows about farming does not leave it’ In [34] and [35] ḥafaḏ ̣ ‘to learn by heart’ and taˁallam ‘to learn’ are both change of state verbs, and their ap indicates the result of the change, hence the alternative English translations which highlight respectively the perfective nature of the action (‘have learnt’) and the state which has resulted (‘know about’, ‘know off by heart’). The ap of atelic verbs (i.e. those which have no inherent end point) such as ‘to eat/consume’ is always perfective = ‘have eaten/consumed’. Their habitual and continuous aspect = ‘eating/consuming’ is expressed by the p-stem verb. Contrast the perfective sense of the ap in [36] and [37] with the habitual and continuous senses of the p-stem of the same verb in [38] and [39]: [36] sittat ašrāb māklīn-ha l-ḥašīš (6) ‘There are six seed-beds which have been overgrown by weeds’ [37] al-ḥīn inta mākil šāy fi baṭn-ak . . . taˁāl lī min iṣ-ṣubḥ lā tākil ayyat šay (5) ‘Now you’ve eaten something (sc with the result that I cannot treat you) . . . come to me in the morning and don’t eat anything (before you do)’

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[38] kānat tākil əḥbūb willa? (48) ‘Was she taking contraceptive pills, or what?’ (habitual) [39] tamši tākil fīha (28) ‘She was walking along, nibbling at it’ (continuous) The sense of [40] is ‘I married X (and still am married to X)’ or simply ‘I have a village Baḥrānī husband’. The same sentence with s-stem axāḏt would be a statement of what happened ‘I got married to . . .’ without any implication as to whether its consequences are still continuing, and it would typically occur in a different kind of context, e.g. a list of life events: ‘I got married, moved house, had my first child’, etc. Similarly [41] focuses on the result of the process (= ‘my mother became, and remains a divorcee’), not the fact of her getting divorced: [40] ana māxḏa min il-ḥalāyil (Manāma 5) ‘I am married to a village Baḥrānī’ [41] il-wālda əmṭalg-in-ha abū-y (Manāma 5) ‘My mother is divorced from my father’ Examples [42]–[48] below are further examples of the ‘experiential past’. Example [42] was said by a middle-aged man who had fallen from a palmtree in his boyhood, the effects of which were life-long. The choice of the ap ṭāyiḥ signifies the continuing relevance of the effects of this fall, which are spelled out in the rest of the example. [42] ana ṭāyiḥ min naxla, itṣawwab il-lisān (3) ‘I had a fall from a palm-tree, and my speech was affected’ Example [43] was the down-to-earth view on child-birth of a woman who had had nine children, and was asked about how mid-wives helped: [43] lēn allah ˁaṭ-inn-iš il-ˁāfya, mā tiftikirīn fi ḥābbat wilid wi lā ġēr-uh (28) ‘If God has brought you through safe and sound, you’re not thinking about midwives or about anything else’ Example [44] is part of a description of an old man’s younger days, whose phases he marked off by his new experiences: [44] ḏīk is-sana awwal mā rāčib iṭ-ṭāyra (44) ‘That year was when I had my first flight in an aeroplane’

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Note that rāčib here is used in its durative, rather than inceptive aspect, hence the difference in meaning from rāčib in example [8]. Examples [45]–[48] are examples of the experiential past involving psychological/cognitive verbs: [45] yumkin šāyf-inn-ak gabil (5) ‘It’s possible I’ve seen you before’ [46] mā daššēna il-ġōṣ lākin sāmˁīn (Manāma 8) ‘I didn’t go diving but I’ve heard about it’ [47] ˁind-i nikat bass nās-in-hum (5) ‘I know some jokes but I’ve forgotten them’ [48] baˁad wāḥid ism-uh rāyiḥ ˁann-i (24) ‘There’s another one whose name has slipped my mind’ 5.2.4.2.5 Anteriorising action/state: the pluperfect Since the ap often expresses what ‘has happened’, recently or in the speaker’s experience, it is naturally also used as a means of expressing what ‘had happened’ before a past event described by the main verb, often by way of an explanation, or the provision of other relevant background information. Example [49] occurred in an account of a village feud of the 1920s, and the theft was put forward by the speaker as the event that had triggered it: [49] sabab-ha muġṭa bāykat-inn-ah čalba min l-əbdayyaˁ (3) ‘The cause of it was a pot-lid which some bitch from Budayyaˁ had stolen’ In the next example, [50], the ‘going’ expressed by the ap ġādi self-evidently preceded the ‘coming back’ (ǧīt), but the meaning would be subtly different if the s-stem ġadēt had been used instead of the ap ġādi. In context, ġādi implies that ‘going’, i.e. being absent, was the cause of a problem which could only be solved by ‘coming back’—the speaker had had to come back in order to attend to an unanticipated problem on his farm. The s-stem verb ġadēt would be interpreted sequentially—‘I went, and then I came back’—with no implication that ‘going’ had caused a problem which was solved by coming back. The intention implicit in the Arabic that the speaker actually used is brought out by the translation: [50] ana ġādi karzakkān wiyya l-xāl u ǧīt (12) ‘I had gone to Karzakkān with my uncle, so I (had to) come back’

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Example [51] occurs in the context of a description of what happened when the pearling fleet returned to port, so the main verb, a p-stem, describes what normally or habitually happened: yiwaṣlūn ‘they would arrive’. The two aps describe the state in which the people to whom they were returning were in: ‘having had (i.e. finished) lunch’ (the sense of the ap with durative, atelic verbs is always subsequent state) and ‘getting up’ (the sense of the ap of translocatives like ‘get up’ is always concurrent with the point of reference): [51] yiwaṣlūn w in-nās mitġaddīn, gāymīn min al-ġada (33) ‘They would arrive when people had finished their lunch, (or) were just getting up from their lunch’ Example [52] is the anterior background to an anecdote about the perceived loose morals of modern women. The use of the two aps signals that the death of a particular woman’s husband and the offer of a new marriage (the social norm) were relevant issues in making the ‘case for the prosecution’—the speaker goes on to say that the woman turned down the offer of marriage on the untrue grounds that she was barren; in actual fact, as was discovered soon after when she was caught in flagrante delicto, she had been having a regular sexual liaison for years as a widow, and simply wanted ‘to do as she pleased’: [52] hēka ˁində-na, waḥda mitwaffi zōǧ-ha u ǧāy lēha wāḥid yixṭub-ha . . . (7) ‘There’s this woman in our village whose husband had died, and a man had come to ask for her hand in marriage . . .’ Example [53] is an explanation of why parents did not send their daughters to government schools when a non-religious school system first developed: [53] māxḏīn fikra mub zēna ˁan il-madāris (Manāma 7) ‘They had formed a bad opinion of (government) schools’ Example [54], out of context, could have almost any time reference. In fact the question was directed at a woman who was telling the story of how she had discovered in her mid-teens that arrangements were being made for her wedding: [54] maḥḥad əmˁallim-inn-iš? (Manāma 5) ‘Had nobody told you?’ In example [55] the main verb is an ap and has the auxiliary kān, though this is not strictly necessary, as, even without it, the context makes it clear that the

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sense of the ap is anteriorising: the speaker is relating that when she was born, her family had made a vow that if she survived to adulthood (the rate of infant mortality then was extremely high), they would read prayers over her on her wedding day:45 [55] kān ahl-i nāḏrīn ˁalay yigrūn ˁalay mīlād (Manāma 8) ‘My family had made a vow concerning me that they would read prayers for the Prophet over me (on my wedding day)’ Example [56] occurred in the telling of a folk-tale (qaṭr in-nada ‘Dewdrop’) in which a woman who has fallen pregnant accidentally pricks her finger with a needle, and instead of blood, a drop of water appears. On the spot she decides to call her unborn child ‘Dewdrop’ because: [56] ṭāyiḥ maṭar dīk il-yōm (Manāma 1) ‘Rain had fallen that day’ Here the ap again has a back-grounding, explanatory function. Example [57] is similar to [54] in that the ap is again the main clause verb, and the action it describes is anterior to that of the verb in the time clause which frames it. Recall that the verb in time clauses introduced by gabil mā and gabil lā ‘before’ is p-stem, as here, even when the action referred to is clearly past (see 5.11.2.3). [57] tilifizyūn kabil mā yimūt mištir-inn-əh (19) ‘He had bought a television before he died’ Example [58] provides an extended example of anteriorising ap use from a folk tale told by an elderly woman from a BV community (5). The opening sentence presents the results of the hero’s activities: a once derelict house was now packed full of useful household appliances. How he had achieved that transformation is then described by means of a long string of aps (boldface below)

45  This (wholly un-Islamic) practice of ‘vowing’ to do something meritorious in recompense for the granting of baraka, e.g. the healing of a chronic illness, the granting of a child to a woman thought incapable of conception, etc. used to be widespread, and practised by women from both the A and B communities. It was often done at the shrine of a holy man, but among the A community especially, it seems to have involved animistic practices such as visits to rocks and other topographical features.

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which list, in typical story-telling style, each of the actions he had taken (all, obviously, anterior to the visible results) and which in their totality had now transformed the derelict ruin into a desirable residence: [58] mā addat l-əḍḥēwa illa hu əmčakkar ˁawāyiz . . . māxid əgdūr u māxid əbġāl u māxid ačil u māxid ašya . . . mitmašši əb-hum, ġādi əb-hum u mārr il-ˁēn u tāris əb-ha hēk il-ǧaḥlatēn . . . (5) ‘By mid-morning it (the house) was crammed full of household things: he had bought saucepans, he had bought small water pots, he had bought food and he had bought (other) things . . . he had gone back and forth with them, he had taken them and gone to the well, and with them (= the small water pots) he had filled up those two large water pots’ Finally, reflexes of CLA qad can be used with the ap to form pluperfects, though such forms are less common than qad + s-stem verbs (see 5.2.9.1.1 and 5.2.2.3) with a similar anteriorising function, e.g. [59] git “naˁam, āna git lihā, lākin gid-hum gāylīn lī, yaˁni, “rūḥ u gūl liha . . . ” (44) ‘I said, “Yes, I did tell her, but it was them that had told me “Go and tell her”’ 5.2.4.2.6 Note on some ap developments: ergative verbs Ergative verbs, that is transitive verbs whose object can become their subject, with the verb acquiring an intransitive sense (sometimes called ‘middle voice’) occur in English, e.g. ‘this shirt washes easily’, ‘the 2010 burgundies are drinking well’, ‘the rice cooked in ten minutes’, ‘the window broke’. In BA and Arabic generally, middle voice is expressed through the derivational morphology, though the details differ between CLA and the dialects, and between the dialects themselves. In BA, as we saw in 4.1.2.4, ‘middle voice’ is often expressed by a pattern V verb, e.g. tbaṭṭaṭ ‘to split (itself) open’ versus transitive pattern I baṭṭ or pattern II baṭṭaṭ ‘to split (s’thing) open’. However, in some roots, the same verb can have be both transitive and middle voice, e.g. bannad ‘to close, stop (s’thing’)’ and ‘to come to a stop, close (intrans)’. An unusual development in BA (only recorded in the B dialects) is that the ap of certain transitive pattern I verbs can be used ergatively, as in the English examples above. However, in all verbs where this occurs, it (a) only occurs in the ap; (b) only occurs with a complement noun, explicit or implicit. Some examples:

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šaḥan ‘to load’: maḥmal šāḥin ḥaṣa yarkis, lā? (Manāma 5) ‘A boat loaded with stone will sink, won’t it?’ il-maḥmal šāḥin yazwa (48) ‘The boat was loaded with crewmen’ šāḥina dānāt (dialect poetry) ‘It is encrusted with large pearls’ minn-ič šāḥin is-sbētār (dialect poetry) ‘Because of you the hospital is filled (with injured men)’ taras ‘to fill’: yiṣīr inšāllah tāris hāḏa (5) ‘This (seed-bed), God willing, will be filled (with healthy plants) ġaṭṭ ‘to immerse’: killə-ha šāḥna māy, ġāṭṭa māy (12) ‘All of it (= farmland) was flooded with water, drowned in water’ sadd ‘to block, fill in’: kill-əh sādd (Manama 5) ‘It’s all been filled in (with earth)’ The one exception noted, which does not have a noun complement was: gaṣṣ ‘to break, cut through’: maḥmal gāṣṣ mismār-ah (dialect poetry) ‘a boat whose nails are broken’ In all these examples, the ap whose translation has been italicised has the meaning which a pp would normally have. But it is not the case that, in BA, the verbs from which these aps are derived have a complete alternative set

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of passive or middle forms marked by a different vowel pattern, as they do in some other Arabic dialects such as Cairene, where pairs like rakaz ‘to make stable’ rikiz ‘to come to rest’, sakan ‘to live in’ and sikin ‘to be occupied’ are not uncommon. Interestingly, however, in Cairene, šaḥan can mean both ‘to load, fill’ and ‘to be loaded, filled’ with no change in vowelling.46 All one can say on the basis of my BA data is that passive meanings for these otherwise active verbs did not occur other than in the ap,47 and that there is always a synonymous pp form which is the more common usage, viz mašḥun ‘loaded’, magṣūṣ ‘broken’, matrūs ‘filled up, full’, masdūd ‘blocked’. Passive finite forms are freely created by the usual method of in- prefixation, e.g. inšahan ‘to be loaded’, ingaṣṣ, ‘to be cut’, intaras ‘to be filled’, insadd ‘to be blocked’, etc. 5.2.4.2.7 Note on the use of yāy One particular and seemingly idiosyncratic use of the ap of ǧa/ya ‘to come’ was noted. This occurred in one pearl-diver’s account of life on board ship in the instructions given by the nōxaḏa (captain) to the crew. Here are some examples: gāl “yallah! yāyīn əxḏaw š-šrāˁ!” yaw xaḏaw š-šrāˁ (48) ‘He said: “Come on! Come and take the sail!” so they came and took the sail’ wiṣlat il-bīwara . . . gāl “yāyīn ḥagg il-mīdāf!” yaˁni iyurrūn-ah (48) ‘The anchor came up . . . He said: “To the oars!” meaning that they should pull them’ gāl “xarrub48! yāyīn əxḏaw š-šrāˁ!” (48) ‘He said: “Collapse (the sail)! Take (and make ready) the sail!” u ˁugub gāl “yāyīn ḥagg l-əšrāˁ (48) ‘And afterwards he said: “To the sails!” 46  H&B 454 gives an example il-ˁarabiyya šaḥanit ‘the car has been fully loaded’. 47  This may, of course, be simply because I did not record this usage, rather than that it does not occur. 48  The verb xarrab was glossed by a (non-expert) native speaker as the act of collapsing the sail from its position as a sunshade, prior to using it for its normal purpose. However, the word xirāb with which it would seem to be connected is the long anchor rope, which is paid out as the boat moves from one pearling bed to another. It is possible that it means ‘to haul in the anchor rope’ (in preparation for sailing on).

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yāyīn seems to mean ‘(we) are about to . . .’ as it often does in normal BA speech, and here seems to mark a new instruction to the crew, but it is normally followed by a p-stem verb, not an imperative, as in the first and third of the examples here. The imperative does have some unusual uses in Gulf and Najdi Arabic, notably the so-called ‘narrative imperative’ in which it substitutes for an s-stem verb in stories as a way of giving a dramatic immediacy to the events recounted (see 5.2.7, 6.3.2). Here, however, its use remains a puzzle. 5.2.5 The passive participle (pp) The passive participle (pp) functions grammatically as an adjective, and describes the state of an entity consequent to an action performed upon it. Like the ap, the pp has no inherent time reference. Examples: il-ġūri matrūs yinzabīl (dialect poetry) ‘The kettle was full of ginger tea’ is-sāmān hāk-hu maflūt hnāk (14) ‘The stuff has been dumped over there’ šūf, hāy il-arḍ mankūḍa (15) ‘Look, this land has been dug over’ fi s-sayyāra mālat-hum čanṭa flūs magṭūṭ (15) ‘In their car was a bag of money lying (lit ‘thrown’) there’ is-sifti mu marbūṭ zēn (19) ‘His safety helmet wasn’t secured properly’ lākin lō hāda l-ǧadwal maǧyūb ihni . . . (4) ‘But if this irrigation channel were to be re-directed here . . .’ – – – –

mabniyya l-əgbūr? (5) masṭūḥ mūl (24) ‘Are the tombs (in the form of) buildings (lit ‘built’)? ‘Completely roofed over’

yirūḥūn maˁdūmīn u iyūn mawlūdīn (33) ‘They would go (on the pilgrimage) childless, and come back with children’ (lit ‘. . . . deprived (of children) . . . (with children) born’)

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sīsam əmbayyaḍ (48) ‘Tin-plated ebony’ nuṣṣ-ah mbannad, il-lēt mālah mbannad (Manāma 5) ‘Half of them were blacked out (lit ‘closed’), (half of) its headlights were blacked out’ il-yihhāl əmtawwaḥīn hāk-ku wēš kiṯra-hum, niswān iyībūn bi d-darāzin! (radio play) ‘Kids are being shelled out like peas (lit ‘spewed out, how many there are!’), women are having them by the dozen!’ hāk-hu fīh ḥṣir u ġēr-uh mfallatīn (24) ‘There are straw-mats and other stuff which have been thrown there’ awlād-iš mšattatīn ə? (Manāma 5) ‘Have your children been split up (sc between their different fathers)?’ ˁarab əmsamra, awādim əmsamra (48) ‘(There were) men who were swept away, people who were swept away (sc by a shipwreck)’ One verb pattern, VII (and for a few verbs, pattern VIII, e.g. ibtāg ‘to be stolen’, ibtalaš ‘to suffer inconvenience’), is inherently passive, and has only a (morphologically speaking) active participle, whose meaning is of course passive. gāl “ḏī minkasra kānat ˁind-ak” (44) ‘He said: “That got broken when it was in your hands” hāda l-muwaḍḍaf yigūl “tara il-fallāḥ minḍarr” (15) ‘This government official says “Maybe the farm worker is in a bad way (lit ‘got harmed’)’ kān minbaṭiḥ fōg-him (5) ‘He was lying on top of them’ (lit ‘made prone’) 5.2.6 Use of kān The use of existential, copular and auxiliary kān is one of the syntactic elements which most noticeably differentiated the speech of educated and uneducated speakers. The uneducated hardly ever use it, even in extended narratives— context and other sentence elements are sufficient to indicate relative past

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time reference. Educated speakers, on the other hand, tend to use it a lot. Undoubtedly, this is an influence from the literary language, but possibly also from other Arabic dialects from outside the Gulf area, which are well represented in the modern white-collar work-places of urban Bahrain. Here is an extract from the speech of a twenty-year old woman from the A community (48) of Muḥarraq. She is a secondary school graduate who was working as a bank clerk, and was talking here about her parents’ marriage. The extract is the beginning of her answer to a question as to whether there was any contact between her mother and father before they became engaged to be married: awwal mā kān ṭabˁan . . . yitrāwā li awwal, lā . . . yaˁni umm-i ha-l-lōn u abū-y . . . ṭabˁan kānu b-rūḥ-hum . . . agūl lak, yaˁni šlōn umm-i awwal maˁa abū-y tzawwaǧat, lā? yaˁni s-sālfa?zēn! abū-y awwal xaṭab umm-i ṭabˁan mā čāfat-əh wi lā čāf-ha, bass abū-y kān min ahal umm-i, kān yaˁni lih ṣila liha, yaˁni š-ism-ah, min ahal-ha u yaˁni xiṭab-ha . . . ṭabˁan mā čāfat-əh ayyām il-xuṭūba, wi lā šay . . . yaˁni bass kānat təˁarf-əh min gabil liˀann-əh awwal fi bēt-hum ‘Originally of course, there wasn’t (any contact) . . . . it seems to me that in the old days, no . . . I mean, my mother was that way and my father . . . of course they were separate from one another . . . Shall I tell you how my mother got married to my father? I mean the story of it? Alright! When my father first got engaged to my mother, she hadn’t ever seen him, nor he her, but my father was from my mother’s family, he was related to her, I mean, what d’you call it, from her family, so he got engaged to her . . . of course she didn’t see him during the engagement or anything like that . . . but she was aware of him before that because he originally lived in their house’ In the space of about sixty words, the speaker uses kān five times (boldface) as a past-tense existential, copular, and auxiliary verb. Compare this with the account below49 of a typical old-style marriage given by woman in her forties from the B community of al-Fāḍil (Manāma 7) who was attending illiteracy eradication classes at the time: iz-zawāǧ il-awwali, māl ˀawwal? yitqaddamōn yaˁni ila l-bint, ˁind abū-ha, yisˀalūn ǧamāˁat-ha u ahliyyāt-ha hal yaˁni ināsib-ha, mā ināsib-ha ilwalad yaˁni ida hu ġarīb.. ida maṯalan wald ˁamm-ha, lā, yaˁni abū-ha yiqbal wald axū-h . . . bass ida ġarīb, lāzim awwal yisˀalūn ˁan aṣl-ah u ˁan 49  DCSEA II 184–185.

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ḥasab-ah u ˁan nasab-ah, yaˁni šinhu? mu zēn?aṣl-ah zēn? yaˁni . . . ida hu zēn, yirḍōn, yiqiblōn, u ham il-bint baˁad, čidi, yaˁni yisˀalōn ˁan ḥasab-ha u ˁan nasab-ha . . . ahl il-awwal, hāḏi ˁādāt-hum yaˁni, taqālīd . . . u baˁadēn iǧībūn il-mahar u imilčūn, u šism-ah, u lēlat il-ˁirs yiḥannōn-ha u yixaḍbōn-ha . . . ahl l-awwal baˁad mā fīh ixḍāb . . . ˁind-na al-ḥīn lā, ixḍāb u ḥanna u mīlād u ǧalawāt u mṭōrab, ġasāl l-irǧūl . . .  ‘Marriage in the old days, in the old-style? They would go to the girl, to her father, they would ask her kin and her family members whether the boy suited her or not, if, that is, he was not from the family . . . but if he was her cousin, then no, her father would accept his brother’s son . . . but if he wasn’t from the family, first they had to ask about his reputation and background—what was he like? No good, or from a good family? If he was good, they would agree, and accept . . . and the girl too, in the same way, they would ask about her reputation and background . . . That was how they did things, the old-timers. Then they brought the dowry and made the marriage contract, and on the wedding night, they would henna her and paint her nails. In our community, in the old days, they didn’t paint her nails, but now, no, (it’s different), there’s nail painting and henna, and recitations of the story of the Prophet’s birth and marriage, and ǧalwa-prayers and mṭōrab-dances, and the washing of (the bride and groom’s) feet.’ Here, in this somewhat longer extract on marriage as it was in the 1940s/50s, there is not one example of kān in any of its functions, although there are plenty of points in the narrative in which it could have been used and even though the speaker’s style in other respects (e.g. use of verbs like yitqaddam, nouns like taqālīd, and function words like hal) supplies clear evidence of her acquaintance with MSA, the context of ‘past’ has already been established, and it seems that kān is felt to be redundant. One odd fact about kān as an auxiliary verb in uneducated BA speech, apart from its virtual absence, is that on the few occasions where it did occur it often failed to agree in number with the verb it modified—singular when the main verb was plural, e.g. ḍaww rafīˁ wāyid, usbūˁ kān yiṭaffūn-ah (21) ‘A raging fire which they took a week to put out’ A similar tendency has been noted by Ingham for the dialect of the Muṭair of north-eastern Arabia, but with modal verbs. He notes ybi yirtaˁūn fīh ‘they

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wished to graze on it’ where the modal verb ybi is sng and the governed verb pl,50 a phenomenon which I recorded as also occurring in BA, e.g. baġa yizūrūn-ah (33) ‘they wanted to visit it’. These examples of non-agreement are perhaps evidence of grammaticalization via the reduction of redundant inflections, a process which is already well-advanced in other items, such as gāˁid (lit ‘sitting’) an aspectual particle denoting continuity which has become ‘frozen’ for some speakers of BA, no longer inflecting for gender or number when used in this aspectual function. 5.2.7 The narrative imperative In narratives (sālfa pl sawālif ), folk-tales and anecdotes, the imperative form of the verb is sometimes used instead of the s-stem, apparently to impart immediacy and colour to dramatic episodes in the story. This is one of a number of usages51 which co-occur in traditional story-telling style, and which have currency not only in Arabia and the Gulf but more widely in bedouin communities and in sedentary ones which historically underwent bedouin linguistic and cultural influence.52 Examples (imperatives bold): ġāfalat-ha u əxḏī nuṣṣ-ah u xišši! (16) ‘She crept up on her and took half of it and hid (it)!’ ḥagga š-šēx xall-ha, sikk il-bāb u xall-ha (Manāma 10) ‘Even the old man let her in, he shut the door behind her and let her in’ 5.2.8 The passive voice The internal or ‘apophonic’ passive is of relatively infrequent occurrence in BA, unlike the dialects of Oman and Central Arabia, where it occurs often. In my data, only 3rd person internal passives of this type were recorded across a range of verbs; 1st person occurred only in the s-stem of the verbs xilig-/xilikand wilid- ‘to be born’ as fixed phrases (e.g. min əxlikt ‘when I was born . . .’)

50  ING2 58 n.36. 51  Others are the transferred 2nd person pronoun, the ethic dative, presentative particles, ‘back-stitching’, the use of the historic present. Examples of all these in BA narratives are described in more detail in Chapter 6. 52  See HENK2 129–158 for these usages in the Negev, and 151–152 in particular for the narrative imperative; see GAL 18 for some of these usages in women’s stories from northern Algeria.

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and there were no examples at all of 2nd person forms. It would seem from this that the internal passive is becoming obsolescent in Bahrain. It has been replaced by two alternatives: either active verbs with an unspecified ‘they’ as subject or, as in urban Arabic dialects, by a passive prefix, which in the Gulf is (in most cases) the pattern VII prefix in-.53 Even in verbs where the internal passive clings on in fixed phrases like xwlidt ‘I was born’, it is being replaced by these strategies, so one hears inwilidt ‘I was born’, and even odd-sounding phrases like wēn ǧābō-k? lit ‘where did they give birth to you?’ See section 4.2 for examples of internal passives which occurred in the data, which will not be repeated here. 5.2.9 Aspectual and modal particles and verbs This section exemplifies through usage the most commonly occurring particles and phrases which perform modal, aspectual and discoursal functions in BA, several of which can perform more than one of these functions. Modal verbs and particles express epistemic possibility, physical ability, need, obligation, etc; aspectual verbs and particles cover areas like the onset, suddenness, repetition and continuity of actions and states; ‘discoursal’ markers are those which help the listener understand the speaker’s unfolding intentions in a interaction or a narrative, and thus cover such areas as the sequencing of actions, logical consequence, implication, affirmation, suasion of various kinds (warning, cajoling, encouraging, chivvying, etc). The BA dialects are rich in these particles, and preserve some, lost in other dialects, which have cognates in CLA. Where this is the case, this CLA link, historical and semantic, is investigated in some detail. 5.2.9.1 Modal/aspectual particles and discourse markers 5.2.9.1.1 gad, gid, kid, čid: dialectal reflexes of CLA qad54 Reflexes of CLA qad survive in BA55 and the Eastern Arabian dialects more generally, as they also do in Najd, though with modified functions. Let us first briefly review the functions of qad in CLA. Both Wright and Reckendorf 53  The in- prefix (like the pattern X prefix ista-) can be freely prefixed to verb patterns other than pattern I in Bahrain and in other Gulf and Arabian dialects. See 4.1.2.10. 54  Sections 5.2.9.1.1 and 5.2.9.1.2 are based on HOL9. 55  Johnstone’s statement that reflexes of CLA qad ‘do not occur in Kuwait and Bahrain’ (EADS 15) has been shown by later research to be incorrect—they occur quite commonly in the Bahraini dialects, and in both types, A and B. Given the close relationship between the Bahraini A dialects and those of Kuwait, it would be surprising if they did not occur in Kuwait too.

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describe these in more or less the same terms. Before an s-stem verb, qad either (a) indicates that ‘something has already taken place, or that something has happened in agreement with or in opposition to, certain symptoms or circumstances’,56 e.g. kuntu ˀarǧū maǧīˀatahu faqad ǧāˀa ‘I was hoping he would come and he really has come’ kāna sāliman ṣaḥīḥan faqad māta ‘He was hale and hearty and now is dead’ or (b) ‘marks the position of a past act or event as prior to the present time or another past act or event’, i.e. is frequently equivalent to an English plu­ perfect, e.g.57 ˀaxraǧahu wa qad ˁummiya ‘He led him out blinded’ (lit ‘and he had been blinded’). Reckendorf adds58 that qad before the s-stem also (c) frequently reports the present result of a past action or set of circumstances, e.g. qad yatimat binti ‘My daughter has been orphaned’ Before a p-stem verb, CLA qad sometimes has a modal, and sometimes an aspectual colouring, translatable as ‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’ or ‘on occasion’, e.g.59 inna l-kaḏḏāba qad yaṣduqu ‘The (habitual) liar may perhaps (or ‘sometimes’, ‘on occasion’) speak the truth.’ Both Reckendorf60 and Brockelmann61 speculate that, in qad + s-stem constructions, CLA qad is a vestige of the verb qadama which at some point in 56  WR Vol. I 286. 57  WR Vol. II 5. 58  RECK 299. 59  WR Vol. I 286. 60  RECK 296. 61  BROC 507.

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the unrecorded past had a now lost use as an auxiliary verb, paralleling the use of its Syriac cognate, and meaning ‘to have done something beforehand’. Thus qad qatala ‘he has killed’ (or ‘he is a killer’) is ultimately traceable to *qadama qatala ‘he went out beforehand he killed’ via the loss of the referential content of qadama (‘going out’) but the preservation of its temporal scope (‘beforehand’), so that the phrase simply came to mean ‘he has, previous to the time we are now speaking in, killed’ or ‘he has been a killer’. A similar type of semantic extension via lexical meaning loss is proposed by Reckendorf 62 for the meaning of qad when followed by p-stem verbs: so qad yaqtulu, from *qadama yaqtulu came to mean ‘it may be that he will kill’ via first ‘he went out in the past killing’, then ‘he would in the past sometimes kill’ and finally ‘he may/might kill’. Whatever the validity of these proposals (and it will become clear below that I do not accept them), there is plenty of evidence from a wide variety of Arabic dialects that dynamic and change-of-state verbs such as qām, rāḥ, qaˁad, and ˁamal have been the source for many verbal clitics with an aspectual or modal function, via a process of morphological reduction and loss of lexical meaning similar to that proposed by Reckendorf and Brockelmann for qad. Prima facie, therefore, the recent dialectal history of Arabic would seem to offer some support to their general hypothesis. In Bahrain, reflexes of CLA QAD63 occur in the uneducated dialects of both A and BV speakers in Bahrain, though the phonological evolution of the particle has followed a different path in each case: /(A dialects) → gad→gid→ǧid QAD \(B village dialects) → kad→kid→čid Reflexes of QAD occur quite commonly, though more frequently with the s-stem verb than the p-stem. The ‘resultative’ use of QAD + s-stem, where the structure indicates a presently relevant result of a past action or a state of being realised as a result of a past action, is clearly illustrated in examples [1] and [2], both from BV speakers:

62  RECK 300. 63  Capitalised qad, which does not occur in its CLA form in any Bahraini dialect, stands generically in this section for all of the various dialectal reflexes of CLA qad. Similarly QAṬṬ generically stands for all the various dialectal successor forms of CLA qaṭṭ

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[1] mā dām ana əsawwi ha-l-ǧadwal hādi, gad64 ṣanaˁt liyyi arbaˁ faṣlāt, xams faṣlāt (31) ‘As long as I make this irrigation channel here, I will have made myself four or five seed-beds’ (i.e. as a result of making the channel) [2] awwal mā aˁruf šay, al-ḥīn čid istafādēt (10) ‘Before I was ignorant, now I’ve derived some benefit’ (i.e. as a result of attending school) This last example, in which an illiterate woman was emphasising how much good attending literacy classes had done her could also equally well be interpreted like Wright’s example of anticipation being actually realised i.e. the woman is saying that ‘I have indeed now benefited’. The next three examples illustrate the pluperfect, ‘anteriorising’ use of the QAD + s-stem construction: [3] yaˁni fi l-adān hi čid ṭalaˁat (11) ‘By prayer time, she had (already) gone out’ [4] əsawwi li yimkin sabˁa snīn ḏīk is-sāˁa, ǧid-ni ḥafaḏ̣t il-qurˀān (44) ‘I was aged about seven at that time, I had just finished Qurˀān school’ [5] ǧid ˁād ˁugub mā ya, gām iṣ-ṣāḥib māl-na u riṭan ˁala wāḥid ism-əh “dōxəti”, yaˁni ir-raˀīs il-ˁōd (44) ‘Then, after he had arrived on the scene, our boss went and talked foreign with a man called Docherty, who was the big chief’ Dialectal reflexes of QAD + s-stem in all these examples are used in semantically similar ways to the same construction in CLA, although, as can be seen in the last two, there is a formal difference in that they can have pronouns attached to them and do not have to be directly preceding the verb. The following two examples however, represent constructions which are not related to CLA usage as recorded by the mediaeval Arab grammarians: [6] mā yūfar kid min zamān ṣaffēna ḥadādat-əh (13) ‘As soon as it (= crop of lucerne grass) was ready, we sold off all of it’ (lit ‘cleaned up its money’) 64  Not the expected BV reflex kad:/k/< OA q shows a variable tendency to be replaced by the ‘regional standard’/g/in BV speech, as noted elsewhere.

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[7] mā nikṭaˁ bakar-na kid hādi wildat (19) ‘No sooner had we stopped (milking) our cows than this one gave birth’ This discontinuous mā . . . kid construction (found only in certain B villages) with the meaning ‘no sooner X than Y’ or ‘hardly had X happened than Y happened’ has a variant construction (also B) gaṭ mā . . . illa which is used in the same way, and in which what is seemingly a reflex of QAṬṬ rather than QAD occurs: tāli al-ḥīn gaṭ mā tčūfūn-ha illa hi ḥāmil (28) ‘Then no sooner do you set eyes on her than she’s pregnant’65 (or ‘Then, hey presto! She gets pregnant!’) We will term these constructions, for want of a better term, ‘presentative’. They function like the more familiar mā . . . illa or lā . . . illa structures common in many dialects. In BA, verbs of perception such as šāf ‘to see’, simaˁ ‘to hear’, and waˁa ‘to become aware’, whether in the s-stem or p-stem, are used interchangeably in this construction to indicate the sudden onset of an action or state, e.g. lā šifna illa ruˁāt in-nəˁēm kil wāḥid yitsarsar wiyya l- fāni (33) ‘Then, all of a sudden, the people from Nuˁēm began whispering to each other’ (lit ‘we did not see except the people of Nuˁēm began whispering to each other’) mā waˁēt illa waḥda əmbaṭla il-bāb u dāšša (Manāma 10) ‘Then all of a sudden a girl opened the door and came in’ (lit ‘I did not become aware except a girl had opened the door and come in’) In these examples, the literal ‘seeing’ and ‘becoming aware’ senses of the verbs have become so attenuated as to virtually disappear. Similarly, the sense of the immediately preceding examples is of one event following hot on the heels of another—so much so that [6] literally means that ‘the lucerne grass does not become ready for harvesting except that we have for some time past already 65  The context for this example was a description of the difficulties a woman friend of the speaker’s had had in getting pregnant. Having tried for some time she had resorted to a making a vow (nadar) that if she got pregnant she would pay for a relative to go on a religious pilgrimage to a shrine in Iraq.

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sold it all off’ i.e. it sells so fast we’ve sold it before it’s even ready to be sold, or, put more idiomatically, it ‘sells like hot cakes’. Although the BV form kid is almost certainly etymologically related to QAD, it is not impossible that it has been historically contaminated, possibly as a consequence of phonological convergence, with the semantics of CLA kāda/yakūdu66 ‘to almost do s’thing’, which is used in somewhat similar fashion to dialectal kid, as in the following CLA examples: mā kidtu ˀuṣallī l-ˁaṣra ḥattā ġarubati š-šamsu ‘Kaum hatte ich das Vespergebet verrichtet, da ging die Sonne unter’67 mā kidtu ˀan ˀuṣalliya ḥattā kādati š-šamsu ˀan taġruba ‘I was nearly not praying the afternoon prayer till the sun was nearly setting’68 One can only speculate how this discontinuous mā . . . kid construction and its variant in qaṭ arose. In all three examples, the clause introduced by kid or gaṭ indicates a sudden or unexpected turn of events, and one way of explaining the meaning is as an extension of QAD in the sense ‘just now’ or ‘just a moment a go’. Turning now to a brief consideration of two final examples of BA reflexes of QAD, we see that the reflex has no obviously ‘resultative’, ‘anteriorising’ or ‘presentative’ function, as in the first seven examples, but marks an episode in a linear narrative sequence: [8] ǧid iṯnēn-hum yaw u gaddamō lihum wilīma (44) ‘The two of them came and gave them a banquet’ This use (the only example of its kind in the data) looks very much like one of those noted by Ingham for the Āl Murra of southern Arabia, in which it is difficult to tell whether QAD has any meaning or is just, in his words ‘a lexically empty syntactic particle’ akin to CLA ˀinna and likewise used to introduce nominal sentences. It is used in this fashion throughout southern Arabia in an arc stretching from south of the Qatar peninsula through southern Najd and into S.W. Arabia, where it is reported by Rossi and Watson for Ṣanˁāˀ and 66  See 5.2.9.1.3 67  RECK 303. 68  WR Vol. II 106. Wright’s translation is virtually unintelligible. In more idiomatic English: ‘Scarcely had I begun praying the afternoon prayer than the sun was about to set.’

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Landberg for S. Yemen.69 It is possibly significant that this example was produced by an elderly informant, who, though a long-term resident of Bahrain, was a member of the Dawāsir tribe, whose original dīra is close to that of the Āl Murra in south-western Arabia. The final example below, the only one in the data which illustrates dialectal QAD + p-stem, in the sense of ‘perhaps’ or ‘oftentimes’, has the same modal meaning as the analogous CLA construction: [9] yirūḥ kid yičūf saḥtīta fīh willa šay, yirūḥ yišīl-əh (Manāma 5) ‘He’ll go and may see a little pearl or something inside it, and he’ll remove it’ 5.2.9.1.2 The reflexes of CLA qaṭṭ/qaṭ The CLA particle qaṭṭ or qaṭ is described by Wright and Reckendorf70 as always occurring with a verb whose meaning is what is often termed the ‘experiential perfect’, whether affirmative, negative or interrogative, often the equivalent of English ‘ever’ or ‘never’. Some examples from Reckendorf71 and Wright:72 Declarative affirmative: ṣaraxa š-šayṭānu bi ˀanfaḏi ṣawtin samiˁtuhu qaṭṭ ‘Satan shouted in the loudest voice I have ever heard’ Declarative negative: . . . ˀanna l-ˁaraba lam talqa miṯla ǧamˁi fārisin qaṭṭ ‘. . . that the Arabs had never before met with an army like that of the Persians’ Interrogative: hal raˀaytahu qaṭ ? ‘Have you ever seen him?’

69  ROSSI 41–2; SAN 413; GLOS 2463–4. 70  RECK 438: ‘qaṭṭ kommt fast nur in negirten oder ungewissenen Sätzen vor, und bezieht sich im Altarabischen immer auf die Vergangenheit’. 71  RECK 438. 72  WR Vol. II, p. 286.

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The first six sentences below are typical examples of the use of the dialectal reflex (normally gaṭ) of QAṬṬ in declarative negative sentences in Bahraini Arabic; the seventh to ninth sentences give interrogative examples, and the final two interrogative negatives.73 In the sense that QAṬṬ is reserved for the same ‘experiential perfect’ meaning as qaṭṭ is in CLA, the BA usage is similar to the CLA one, though of course the dialectal negative is with mā + s-stem, and occasionally (as in two examples below) a p-stem verb may be used. What is most striking is the position of QAṬṬ before the verb (like CLA qad) in contrast to the normally phrase-final position of qaṭṭ in CLA: yāxiḏ-na u yiwaddī-na l-bēt wa lā gaṭ laˁabna (Manāma 6) ‘He would take us there and bring us back home but we never played games’ lā gargaˁna wa lā riḥna ˁāyadna, wi lā gaṭ min ḥayāt-na marrēna bēt (Manāma 9) ‘We never trick-or-treated, we never went Eid visiting, and we never in our lives went to anybody’s house’ mā gaṭ riḥt is-saˁūdiyya (Manāma 7) ‘I’ve never been to Saudi Arabia’ wi lā gaṭ infaxat ˁalēh dūda wa lā gālaw ṣād-əh ḥāyif (Manāma 7) ‘No maggot ever tainted (lit breathed on) it (= food), nor did they ever say it became spoiled’ marratēn tyi ˁində-na, mā gaṭ tigahwēt (radio play) ‘This is the second time you’ve come to our house, and you’ve never had coffee’ hāḏēlāk ačūf-hum . . . gaṭ mā ačūf-hum (radio play) ‘Those ones when I (tried to) look at them . . . I couldn’t see them at all’ mūl, mūl, kaṭ! (3) ‘Never, never, not at all’ gaṭ gilti lēha šay u gālat “lā mā asawwī-h”? (48) ‘Have you ever told her to do something, and she said “no I won’t do it”?’ 73  QAṬṬ in declarative affirmative sentences did not occur in the BA data.

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gaṭ āmartī-ha u gālat lič lā ? (48) ‘Have you ever given her an order (to do something), and she told you “no”?’ gaṭ wāḥid min-kum šāf yinni ? (TV play) ‘Has any one of you ever seen a spirit?’ zōǧ-iš maṯalan mā gaṭ yōm yihāwiš-iš ? (Manāma 5) ‘Has your husband ever picked a fight with you?’ mā gaṭ yōm harabtīn ? (Manāma 5) ‘Did you ever run away from school?’ To sum up the situation in Bahrain: some uneducated speakers, both A and B, (i) use QAD to express the same ‘resultative’ and ‘anteriorising’ functions of the CLA particle before a s-stem verb, and its modal function before a p-stem; (ii) some B speakers use kid (and some use reflexes of QAṬṬ) in novel, non-CLA ways which seem to be developments of CLA qad; (iii) the dialectal ‘experiential’ sense of QAṬṬ is analogous to its use in CLA, though syntactically it occupies the slot which qad occupies in CLA. There seems, in other words, to have been a partial merging of the dialectal reflexes of QAD and QAṬṬ, perhaps explicable by their phonological similarity. In neighbouring Najd, historically the geographical origin of the main group of A dialects of Bahrain, the most striking thing about ‘experiential’ negative and interrogative constructions, as recorded by Ingham,74 is that all have dialectal reflexes of CLA qad (= gid or ǧid) rather than of qaṭṭ/qaṭ. Compare the following Najdi examples with the similar Bahraini negative examples and interrogative examples: Declarative affirmative: int ǧid ǧīta-hum gabul ‘You have visited them before’ Declarative negative: mā gid šift-ih ‘I have never seen him’ 74  ING 104–5.

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Interrogative: gid daxalt u sallamt ˁalēh w ana mā-ni mġayyirt-in hdūm-i ? ‘Have I ever entered and said hello to him, without having changed my clothes?’ Thus whereas the Najdi dialects make use of QAD for all of the constructions—declarative or interrogative, and whether affirmative or negative— which express the ‘experiential’ past, the BA dialects use QAṬṬ, with QAD being reserved for affirmatives of whatever semantic colouring. If, however, we disregard the phonological differences between Najdi gid/ǧid and Bahraini gid, ǧid, gaṭ, their pre-verbal position and semantic ranges are strikingly similar. Furthermore, it is not even certain whether all Bahraini speakers consistently observe the pronunciation difference: in interrogatives like gaṭ riḥt is-saˁūdiyya? ‘Have you ever been to Saudi Arabia?’ it was sometimes difficult to decide whether one was hearing gad or gaṭ, or whether for some speakers these forms were in free variation. In the Bahraini mā . . . kid/gaṭ ‘presentative’ type of construction, as we have already seen, the reflexes of qad and qaṭṭ seem to be merely dialect variants. This functional and geographical distribution of QAD and QAṬṬ makes one wonder whether CLA qad and qaṭ may themselves have originally been positional or perhaps ancient dialectal variants of one and the same form. This speculation is supported, if only indirectly, by the fact that CLA qad and qaṭ are free variants in other syntactic structures where they function as a noun (or verb) meaning ‘to be enough for’ in such structures75 as: qad zaydin/zaydan dirhamun or qaṭ zaydin/zaydan dirhamun ‘A dirham is enough for Zayd’ and all of qad-nī/qad-ī/qaṭ-nī/qaṭṭ-ī dirhamun ‘A dirham is enough for me’

75  FLE 474.

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Kofler,76 in his summary of the idiosyncrasies of the old Arabic dialects as recorded in the work of the Arab grammarians, quotes Ibn Sikkīt’s comment that gad-nī ‘it is enough for me’ is a Najdi variant of qaṭ-nī, commenting that ‘nicht selten wird dialektisch ṭ zu d oder t; meist ist dieser Wandel als Dissimulation zu begreifen, wenn in der betreffenden Wurzel noch ein anderer emphatischer Laut vorkommt.’ It may be that the contemporary phonological difference between the reflexes of qad/qaṭ in eastern and central Arabia is a vestige of this ancient sound change, in which qaṭ would seem to be the ‘parent’ form. Cohen,77 also noting the free variation between qad and qaṭ in the CLA qad-nī/qaṭ-nī structure, states however that qaṭ ‘n’est pas en usage comme particule de verbe’. But as the Bahraini data presented in this paper, gathered some fifty years after the publication of Cohen’s work makes clear, CLA qaṭ did in fact give rise to a verbal particle gaṭ, though precisely at what point in eastern Arabian language history it is impossible to say.78 In Cohen’s view (and mine) the argument advanced by Reckendorf and Brockelmann about the origin of qad outlined earlier ‘rend malaisément compte de l’emploi indépendant’ of qad in the qad-nī structure. It makes more sense historically to see its origin in qaṭ, the latter ultimately deriving from the verb qaṭṭ, whose meaning ‘to cut’, in Cohen’s words79 ‘justifie à la fois (le sens) de “suffisance” (emploi indépendant avec les pronoms), et celui d’ “événement” (avec l’imparfait) avec une nuance de sens “déjà, voici que . . .” où s’explique l’emploi de cette particule quand elle est jointe au parfait’. To sum up: CLA qad and qaṭ may be old dialectal variants derived from a single lexeme, and this seems to be what is reflected in the close functional similarities between the modern Bahraini and Najdi systems for expressing past-perfect meaning, despite the phonological difference between the forms of the particle. It may, in other words, make more sense to regard the present situation in qad- and qaṭ-preserving dialects as reflecting an ancient dialectal split rather than a modern deviation from a Classical norm. If so, the present situation and its possible history can be represented diagrammatically as follows (* = reconstructed historical form not today attested in the dialect(s) in which it is assumed to have occurred at some point in the past): 76  KOF 97. 77  COH 62. 78  The CLA ‘it is enough for . . .’ uses of QAD/QAṬṬ + pronoun do not survive in the Gulf dialects, though a similar construction with bass ‘enough’ is current, e.g. bass-ək ə? ‘Have you had enough (tea, etc)?’, as is one with the possibly related noun gadd ‘size, amount’, e.g. hāḏa gadd-əh ‘that’s the (right) amount for him’. 79  COH 62.

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Najd: CLA *qaṭ → *qad → *gad → gid → ǧid ( = free variants for all of ‘resultative’, ‘anteriorising’, ‘experiential’ meanings) Bahrain A dialects (historically related to Najdi dialects): CLA *qad → gad → gid → ǧid ( = free variants for ‘resultative’, ‘anteriorising’ meanings) CLA *qaṭ → gaṭ (= variant for ‘experiential’ meaning) Bahrain B dialects: CLA *qad → *kad →kid → čid (= free variants for ‘resultative’, ‘anteriorising’, ‘presentative’ meanings) CLA *qaṭ → kaṭ or gaṭ (= free variants for ‘experiential’ meaning (and ‘presentative’ for some dialects)). 5.2.9.1.3 čūd In BA, as elsewhere in the Gulf, the particle čūd has an epistemic function principally expressing likelihood or probability, overlapping with some of the uses of QAD (though whether there is any etymological relationship between the two remains to be established). In Bahrain, čūd occurs in both A80 and B dialects: is-sana illi twaffa bū-k, gabil-ha bi sintēn . . . čūd umm-ak mawǧūd (Manāma 7) ‘(It was in) the year when your father died, (or) a couple of year before that . . . your mother might still have been alive’ tistuwi ha-l-kubar, baˁad wēšo? čūd xāsat u rāḥat (4) ‘It grows this big, and then what? It’ll have rotted and died’ (sc ‘By the time it grows this big, it’ll have . . .’) lā, mub ˁan ˁēb—mā ˁinda-ah yirūḥ yiˁarris marra ṯānya . . . čūd anfaq il-bēzāt illi ˁind-ah (48) 80  As Johnstone notes (EADS 15), čūd is one of the few exceptions to the phonological rule that/k/did not undergo affrication in back-vowel environments in those Gulf dialects (among them the Bahraini A dialects) that historically underwent conditioned affrication.

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‘No, it wasn’t because of the shame of it—he just didn’t have the means to go and marry for a second time . . . he would most likely have (already) spent the money he had’ mudarrisīn gabil-na baˁad hast . . . čūd darrisō-hum (45) ‘Before our time there were indeed teachers . . . they probably taught them’ In central Najd, an unaffricated variant kūd has a similar range of meaning, one which Ingham translates as ‘perchance’.81 kūd and kūd in also occur with the sense of ‘perhaps’ in central and southern Sinai.82 It is recorded as kūd with the sense of ‘except’ in a colloquial poem from Abu Dhabi: mā buga kūd an-nōxaḏa kanna naṭṭār ‘only the captain remained, as if were a watchman’,83 a usage in which kūd = illa, also recorded for southern Najd,84 Yemen, Najd, northern Arabia (Šammar) and Jordan (Rwala).85 In some dialects and constructions (see 5.2.9.1.4 below) it is synonymous with illa in the sense of ‘must’. I also recorded it in poetry from southern Jordan in the phrase kawd-in u talṭīf ‘willy nilly, by hook or by crook’ (lit ‘by force or by persuasion’).86 Its most likely origin is CLA yakūdu ‘to almost do s’thing’. 5.2.9.1.4 illa illa has many uses in BA,87 but one which is especially noteworthy is discourserelated, when it is used to contradict a speaker, or to deny the presupposition which lies behind a question or statement. Examples: – – – –

iz-zaman mā taġayyar lā, illa taġayyar! (41) ‘Times haven’t changed’ ‘Oh yes they have!’

– mā trūḥīn l-ənxīl willa šay? – illa aġdi! hād-āni akūl liš lā?! (28) 81  ING 126. 82  JONG1 178; JONG2 244–245; BAI 451; HOL & ABU1 59. 83  HOL & ABU2 180. 84  KURP 289. 85  EADS 16. 86  HOL & ABU1 101. 87  See DCSEA I 15.

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– ‘You didn’t go to the palm groves or anything? – ‘I certainly did! I just told you, didn’t I?!’ illa ṯamar! hāk-hu yibayyin, wāḍiḥ! (5) ‘It has flowered! Here, you can see it clearly!’ (contradicting a farmer who had said his crop had not flowered) In the following example, the sentence with illa is meant ironically (i.e. the speaker doesn’t believe her interlocutor): illa aṣaddig inta, yā xanfa! . . . aṣaddig rayil bint-i, rayil bint-i gāˁid kil yōm (14) ‘Of course I believe you, you queer! . . . I believe my son-in-law, my son-inlaw who is here (with me) every day (sc and not you)’ These usages are similar to Ingham’s examples for Najd, where sentence-initial illa, like sentence-initial kūd, can indicate necessitative (rather than epistemic) ‘must’, ‘had to’, ‘forced to’.88 5.2.9.1.5 xōb Seemingly a borrowing from Persian,89 this is a particle with a range of functions.90 The main one is conversational/situational implicature, i.e. it signals an inference a speaker makes on the basis of what his interlocutor has said, or what he knows about that person, e.g. inta xōb wāldat-ik min Ğanabiyya? (1) ‘So your mother’s from Janabiyya, then?’ (sc it follows from what you’ve told me) təˁarfūn xōb iḍ-ḍurūf (Manāma 5) ‘You know perfectly well the circumstances (we are in)’ (sc so why are you implying you don’t?) fahamt-ə? inta xōb fāhim! (12) ‘D’you understand? I’m sure you do!’ 88  ING 125. 89  ST 481: khūb ‘good, beautiful, elegant’. 90  There is a cognate borrowing in Baghdadi Arabic xō, which has a similar range of uses (W&B 148, BLA 150).

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mā čift inta xōb! (Manāma 2) ‘I don’t expect you’ve seen (such things)! hādi illi yigūlūn . . . ana xōb mā rīḥt (Manāma 5) ‘That’s what they say . . . but (obviously) I haven’t been (and seen it) myself’ With negative imperatives or warnings, it is used to soften the injunction: hāda xōb mā tšīl-əh kill-əh (5) ‘You really oughtn’t to take all of it out’ -wallah mā axadna! (9) -lā tiḥlif xōb bi llāh! ‘By God, we didn’t take it!’ ‘Please don’t swear by God!’ (implied ‘you are a liar’) 5.2.9.1.6 aṯar/aṯari/ˁafar/ˁafarāt All these are dialect variants of a modal particle somewhat similar in meaning to čūd—‘perhaps, probably, maybe’ or ‘it seems/it turns out that’.91 Pronouns may be attached to it. The B dialects replace/ṯ/in this word with/f/(as they do systemically), and generally have/ˁ/for what was historically a glottal onset.92 The occurrence of these two saliently B phonological features in tandem in this word has given it the status of a sociolinguistic marker, to the point that some A speakers among themselves use the phrase awlād il-ˁafar (‘the boys who say ˁafar’) in jocular reference to the BV community. However pronounced, this particle was recorded more frequently in B speech than in A. Examples: sawwaw ḥiǧra zēna aṯarāt-ha arbaˁat ayyām yisawwūn fīha (Manāma 8) ‘They made a beautiful room, for perhaps four days they might work on it’

91  The particle appears to be related to the Najdi iṯir which Kurpershoek (KURP 3) glosses as ’particle expressing a sudden realization’. For S. Arabia (GLOS 493–495) Landberg gives various forms, all meaning ‘it seems that . . .’ and ‘voici que . . .’ In Baghdad (W&B 3) aṯāri has the sense ‘it seems, it turns out that . . .’ 92  This glottal/pharyngeal mutation (known to the mediaeval grammarians as ˁanˁana) is typical of the BV dialects and occurs in other high frequency items, e.g. ila ˀan → ila ˁēn/ ilˁēn ‘when, until’, ˀan lā → ˁan lā ‘lest’, ˀaǧal→ ˁaǧal ‘then, so’. See 2.1.1.5.

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l-awwal ˁafarāt-hum yiwaddūn, al-ḥīn ˁafar mā yiwaddūn (6) ‘In the old days I think they used to deliver, now I think they don’t’ ila l-ḥīn ˁafar iǧi . . . ačfar min ifnaˁšar sana min twaffa abū-yi (28) Up until now, it’s probably around . . . more than twelve years since my father died’ min zamān! . . . ˁafar min sanat mā ǧābat fiḍḍō ibrāhīm (41) ‘(It was) ages ago! . . . I think in the year when Fiḍḍa gave birth to Ibrāhīm’ ˁind-hum ˁafar ˁiǧil mrabbīn-ah ila yōm xāmis (19) ‘It seems they have a calf they’ve been raising for (slaughter on) the fifth day’ 5.2.9.1.7 tara This is an invariant particle etymologically related to the verb raˀa ‘to see’, virtually no other trace of which has survived in the BA dialects.93 It has a number of uses:94 (1) epistemic: ‘it would appear, seems to be the case that . . .’: tara sanābis ˁind-hum ḥarīga ˁōda (33) ‘Apparently there’s a big fire at Sanābis’ (said on the basis of word-ofmouth report) bōbar əxsarnā-h tara ha-s-sana (4) ‘It looks like we’ve lost our pumpkin crop this year’ (said while viewing the state of the crop) (2) assuring, warning, reminding; this usage is similar to the Welsh English admonition/attention-grabbing phrase ‘look you!’: waˁˁad-hum, gāl ‘tara bāčir yarār!’ (48)

93  In fact, a single instance of raˀa as a dialectal verb was recorded in Bahrain, in BV (3): u raˀo šābb ṭalaˁ ˁalēhim ˁala firis ‘and they saw a young man appear before them riding a mare’. But the verb survives as the normal dialectal form in a number of Omani Arabic dialects (HOL8 49). 94  Cf W&B 55 for Baghdad, where tara has a similar range of meanings.

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‘He gave them advance warning, he said: ‘Tomorrow we’ll be pulling her (= the boat) (into the sea)!’ fīk xēr u tdallal bass, iḥna ḥāḍrīn tara! (5) ‘You’re a good man, so just say the word and we’re at your service, of course!’ ōguf galīl, lā tāxḏ-ik il-māya—tara l-māya ṯabur! (48) ‘Wait a little, lest the tide take you—the tide’s going out, look you!’ (3) ‘or else, otherwise’: lā tigūlīn ḥagg aḥad tara yiḏ̣ḥak ˁalēč (radio-play) ‘Don’t tell anyone that or else they’ll laugh at you’ (4) ‘because’: lā yiṭra l-mōt ˁala bāl-ik, tara ˁumr il-insān magsūm (dialect poetry) ‘Don’t give death a thought, because everyone’s life-span is pre-ordained’ 5.2.9.1.8 činn- and variants95 činn-/kinn- (< kaˀann-) in BA can be used to mean ‘as if’, as its cognate forms can in other Arabic dialects. But in BA it is often also used in the sense of something seen to be the case by the speaker, and to be virtually equivalent to ‘I think’, e.g. the following examples, all in the A dialect, and from a radio play: činn-ah aḥad yāy! ‘I think someone’s coming!’ (lit ‘(it’s) as if someone is coming’) il-bāb činn-ah yiṭiggūn-ah ‘I think someone’s knocking on the door’ mu činn-ah aḏ̣āfr-ik iṭwāl? ‘Don’t your finger nails look a little too long?’ bass ḏi činn-ah rāgid ‘This one seems to be asleep’ 95  See also 5.10.1.

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činn-i amma šaˁr-ič ṭawīl ‘To me, your hair looks long’ Other examples from natural conversation: mā činn-ah ˁində-hum ġōṣ, ˁində-hum ˁirs! (48) ‘They didn’t look like they were going pearling, but like they were going to a wedding!’ činn-ha bint faqīr (33) ‘She looked like a poor man’s daughter’ ṣōn činn-ah yamur (51) ‘Donkey shit (so hot) you’d think it was live coals’ A particularly interesting variant form, recorded twice in one BV village (3), was the phrase kinn-ak bi-: interesting because it is dialectally highly unusual and is attested in a very similar form for CLA. Examples: – wēn il-bāṣ? – kinn-ak bīh! – ‘Where’s the bus? – ‘It’s just coming now!’ kinn-ač əb-him iǧūn? ‘D’you think they are coming?’ The phrase in the first of these examples was explained to me at the time as equivalent to the presentative structures hāk-hu ǧāy! (B) and ka-hu ǧāy! (A) which mean more or less the same thing as kinn-ak bīh! An isomorphic phrase for CLA, kaˀanna-ka bi, is described by Wright,96 who gives several examples: kaˀanna-ka bī qad yā ḏarīḥu qaḍaytu ‘It is, O Darih, as if thou sawest me already dead’ and with the 1sng as subject: 96  WR II 158.

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kaˀann-ī bi-ka tuxādiˁū-ni ‘It seems to me that thou art trying to deceive me’ kaˀann-ī bi-ka qatīl-an ‘Methinks I see thee slain’ Wright explains the structure by positing an ellipted verb, e.g. kaˀann-i (ˀuḥissu) bi-ka, or kaˀann-ī (abṣuru) bi-ka ‘it’s as if I sense/see you . . .’ On that basis, the meaning of the first dialectal example given would literally be ‘it’s as if you can sense/see it’ (i.e. it’s so close it’ll be here in no time). Whatever the plausibility of that explanation, the BV structure seems identical in form and function to the CLA one. 5.2.9.1.9 tigūl and variants tigūl ‘you would say’= ‘it was as if’ is used in a similar way to činn-, e.g. in kāmat tamši fi ṭ-ṭarīk, itkul hādi hādya (7) ‘If she went walking down the street, it was as if she were fully sighted’ (implied ‘but she was in fact blind’) This use of tigūl is not particularly common in Bahrain, but in the form tugul/ tigil is frequently encountered in Najd.97 5.2.9.1.10 ˁād and zād As a textual and suasional particle, ˁād is widely used in all the Gulf dialects98 and in Iraq.99 It occurs in both the A and B dialects of BA, and has a variant form zād in some B villages. It seems to have evolved from the verb ˁād, which also occurs in the BA dialects in the sense ‘to remain, still be’ and with a negative particle (mā ˁād, ˁād mā, ˁād lā) ‘to no longer be’.100 The verbal force seems clear in the following examples, but all involve 3msng s-stem forms, and it is easy to see how this may have become ‘frozen’ morphologically and become a particle with extended senses. Examples of ˁād in which it seemingly still functions as a verb: 97  ING 119, 128–129. 98  Johnstone variously notes it as an ‘adverb’ (EADS 68) meaning ‘again, still’ for the whole Gulf, and as an ‘interjection’ for Bahrain (EADS 107) with a range of meanings. 99  W&B 327. 100  Both types of usage, as a verb and a particle, are also noted for central Najd (ING 181) and Oman (CH).

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mā adriˁ ād miš, b-ašūf . . . lēn miš, aǧīb lək (5) ‘I don’t know if there is still any left, I’ll have a look . . . if there is, I’ll bring you some’ hāḏa l-ġōṣ ˁād gānūn fīh (48) ‘It (= coffee-drinking) was a rule when pearl-diving’ wi l-ḥanna wa l-mašmūm, mā ˁād yištiri illa l-ġarīb (dialect poetry) No-one apart from foreigners buys henna and sweet basil anymore’ mā yāzat lih, ṭallag-ha, ˁād mā yisˀal fīha (Manāma 6) ‘If she didn’t suit him, he would divorce her, and no longer ask after her’ gāl “mā fīh ˁād mamlūk” (44) ‘He (= the British Political Agent) said: ‘There will no longer be any slaves’ (speaker was explaining the reform of the pearl industry, forced by the British in the 1920s). The various textual functions of ˁād/zād as a particle are apparent in the following examples: (1) marking temporal sequencing in a narrative (= ‘so, next’): kām ˁād u šāf lih hādi (41) ‘So then he went and found him this (girl)’ (sc to marry) ṣawwat ˁād is-sēb “guwwa, guwwa, guwwa!” (48) ‘Then the puller shouted out ‘keep going, keep going, keep going!’ (2) marking consequence (= ‘so, therefore’) xamsa yibti min il-awwali? ˁād wēn-hum? (51) ‘You’ve had five (children) by the first (husband)? So where are they?’ bass ˁād min wēš? bass ˁād yumkin—tšūf ḥasabāt-əh?—bass ˁād timūt u yistawrif min-ha z-zōg (7) ‘Now why was that? Because it might just happen that—you see his calculations?—she might die, and her husband would then inherit from her’ (explaining why a father did not want his blind daughter to marry a suitor)

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wēš ˁād lō xammēt, yā yumma? (5) ‘What difference would it make if I were to do the sweeping, mum?’ zād wēn-hu yidris? (4) ‘So where’s he studying then?’ (implied: ‘what I was assuming must be wrong’) (3) giving a reason, explanation (=‘because’): – – – –

ḥatta ˁala l-lēt mā nigdar nxayyiṭ (Manāma 7) ˁād kibarna! ‘Even by the light (of a lamp) we can’t (see to) sew’. ‘Because we’ve got old!’

(4) marking a concession, reservation (= ‘however, but’): lā, mā miš mustašfayāt, ˁād fi zaman-na hast (Manāma 7) ‘No, there weren’t any hospitals, but in our time there were’ amma ˁād ana, bass xalāṣ (3) ‘But as for me, I’m retired’ wēš dīk al-marāgid ˁād ḥalat-hum?! (33) ‘But what state were those beds in?!’ (implied: ‘terrible’) zād ašūf-ək minta tiˁruf agūl lək “b-tnaws-ah?” (12) ‘But I see that you don’t understand when I say to you ‘are you going to keep him company?’ (implied: ‘I thought your Arabic was good enough to understand that’) ˁād also has a number of suasional uses when used with an imperative: (5) cajoling, chivvying: sōlif iyyā-h ˁād! (5) ‘Come on, chat with him, will you?!’ rūḥ ˁād! (48) ‘Just go, OK?!’

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salfū-na ˁād! (20) ‘I beg you, lend us (yours)!’ (6) mild warning, reproach: ismaˁ ˁād, mu min kaḍiyyat il-māy (1) ‘Now just listen a moment, it wasn’t because of the water problem’ ṣabri ˁād šway! (Manāma 8) ‘Whoa, just wait a moment!’ 5.2.9.1.11 aǧal/ayal and ˁaǧal/ˁayal aǧal and its dialectal variants have some of the same functions as ˁād in the ‘textual’ domain: (1) marking off stages in a narrative: habbō-h . . . lēn ibirzaw, gālaw “ˁayal, bārzīn!” (48) ‘They cleaned it (= ship’s hull) . . . when they’d finished, they said ‘Right, we’re ready!’ (2) consequence or inference (‘so . . .’): ġadēna bēt ˁumrānaw, gāl mā šifna aḥad . . . ˁagal ġada wēn-ə? (41) ‘We went to ˁUmrān’s house—he said he hadn’t seen anybody . . . so where on earth could he have gone?’ ˁayal šlōn? fi ḏāk iz-zaman hast nās itbūg (48) ‘So why (did he do that)? (Because) at that time there were people who stole’ (3) concession (‘but, however’): gāl “gūmi sawwi lēna finǧāl” . . . yaˁni hu yikṣud ila l-čāy . . . aǧal maratt-əh tiˁruf tisawwi fanāǧīl! (41) ‘He said ‘go and make us a cup’ . . . meaning tea . . . but his wife knew how to make cups!’

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(4) affirmation: ē, b-asawwi ˁaǧal, lā? (19) ‘Yes, I’ll certainly do it, won’t I?’ 5.2.9.1.12 ˁasa/ˁasāThis modal particle, with or without a pronoun suffix, is widely used in central Arabia and the Gulf and is cognate with CLA ˁasā ˀan. . . . In BA it has two distinct uses:101 (1) expressing the optative (‘I hope . . .’/‘May . . .’):102 ˁasā-kum bi xēr (Manāma 7) ‘I hope you are well’ (used as a greeting) yā yumma, ˁasa mā šarr? (radio play) ‘Mum, I hope there’s nothing wrong?’ (in response to an unexpected night-time knock on the door) šlōn-ak yā yubba wiyya š-šuġil? ˁasā-k mirtāḥ? (radio play) ‘How’s the job, son? You’re happy in it, I hope?’ ˁasā-ni niǧaḥt fi l-imtiḥān? (Manāma 10) ‘I hope I passed the exam?’ ˁasā-kum min ˁuwwād-ah (Manāma 8) ‘(May you have) many happy returns of the day’ (lit ‘may you be among those to whom it returns’) (greeting at Eid) ˁaṭū-na knār, “ˁasā-kum in-nār!” (51) ‘(If) they gave us (only) lotus fruit, (we’d say) ‘May you go to hell!’ ˁasā-ha mičwa!103 (14) ‘May she (get) a branding iron!’

101  BRO 159 gives examples of the same two uses in Omani Arabic. 102  This is its only use in Najdi (ING 122–123). 103  Said by an old man of a young girl who was not doing what he had told her to do quickly enough.

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(2) expressing possibility: ˁasa fīh dūd, ˁasa fīh wasax (48) ‘There might be maggots in it, there might be dirt in it (= divers’ food)’ ˁasā-h xrāb (41) ‘It may be badly constructed’ ˁasā-h mā iyi li rubˁ sāˁa (Manāma 7) ‘He may not come (even) for a quarter of an hour’ 5.2.9.1.13 yā rēt and lēt Apparently related to CLA (yā) layta, these are interchangeable particles with the desiderative sense ‘would that . . .’ lēt ihni al-ḥīn Ğalīlō, allah yixallī-h! (Manāma 7) ‘Would that Jalīl were here now, may God preserve him!’ yā rēt mā kubart, baˁad-ni ṭifla alˁab! (Manāma 5) ‘Would that I hadn’t grown up and was still a little girl, having fun!’ 5.2.9.1.14 yikūn This invariable particle, the 3msng p-stem of ‘to be’, is used in BA in a variety of modal senses to express possibility, probability, speaker presumptions104 or mild obligation,105 e.g. yikūn tisallim lik . . . lāzim falāfat ālāf (3) ‘It’s possible you’d pay out . . . it must be 3,000’ ṣandiga yikūn timnaˁ il-maṭar (41) ‘A shed is supposed to keep the rain out’ (the visual evidence is that it isn’t) yiḍirbūn-ah ha-š-šakil u yikūn yiftarr (Manāma 1) ‘They would hit it like that, and, supposedly, it would go round’ (explaining an old-time children’s game, which the speaker had not actually seen)

104  Similar senses noted in W&B 413 for Baghdad. 105  WAT 49 notes yikūn in the same sense for Ṣanˁāˀ

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hāda mā fīh dūd?! fīh, ē! gabil la tākl-əh yikūn tiṭālˁ-ah! (5) ‘Isn’t there a maggot in this?! There is, yes! Before you eat it, you ought to have a close look at it!’ baṣal ida istagwa yikūn tinaggilūn-ah (5) ‘If onions grow strongly, you ought to transplant them’ From these usages, a connected sense of facilitation has developed: – – – –

šlih? yikūn itšīl-ha arbaˁ niswān (45) ‘Why (did they do that)?’ ‘So that four women could lift her’

yikūn yiˁayyiš ˁiyāl-ah (45) ‘So that he could feed his kids’ 5.2.9.1.15 čān (in) čān, and suffixed (in) čān- have a wide variety of functions in BA in both the protasis and apodosis of conditional clauses which are dealt with elsewhere (see 5.11.1.1), but čān can also function by itself as a modal particle, expressing a hypothetical possibility (‘could have . . .’) or obligation (‘should have, ought to have . . .’),106 e.g. čān baˁad hast madrasa ġēr ana mā fahamt ˁan-ha (Manāma 4) ‘There could have been another school which I didn’t know about’ yōm yigūl yiṭarriš, š-yiṭarriš?! čān ya huwwa! (Manāma 7) ‘When he says he’ll send (someone), what does he send?! He should have come himself!’ 5.2.9.1.16 (in) čān bThe use of the b- prefix in this construction expresses an imagined or hypothetical possibility (irrealis), e.g. hādi nṭayr-ah in čān b-iǧī-na wāḥid yišrab (34) ‘We would throw this (cup) away, if someone were to come and drink (coffee from it)’ 106  ING 127 exemplifies a similar range of usage for Najd.

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čān b-tistaḥmig, istaḥmig! (7) ‘If you’re going to get angry, (go ahead and) get angry!’ in čān b-yṣīr šōt min il-kahraba . . . (33) ‘If there were to be a short-circuit in the electricity supply . . .’ čān b-tuˁṭī-ni ḥurma, ana wald ˁašra snīn! (7) ‘If you were to find me a wife, I’d be a boy of ten (again)!’ 5.2.9.1.17 balki and balkat These two expressions, with a sense of ‘maybe’, and also common in Iraqi Arabic,107 were recorded only in certain BV dialects, e.g. balki ˁalēčim šuġil šway (14) Maybe you’ve got a little work to do’ al-ḥīn məḥāri, balkat iǧi . . . xams u falāfīn (28) ‘Now (I’m) about, maybe around . . . thirty-five (years old)’ 5.2.9.1.18 ǧāy/yāy ǧāy, lit ‘coming’, has an inchoative sense when used as a verbal prefix, roughly ‘to start to, be about to’, e.g. ana ǧāy atraǧǧa akidd arbaˁ ānāt108 (6) ‘I’m starting to hope I’ll earn a bit of cash’ A similar usage is found in northern Oman,109 and also in southern Iraq.110 The verb ǧa/ya + bi has a similar inchoative use, see 5.2.9.3.10 below. A possibly connected use of ǧāy/yāy (already noted in 5.2.4.2.7) occurred in accounts of how a pearl-boat captain gave instructions to the crew. Here, however, yāy agreed with its subject and was usually followed by an imperative:

107  Probably borrowed from Turkish, though the ultimate origin is Persian. 108  Lit ‘four annas’ in the currency used in Bahrain until the early 1960s and still in common parlance among the older population in the mid-70s (= 25 fils in the present currency). 109  E.g. gāy yikabbis yiṣalli ‘He was just starting to bend in order to pray’ recorded by CH in Izkī 110  MEIS xxxvii: ǧāy amūt ‘I am dying/about to die’

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gāl “yallah! yāyīn əxḏaw š-šrāˁ!” yaw xaḏaw šrāˁ . . . wiṣlat il-bīwara . . . gāl “yāyīn ḥagg il-mīdāf!”, yaˁni iyurrūn-ah . . . gāl “xarrub! yāyīn əxḏaw š-šrāˁ, xaṭfa!” yaw ḥagg il-əšrāˁ (48) ‘He said, ‘Come on! Raise the main-sail!’ They started to raise the mainsail . . . The anchor came up . . . he said ‘Take the oar(s)!’, meaning they should row . . . He said, ‘Make ready (the main-sail), take the sail! (we’re going to use) sail power!’ They started to raise the sail’ 5.2.9.1.19 kafu (variant kafi) and kafuThese modal particles of ability, which show no gender or number agreement, are cognate with CLA kufūˀ and kafˀ ‘equal to, a match for’ respectively, and occur in both the A and B dialects covering a semantic spectrum of capability (financial, physical) and competent authority. Examples: ma-ḥna kafu ništiri ˁala xams imya (6) ‘We can’t afford to buy at (a price of) five hundred’ akīd yā ˁēnī, ana kafū-ha! (radio play) ‘Certainly, my dear, I’m can match her (prowess)!’ kafu lēhum ḥagg yihaǧǧilūn-na? (41) ‘Do they really have the authority to throw us out?’ mā yigdar yiṭlaˁ—mu kafu! (5) ‘He can’t go out (to work)—he hasn’t got the strength!’ wugaf tilmīḏ kafu, min ġēr mā yiḏ̣ḥak aw yihāb (Manāma 7) ‘A pupil equal to the task stood up, neither laughing nor afraid’ (dialect poetry) al-ḥīn maḥḥad kafi yigdar yāxid ḥagg-ək (Manāma 2) ‘These days no-one is able to usurp your rights’ 5.2.9.1.20 yumkin yumkin is used in BA in the same general sense of possibility as in other Arabic dialects, though it is not very common in uneducated speech, in which other particles exemplified in this section are commoner. Examples: yumkin azyad min miyatēn bēt illi ˁidimat min id-dīra (33) ‘Maybe more than two hundred houses in the village were destroyed’

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bass ˁād yumkin zōg-ha yāxid-ha u hu yimūt, yikbaḍ min-ha rubbiya (7) ‘But then perhaps (if ) her husband marries her and he (= her father) dies, he (the husband) will get some money from her’ The pattern II verb makkan ‘to enable’ occurs, but in uneducated speech usually in religious contexts, and predicated of God, e.g. ilēn allah makkan-ah, yisawwi ˁan nafs-ah (3) ‘If God enables him to, he’ll do it of his own free will’ 5.2.9.1.21 (mā) fīh As well as its use as an existential particle, fīh was occasionally attested with the modal sense of ‘it’s allowed/possible for . . .’, as in some Levantine dialects: yaˁni it-tamšīṭ, fīh yimaššiṭūn (11) ‘I mean, (as for) hair-combing, they can comb their hair’ mā fīh b-abīˁ u aštiri, arūḥ aštaġil? (36) ‘Couldn’t I buy and sell, go and work?’ 5.2.9.1.22 lāzim and variants lāzim has a range of modal meanings similar to that found in many other Arabic dialects: necessity, obligation and epistemic probability (‘must be . . .’, ‘must have . . .’), e.g. Necessity: ġaylami baˁad digal . . . digalēn lāzim (48) ‘The mizzen is also a mast . . . there have to be two masts’ Obligation: min il-yidīda lāzim yiṣabb lih (Manāma 7) ‘It (= ‘tea’) has to be served to him from the new one (= tea-kettle)’ Absence of obligation: mu lāzim trūḥ tāxiḏ sayyāra (5) ‘You don’t need to take a taxi’

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Epistemic probability: lāzim b-yṣīr hawa (Manāma 6) ‘There was definitely going to be a storm’ lāzim fīhum šay (45) ‘The must be something wrong with them’ lāzim gāyla liha šay (radio play) ‘You (f) must have said something (insulting) to her’ (sc that would explain her behaviour) Local variant forms which have the same range of meanings are lazm-an, lizm-a111 and luzūm: lō šift raqam, lazm-an agra, lazm-an abba agra (3) ‘Whenever I see a number, I have to read it (out loud), inevitably I want to read it out’ (said by a woman at a literacy eradication centre) muhu lizm-a, ˁaǧal bass! lā tilzim il-ˁālam! (4) ‘(If) it’s not compulsory, then fine, stop (saying it is)! Don’t force people to!’ wi lā inta luzūm bāčir, ġēr wakt, ˁala farāġ-ik (3) ‘You don’t have to (come) tomorrow, (come) another time, when you are free’ 5.2.9.1.23 lēs bidd and variants lēs bidd which literally means ‘there is no alternative’, occurred once only in my data and appears to be obsolescent: ida nafar wāḥid—lā walad, lā mara—lēs lēh bidd (12) ‘If a person is on his own—no son, no wife—he has no choice’

111  Both these forms are etymologically examples of dialectal tanwīn, though lizm-a has lost its nūn.

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lēs112 bidd functions like the CLA lā budd. Similar phrases with the same meaning—lās badd and its apocopated variant s-badd, lā badd, lā budd—have been recorded in the bedouin poetry of southern Sinai.113 A more frequently occurring variant of the same phrase was kill-əh u lā bidd/ budd (lit ‘all of it and no avoiding’) as in: hāda kill-əh u lā bidd (24) ‘This is no choice (for you) but (to take) this’ ida kill-əh u lā budd čidi, akdar ašukk liyyi šway min hādōlēn māl ha-ləšrūb, ənridd ənšukk-hum (34) ‘If it has to be so, I could dig myself a few of those seed-beds, I could redig them’ al-ḥīn kill-əh u lā bidd bi-nitrik-əh (4) ‘Now we will have no choice but to abandon it’ ida kill-əh u lā bidd b-trūḥ tiḥāǧil, taˁāl ištəġil wiyyā-y ihni! (17) ‘If you must go around peddling (farm produce), come here and work with me!’ lā budd hi tbūl ˁalēh u tixra (41) ‘She (= a baby) is bound to piss and shit on it (= a new mattress)’. mā lihum bidd . . . yixaṭif (Manāma 6) ‘They (= the crew) had no choice . . . he (= the captain) sailed on’ 5.2.9.1.24 ˁala The preposition ˁala has many senses in BA, among them, as in many other Arabic dialects, obligation, e.g.

112  Dialectal lēs, which occurs only in this ossified 3rd person form, is cognate with CLA laysa ‘there is not’. Johnstone (EADS 148) records one instance of lēs in the Kuwaiti dialect (of the late 1950s) in the phrase lēs ḥadīṯa ‘not modern (f)’, and notes another instance of it (ibid.) in the Dōsirī dialect of Kuwait: lēs int b-minhum ‘you are not one of them’. lēs has also been recorded in the dialect of Abu Dhabi in the example id-dār lēs, mistranslated as ‘the house was empty’, but which in fact means ‘the house was no longer there’ (RAW 112, 119). 113  HOL & ABU1 238, BAI 430.

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ˁalēčim šuġl šway (14) ‘You have a little work to do’ məˁābal iḍ-ḍana kill-əh ˁalēš intīn (28) ‘Looking after the new-born baby was all your (= the mother’s) responsibility’ The deontic sense is there even when there is no verb or verbal noun, e.g. ˁalēkum bi ṭafu t-tanānīr (41) ‘You ought to use the ash from bread ovens (as a fertilizer)’ 5.2.9.1.25 (mā) yiṣīr The verb ṣār has many senses in BA, e.g. ‘to be’, ‘to come into being’, ‘to start (to do s’thing)’, ‘to get to the point where . . .’, ‘to become’, ‘to happen’, and with li to indicate continuity of an action or state (‘to have been doing X for . . .’).114 Its p-stem form yiṣīr has, however, a modal function covering possibility (here similar to yumkin), as in the following examples: hāda l-gatt yiṣīr fīh rubḥ (6) ‘There may be some profit to be had from this lucerne grass’ yiṣīr maftūḥ (3) ‘It (= tape-recorder) may (already) be turned on’ It can also be used to ‘soften’ direct personal questions: ḥaǧǧi ˁali wēš yiṣīr lik? (1) ‘What relation might Ḥaǧǧī ˁAlī be to you?’ and also in a judgemental function: hāḏa, yāxū-k, mā yiṣīr ‘That, my friend, won’t do’ (but also, in the right context, ‘that is impossible’ or ‘that can’t be true’) 5.2.9.1.26 mā yimdi-/madaThis verb occurs only as an impersonal 3msng and usually in the negative, with the sense ‘to be unable to do s’thing because of a lack of time’, e.g. 114  See DCSEA I 307.

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mā yimdī-na nbarriz il-farša u niˁazim in-nās (radio play) ‘We don’t have enough time to get the bridal chamber ready and invite people’ mā madā-ni azraˁ (1) ‘I haven’t had time to plant (seeds)’ It would appear to be cognate with the CLA verb, not used in MSA, madā ‘to grant a delay to’. In Najd, yimdī ’it is possible for X to . . .’ routinely occurs with positive meaning,115 but this usage was noted only once in the BA data: yisūg bidūn mā yimdī-h yiḍrub (5) ‘It (= plant) bolts without (= before) having had the time to get established’ 5.2.9.1.27 yabġi li- and variants baġa/yabġi (and variants) ‘to want’ is a high-frequency modal verb and the default Gulf-wide choice in this sense. In BA, the 3msng of the p-stem form with the preposition li is used as an impersonal verb (lit ‘it needs for . . .’) in the different sense of ‘need, require, cost’,116 e.g. yibġa lēh bittāt (12) ‘It (= main drainage channel) needs subsidiary channels’ (lit ‘daughters’) ḍīfat abū-h yabbi lih ˁašra (19) ‘His father’s hospitality costs ten (thousand)’ yabġi lih šayalān (5) ‘It (= tomato crop) need to be removed’ hāda mu zēn—yabġi lih ḍarb! (41) ‘He’s not a good boy—he needs a beating!’ Examples also occurred without li: mā yibġa tiġfil ˁann-ah, fīh tawkīš u ġēr it-tawkīš daym-an (34) ‘You can’t neglect it (lit. ‘it doesn’t need (that) you neglect it’)—there’s weeding and other things to do, all the time’

115  ING 129, 184. 116  Also recorded for Najd, see ING 129.

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and in this case the verb can be personalised, e.g. hāy timba šagāg (4) ‘This (= arḍ, f gender) needs digging over’ 5.2.9.1.28 mā yaḥtāy This A dialect expression, always in the negative, and literally meaning ‘it doesn’t need’ is used somewhat similarly to ‘needless to say’ in English: u yiṭiggūn-ah—mā yaḥtāy agūl lik—lēn yihalk (48) ‘And they would beat him—I don’t need to tell you—until he died’ ˁuyūn-ha kubur il-fanāyīn u . . . mā yaḥtāy baˁad! (radio play) ‘And her eyes were as big as cups, and . . . no more need be said!’ š-isawwūn fīh? mā yaḥtāy baˁad! (Manāma 5) ‘(You’re asking) what they did to him? No need (to tell you)!’ 5.2.9.1.29 ḥurwa117/miḥāri118 These expressions, recorded in B communities only, are used when guessing or estimating the size, age, or length of something: čidi, ḥurwa iyi xams sāˁāt (Manāma 5) ‘Like, I should think, around five hours’ ḥurwat falāf snīn (28) ‘I should estimate three years’ miḥāri, mā axadat-ah, yaˁni xamstaˁšar sana (28) ‘I’d say, when she married him, (she was) fifteen years old’ 5.2.9.1.30 ˁabālThis phrase, an apocopated form of ˁala bāl- is used in the sense ‘in X’s opinion’, e.g.

117  Cf ING 176: ḥirwiti ‘my guess is’. 118  According to DATH II: 1218 note, this word is the plural of imḥarra meaning (in Oman) ‘hope’.

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ˁabāl-ič xarbuṭa! (Manāma 10) ‘You think that’s nonsense’ mā ˁabāl-i inn-ah ˁalēha māṣūxa (44) ‘I didn’t realise that to her it was an obscenity’ il-ǧibin w iz-zibid hāḏi ˁabāl-hum māl xinzīr (Manāma 6) ‘They thought that cheese and butter came from pigs’ 5.2.9.1.31 ˁaḏạ nn-/ˁaḏ̣annat- (< ˁala ḏ̣ann-/ḏ̣annat-) These phrases are used in a similar way to ˁabāl-, e.g. bass fīh yiḥḥ, ˁaḏạ nnat-ī (Manāma 6) ‘But I think there were watermelons’ 5.2.9.1.32 ḥasbāl- (< ḥasab bāl) and variants ḥasbāl- is another phrase similar is meaning toˁaḏ̣ann- and ˁabāl-, e.g. ḥasbāl-ik dyāya? (dialect poetry) ‘Do you think I’m a chicken (i.e. easily scared)?’ A variant is ˁazbāl-:119 fōg iṯ-ṯalāṯīn ingaḏ̣at, u āna ˁazbāl-i ˁašar (dialect poetry) ‘More than thirty (years) have gone by, but it seems to me like ten’ 5.2.9.1.33 yā zaˁam The basic sense of this phrase120 is ‘supposedly’, ‘allegedly’, ‘as though’, e.g. iḥna mā nistaˁmil, yā zaˁam rāqyīn! (48) ‘We don’t use that, we’re supposedly too sophisticated!’ 5.2.9.1.34 yibayyin bayyan is one of the normal BA verbs for ‘to appear’, but the p-stem form is also used in an impersonal sense for ‘it appears to be the case, to look as if’. Examples:

119  In Iraq, the form is ḥazbāl- ‘in the opinion of’ (W&B 99) 120  It also occurs in Najd. See ING 178.

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yibayyin lī ḥačī-kum mu Ğamri (25) ‘You don’t sound to me as if you’re from Banī Jamra’ (lit ‘it appears to me your speech . . .’) yibayyin ˁalēh mu māl akil hāda (5) ‘He doesn’t look like he eats much’ (lit ‘it appears that he is not one for food, this (man)’ lo nuṣṣ šūġla, yibayyin ˁind-ah wāǧid (1) ‘Even if it’s only half a job, it seems a lot to him’ 5.2.9.1.35 yitrāwā Similar in meaning and use to yibayyin is yitrāwa (Pattern VI < r-ˀ-y), which only occurs in this form: yitrāwa lik ana ġašīm?! (5) ‘Do I seem like a green-horn to you?!’ yitrāwa lina miṯil il-qūzi illi yisawwūn-ah š-šyūx (48) ‘To us it tasted like the roast lamb that the sheikhs make’ “ḍāˁ “-ə? yitrāwa liyyi kāl “ṭāḥ” (41) ‘(D’you think he said) “He got lost”? It seemed to me that he said “He fell off” ’ ’ 5.2.9.1.36 wāl biwāl bi- has the sense ‘hardly, scarcely’ and is similar in usage to the Egyptian colloquial expression yadōb. ihni iṣ-ṣaxīn wāl bi-ha tāxid (19) ‘Here (the ground’s so hard), the spade can scarcely cut it’ il-ṭubēla wāl bi-ha ˁala l-ḥayāwīn, ˁala s-sayyārāt (41) ‘The garage is hardly big enough for the animals and cars’ – – – –

ˁišrīn sana? lā, wāl bi-ha . . . iǧi sittaˁšar (19) ‘(Is he) twenty years old?’ ‘No, hardly that . . . about sixteen’

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wāl bi-hum yigdarūn ˁalēha (radio play) ‘They can hardly manage to do that’ lō yigdar yizḥaf, wāl bi-h! (dialect poetry) ‘If he can crawl, that’s as much as he can do!’ 5.2.9.1.37 zēn, nzēn This discourse marker, roughly equivalent to Eng ‘right, alright, OK’ is used to change the subject of conversation or introduce new material or a new perspective, e.g. nzēn, yā ˁayša . . . il-yōm šingāyil ġadā-č? (45) ‘Right, Aysha . . . what did you have for lunch today?’ – mā afraġ min ašġāl il-bēt, dā-ni bass šaġġāl (11) ‘I didn’t (ever) finish the housework, I was always working’ – zēn, lo mafal-an yā-š farāġ, wēš tiḥibbīn tsawwīn? ‘OK, but if you did have free time, what did you like to do?’ – axayyiṭ ‘Sew’ 5.2.9.2 Verbal prefixes Here we describe a set of prefixes which can be attached to the p-stem verb, and which perform a variety of aspectual and tense-related functions. 5.2.9.2.1 bi-/b-121 This prefix has a number of uses: (1) future This is its commonest use in Bahrain, e.g. kāl “ˁaṭū-na illi allah yikitb-ah, b-inrūḥ” (5) ‘He said, ‘Give us what God has written (that you should give), and we’ll go” ’ 121  When bi (b- before vowels and semi-vowels) occurs before a nasal consonant, as it does with the 1pl, this prefix is sometimes realized by BV speakers as m-. e.g. m-inṭarriš ‘we’ll send’, m-inrūḥ ‘we’ll go’.

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al-ḥīn buġyat-him arbaˁ . . . arbaˁ b-ykamlūn-him, fintēn b-yrismūnhim (41) ‘Now they want four . . . four they’re going to finish, and two (more) they’re going to plan’ lēn ibirzaw, gāl lihum “bāčir b-indišš” (48) ‘When they were ready, he (the captain) said, “Tomorrow we’ll put to sea” ’ (2) ‘to be on the point of’, ‘to be about to’ ramat əb-rūḥ-ha, b-itmūt (5) ‘It threw itself (onto the shore), it was about to die’ (3) volition lēn b-yiṭlaˁ mā yigdar yiṭlaˁ (48) ‘When it tries to get out (of the fish-trap), it can’t’ (4) irrealis in some conditional sentences (see 5.2.9.1.16 for examples) 5.2.9.2.2 abaThis particle has the same function as b- but is restricted to the 1sng form of the verb. Before verbs in which the 1sng preformative is ā, e.g. ākil ‘I eat’ (i.e. verbs which historically had an initial ˀ as radical but lost it) the final a of the prefix is dropped. Examples: ana baˁad aba-ˁazm-ah (19) ‘I’m going to invite him too’ hāda-na aba-ġdi, aba-dišš is-sūk (5) ‘I’m going to go now, I’m going to go into the market’ ana aba-štari lək min ˁind-i čīs čaklēt, čīš bahluwān,122 gūṭi ˁilūč (7) ‘I’m going to buy you, from my own pocket, a bag of chocolate, a bag of candies, and a packet of chewing gum’ ab-ākil šabˁat-i (1) ‘I’m going to eat my fill’ 122  Lit ‘hero’ or ‘acrobat’, which is a brand name.

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In Bahrain, only the BV dialects have this form of the prefix, and, as noted, only in the 1st person, the other persons having a simple b- with the same sense. However, given that, in the same BV dialects, many speakers have free-standing p-stem forms of the verb baġa ‘to want, be about to’ which lack the ġ, e.g. abba ‘I want’, tabba/tubba ‘you (m) want’, yabba/yubba ‘he wants’,123 it seems probable that these forms are the origin of both 1st person aba- and the (reduced) b- prefixes, a supposition which is supported by the forms recorded for Najd, southern Yemen and northern Oman (see below). In the southern Iraqi town of Zubair and the ports of Fau, near the Kuwaiti border, the same particle aba- is reported,124 but in certain Najdi dialects,125 a full set of prefixes of this type, viz naba-, taba-, yaba- exists, seemingly derived from nabġi, tabġi, yabġi (or nabġa, tabġa, etc. which are alternative forms of this verb) ‘I want, you want, etc.’ via the dropping of the ġ. The free-standing p-stem forms abā, tabā, and yabā ‘I/you/he wants’ are also noted for South Arabia,126 and there is a similar full set of forms of this general shape, though here they are clearly prefixes, in Oman, which I recorded in the 1980s e.g. tbātšūf-ik ‘she wants to see you’ and abā-šūf-ha I’d like to see her’ (both Nizwa examples). In Oman, these fuller prefix forms seem to be in free variation with the apocopated ones, as in b-itkahyu? ‘Would you like to have coffee?’ The situation in Bahrain seems to represent a more advanced stage in the reductional process whereby verb forms like abġi, tabġi and abġa/tabġa become first reduced to abba/tabba, then become clitics of the aba-, taba- type and then are finally reduced to a simple b-, at which point the original link with the lexical verb is obscured. 5.2.9.2.3 dThere are two separate d- prefixes in Bahraini Arabic, both recorded only for B speakers: (1) prefixed to an imperative, d- has an encouraging, cajoling sense:127 d-igdaˁ! (14) ‘Please do have a bite to eat!’ (farmer to guest)

123  In some BV dialects, dissimilation occurs in these forms, e.g. amba, tumba, yumba. 124  ING2 43. 125  KURP 15–16. 126  GLOS 11ff. 127  This use of d- occurs also in Iraqi Arabic, see ERW 140.

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d-rūḥi yumma, trayyagay! (11) ‘Go (f), my dear, and have your breakfast!’ (Qurˀān school teacher to pupil) yā xalk allah, d-gūlū šu l-fikir wa r-rāy (dialect poetry) ‘O people of God, do say what your thought and opinion is’ (2) prefixed to p-stem verbs to indicate present tense:128 kilmā bēn ṯalāṯat šuhūr da-yišrab-ha (Manāma 1) ‘For the whole period of three months he would drink it’ Neither of these two prefixes was common or used generally by the B community. The dialectal poetry example occurred in a B poem that was full of Iraqi influences, and it may be that this is another of them. However, it is also possible that these prefixes, for some B speakers at least, are the vestiges of old links between some of the B dialects and those of lower Iraq. 5.2.9.2.4 rāḥ This prefix is routinely used to denote ‘futurity’ in all the dialects of Baghdad129 and is also used in Kuwait with the sense ‘to be about to’.130 Johnstone noted it in his 1950s study of Gulf Arabic, EADS, and for Bahrain specifically,131 as denoting ‘intention’ rather than ‘volition’ (which he claims is the basic sense of b-). This claim is not borne out by our data: rāḥ as a verbal prefix occurred only very rarely, and always in the sense of the simple future. Furthermore, it seemed to be typical of the speech of speakers with some education and therefore (presumably) an acquaintance with the dialects of neighbouring areas, such as Iraq, e.g. lēn wāḥid dās fi wasaṭ il-ǧadwal, rāḥ yinkisir (5) ‘If someone treads on the middle of an irrigation channel, it will crumble’ “šayyab”?! hāda rāḥ yiṣīr badar! (5) ‘ “Got old” (you’re saying)?! It’s going to form seeds!’ 128  Also noted by Erwin (ERW 139–140) for Baghdad, and by Blanc (BLA 116) for rural southern Iraq. 129  BLA 117–118; W&B 183. 130  KOC 49. 131  EADS 152.

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Both these examples were produced by the educated (Shīˁī) Agricultural Extension Officer (muršid zirāˁi) who accompanied me on visits to farms. 5.2.9.3 Modal and auxiliary verbs 5.2.9.3.1 gidar/yigdar This verb governs another verb directly. Its basic sense is of physical capability, e.g. wi lā ana kādir aštəġil (1) ‘I can’t work’ (said by a farm labourer with diseased hands) al-ḥīn maḥḥad yigdar yimši ḥatta min ihni li hni (33) ‘These days nobody can walk, even from here to here’ (sc they are too fat/lazy) lā, ḥaǧǧi, mā yigdar wāḥid mā yišrab (5) ‘No, Ḥaǧǧī, one cannot not drink (water)’ (said to an ill man who thought not drinking water would cure him) It can also have the sense of general possibility, e.g. yigdar yiǧi il-ˁaṣāri, mafalan ‘He can (= ‘is free to’) come in the afternoons, for example’ It is also frequently used without another verb (but with ˁala) in the sense of ‘having the ability to overcome, cope with, endure’, e.g. hāda mā yigdar ˁala l-wakit māl il-baḥrēn (15) ‘This (crop) can’t cope with the Bahraini climate’ waṣalat min mawātir yumkin tyi azyad min ˁišrīn mōtir, wi lā gidraw ˁalēha (33) ‘Perhaps more than twenty fire-engines came, but they couldn’t control it (= a village fire)’ āna mā abbi māy, āna ˁōd u agdar ˁala l-ˁaṭaš (48) ‘I don’t want water, I am an adult and can put up with thirst’ mā agdar ˁala frāg-hum (radio play) ‘I can’t bear to be apart from them’

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The complement needs no preposition in some contexts, e.g. ˁala qadar al-inšān, yāˁni—nās yigidrūn ḏibīḥtēn, nās yigidrūn ṯalāṯ, nās yigidrūn waḥda (48) ‘It depended on each person’s (financial) position—some people could (afford) two slaughter-animals, some three, some only one’ 5.2.9.3.2 guwa/yigwa (kawa/yikwa) The basic lexical meaning of this verb in all the BA dialects is ‘to be/become strong’ (it is cognate with CLA qawiya), e.g. yikwa šway (11) ‘It (= the crop) is becoming a little sturdier’ awwal mā ˁēn-i fitḥat u ˁiḏ̣āmat ryūl-i guwat (dialect poetry) ‘When first my eyes opened and the bones of my legs grew strong’ but it is also used in some BV villages as a modal verb, a virtual synonym of gidar in its ‘capability’ sense, e.g. mā kawēt asawwi hāda (26) ‘I couldn’t (= wasn’t strong enough to) do that’ 5.2.9.3.3 ˁabbar and tiˁabbar These verbs also cover the semantic area of ‘capability’, but usually in the sense of ‘know how’,132 e.g. il-wāḥid illi yiˁabbir, b-rūḥ-ah yixayyiṭ . . . willi mā yiˁabbir, yikāri ˁalēna (45) ‘Anyone who knew how would sew their own dresses; anyone who didn’t would pay us to do it (for them)’ mā niˁabbir nxalli hādīk (36) ‘We can’t just abandon these (palm-trees)’ (= ‘we don’t have the heart to . . .’/‘it’s against our nature as farmers to . . .’)

132  In Oman (REIN 285), ˁabbar has the sense of ‘bring to a successful conclusion’; SHAH 259 gives the meaning ‘to be able’ for the Shiḥḥī dialect of the Musandam peninsula, Oman.

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azyad min ˁašrat ayyām nˁabbir, ḥakka baˁad (34) ‘We can (leave it (= crop)) for more than ten days (without water), even longer’ (the sense is of having the farming knowledge that would allow us to do this) tiˁabbarat . . . lā ḍallat tirgub ḥamal-ha illa hi baˁad ǧāyba walad! (5) ‘She knew how (to be patient) . . . and no sooner had she made up her mind to wait to conceive than she gave birth to a boy!’ mā titˁabbar lēhum . . . yaˁni inta miṯil mā tigūl ġarīb (Manāma 2) ‘You won’t know how (to communicate) with them . . . you’d be, as you might say, a stranger’ 5.2.9.3.4 mā ṭāˁ ṭāˁ as a lexical verb normally means ‘to obey’ as in other Arabic dialects. However, in certain BV dialects the negative of the 3rd person occasionally occurred as an impersonal verb ‘to be impossible for’, e.g. mā ṭāˁ-hum ˁala l-bēt (4) ‘They were unable to look after the house’ This seems to be a southern Gulf feature, as the same negative use of this verb is recorded for southern Yemen,133 the Bāṭina Coast of Oman134 and I recorded it in Ṣūr, south-eastern Oman,135 e.g. mā ṭāyiˁ yigbaḍ ˁilim (example recorded in Ṣūr) ‘He was incapable of learning’ It also occurred in my Omani data from the port of Ṣūr without the negative particle in the sense ‘to be possible’: iḏa ṭāˁ ši minni ytiˁēlaǧ, šay minnə mā ytiˁēlaǧ ‘If (a fracture) here had been able to heal, another one there had not’

133  GLOS 2231. 134  BRO 155. 135  HOL & de J 92.

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5.2.9.3.5 (mā) ṭāg Normally used in the negative in the sense ‘to be unable’:136 mā yiṭīg šay, mā yigdar yākil (15) ‘He can’t do anything, he can’t eat’ The expression also has the sense ‘to be unable to endure, put up with’, e.g. mā aṭīg-ik ‘I can’t stand you’. 5.2.9.3.6 ˁaraf ˁaraf, as well as its common sense of ‘to know s’thing/s’one’ is often used in the sense of ‘know how to’/‘be able’: mā aˁarf agra (48) ‘I can’t read’ (said by an illiterate woman) aˁruf aḥišš (1) ‘I can cut with a sickle’ (said by a man who had gone blind, but could at least still do some simple farming jobs) al-ḥīn əḍrūs ṭāḥat, baˁad mā aˁruf atkallam (3) ‘Now my teeth have fallen out, so I can’t talk (properly) any more’ ḥatta l-mitˁaṣrīn təˁruf lēhum twallid-hum (Manāma 7) ‘Even the ones who were having a difficult labour, she (= the midwife) knew how to help them give birth’ ˁiǧizt, ǧarrabt ˁala ism-i abā-kitb-ah, mā ˁaraft (3) ‘I couldn’t, I tried to write my name, but I didn’t know how to’ 5.2.9.3.7 ˁiǧiz and ˁaǧaz As well as modals of ability, there are also in BA modals of inability. First of all, there is ˁiǧiz/ˁaǧaz and its participle ˁaǧzān: ana ihni mā yistawi bōbar ˁind-i . . . ˁiǧizt (19) ‘My pumpkins don’t grow well . . . I’ve failed’

136  The same sense for the negative is recorded in southern Yemen (GLOS 2233); ṭāq has the sense ‘to be able’ in Baghdad, but in the Jewish dialect only (BLA 153).

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al-ḥīn ˁād ˁaǧizt, šibt (4) ‘Nowadays, I am incapable, I’ve got too old’ dār, dār, ˁaǧaz, mā kabaḍ aḥad (7) ‘He searched and searched but failed, he couldn’t find anyone’ lēn iˁyizaw, gaṭṭō-hum fi l-baḥar (45) ‘When they couldn’t carry on (singing) any more, they threw them into the sea’ ˁaǧzānīn, mā fīna batˁa (3) ‘We’re incapable, we haven’t any strength’ Compare the following with some of the examples in 5.2.9.3.1 above: ˁiǧiz ˁan ‘to be incapable of’ is the direct opposite of gidar ˁala: sawwar-ha u baˁadēn ˁiǧiz ˁan-ha (17) ‘He built a wall around it but then couldn’t complete it (sc through lack of money)’ hāk-hi xamsīn ˁala kōlat riǧil-ha ˁiǧzat ˁan-him (41) ‘There were still fifty (rupees) (outstanding) which, according to her husband, she was unable to pay back’. 5.2.9.3.8 ˁāz/yiˁīz vn ˁōz The basic lexical sense of this verb, recorded only as an invariable 3msng, is ‘to be lacking’,137 e.g. mā ˁāz-ha illa l-ǧudrān (24) ‘The only thing it lacked were the support-walls’ kām u waddā-h fi hēk il-ḥiǧra illi mā ˁāz-ha šay (5) ‘He went and took him to this room which lacked for nothing’ It has an extended modal sense of ‘to be difficult/impossible for’, recorded only for BV speakers: yiˁīz-ni zirāˁat-ha (1) ‘I can’t sow them (= plant beds)’ (sc they are too much for me) 137  Clearly related historically to the Egyptian Arabic modal verb ˁāz and its participial forms ˁāwiz/ˁāyiz.

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il-bint ḍarīra lākin mā yiˁīz-ha šay (7) ‘The girl was blind, but there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do’ kill-əh fi yōm . . . wēšhu? yiˁīz allah šay? (5) ‘It was all (done) in a day . . . so what? Is there anything that God can’t do?’ 5.2.9.3.9 baġa/yabġi138 and variants This is the basic verb ‘to wish, want’: abbī-ha trūḥ tidarris (48) ‘I want her to go and teach’ yimbā-k inta tsōg (3) ‘He wants you to drive’ abbā-ha tṣīr ihni xaḍra (11) ‘I want it to be green here’ (sc with crops) kāl “tibbēn-ni aṭallik-š?” (28) ‘He said ‘d’you want me to divorce you?’ The sense of baġa can also be ‘to be about to do s’thing’ (cf one of the uses of b- in 5.2.9.2.1): lēn baġa yiˀaḏḏin . . . (45) ‘When he was about to make the call to prayer . . .’ iḏa yabbūn yimūtūn, mā yiˁarfūn šinhu mōtat-hum ˁala ay sabab (Manāma 7) ‘When they were going to die, they wouldn’t know what the cause of their death was’ 5.2.9.3.10 ǧa/ya biThe verb ‘to come’ when governing a p-stem verb to which the bi- particle of ‘proximal intent’ is prefixed carries the sense of ‘to be on the point of’, ‘to intend to’ or even ‘to try to’, do s’thing. Examples:

138  The phrase yabġi li ‘it needs . . .’ has been dealt with separately in the modal particles section, 5.2.9.1.27.

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il-ˁām ǧaw b-ihiddūn-ha (19) ‘Last year they were on the point of abandoning it’ wēn itrūḥīn lēn yīti bi-tūladīn? (51) ‘Where did you go when you were about to give birth?’ yōm yat bi-trūḥ . . . (Manāma 7) ‘When she was preparing to leave . . .’ yōm ya b-iyi, š-isawwūn? (48) ‘When he (= boat captain) decided to return (to port), what did they (= the pearling crew) do? yaw b-yšingūn-ah (48) ‘They were getting ready to hang him’ kil min ya b-iṭaffī-ha mā gidar yiṭaffī-ha (33) ‘Everyone who tried to put it out couldn’t put it out’ Some speakers also used this construction without the b-, e.g. mā ǧat tḥanni rǧūl-ah, gabaḍ-ha (Manāma 1) ‘When she was about to henna his feet, he grabbed hold of her’ yōm yat trūḥ . . . (Manāma 6) ‘When she was about to go . . .’ 5.2.9.3.11 gām/yigūm There are two distinct modal uses of this verb, whose basic lexical meaning is ‘to rise, get up’. When governing a p-stem verb, it is an inchoative, indicating the onset of a state or action; when followed by an s-stem verb (with or without an intervening u ‘and’), it also signals a new action or type of behaviour, but usually of a sudden or unexpected kind. Examples: (1) gām + p-stem kāmaw yithaddidūn (3) ‘They started making threats’ il-awwal, lēn gāmaw in-nās yināmūn . . . (33) ‘In the old days, when people went off to bed . . .’

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gām hāḏa n-nōxaḏa yistānis (48) ‘The captain started to look really happy’ kām yirṭin wiyyā-h (19) ‘He started gabbling away in a foreign language with him’ gumt āxḏ-ah bi ṣ-ṣaxxīn (11) ‘I set about attacking it with a spade’ hāy sitt isnīn gumt aṭlaˁ min il-bēt . . . il-awwal mā aṭlaˁ, kill-ah fi l-bēt (Manāma 7) ‘It’s six years now since I started going out of the house . . . before, I didn’t go out, I was always at home’ il-mara tṭawarat u gāmat timašši sayyāra (Manāma 5) ‘Women have got more sophisticated and have started driving cars’ kumt aftihim kill il-axlāq iz-zēna (32) ‘I’ve come to understand all the nice ways of behaving’ The structure is also commonly used with imperatives. In this construction, the imperative gūm does not literally mean ‘get up’, but is an encouragement to ‘start’ doing something new: kūm saww ġalyūn! (19) ‘Make (us) a pipe (to smoke)!’ gūmi sawwi lēna finǧān! (41) ‘Go and make a cup (of tea)!’ yallah, gūmi račbi il-ˁawāyiz illi ǧibt iliš! (5) ‘Come on, make a start on setting up all the household things I’ve brought you!’ (2) gām + u + s-stem In the next two examples gām/kām governs a verb phrase which describes habitual or repeated action, hence the translation ‘took to’: gām xāl-i u lawwaṣ minni u minni (5) ‘My uncle took to scrounging from here and there’

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u kām u ḍall iǧīb lēh . . . (7) ‘And he took to constantly bringing him . . .’ In the remaining examples, the Aktionsart is punctual rather than habitual or repeated, and so the sense of the phrase is of a sudden or unexpected action, justifying the translations ‘he upped and . . .’, ‘he went and . . .’, ‘he suddenly . . . .’, and the modifying phrase ‘just like that’: il-arḍ kām u bāˁ-ha (41) ‘He upped and sold off the land’ (sc without warning) kām hāḏa r-raˀīs u kalab ˁalēna l-ḥāl (17) ‘That leader went and did the dirty on us’ (implication is of a unexpected turn of events) (3) gām + s-stem gām rikab fōg ǧidār (Manāma 1) ‘He went and climbed on top of a wall’ gām fazz yiṭāliˁ il-maḥḥār (48) ‘He immediately leapt to his feet, examining the clam shell’ kām ġada yiḥūm fi l-mičānāt (5) ‘He upped and left, wandering in (different) places’ šāl ˁalēna ūdām min dāxil u gām ˁaṭā-na yyā-h (3) ‘He went and got out some meat for us from inside and gave it to us, just like that’ (sc it was an unexpectedly generous action) 5.2.9.3.12 ṣār When governing a p-stem verb, ṣār139 can have, like gām, an inchoative sense of beginning to do something. The difference is that ṣār is often used to mean ‘to gradually get to the point where s’thing starts to happen/becomes the case’, whereas gām usually signals a more abrupt change. The following are typical examples of the use of ṣār in this sense: ˁugub mā māt il-abu ṣār šway iǧī-hum (5) ‘After the father died, he took to visiting them now and again’ 139  See also (mā) yiṣīr in section 5.2.9.1.25.

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axū-č ṣār ḥatta l-əxmām yixumm fi l-bēt w il-qasāl yiqassil! (radio play) ‘Your brother has got to the point where he even sweeps up rubbish in the house, and does the washing!’ (the female speaker disapproves of how modern men are starting to behave) ṣār (always uninflected) is also one way of expressing the ‘experiential’ past, whether distant or recent, e.g. ṣār lī sana kāmla aštaġil fi l-maṭār (48) ‘I’ve been working at the airport for a whole year’ (i.e. ‘and I am still working there’) ṣār lik čam waqt fi l-ġōṣ? (Manāma 4) ‘How long did you work as a diver?’ (said to a long-retired man) 5.2.9.3.13 gaˁad/yigˁad/gāˁid and variants In BA gaˁad is the default lexical item for ‘to sit’, ‘to stay (in a place)’, but as in many other Arabic dialects, it has developed from this a separate aspectual function as a verb or a participle that marks durative or regularly repeated action, e.g. ana gāˁid wiyya dēlēn, gāˁid aḥišš (6) ‘(Yesterday) I stayed with them, cutting grass’ gāˁid yimrax-ni u abū-y yirūḥ il-manāma (19) ‘He continued to massage me while my father went off (sc to seek medical help) from Manāma’ tigˁid issibb-iš (Manāma 5) ‘She would keep on insulting you’ – tigˁid kil yōm trišš-ha? – ē, ˁād mā tigˁid, mā yiṣīr (1) – ‘Do you keep on spraying it every day?’ – ‘Yes, if you don’t keep on, it won’t be any good’ tāli istamallēt u gaˁadt atharrab (19) ‘Then I got fed up with it (= school) and kept running away’ min ˁugub il-ġōṣ, gaˁadt arūḥ is-safar gabil (48) ‘Before, after the pearling season had ended, I regularly went on trips outside the country’

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marra¸ il-ˁaza,140 gaˁadu yiṣawrūn (25) ‘Once, during the Muḥarram processions, they (= foreign spectators) kept on taking photographs’ 5.2.9.3.14 tamm and ḏ̣all These two verbs mean ‘to remain, stay’, but both are also used in verb stings to denote continuous, iterative or habitual action ‘to keep on X-ing’, ‘to do X again and again’. tamm is used by both A and B dialect speakers, though mainly A; ḏ̣all (or more often ḍall) is the typically B form. Examples: (1) tamm ˁugub mā yītu l-ḥidd, tammētu trūḥūn il-baḥar? (45) ‘After you moved to al-Ḥidd, did you continue going down to the sea?’ tammaw yifandisūn fi ha-l-əmḥammar u s-simič (48) ‘Again and again, they dug their hands into the sweet rice and fish’ lēn ǧirīb il-hēr, gaṭṭ il-bild, tamm yablid (48) ‘When he (= the captain) was near to the pearling-ground, he cast the lead, and kept on casting it’ (sc to measure the depth of the water) tamm yiḍrub ˁalēh ilēn yiṭlaˁ barra (Manāma 7) ‘He pulled and pulled on it (= the rope) until he (=the diver) came out of the water’ tammat tyi fi l-ˁašrat il-ayyām marra (44) ‘She kept coming once every ten days’ wāḥid tamm baˁad falāfat ayyām yināziˁ (3) ‘One man struggled against death for three more days’ (lit ‘stayed struggling’) (2) ḏ̣all hast baˁad minnāk šaǧar hāk-hu ḍall yiḥitt (34) ‘There’s a tree over there that keeps on losing its leaves’

140  Lit ‘mourning’. These Shīˁī religious processions are held every day from the beginning of the month of Muḥarram, culminating in very large ones on the 9th and 10th.

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ḏ̣all yiġūṣ, yidawwir (20) ‘He carried on diving and looking (for clams)’ ḍallēt axallī-h fi bēt wald ˁamm-uh (Manāma 5) ‘I would leave him at his cousin’s house on a regular basis’ ḍallat təġdi u iǧǧi (5) ‘She was continually going out and coming back’ 5.2.9.3.15 radd The basic meaning of radd is, as in other dialects, ‘to answer’, ‘to send back, turn (s’thing)’, ‘to come back’. When governing a following verb, it has the sense of repeated action, or going back to a previous state, sometimes corresponding to verbs in English with the ‘re-’ prefix. These senses occur in both the A and B dialects.141 Examples: yiridd yintiris min ḥarārat iš-šams (42) ‘It (= battery) is recharged by the heat of the sun’ tridd itsawwi nafs iš-šay (Manāma 5) ‘She does the same thing again’ yiridd yitlawwat u yimūt (6) ‘It shrivels up again and dies’ aridd aba-baddi fīh (4) ‘I’m going to begin it all over again’ kassar-ha u radd laḥḥam-ha (5) ‘He broke it (= bone) and joined it together again’ ˁugub mā fagaˁ radd kill-əh māt (6) ‘After it (= crop) came up it all died back again’ awwal kālat b-aǧi, tāli raddat načafat (41) ‘At first she said she’d come, then she went back on her word’ 141  But not noted in other works on Gulf and Najdi Arabic which have been consulted.

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min ˁugub ṯalāṯt ayyām baˁad raddaw rāḥāw (45) ‘After three days, they went back again’ ohō, radd ṭāḥ marra ṯānya! (radio play) ‘Oh no, he’s gone and fainted again!’ raddēna nafliǧ, čān maḥḥār wāyid (48) ‘We resumed opening (them), if there were many clams’ 5.2.9.3.16 badda This appears to be the basic dialectal form of ‘to begin’, rather than bida. It is often encountered with a verbal noun object, rather than a verb. Examples: hāda badda ˁamār-hum, yibayyin lih ˁazam ġer (5) ‘He started to prepare these (seed-beds) but seems to have decided (to switch to) others’ hādīk ir-rāsiyya baˁad-hi mā tibaddi fi ṭ-ṭalˁa (29) ‘The top one (= seed-bed) still hasn’t begun to sprout’ 5.2.9.3.17 girib/ǧirib bi-/garīb/ǧarīb bi girib/ǧirib (via ǧ < g < q) is literally ‘to be/come near to, to approach’ in a locative sense but can also be used with the particle b- in a temporal sense to mean ‘to be on the point of’, and is then synonymous with the second sense of baġa exemplified in 5.2.9.3.9 above. The adjective can also be used in the same temporal sense, e.g. lēn girib b-iyūn, tammēna nsawwi “tōb, tōb yā baḥar” (45) ‘When they (= pearl divers) were due to come back, we kept on singing ‘Good betide you, o sea!’ garīb hāk-hu b-yinǧaḥ (19) ‘He’s soon going to pass (his driving test)’ ǧirīb b-ytizawwaǧūn (48) ‘They’re going to get married soon’ . . . ḥagg lēn garīb bi-tūlad (Manāma 2) ‘. . . for when she’s near the point of giving birth’

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A verbal noun can also be used instead of a verb, e.g. ginna142 “al-ḥīn əgrubat yīyat-hum” (Manāma 6) ‘We said, ‘Now they’ll soon be coming home’ 5.2.9.3.18 xalla As in many Arabic dialects, xalla has a basic sense of ‘to allow, let, cause’ s’one do something. Its main modal sense is the uses of its imperative as an optative, with the sense ‘let us/him/her/yourself . . . etc.’ Examples: yallah! xal-na nxaṭif! (48) ‘Come on! Let’s sail on!’ xallī-h yiwalli! (4) ‘Let it go!’ (= forget about it) xallī-č mā tifˁal šay, lākin in-nās tāxid bi l-alsina (41) ‘Let’s say you do nothing (wrong)—people still listen to (wagging) tongues’ xallī-k iǧǧīb lēna šway (19) ‘Bring us a little of it’ xall-ik ˁāyīš mitwassiṭ (dialect poetry) ‘Take things easy!’ 5.2.10 The complementation of certain verbs 5.2.10.1 Verbs with double objects A noteworthy feature of the BA dialects is the syntax of verbs which can take both a direct and indirect object without a preposition. Where there are two pronominal objects, the indirect object is normally suffixed to the verb and the direct object is affixed to the particle iyyā. These are often pattern II causative verbs e.g. lō yīt gabil, čān sammaˁnā-ək iyyā-h (48) ‘If you’d come earlier, we would have let you hear one (= sea-song)’ (lit ‘caused you to hear’) 142  < gilna.

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arawwī-k iyyā-ha (3) ‘I’ll show you it’ (lit ‘cause you to see’) ˀaǧǧirū-na iyyā-h (5) ‘Lease us it (= a house)’ (lit ‘cause us to rent’) afaṣṣix-ha iyyā-ha u alabbis-ha libās ġēr (11) ‘I strip her of (lit ‘make her take off’) them (= dirty clothes) and dress her in fresh clothes’ In other cases where the same construction occurs with a non-causative verb, the verb is one like ‘give’ or ‘sell’ involving a process of exchange: min gadd hāy illi ˁaṭēnā-k iyyā-ha wāǧid (34) ‘There are many the (same) size as the ones we gave you’ bass il-čandala, mā b-abīˁ-k iyyā-ha (Manāma 2) ‘But the roof beam, I won’t sell you it’ However, some speakers reverse the order of pronouns in some of the verbs exemplified above, e.g. šingāyil hāḏi illi txayṭūn-ah u tlabbisūn-ah iyyā-hum? (45) ‘What kind of thing was it that you sewed, and dressed them (= your children) in?’ bāˁ-ah iyyā-na (24) ‘He sold it to us’ and for some speakers these verbs can have an alternative pattern of complementation, with the direct object suffixed to the verb and the indirect object taking a preposition, e.g. bāˁ-ha ˁala yūsif fi l-guḍaybiyya (17) ‘He sold it to Yūsuf in Guḍaybiyya’ iyyā can also be used with an indirect object with the sense ‘for the benefit of’ or ‘to the detriment of’, e.g.

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ǧābo lēhum xarūf wēš kubr-ah, ˁōd¸ ḍaxəm u čaffitā-h iyyā-hum (Manāma 5) ‘They brought them a really big sheep, large, fat, and tied it up for them’ (sc so they could easily slaughter it) awlād il-madrasa xarrabō-ha iyyā-y (1) ‘The boys from the school ruined it (= farm fence) for me’ (sc causing me a loss)’ But again, some speakers use an alternative pattern of complementation for this sense also: ida gaˁadti ihni xarrabtī-h ˁalay (45) ‘If you sit here you’ll ruin it (= my trade) for me’ 5.2.10.2 Verb complementation with prepositions 5.2.10.2.1 li, ila, ḥagg A noteworthy feature of BA is the number of common verbs which can take a prepositional complement which changes their lexical aspect compared with when the same verb takes a direct object. Cognitive verbs of knowing and understanding are a case in point when they are followed by li, ila, or ḥagg (which are seemingly interchangeable in this context). With faham ‘to understand, realize, grasp’, the sense of the verb with a prepositional complement is of ‘arriving at an understanding of the concept, essence or reality of something or someone’, e.g. awwal mā fahamt ila l-madrasa, hāda ˁabd ar-rasūl tāǧir (Manāma 1) ‘The first inkling I had of what a ‘school’ really was, it was the one (run by) ˁAbd al-Rasūl Tāǧir’ nās baˁad yitimmūn li sabaˁ ṯamān baˁad, mā yifihmūn ḥagg ḥačī-hum (Manāma 8) ‘Some (= children) get to the age of seven or even eight, yet (people) still can’t manage to make out what they’re saying’ mā fahamna lēha illa šarrūx minni u šarrūx minni (33) ‘We only ever knew her wearing a rag here and a patch there’ The same prepositions can be used with ˁaraf ‘to know’ to a similar effect = ‘to know something/how to do something from experience’:

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tiˁarfīn lēhum? (48) ‘Can you make out the meaning of what they’re saying?’ ḥatta l-mitˁaṣrīn təˁruf lēhum twallid-hum (Manāma 1) ‘Even the ones having a difficult labour, she would know how to get them to give birth’ illi fīh iftāg təˁarf lih (Manāma 6) ‘Anyone who had a hernia, she knew how to treat it’ mā yəˁarf ḥagg il-mara—šinhi l-mara ḏi? (51) ‘He didn’t know anything about women—what was (this thing called) ‘woman’?’ in-nihma mā aˁruf lēha (48) ‘I have no knowledge of (how to sing) sea-shanties’ il-ˁarab yəˁarfūn ḥagg il-mall143—yičwūn-ah (Manāma 6) ‘The sailors144 knew all about ‘the bends’—they treated it with a branding-iron’ 5.2.10.2.2 fi The preposition fi is used in the complementation of a wide variety of verbs and generally adds an extensive or intensive sense, e.g. Extensive uses: akal fi ‘to eat away at (over a period), continuously eat’: ḥatta ˁala z-zarˁ yaˁtadi, yākil fīh (17) ‘It (= pest) even attacks the crops, and eats away at them’ ˁala ṭūl il-ayyām yāklūn fih (45) ‘Over the course of the following days, they would eat from it’

143  mall is ‘the bends’, or decompression sickness—the headache, dizziness and joint pains suffered by pearl-divers when they ascend too quickly after a series of deep dives. 144  Lit ‘the Arabs’, which often simply means ‘men’ in any context.

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tamši tākil fīha (Manāma 1) ‘She walked along, nibbling on it’ axaḏ fi ‘to (constantly) take from, dip into’: ha-ṯ-ṯalāṯīn rubbiya nāxiḏ fīha šahar wāḥid (Manāma 7) ‘We’d constantly dip into those thirty rupees over the course of a month’ gamgam fi ‘to nibble away at’: nuˁṭi il-ḥayāwīn yikamkimūn fīh (19) ‘We give (it) to the animals to nibble on’ xaraf fi ’to go picking (dates or a crop, on a regular basis)’: axruf fi l-irṭab (Manāma 1) ‘I would go picking dates’ liˁab fi ‘to play with’: nigˁad nlāym-ah u nilˁab fīh (Manāma 5) ‘We would collect them (= sea-shells) together and constantly play with them’ Intensive uses: ṭāḥ fi and ḍarab fi ‘to beat up’: yiṭīḥūn fīni (Manāma 8) ‘They piled into me’ ˁād inta ṭāyiḥ fīni halayūs (48) ‘You’re going to give me a hell of a beating’ tiḍrub fīkum ida mā ḥafaḍtūn? (Manāma 2) ‘Did she give you a thrashing if you hadn’t learnt (the lesson) by heart?’ yiḍrub fīh rāyiḥ, fi r-raǧāyil māl-ih (Manāma 1) ‘He gave him a beating, on (the soles of ) his feet’

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yiḏ̣rab fi ḥadīd bārid (44) (proverb) 𐅽‘He is flogging a dead horse (lit ‘beating on cold iron’)’ miša fi ‘to ruin, play havoc with’: yirǧaˁ ila z-zarˁ, rāḥ yimši fīh (17) ‘It (= rat) returns to the crops and plays havoc with them’ ištaġal fi ‘to become established in’: w in-nār tištaġil fi rās iṯ-ṯāni (5) ‘And the fire took hold in someone else’s hair’ xallaṣ fi ‘to finish off’: axalliṣ fīha rāyiḥ (17) ‘I’ll finish it off completely’ 5.2.10.2.3 ˁan One of the basic senses of ˁan in BA is ‘away from’, ‘avoiding’. It can be used with a wide variety of verbs, in many cases resulting in idiomatic expressions somewhat different from the apparent literal sense. Examples: rāḥ ˁan/ištaġal ˁan/gaˁad ˁan ‘to go, work, stay away from’: yirūḥ ˁann-i, yištaġil ˁann-i, yigˁad ˁann-i fi l-balādīn (28) ‘He leaves me and works away from me, stays away from me, in other villages’ ḏīč il-yōm rāḥ ˁan-na s-sayyāra (Manāma 8) ‘That day the car went without us’ baˁad wāḥid ism-uh rāyiḥ ˁann-i (24) ‘There’s another one whose name has slipped my mind’ bāt ˁan ‘to spend the night away from’: ilēn bāt ˁan-na, wāldat-ah mā tākil il-akil (19) ‘If he spent the night away from us, his mother wouldn’t be able to eat’

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ḏ ̣ ahar ˁan (A dialects only) ‘to abandon, desert’: banā-ha u rāḥ ˁan-ha u ḏ̣ahar ˁan-ha (48) ‘He built it, then left it and abandoned it’ fačč ˁan ‘to disappear from, leave’: lamma šway yifičč ˁann-ah, raddēna galaˁna, biˁna (34) ‘When it (= plant pest) leaves it (= crop), we’ll pick it again and sell it’ tkaffa ˁan ‘to keep away from, do without’: iḥna min xulukna kill-əh mitkaffīn ˁan in-nās (3) ‘Ever since we were born, we’ve always kept our distance from people’ tġašša ˁan ‘to veil oneself so as not to be seen by’: awwal mā dār it-tilifizyūn, yitġaššōn ˁann-ah (51) ‘When television first came along, (women) used to veil themselves from it’ labas ˁan ‘to dress to protect oneself from’: yilabsūn ˁann-ah (48) ‘They (= pearl-divers) would put clothes to protect themselves from it (= the sting of jellyfish)’ sakat ˁan ‘to refuse to talk to’: sikat ˁann-ah (Manāma 6) ‘He stopped talking to him’ yisiktūn ˁan-hum, mā yitḥaččūn (Manāma 10) ‘(if) they (=the parents) don’t talk to them, they (= their children) don’t (learn to) speak’ māt ˁan ‘to die leaving/without seeing s’one/s’thing’: yimūt ˁann-i abū-y, sitt isnīn (Manāma 1) ‘My father died and left me when I was six’

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yimūtūn ˁan-ha (Manāma 6) ‘They (= villagers) would die without having seeing it (= the capital, Manāma)’ ixtarab ˁan ‘to be corrupted by’: yišūfūn-ah mā yigˁad min in-nōm u yixtirbūn ˁann-ah (Manāma 1) ‘They see him not getting up in the morning to pray and they get corrupted by that’ 5.2.10.2.4 ˁala ˁala is often used idiomatically in BA in the sense of ‘to the detriment of’: axaḏ ˁala ‘to charge s’one for s’thing’: yāxiḏ ˁalēk iǧra (5) ‘He’ll charge you a fare’ akal ˁala ‘to erode, use up, cost’: zrība baˁad bi-tāčil ˁalēna afkal min ḥiǧārat-əh (41) ‘(Registering) the byre will cost us more (lit ‘eat away at us more heavily’) than the stones (to build it) did’ ṭāḥ ˁala ‘to faint, inconveniently to s’one’: radd ṭāḥ ˁalēna! (radio play) ‘He’s gone and fainted on us again!’ (i.e. ‘fainted at an inopportune moment’) rāḥ ˁala ‘to disappear from’: hu šikil il-ḥalwāyō, bass ana rāyiḥ fikr-i ˁalēh (Manāma 1) ‘It’s like a jack-pomfret, but I can’t think of (its name)’ il-isim rāyiḥ ˁala fikr-i (15) ‘The name’s gone from my memory’ rāḥ ˁala bāl-i, mā aˁruf ism-ah (32) ‘It’s gone out of my head, I don’t know its name’

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xallaṣ ˁala (see also xallaṣ fi above with a similar meaning) ‘to finish off completely’: abġi lī usbūˁ kāmil lēn axalliṣ ˁalēha! (radio play) ‘I’ll need a whole week to finish her off completely (= kill her)!’ 5.3 Agreement What follows is an analysis of variation in agreement patterns within the noun-phrase, and between the noun phrase and other elements of the sentence, where the head of the noun phrase is, by form or by meaning, a plural. In the Arabic dialectological literature, a distinction is sometimes drawn between what is termed ‘strict’ (pl—pl) and ‘deflected’ (pl—fsng) agreement.145 This distinction will be adopted here, since it is a main site of morphological variation. Compared with the situation in neighbouring central Arabia and the southern Gulf including Oman, in all of which the fpl survives as a category of the verb, adjective and pronoun, the situation in Bahrain is simpler. Apart from a few marginal usages which will be described in passing, the fpl as an agreement category has been lost: in virtually all agreement loci, the basic choice is between common pl, regardless of the gender of the head noun, and feminine singular. An exception to this is a category of collective non-human nouns, formally distinguished from plurals, which to some degree are treated differently. Human and non-human plural heads will be dealt with in turn, because animacy has been noted as a major semantic factor affecting agreement patterns in Arabic,146 though, as we shall see, there are others at play. Brustad,147 in her analysis of data from four Arabic dialects, notes that the degree of what she calls the ‘individuation’ of a noun—in which several factors potentially play a part: agency (which we are calling ‘animacy’), definiteness, specificity, textual or physical prominence, qualification (e.g. by adjectival modification) and quantification (especially with the numbers 2–10) all have an effect. This also applies to our Bahraini data. The analysis here is based on sixty-five conversational texts148 produced by forty-nine speakers, seventeen of them speakers of A dialects and thirty145  BELN 98–99. 146  BELN 100–102. 147  BRU 24ff. 148  The texts analyzed were those translated and annotated in DCSEA II, supplemented by a small number of others from other locations in Bahrain not included there.

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two speakers of B dialects. The conclusions are not the result of an exhaustive statistical analysis of all the noun phrase tokens with plural heads which occurred, but derived rather from the general behaviour of the relevant headtypes, for many of which there were many dozens of tokens. This is not therefore a detailed variationist study in the classic sense, but rather is indicative of the main trends in the data. The speakers selected here all had little or no formal education, so the data analyzed are different from those which informed the writer’s earlier account of Gulf agreement systems, which was based on educated speaker behaviour, and summarised the situation in the Gulf generally, rather than just that of Bahrain.149 Relevant plural noun head examples were those which co-occurred with attributive or predicative adjectives, participles, finite verbs, anaphoric pronouns or demonstratives. Naturally, many examples of noun phrases occurred with several of these potential loci of grammatical agreement at the same time, which provided insights into the variability of the system. In toto, there were 49 different human head-types (that is, individual plural nouns) and 131 different non-human head-types in the data analyzed. These head-types naturally reflected the topics of conversation: in the case of B speakers, this was weighted towards agriculture and farming generally and in the case of the A male speakers towards pearl-diving. Female speakers from both communities generally talked about marriage, family and community issues. The first thing to note is that the agreement system revealed by the analysis is full of variation. Some of this appears to be free and not obviously explicable; but most of it is patterned, and the patterning seems to be dependent partly on the semantic/pragmatic factors outlined above, and partly on the morphological classes of the items involved. It does not however appear that there is any major systemic communal difference in the Bahrain agreement system which consistently distinguishes the A and the B dialects. 5.3.1 Human heads 5.3.1.1 Nouns and adjectives/participles Whether the adjective is used attributively or predicatively, strict agreement is overwhelmingly the norm with plural human head nouns (and pronouns), including duals, and whether or not the head noun is grammatically definite. The adjective pattern used is the broken plural if one exists, otherwise the strong plural form with the -īn suffix for both male and female gender. Examples: 149  GA 155–156.

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A dialects: l-əṣbayān l-əkbār (45) ‘The older boys’ banāt l-əkbār150 (45) ‘The older girls’ il-ˁarab il-awwaliyyīn killiš (Manāma 7) ‘The real old-timers’ awwal il-banāt fī l-bēt guˁūd (48) ‘In the old days the girls sat at home’ wāyid il-mudarrisāt laṭīfīn (Manāma 7) ‘The teachers (f) are really nice’ sufūr iḥna wāgfīn nḥāčī-hum (Manāma 7) ‘We stand there unveiled, talking to them’ ḏ̣ˁāf in-nās (45) ‘People were poor’ B speakers: nās mitwasṭīn (Manāma 10) ‘People of average means’ it-tiǧǧār is-sāyrīn (5) ‘The travelling merchants’ il-ḥalāyil zēnīn (5) ‘The Baḥārna villagers are kind-hearted’ abwat-kim taˁbānīn ˁalēkim (3) ‘Your fathers tired themselves out for your sake’ 150  For the ‘missing’ definite article on banāt, see 5.1.1.

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ḥakka ˁaǧāyiz muhum b-rāḍīn (7) ‘Even old women aren’t agreeable (sc to marrying me)’ iḥna ˁittag, mā nizmir ˁittag-na ḥna (5) ‘We are old hands (ourselves), so we don’t bully our old-hands’ awlād iṯnēn ṣġār (5) ‘Two young boys’ However, quite a number of instances were recorded where human plurals attracted deflected agreement. One category of meaning where this often occurred is where the reference is contextually generic or collective (e.g. ‘kind people’, ‘all of us’) rather than specific (‘the people who live in my street’), though the dividing line between the two is fuzzy, and not all speakers made a clear or consistent distinction between the two types of meaning. Examples of deflected agreement: . . . liˀann-əh mā miš daxātir ˁadla (Manāma 7) ‘. . . because (in those days) there were no proper (fsng) doctors’ killə-na nahhāma radiya (48) ‘All of us were worthless (fsng) singers’151 yigḥaṣ, wi n-nās muṣṭaffa, dāyra madār-ah (20) ‘He would jump about, with people lined up (fsng), surrounding (fsng) him’ kill-əh mištaġila, in-nās (34) ‘People (these days) are always working (fsng)’ mā ˁinda-ak banāt əmˁarsa? waḥda bass? il-bāgi baˁad-hum ṣġār? (5) ‘Don’t you have any married (fsng) daughters? Just the one? Are the rest of them (pl) still too young (pl)?’

151  That is, on pearling dhows. The nahhām was employed to sing work sea-songs to encourage the other crew members in their labours, but often they did no labour themselves.

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This last example is typical of how mixed agreement in lengthy sentences and short texts with human heads works: a (generic) plural head with deflected adjectival agreement in subject or topic position is amplified/modified/individuated in the predicate with plural anaphoric pronouns, adjectives, verbs or demonstratives. Similar examples are: awādim kaṯīra haddaw aˁmāl-hum (12) ‘Many (fsng) people have left (pl) their (pl) jobs’ awādim zēna yiˁilfūn ˁala r-raǧǧāl wa l-mara (5) ‘Good (fsng) people who provide (pl) sustenance for a man and his wife’ ˁarab msamra, awādim əmsamra . . . maytīn killiš (48) ‘Men were swept away (fsng), people were swept away (fsng) . . . all completely dead (pl)’ As we shall see in more detail below, this principle of fsng in the subject nounphrase and pl in predicated elements is especially noticeable where there is a succession of finite verbs. As already noted, there is a good deal of free variation, and the very same speaker sometimes used strict and sometimes deflected agreement for the same ‘generic’ reference. Noteworthy is: abwat-kim taˁbāna ˁalēkim, abwat-kim it-taˁbāna (3) ‘Your fathers tired themselves (fsng) out for your sake, your father were the ones tired out (fsng)’ This sentence occurred just a few seconds after the same speaker had uttered a virtually identical sentence, presented earlier, but with pl, i.e. strict, agreement (taˁbānīn) instead of deflected (taˁbāna): abwat-kim taˁbānīn ˁalēkim (3) ‘Your fathers tired themselves out for your sake’ 5.3.1.2 Verbs More examples of human heads occurred with predicate verbs than with attributive/predicative adjectives, and a similar pattern of agreement was revealed: strict agreement dominated (in a ratio of about 5:1) but there were still a good number of examples of deflected agreement. The latter was again often associated, where it occurred, with generic reference. Typically, it was

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used to describe what normally happens/happened, rather than what actually happened at a specific point in the past with specific actors, for which strict agreement was typically used. Nonetheless, there were still apparent counterexamples to this general trend. Examples with nās ‘people’ as head noun were particularly frequent. Examples: Strict agreement A speakers: il-ġāṣa ḥawwalaw (48) ‘The divers descended (to the sea-bed)’ iyūn-ič əṣbayān əkbār (45) ‘Older boys would come to you’ il-banāt mā yirūḥūn is-sikka (48) ‘The girls never went out into the street’ ingaṭˁaw il-ḥayāyīm (45) ‘The quack-doctors (of old) have disappeared’ ˁād nās raddaw, nās yawwidaw maḥall-hum hnāk gāˁdīn (44) ‘So some people returned, but others remained where they were, over there’ B speakers: lēn gāmaw n-nās ināmūn, ināmūn əb ṣaxxa (33) ‘When the people (sc of our village) went to bed, they would sleep in complete silence’ ˁašar isnīn akalo n-nās ǧarīš (16) ‘For ten years the people ate milled wheat’ (sc during and after World War II, when rice was not available) yaw in-niswān yābō l-ˁadīd u sawwaw ḥiǧra zēna (Manāma 10) ‘The women came and brought the musical instruments, and set up a lovely room’ lēn murḍaw awlād-na . . . (16) ‘When our children fell ill . . .’

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Deflected agreement A speakers: il-banāt bass tilbas darārīˁ u baxānig (Manāma 7) ‘The girls would just wear under-gowns and hoods’ gāl “ṭayyiḥ”, irkubat il-ġāṣa (48) ‘(The captain) would say “ready (the oars)!”, and the divers would climb up (onto the boat)’ tyī l-fazˁa (48) ‘The team of helpers would come’ al-ḥīn, ˁugub¸ il-ˁarab ədrisat, əˁrifat (Manāma 6) ‘Now, later on, men have been to school, have got more understanding’ iḏ̣harat in-nās, grēḏ̣a grēḏ̣a yāt il-ḥidd (45) ‘People left, (and) they gradually came (and settled) in al-Ḥidd’ fī ḏāk iz-zaman hast nās itbūg . . . (48) ‘In that era, there were people who stole (sc as a way of life) . . .’ B speakers: tyi ummahāt-na tnādī-na (Manāma 5) ‘Our mothers would come and call us’ (sc to come home from the sea-shore) tidbaḥ minnəh naṣāra sabˁīn alf (3) ‘Seventy thousand Christians will be killed by it’ id-darārīs . . . ittisaḥḥar (Manāma 7) ‘The Qurˀān scholars would have their pre-dawn breakfast (sc during Ramadan)’ il-ˁazzāma tiˁzim ḥagg lēltēn (Manāma 5) ‘The (wedding party) hosts would invite (guests) for two nights’ yāyīn mirtāḥīn wi n-niswān txadim (Manāma 9) ‘(The men) would come back home feeling relaxed, while the women would get to work’

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al-ḥīn in-nās darasat, lā? fahamat . . . tiṭawwarat, mu šikil il-awwal, hamaǧiyya (3) ‘Now people have been to school, haven’t they? They understand . . . they’ve developed, not like in the old days, (when they were) ignorant’ wi n-nās təġrif min il-baḥar u tikitt ˁalēha (33) ‘The people were scooping up sea water and pouring it onto it (= the fire)’ ḥaṭṭēna nās tikuṣṣ fīha (29) ‘We sent people to dig it (= a well) out’ A particularly common use of nās was as an indefinite distributive (‘some . . . others’), used to differentiate sub-groups within a larger group. This usage was normally associated with deflected agreement and often a p-stem verb to describe ‘what normally used to happen’ in the past, e.g. nās tirkab nās tiḥawwil (48) ‘Some (divers) would come back up, while others would go down’ (ex-diver describing the shift system of pearl-diving) nās tiṭbax u nās itsawwi čāh (45) ‘Some cooked, others made tea’ (ex-diver describing the division of labour at meal-times at sea) nās tbīˁ bāǧilla maglay, nās tbīˁ maṭbūx, nās tbīˁ zagg is-sībāl maglay (45) ‘Some sold fried peas, some sold cooked dishes, some sold fried monkey-nuts’ (woman describing different types of women vendors in a market) nās itrūḥ maši, nās itrūh ˁala ḥamīr (16) ‘Some would go on foot, some on donkeys’ (travel to Manāma in former times) nās itḥibb nās, nās issāˁid nās (Manāma 7) ‘Some liked others, some helped others’ (woman describing neighbourliness in a traditional quarter of Manāma) hast nās ittimm lē ˁugub il-məġarb (48) ‘Some would continue (sailing) until after sunset’ (ex-diver describing the practice of some, but not all boat-captains when returning to port)

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These examples contrast with a superficially similar example, quoted above, in the strict-agreement category: ˁād nās raddaw, nās yawwidaw maḥall-hum hnāk gāˁdīn (44) ‘So some people returned, but others remained where they were, over there’ But there is a difference. In the example with strict agreement, which occurred in an account of how the British Political Agent expelled the Dawāsir tribe from Bahrain in the 1920s, the speaker is describing what two specific groups of people (some members of which he named) actually did (s-stem) after the mass expulsion: one came back to Bahrain, whereas the other made a new life in what eventually became Saudi Arabia. In the other examples, nās designates what an undifferentiated sub-group habitually did. This difference in individuation is what probably lies behind the agreement patterns used in these two contrasting examples. The likelihood of strict agreement is higher where the verb is s-stem and describes an actual event, lower when it is p-stem and describes habits or in unspecific terms what generally happens/used to happen. Mixed examples, where different verb agreement patterns occurred with the same head noun in the same sentence, occurred frequently, but again exhibited certain common patterns. Note the following coordinated sentence examples (all A dialects) which have the following structure: V S |u | (S) V (fsng) |and| (pl) tyāmaˁat il-banāt l-əkbār |u | sawwo lihum əmrādā yiqōṣdūn (45) V(fsng) S |and| V(pl) V(pl) ‘The older girls gathered and performed the əmrādā dance, reciting odes’ yāt ir-rayāyīl |u | šālō-na (45) V(fsng) S |and| V(pl) ‘The men came and carried us off’ ityī l-ḥammāra . . . |u | ḥammalō-h . . . (48) V(fsng) S |and| V(pl) ‘The donkey-drivers would arrive and load it up’ The first clause has V S word order with the V slot filled by a fsng verb and the S slot by a pl human head noun, followed by an amplifying clause with the same

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(understood) S with the verb in the pl. The first clause (fsng verb) seems to provide a general descriptive statement to launch a new episode in the speaker’s narrative (‘the older girls gathered’, ‘the men came’, ‘the donkey men would arrive’), and the following sentence(s) (pl verbs) build on it, carrying the story forward and providing more detail. Examples also occurred with S V order in the first clause, rather than V S, e.g. il-ˁarab rāḥat il-masyid, ˁayyidaw (51) ‘The men went (fsng) to the mosque (and) went (pl) Eid-visiting’ The following example provides a variation on this theme: lēn ǧirīb in-nās b-ddišš il-ġōṣ, fannišat . . . liˀannə-hum māxiḏīn tisgām u ḏi, kil yōm fannišaw u rāḥō l-ġōṣ (Manāma 6) ‘Whenever the time approached for people to go (fsng) pearl-diving, they would resign (fsng) (their employment at the oil company) . . . because they (pl) had taken (pl) a pearling loan and such like, every day they quit (pl) (their oil-company job) and went diving (pl)’ In this example, the head noun in-nās ‘people’ in the ‘focusing’ clauses of the opening sentence has fsng verbs (ddišš and fannišat). This clause states in general terms what happened on a regular basis every year at the time when the oil-industry and pearl-diving were vying to attract men’s labour: ‘Whenever . . .’. There is then a short pause, and the speaker takes the narrative forward by explaining the reason for what he has just described: ‘because they . . .  . . .’ and now the agreement of pronouns, participle and verb is all strict. In this amplifying second sentence, it is as if the speaker is individuating the actions which he described in generic terms in the first sentence. The hum ‘they’ in reference back to nās is the point at which the members of the group are formally pluralized, triggering the subsequent strict agreement in all parts of speech. This example is similar in that respect to the one quoted earlier: mā ˁinda-ak banāt əmˁarsa? waḥda bass? il-bāgi baˁad-hum ṣġār? (5) ‘Don’t you have any married (fsng) daughters? Just the one? Are the rest of them (pl) still too young (pl)?’ It is perhaps significant that not one example of this type of clause sequence was recorded with the agreement sequence occurring the other way round, viz *pl →fsng. The examples that occurred of a comparable fsng → pl switch in the B dialects involved a greater distance between the head noun with fsng verb and

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the same head noun with pl verb, which has also been shown to be a factor associated with a shift to strict agreement. For example, at the beginning of a rambling account of a calamitous event in Bahrain,152 supposedly predicted in a Shīˁī text known as the xuṭbat al-bayān and attributed to ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, the Prophet’s cousin and brother-in-law, a BV speaker begins: titḥāma l-ˁarab bi l-ˁarab wi l-ˁaǧam bi l-ˁaǧam, wi l-inglīz titḥāma baˁḍ-ha l-baˁḍ . . . (3) ‘The Sunni Arabs will protect (fsng) one another and the Persians likewise . . . the Europeans will protect (fsng) one another (fsng) too . . .’ Here, in this opening statement describing in general terms what will happen, we have fsng agreement of the verbs with the collective plural nouns il-ˁarab and il-inglīz, and an anaphoric fsng pronoun. mita ṣṣīr? ‘When will this event occur?’ the speaker continues. He answers his own question: kāl “fi zaman tarkib il-furūǧ bi s-surūǧ” ‘He (=ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib in the xuṭba) says: ‘In the era when cunts ride (fsng) on saddles’ by which the speaker means ‘when women drive cars’. This cryptic (and rhyming) pronouncement provides another generic description for later amplification: like the human heads ˁarab, ˁaǧam, inglīz in the opening statement, the plural furūǧ, a metonym for ‘women’, attracts deflected agreement. Then, as the explanation of all this unfolds, and the speaker goes into detail about exactly what will happen, the agreement system for the human head nouns switches from deflected to strict: lākin ida kamal ha-l-ǧisir u salakat-ha ha-s-sayyārāt, əˁruf an il-wakˁa ššibb . . . kalām amīr al-muˀminīn mā yixtilif . . . ḥatta him il-ˁarab ˁind-him iṭ-ṭilāˁ ˁala l-xuṭba hādi, yikrūn fīha awkāt . . .  ‘But if that bridge is completed and cars go along it, know that the calamity will be ignited . . . the words of the Commander of the Faithful do not 152  The ‘calamity’ (wakˁa) referred to by the speaker is the building of the bridge linking Bahrain with Saudi Arabia, which opened in 1986, and at the time of the recording (1978) was still only in the planning stage. It was widely feared by Bahrainis that there would be a flood of Saudi ‘tourists’ seeking alcohol, and that Bahrain would be particularly popular with Saudi women, who were not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia but would be free to do so in Bahrain—hence the cryptic comments in the second part of the text quoted.

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change . . . even they (pl), the Sunni Arabs, they (pl) peruse this xuṭba, they read (pl) it now and then . . .’ Again, two occurrences of the pl pronoun him are followed by pl agreement in the verb. The textual shift is again fsng→pl. A factor here, as suggested by Belnap for similar patterns in his Cairene data, may be ease of recoverability of information: the nearer an agreement locus is to its head, the more immediate is the association between the two, so deflected or neutralized agreement when close to the head is less likely to interfere with the interlocutor perceiving the grammatical relationship between it and the agreement locus.153 Confusion or ambiguity may increase with distance, hence the need for strict agreement. Whilst there is a good deal of free variation in the data, the overall distributional pattern of deflected and strict agreement with human head nouns observed here bears out the theory of Brustad,154 who compared agreement data across a range of Arabic dialects and found a common trend, stronger in some than in others, but present in all to some degree: the greater degree of individuation, the greater the use of strict, i.e. pl agreement. As she points out, degree of individuation is determined by the judgement of the speaker (which can be variable from one to another) and is not automatically determined by the head noun. So adjectival modification may be strict or deflected, depending on whether the noun is seen as a class of people or as a group of particular individuals—which will often also mean a difference in grammatical definiteness (nas zēna ‘nice people’ as a class, versus in-nās iz-zēnīn illi aˁarf-hum ‘the nice people I know’). Other forms of linguistic individuation, such as the choice of pl rather than fsng adjective with a noun will mean that subsequent reference to that noun-adjective phrase will also be individuated: pl -hum rather than fsng -ha. And as we have seen in several ‘mixed’ examples, an entity which is introduced by the speaker as a class or group (awādim kaṯīra ‘a large number of people’), can, in a short space, become individuated: haddaw aˁmāl-hum ‘left their jobs’—they had different jobs, and left them individually. This shift of focus from the generic to the specific largely explains the formal fsng→pl shift we have observed. A particularly striking example of the association of different agreement patterns with generic versus individuated reference is the following exchange, in a conversation between two B women (S1 and S2) from Manāma about life during the youth of S2:

153  BELN 103–4. 154  BRU 52–59.

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S1: S2:

bass nās mˁayyanīn ˁind-hum rawādu? ‘Was it only certain (pl) people who (pl) owned radios?’ wallah, kānat nās wāǧid ˁind-ha rawādu! ‘By God, there were (fsng) lots of people who (fsng) owned radios!’

5.3.2 Human collective nouns There are a number of human collective nouns which are not morphologically plurals but which, like them, sometimes take fsng and sometimes pl agreement: il-ˁālam used in the sense of ‘people’ (rather than ‘world’); ahl/hal and ahliyya, all meaning ‘family’; ǧazwa/yazwa ‘crew, ship’s complement/company’. Examples: 1. ˁālam in the sense of ‘people’ generally has fsng agreement, as it does in other Arabic dialects (e.g. Cairene). Examples: al-ḥīn tixassasat il-amrāḏ ̣ u ṭilˁat il-aṭibbā u iftahamat il-ˁālam (Manāma 7) ‘Nowadays illnesses have got worse, doctors have come on the scene, and people have come to understand (things better)’ iftakkat al-ˁālam min balā-ha (33) ‘The people (i.e. everyone in the village) were freed from the tribulation of it (= a major fire)’ tamām, u našīdāt, u ṭirbat il-ˁālam, il-awlād ṭirbat (Manāma 2) ‘It was great, and there were songs, and people were happy, the lads were happy’ mātat ˁālam wāǧid wi l-maḥāmil tigallabat (20) ‘A large number of people died and the boats capsized’ But ˁālam also occurred with pl agreement, where (in the example below) the distributed, individuated description of the action as being ‘in every place’ may be the reason for the plural verb: kil makān yištəġilūn il-ˁālam (33) ‘People worked in every place (i.e. in different places)’ Mixed patterns occur, and again follow the pattern fsng→pl, and for the same reason as with plural head nouns:

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titkāsar il-ˁālam ˁalēh, lēn fīhum maraḍ lō fīhum šay (Manāma 7) ‘People would fight each other (fsng) to get to (see) him (= a proper doctor) if they (pl) had an illness or if they (pl) had something else’ Here ‘the people’ all did the same thing (and did it to each other); the clause following suggests the speaker conceives of them as doing it for different reasons. 2. hal/ahal and ahliyya (A), ahl (B) and ‘family’ always occurred with pl agreement: əgbalaw ahal-ha . . . (51) ‘If her family agreed . . .’ (sc to her marriage) mā dāššō-na ahliyyat-na il-madāris (51) ‘Our family didn’t send us to (government) schools’ kill-əh ibarrizūn ahal-na (Manāma 10) ‘Our family would get all of it ready’ (sc the wedding chamber) ˁalay ana kān ahl-i nāḏirīn ˁalay, yigrūn ˁalay mīlād, mīlād māl baḥārna (Manāma 10) ‘My family had made a vow concerning me, that (sc at my wedding) they would read prayers for the Prophet over me, prayers in the Baḥārna style’ In these cases, ‘family’, in every case individuated by a possessive adjective ‘her’, ‘our’, ‘my’, refers to (in the first two examples) the senior male members of the family—father, brothers, paternal uncles—who made the decisions about marriage and school attendance; to the adult women of the family (in the third) who organised the wedding preparations; and to the girl’s parents (in the fourth) who often made vows concerning their children when they were born, should they survive to adulthood and marriage. 3. ǧazwa/yazwa ‘crew, ship’s complement’. This term, used by divers to describe the totality of the crew on a pearling dhow, could occur with fsng, pl or mixed agreement. This example occurs at the beginning of a description of the assembling en masse of the crew at the captain’s or boat-owner’s house before their departure:

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yat il-yazwa, kmalat il-yazwa (48) ‘The crew arrived (fsng) and was (finally) complete (fsng)’ In the next example, the speaker is describing the morning work of the divers and pullers—in contrast to that of the captain, the bo’sun and the boy servants: il-yazwa yifašgūn il-maḥḥār (45) ‘The crew would split open (pl) the clams’ The following example is particularly interesting: kil il-yazwa ‘all of the crew’ is topicalized and fronted, and the pronoun which refers to and immediately follows it agrees with it in gender and number (fsng), but the following verb is pl. We have noted previously that kil operates as an individuating element, and that is perhaps what triggers the pl agreement of the verb here: kil il-yazwa hi yitfaṭṭarōn ˁində-na (Manāma 9) ‘All of the crew, they (fsng) would eat their breakfast (pl) (sc on returning to land) at our house’ But perhaps the most interesting example, for what it reveals about the association between semantic function and form, is the following complex sentence: raddat hāḏi l-yazwa illi rkubo fīh yiṭabˁūn-ah u yišīlūn il-ḥaṭab hāḏi (48) ‘The crew, who had got on board (pl), would re-(fsng) submerge (pl) her (= the boat) once more and remove (pl) the wood and things’ The structure is: MV raddat il-yazwa [illi rkubo fīh] yiṭabˁun-əh u yišīlūn . . .  AuxV(fsng) S → V(pl) V(pl) V(pl) In this example, the main verb (MV), which consists of the auxiliary raddat ‘they repeated’ and the lexical verb yiṭabˁūn ‘they submerge’ has itself a mixed agreement pattern, with the auxiliary, which precedes and is in the immediate proximity of the subject yazwa taking fsng agreement and the lexical verb, which follows it at some distance, taking pl agreement, matching that of the verb in the intervening parenthetical relative clause [illi rkubo fīh] which splits

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it from its auxiliary. The ‘individuating’ pl verb in illi rkubo ‘who had got on board’ is naturally followed by pl agreement in the two following verbs which describe the sequence of actions the crew subsequently took. Like the earlier examples with formally plural head nouns, those with ‘collective’ human heads which exhibit mixed agreement always show the shift fsng→pl within sentences and short stretches of text, but not the other way round. 5.3.3 Non-human heads With plural non-human heads, strict agreement dominated even more than it did with human heads, though sub-categories of nouns could be distinguished in which the proportion of deflected agreements was somewhat higher. There were also a handful of cases of fpl adjective agreement—interesting, as fpl as an agreement category is generally absent from the Bahraini dialects. These are discussed separately. Parts of the body also deserve a separate section. The examples below are presented in rough lexical categories, reflecting the topics of conversation: items/styles of dress and personal adornment; domestic-related; maritime-related; agriculture-related; and miscellaneous. The texts from which the examples are taken, as with the examples involving human heads, were mainly reminiscences about the speakers’ early lives. The exception was the agriculture-related examples, most of which occurred within the context of an agricultural advisor’s visits to allotment farms, when there would be lengthy discussions about crops, transplantation, fertilizers, irrigation and so on where the objects talked about were often visible and adjacent (which proved to be a relevant pragmatic factor in determining agreement). As already noted, factors potentially associated with individuation (and strict agreement) are: definiteness; deictics (‘these, those’); enumeration; adjectives (type, colour, size, shape); other forms of specificity (e.g. ‘the clothes we wore’). Often the pragmatics of the situation is a factor (e.g. farmer describing how a crop (as a whole) has turned out (collective or generic fsng) versus individual plants/crops/seed beds (pl)). 5.3.3.1 Items/styles of dress and personal adornment In this category strict agreement occurred virtually without exception. Examples: Clothes (ṯyāb/fyāb): ṯyāb yiddad (48) ‘new clothes’; l-əṯyāb l-iydād (48) ‘the new clothes’; l-əṯyāb l-əˁtāg (48) ‘the old clothes’; ṯyāb bīḏ ̣ (48) ‘white dresses’; ṯyāb il-bīḏ ̣ 

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(Manāma 9) ‘the white dresses’; il-fyāb il-bīḍān155 (28) ‘the white dresses’; ṯyāb xuḍur (11) ‘green dresses’; ṯyāb mafāḥīḥ (Manāma 7) ‘striped dresses’; īṯ-ṯyāb iz-zēnīn (45) ‘nice clothes’; iṯ-ṯyāb māl il-bēt il-ˁādiyyīn (Manāma 7) ‘ordinary domestic clothes’; kil-hum əfyāb isawwūn-hum, yilbasōn-hum (33) ‘all of them made clothes, made them and wore them’ Types of clothes and accessories: bšūt bīḏ ̣  (51) ‘white cloaks’; nafānīf ṭwāl (45) ‘long skirts’; əfṣūṣ zarg u ḥmār (Manāma 7) ‘blue and red gemstones’; ˁačāyif ṣġār (Manāma 8) ‘small plaits’; xwēṭāt dgāg (11) ‘fine threads’; ḥyūl imtān (Manāma 10) ‘heavy anklets’; hāfāt ṣġār (5) ‘small-size underpants’; hāfāt bīḍān čbār (14) ‘large-size white underpants’; hāfāt l-əmṭarbalīn dēlāk (14) ‘those elasticated pants ( for babies)’; sarawlat il-gēṭān ummahāt iz-zary ḏēlāk l-əmḥaǧǧalīn (Manāma 5) ‘cotton under-trousers with gold braid, those ones with ankle-bands’; kil arbaˁ šaǧarāt masbūčīn fi baˁaḍ-hum baˁḍ (33) ‘each set of four patterns intertwined with each other’. 5.3.3.2 Domestic-related The pattern of variation here was similar to that with clothes items, with strict agreement overwhelmingly dominant, and seemingly because of a similar set of textual and contextual factors (explanation in brackets in each case after the translation). Examples: əhummə bardīn, l-byūt illi min saˁaf (45) ‘They (pl) were cold (pl), the houses made out of palm fronds,’ (specification of a particular design of house of a by-gone age) banēna falāfat iḥǧar ǧiddad (41) ‘We’ve added three new (pl) rooms’ (specification by quantification) arbaˁ b-ikamlūn-him, fintēn b-irismūn-him (41) ‘Four (rooms) which (pl) they are about to finish off, two others which (pl) they are about to plan’ (specification by quantification)

155  bīḏ ̣ ‘white’ is the A dialect plural, bīḍān and all other colour adjectives have a final -ān in the B dialects.

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ḥiǧar-hum ənḏ̣āf (48) ‘Their rooms (sc as opposed to those of others) were clean (pl)’ (specification by possession and characteristic) ha-ṣ-ṣawāni l-əkbār (45) ‘Those large (pl) trays’ (deictic ha- indicating type, specified by size) fnāra min l-ikbār, ummahāt il-manḏ̣ari, hāk-hum li l-ḥīn mawǧūdīn (16) ‘Lamps of the large (pl) type, ones (pl) with a mirror in, they (pl) still exist (pl)’ (specification by size and type) fanāǧīl l-əkbār (5) ‘Cups of the large size’ (specification by size) iyḥāl ṯalāṯ, arbaˁ mṣaffafīn (Manāma 7) ‘Three or four large water pots would be lined up in a row (pl)’ (quantification) wi l-aġrāš ˁala ṭūl id-dačča əmbaxxarīn (Manāma 9) ‘The water jugs would be placed the length of the bench, cooling by evaporation (pl)’ (specification by location) ṣ-ṣyāx l-ədgāg u l-əmtān (9) ‘(both) the thin (pl) and thick (pl) (reinforcing) rods’ (specification by size) ha-d-dakākīn il-ifnēn illi xuḍrān il-bībān (4) ‘Both those shops whose doors are green (pl)’ (specification by colour) ha-l-xubuz l-irgāg (Manāma 9) ‘Those thin (pl) flat-breads’ (deictic ha-, and specification by type, remembered from the speaker’s youth) (deictic ha- to specify a type) ha-l-kawartīn l-əmfallatīn (33) ‘Those discarded (pl) pieces of cardboard’ (deictic ha- to specify a type) wēš dīk il-marāgid ˁād ḥālat-hum? (33) ‘And those (fsng) beds, what was their (pl) condition?’ (deictic ḏīk of specification)

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We note again in this last example the fsng→pl agreement shift (here from the fsng deictic dīk to the pl pronoun -hum) noted in the human-heads section above (and see also below for further examples and discussion). The use of nās as an indefinite distributive with the sense ‘some (people)’ versus ‘others’, and its variable agreement pattern, was noted earlier in the section on human heads. There is a similar use of šay ‘some (things)’ (lit ‘thing’) and a similar variability in its agreement pattern, e.g. in the following exchange where šay is singular, but the predicated verbs are plural, echoing the form of the verb predicated of the pl noun byūt in the question: mā yixurrūn əhummə? (45) ‘Didn’t they (= your houses) (pl) leak (pl)?’ šay yixurrūn, šay mā yixurrūn (45) ‘Some leaked (pl), some didn’t leak (pl)’ A number of examples of deflected agreement in adjectives and verbs were noted. These were many times less frequent than those that showed strict agreement, but still a considerable number. Examples: il-ġani, byūt-hum zēna, wi l-faGīr barastiyya (45) ‘The rich, their houses were nice (fsng), but the poor (had) houses made of palm fronds’ Here, the reference to ‘the houses of the rich’ is generic, and so attracts deflected agreement. il-maraḏ ̣ min il-gawāṭi, ha-l-əmlakkaka (51) ‘Illness comes from tins, those tightly-sealed (fsng) tins’ Again, as in the previous example, this is a general statement, here about tinned food as a supposed source of illness in the modern age—the speaker is not talking about specific tins, but tinned food in general. l-əǧdūr itšīl lēha xešat ˁēš (45) ‘The cooking pots could take (fsng) a (whole) sack of rice’ The speaker here was talking in general about the size of cooking pots in her youth, not about any specific or visible cooking pots.

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However, there was still a degree of free variation in some speakers’ speech which was not amenable to explanation in the terms advanced here. An elderly B village woman, for example, describing the paucity of cars in Bahrain in her 1930s childhood, said, using deflected agreement: hast sayāyīr lākin galīla s-sayāyīr (16) ‘There were cars, but they were few’ and seconds later, repeated the statement but this time with strict agreement: galīlīn is-sayāyīr (16) ‘Cars were few’ A similar example to this last one, this time from an elderly A speaker, also reminiscing, is: is-sayyārāt xfāf (48) ‘Cars were few’ 5.3.3.3 Maritime-related The agreement patterns here were again predominantly strict, as the data consisted of descriptions of real events/situations recollected by ex-pearl-divers. The collective noun il-xašab ‘the boats’ (the sng is xšiba, pl axšāb or xišbān) used by all ex-seaman in accounts of their life at sea was invariably associated with strict agreement: xašab balāyi, kbār (48) ‘(They were) enormous (pl) boats, big (pl) ones’ il-xašab fōg . . . myadfīn fōg is-sīf (48) ‘The boats were on . . . propped up (pl) on the beach’ hast ḏīk is-sāˁa xašab yaˁni əmǧaflīn min ir-radda (44) ‘At that time there were boats which had been taken out of commission (pl) after the end of the close-season diving’ il-xašab əmgaṭṭaṭīn, ṭabāˁa (Manāma 6) ‘The boats were scattered (pl), capsized (pl)’ (sc as the result of a typhoon)

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The few examples of deflected agreement included the following: il-mayādīf bārza, l-əˁgūṣ māl id-digal bārza (48) ‘The oars were ready (fsng), the wedges that secured the masts had been inserted (fsng)’ In this sentence (and others like it), the speaker was not describing any specific boat, but was listing all the things that needed to be in place on any and every boat before the pearling fleet could set sail. ġādi is-sūk . . . tubbun, tubbun! ila l-manšūrāt gāyma ˁala l-əṣgūbāt! (5) ‘He was going to the market . . . (when) hey presto! (He saw that) the flags were there, flying (fsng) from the masts!’ This sentence occurs in a folkloric tale. Flags flying from the masts of ships in the harbour traditionally indicated that the boats had just arrived back, and that nothing untoward had happened to them on their voyage. What the use of the fsng suggests here is that the hero of the story, who was waiting anxiously for their return, suddenly spotted a mass of flags fluttering on a forest of masts in the harbour near to the market. Pl agreement (gāymīn), which is also possible, would suggest that he spotted them individually, rather than all at once as an undifferentiated mass. 5.3.3.4 Agriculture-related The texts collected from farmers were collected in situ, on their farms, and mainly involved conversations relating to objects which were in full view of all involved. Not surprisingly, this degree of local specificity resulted in a dominant pattern of strict agreement, in reference to these visible objects. There were many tens of examples like: šrūb rifāˁ ‘(these) raised seed-beds’ (34);ˁurūg ṣġār imtān (22) ‘small, thick roots’; nagāyil kbār (5) ‘large seedlings’ Quantification invariably involved strict agreement, e.g. arbaˁ, xams xawāfīr killə-hum mātaw (19) ‘Four or five seed-beds, all of them died’ hādi l-əšrūb . . . il-falāfa . . . mumtāzīn, ṣāraw ġalīḍīn (6) ‘These (fsng) seedling-beds . . . the three of them . . . are excellent, they’ve become thick (with plant growth).

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In this last example we see the same fsng→pl shift noted earlier, where the head noun, ‘seedling-beds’ is modified by a deflected agreement element (here the deictic hādi), but this head is then quantified and further specified by a succession of strict agreements on the following adjectives and a verb. Another interesting example of this data patterning is the following, said by a farmer who was pointing to what he was talking about as he said it: hādi s-swāyib . . . il-xilāy hādōlāk (34) ‘These (fsng) irrigation plots . . . (I mean) the empty ones, those over there’ Here we have an initial deflected agreement deictic (hādi), as in the previous example, followed by a strict agreement adjective, again as before, then by a strict agreement deictic hādōlāk. The reference is to one and the same set of empty irrigation plots. The explanation of the deflected then strict agreement of the deictics seems to be that the head noun involves generic reference to the farmer’s plots, and this is achieved with a proximal deictic: the farmer is introducing the subject of ‘these here plots’, which surrounded him as he spoke, as a generic group. There is then a few seconds’ pause, and he goes on to specify a particular sub-set of them, the empty plots, and in doing so uses strict agreement for the adjective and for the contrasting distal (‘those empty ones over there’) deictic. Note the following examples of strict agreement with the dual. Quantification here is what makes strict agreement the norm: ˁulbatēn fgāl (25) ‘Two heavy boxes’ ifnēn-hum zēnin (5) ‘Both of them (= types of fertilizer) are good’ hādelēn ifnēn-hum (5) ‘Those, the two of them (= male palm trees) hāy fintēn zaraˁnā-hum (39) These (fsng) two (= seed-beds) we have sown them’ ˁind-i sidratēn yiǧībūn lēna knār (19) ‘I have these two lotus trees which give us jujube fruits’ ˁid-na bagar, niḥlib-hum bi l-bagaratēn, niḥlib-hum, innaffiˁ-hum (16) ‘We kept cows, and we would milk them in pairs, we’d milk them, we’d feed them’

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Occasional examples of deflected agreement of the adjective did occur, but were generally explicable in terms of the generic-specific contrast advanced here, e.g. whilst arāḍīn xālyīn (Manāma 6) ‘vacant plots of land’ was a reference to their plural number in a particular location and shows strict agreement, arāḍīn šādda (24) ‘soils which hold together (sc do not crumble easily)’ refers generically to a shared quality of some soil-types, and shows deflected agreement. However, the following apparent counterexample is especially noteworthy, as it was the only example which occurred of a dual head noun with deflected agreement: ha-š-širbēn hādi tsawwi lēha sittīn širb (14) ‘These (fsng) two seedling-beds together, these (fsng), would make (fsng) sixty seedling beds’ The example is possibly explicable because the farmer was referring to the two beds combined which had been so productive that they could have filled ‘sixty’ normal beds (obviously not to be taken literally—the number ‘sixty’ is often used for an unspecified large number, a bit like the English ‘a zillion’). But the point is that the farmer was not ‘individuating’ the two beds but talking about their shared characteristic. In the speech of the (educated) agricultural extension officer with whom I was visiting the farmers, cases of deflected agreement occurred more commonly, but also here, many of the examples were explicable in terms of their generic reference, e.g. il-nagāyil mawǧūda ‘there are seedlings available (fsng) (sc at the Agricultural Extension Office)’, where the officer was talking not about any particular type of seedling or real examples of seedlings, but seedlings in general. Another example was in the circumstantial clause wi n-nagāyil ṣaġīra ‘. . . when seedlings are young (fsng)’, where again he was talking not about an actual visible crop but about how to tend any crop of seedlings when they are at an early stage in their growth. Similarly, his statement ḥašīš hast anwāˁ wāyid ṣaˁba ‘There are weed-types that are very difficult (fsng) (to eradicate)’ is again generic in its reference rather than specific, and so the agreement is deflected. 5.3.3.5 Parts of the body With parts of the body in pairs, even where only one pair is meant, the plural noun, not the dual, is normally used. The exception is ‘hands’ (A dialects yad, B dialects īd) which is normally a dual when it refers to ‘one pair of hands’ in both types of dialect (see 3.4.4.3), but is otherwise pl.

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Agreement with these pl nouns is deflected probably because they are rarely individuated (i.e. where ‘two eyes’ means ‘two individual eyes’ rather than ‘a pair of eyes’) Examples: Eyes: ˁəyūn-ha ṣāḥya (7) ‘Her eyes (pl) were healthy (fsng)’ dīk il-əˁyūn illi mā ččūf immin-ha, iṣṣīr činn-ha l-ˁāfya (Manāma 7) ‘Those (fsng) eyes (pl) which (fsng) she couldn’t see out of became (fsng) as if they (fsng) were healthy again (fsng)’ tūyaˁ-ah ˁəyūn-ah (48) ‘His eyes (pl) hurt (fsng) him’ ˁuwēnāt-hum əmkaḥḥala (28) ‘Their little eyes (pl) were smeared (fsng) with kohl’ Where ‘eyes’ was used metaphorically, deflected agreement still applied: txadim u əˁyūn-ha maǧlūˁa (dialect poetry) ‘She would work even if she was totally exhausted’ (lit ‘. . . her eyes (pl) were plucked out (fsng)’) mā tinkisir ˁəyūn-na (Manāma 10) ‘We weren’t embarrassed.’ (lit ‘our eyes (pl) were not downcast (fsng)’) An exception here was the name of a ‘bogey-man’ used to scare children who would not go to sleep: abu l-əˁyūn il-ḥumur (51) ‘The creature with the red (pl) eyes (pl)’ Knees: al-ḥīn tkassarat irkab-na (51) ‘Now are knees (pl) are worn out (fsng)’

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Hands: ayādī-hum əmḥannaya (28) ‘Their hands (pl) were painted (fsng) with henna’ In this example the reference was to the hands of a number of women, not to a single pair of hands. Feet: ḥifyat ryūl-i (44) ‘My feet were bare (fsng)’ nlawwit-ha ˁan ir-ramḍa (11) ‘We would wrap them (= ‘our feet’) (fsng) up to protect them from the hot ground’ Breasts: id-dyūsa illi yinšarab min-ha l-ḥalīb (5) ‘The breasts (pl) from which (fsng) the milk was sucked’ Parts of the body which are not paired, and which occurred as true plurals, also attracted deflected agreement, e.g. lēn ṭalaˁat irḥāt-ha . . . (Manāma 6) ‘When her molar teeth (pl) had come through (fsng) . . .’ mā ṣārat fīhum idbāb (Manāma 7) ‘Their bellies (pl) haven’t grown (fsng) (large)’ 5.3.3.6 Miscellaneous Examples of deflected adjectival and verbal agreement with nouns outside the above categories also occurred. The commonest of these was ašya ‘things’, which scores lowest on the various parameters of ‘individuation’ suggested by Brustad, and invariably occurred in the data examined here with deflected agreement, e.g. ha-l-ašya l-awwaliyya rāḥat (Manāma 6) ‘Those old-fashioned (fsng) things have gone (fsng)’

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šlōn tiḥuṭṭūn ašyā-kum tabrid? (51) ‘How did you leave your things to cool down (fsng)?’ Deflected agreement was also the norm for words with very general ranges of meaning, such as sawālif and ḥačāwi ‘stories, matters, issues’, and ḏikrayāt ‘memories’, e.g. sawālif rāyḏ# a (48) ‘Matters that take time (fsng)’ ḥačāwi ˁōda (radio play) ‘Epic (fsng) stories’ ḏikrayāt-iš il-awwaliyya l-əḥlēwa illi marrat fīš (Manāma 10) ‘Your nice (fsng) old (fsng) memories of things that happened (fsng) to you’ An elderly woman reflected in general terms on the economic difficulties caused by World War II: id-dakākīn xālya, mā fīha šay (Manāma 6) ‘The shops were empty (fsng), there was nothing in them (fsng)’ Another elderly woman, reflecting on the social atmosphere of the time when she was a girl, commented: lō ḏ̣ˁāf in-nās, glūb-hum zēna, ṣāfya ˁala baˁḏ# -hum (45) ‘Though people were poor (pl), their (pl) hearts were good (fsng), sincere (fsng) with one another (pl)’ In this example, there is an illuminating contrast between the treatment of nās ‘people’, a human plural, with which the agreement is strict (three loci of agreement), and glūb ‘hearts’, with which it is deflected (two loci). Undeniably, the statement taken as a whole is a general one; so what explains the different treatment of the two head nouns? It may in part be due to the fronting of the adjective #ḏˁāf ‘poor’, which has the effect of highlighting the contrast between people’s material conditions (bad) and their morale and neighbourliness (good). The positioning of the adjective ḏ# ˁāf emphasises this, as does, perhaps, its plurality: lō #ḏaˁīfa n-nās would sound odd. The speaker might well have used strict agreement if she had used the normal word order, viz in-nās

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#ḏaˁīfa, lākin . . . It is also worth bearing in mind that the sentence could be read another way, viz ‘even though (they were) the poorest of people . . .’ where ḏ# ˁāf in-nās is a construct noun phrase rather than an equational sentence in which #ḏˁāf/#ḏaˁīf is an attributive adjective. In this case, if the adjective is to be construed as applying to many people, as is the case here, it would normally be plural. The strict agreement used with glūb is to be expected: it scores low on the scale of ‘individuation’, and is clearly being used metaphorically. 5.3.3.7 fpl agreement Fpl as an adjectival, verbal and pronominal category has been lost in all Bahraini dialects, though it exists as a nominal form for both human and nonhuman nouns, e.g. mudarrisāt ‘teachers (f), sayyārāt (alternative to sayāyīr) ‘cars’. As we have seen, such fpl nouns normally can have strict (m, i.e. common, pl) or deflected (fsng) agreement, e.g. wāyid il-mudarrisāt laṭīfīn (Manāma 7) ‘The teachers (fpl) are really nice (mpl)’ hast sayāyīr lākin galīla s-sayāyīr (16) ‘There were cars (fpl), but they were few (fsng)’ galīlīn is-sayāyīr (16) ‘Cars (fpl) were few (mpl)’ However, three examples of fpl agreement on the adj, all produced by A dialect speakers, occurred. All involved the same adjective, the formally diminutive ṣġēr ‘tiny’: ḥfērāt ṣġērāt (45) ‘tiny holes’; manā#ḏir ṣġērāt (51) ‘tiny mirrors’; and musaǧǧilāt ṣġēyrāt killiš (48) ‘very tiny tape-recorders’.156 The first two of these three examples were produced by women, and the frequent use of the diminutive noun, which normally pluralizes in -āt, is a feature of women’s (much less so men’s) speech in all Bahraini dialects. Typical of the many nominal examples noted were ṣġērāt, wlēdāt, and frēxāt all meaning ‘little kiddies (m or f)’, bnayyāt ‘little girls’, nṣēfāt ‘little twins’, ˁuwēnāt ‘little eyes’, mrēgdāt ‘little beds’. It may be that the adjectival uses of ṣġērāt in the examples 156  The speaker in this example, an elderly ex-diver, was referring to the small cassette tapes on which I was recording, rather than to tape-recorders.

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above were influenced by the common use of this word as a noun. Certainly, the fpl as an adjectival category was not productive, and non-existent as a verbal and pronominal one. 5.3.3.8 Mixed agreement patterns (non-human heads) Thus far in 5.3, we have tried to show how the generic or specific reference of plural noun phrases is, generally speaking, reflected by distinct agreement patterns which affect all morphological categories in the sentence in the same way. It has further been shown that although this explanation works for most data, there are examples which run counter to it, illustrated most obviously by the inconsistent behaviour of some speakers, who will sometimes repeat what they have said a few seconds earlier virtually verbatim, but switch to the other agreement system and for no apparent reason. It has also been shown that where sentences with ‘mixed’ agreement patterns occur, as they quite often do with human head nouns, there is a strong tendency to shift from deflected (fsng) to strict (pl) agreement as the text develops, with strict agreement being favoured as the distance of the agreeing elements from the head noun increases. This may be to do with the need to ‘keep track’ of the sense of the unfolding text. A clear example of this from the data on non-human heads is: mawātir māl l-ḥukūma yābō-ha . . . waṣalat min mawātir yumkin tyi azyad min ˁišrīn mōṭir—wi lā gidraw ˁalēha (33) ‘The government fire-engines, they brought them (fsng) . . . there came (fsng) perhaps, around, more than twenty engines, but they still couldn’t control (pl) it (= the fire)’ Here it seems to be the specifying of the number of fire-engines that triggers the shift to strict agreement. However, a look at more attenuated examples of mixed agreement systems in non-human heads which ‘break the rules’ suggests that the explanation may be that Bahraini dialects are themselves the long-term result of mixing and dialect contact, which might be the reason for much of the inconsistency. Note the following examples: [1] hast aġrāš il-awwal yibardūn fīha l-māy u hast, ṭāl ˁumrik, əḥbūb illi iyībūnhum min baṣra (44) ‘In the old days, there were clay pots in which (fsng) they cooled water— may your life be long—clay pots which (pl) they brought from Basra.’ [2] il-bībān wi d-darāyiš rakkabō-hum mi zēna (25) ‘The doors and the windows, they put them (pl) in not straight (fsng)’

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[3] ˁašar fṣal li l-bēt . . . inta tbārī-ha, tisakkī-ha agūl li-kum zēnīn, lā bās (34) ‘Ten growing trenches for the house . . . you take pains over them (fsng), you water them (fsng) . . . I tell you they’re fine (pl), there’s nothing wrong’ In one way or another, these three sentences (and more could have been adduced) all offend against the agreement principles which have been put forward thus far. In example [1], the speaker produces two virtually structurally identical sentences, the second of which slightly amplifies the first. He uses the synonyms aġrāš and əḥbūb to refer to the same entity—‘clay pots’, yet makes the pronoun (‘which’ in the translation, but literally ‘them’) which refers to these pots take deflected agreement in the first case and strict in the second. There is no internal linguistic or logical explanation for this. In example [2] the pronoun ‘them’ referring back to ‘doors and windows’ is in strict agreement, but the adjective which follows describing their state has deflected agreement, i.e. the agreement order is the opposite of what it has been argued seems to be the general tendency (fsng→pl) in sentences where agreement is mixed. In example [3], we have an enumerated head noun, ‘ten trenches’ which normally is sure to attract strict agreement; yet the two pronouns which immediately follow and refer back to it show deflected agreement, whilst the adjective which follows them as its attribute is in strict agreement. Whilst it is not the case that ‘anything goes’, the degree of variation within the rules for how agreement works, as described in this section, suggests mixed historical sources for the contemporary dialects. As we have seen elsewhere in this study, there is ample evidence in other parts of the BA dialectal systems to support this speculation. 5.4

Word Order

This section157 is based on six conversational texts published in DCSEA II, chosen to include some that are essentially question-and-answer sessions, and others that are (often dramatic) monologues.158 Details as follows:

157  An edited version of HOL7. 158  The example sentences quoted are indexed using the serial numbers assigned to the main speakers in DCSEA II, e.g. (S18), (S19), etc. followed by the turn number, so, e.g. S18–6 indicates a sentence spoken by Speaker 18 taken from what she said in her 6th contribution in the particular text used. Example sentences spoken by interviewers, who were usually either relatives or close acquaintances of the main speakers, are indicated by the

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Text 1 (DCSEA II: 169–176): S18 and S19 were two semi-literate middle-aged women from the Manāma neighbourhoods (9) and (10) respectively, interviewed at an Adult Literacy Centre where they were attending classes. The first was from the A community the second from the BU. They were interviewed together by their teacher, from the Manāma A community, though from which neighbourhood is not known. The speakers give accounts of their weddings some twenty of more years before, from betrothal to the marriage night. Text 2 (DCSEA II: 204–207): S41 was an illiterate woman of about 60 from the BV (16), interviewed at home by her literate granddaughter. The conversation is about her recollections of village life when she was a girl. Text 3 (DCSEA II: 302–304): S38 is an illiterate 40 year-old BV woman interviewed by her literate daughter. She gives a dramatic account of house fires in her home village (33). This is a monologue. Text 4 (DCSEA II: 22–24): S5 is an illiterate ex-pearl-diver, aged 70 from the A community of (48). He gives an account of a typhoon at sea and the resulting shipwreck and loss of life. The interviewer is me (although my contributions were negligible). Text 5 (DCSEA II: 147–149): S74 is an illiterate BV farmer, aged about 55, from (3). He describes an attack on the village by men from a neighbouring A village, (44), in the 1920s when he was a small boy. The interviewer, also from a BV community, is an agricultural extension officer who was on an advisory visit to his farm. Text 6 (DCSEA II: 77–91): S60 is an illiterate BV farmer from the tiny village of al-Kawara, near (17). The conversation is concerned with the health of the farmer’s crops, the farming methods he is using, and advice on irrigation and composting techniques. The interviewer is the same agricultural extension advisor as in the case of S74. Sentence types in the data: The categorisation of the sentence into two basic types, uninodal and binodal, proposed by Ingham for the Najdi dialects of central Arabia159 is shown by this analysis to be a suitable model for the related dialects of Bahrain (and, I have little doubt, for those of the whole of the eastern Arabian seaboard). Uninodal sentences have a single intonation contour and contain only textually new information, although they may contain old information added as an letter ‘I’ (‘interviewer’): thus (S60-I-6) after a sentence would mean it was part of the interviewer’s 6th contribution in his conversation with S60. 159  ING 35–45.

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afterthought (a ‘tail’) to confirm what has been said or to ensure comprehension. Binodal sentences, often referred to as topic-comment sentences in the literature, have two separate intonation contours (and two nuclear stresses): textually old (hence definite) information that is focus-fronted and new information that follows and provides a comment on it. 5.4.1 Uninodal sentences Uninodal sentences are simple sentences, which may be VP-initial, NP-initial, or contain no verb, and are so-called because they bear a single stress nucleus. After ING, we will call the basic form of this sentence type ‘plain uninodal’. A variant identified for Najd, and common also in BA, is ‘uninodal with tail’, in which one element of the uninodal sentence is echoed, or repeated in a more explicit form (e.g. noun for pronoun) as a post-posed element but without a second stress nucleus. The placement of stress and the order of the arguments in uninodal sentences (obviously related phenomena) are flexible, and depend on pragmatic factors; they will be dealt with in the discussion sections that follow each group of examples. Several categories of sentence/clause are excluded from this analysis:160 (a) those in which subordinate clauses are pre-posed or which begin with a lengthy adverbial phrase, e.g. min ṭāḥ raˀīs-him, wāḥid ism-ah saˁad, fallat dawlat-him (S74–2) ‘When their leader fell, a man called Sa‘ad, their power waned.’ since in BA verb-initial order in the main clause of such sentences is virtually obligatory, as it is in CLA; (b) clauses of attendant circumstance (ḥāl), since they invariably have SV word order in BA, as in CLA and all other dialects of Arabic; (c) sentences in which there is no overt subject, nominal or pronominal. Let us begin by illustrating the variety of word-orderings in simple uninodal declarative sentences in the data.

160  Questions which involve question-words like šinhu, wēš, wēn, etc. have been dealt with in section 3.1.7 and the analysis will not be repeated here.

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5.4.1.1 Plain uninodal (1) Verbal sentences VP-initial Verb-initial sentences in which the subject follows are common in the BA dialects, e.g. (a) with an s-stem verb: [1] waṣalat min mawātir yimkin tyi azyad min ˁišrīn mōtir (S38) ‘Perhaps more than twenty fire engines came’ [2] ṣādi-na ṭūfān hnāk (S5–1) ‘We were hit by a typhoon there’ [3] ḥmalat-ni l-ˁabda (S18–11) ‘The black woman carried me’ [4] simaˁ-ni aṣarrix hāḏi (S19–25) ‘This man heard me screaming’ [5] mā gaṣṣarat fīna ḥaṣṣūm (S41–7) ‘Hassum never let us down’ (b) with a p-stem verb: [6] ṣṣīr il-ḥiǧra ḥalwa wāyid (S19–10) ‘The room started to look very nice’ [7] titḥāma l-ˁarab bi l-ˁarab wi l-ˁaǧam bi l-ˁaǧam (S74–6) ‘The Arabs will protect each other and the Persians too’ [8] tiḏbaḥ minn-əh naṣāra sabˁīn alf (S74–6) ‘Seventy thousand Christians will be killed in it’ (= a future ‘calamity’) [9] isibḥūn il-ḥarīm . . . isibḥūn ḥagg ˁayāl-hum (S5–1) ‘The women were swimming out, swimming (to get) their children’

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(c) with an ap having verbal force: [10] bāykat-inn-əh waḥda (S74–9) ‘Some woman or other had stolen it’ [11] əmḥaḍrat-inn-əh n-naxīl (S60-I-71) ‘The palm-trees shield it’ In story-telling narratives, verb-initial sentences such as [1]–[5] above are common when the speaker is describing sequenced actions—the norm, in fact, among the (less educated) speaker sample here.161 The verb forms in such verbfirst narrative sequences do not have to be—often in fact are not—s-stem, as [9], taken from a dramatic account a shipwreck that happened in 1925, illustrates.162 The choice of p-stem verbs for dynamic verbs in such cases often betokens some kind of repeated, iterative, or durative (rather than punctual) action. In [7] and [8], taken from an apocalyptic account of a coming ‘calamity’ (wakˁa) which the speaker claimed would befall Bahrain, the verb-first sentences are similarly action-oriented, but here the sequence of actions described is projected into the future. [10] and [11] are action-oriented sentences too, hence verb-first, but here the active participles are non-narrative in function: they parenthetically describe actions which in some way form the background to, or explain the topic at hand: in the first case the cause of a an inter-village dispute (hence the pluperfect tense of the English translation), and in the second the reason why a farmer’s crop was visibly thriving. The stress nucleus (boldface) in these uninodal verb-first sentences falls on the final element, whether it is the subject, as in most of them, or the complement ([6]). In sentences of this type, it is textually ‘new’ information that occupies the final position, and thus the rhetorical function of the stress is to mark that newness and give the listener a clue as to how the text will next develop informationally.

161  This is not to say that it is not also the norm for educated speakers in this kind of text; I have not carried out an analysis of ‘educated’ data to see if there are any differences. 162  This conclusion is at odds with DAHL 170, in which the s-stem verbs accounted for some 92% of the verbs in ‘foreground’ (that is sequenced narrative) sentences. It may simply be that in my (admittedly unquantified) data sample, the frequency of the p-stem verbs in ‘foreground’ narrative is simply an indication of the heavy use of the ‘historical present’ for dramatic effect.

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The following extract is a typical more extended example of a narrative in which VS sentences predominate:163 Verb Subject Verb Verb bāykat-inn-əh waḥda . . . ˁində-ha l-mawāˁīn . . . iltafat lēha u axad il-muġṭa min ˁind-ha u Verb Verb Subject saddaḥ-ha u ḍarab-ha wāḥid min ˁāli . . . rāḥat tiḥaššim, sīda rāḥat l-əbdayyaˁ itḥaššim u Verb Subject ǧā-k il-ǧēš il-xamīs . . .  ‘Some woman had stolen it . . . she was holding cooking pots . . . and someone from ˁĀlī turned to her, took the pot-top from her, and knocked her down and beat her . . . she went to seek redress, she went straight to Budayyaˁ to seek redress, and a force came to Khamīs . . .’ Non-VP-initial Verbal sentences in which some sentence element other than the verb comes first are also very common, but here a variety of textual and pragmatic functions seem to be served, which are related in part to the relationship of the initial element to the immediately preceding text, and partly to grammatical status. Some examples: (a) NP-initial, NP as subject of the main clause: [12] nās trūḥ maši, nās trūḥ ˁala ḥamīr (S41–5) ‘Some people walked, some went on donkeys’ [13] kil wāḥid iyīb yinaggiṭ (S18–20) ‘Each person would bring a tip’ [14] hāḏa ifirr išīl margad walad-əh, u hāḏi itfirr əb bit-ha, u hādi itfirr əb ˁēlat-ha, u hāda tfirr ila ǧīrān-əh yiwaggiḍ-hum (S38) ‘This man rushed in and snatched up his son’s bed, this woman grabbed her daughter, that woman her children, someone else went round to wake the neighbours up’ 163  DCSEA II 149.

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[15] smiča tākl-əh . . . šay yākl-əh. . . . nihim yākl-əh (S5–4) ‘A fish eats him, something eats him . . . . a whale eats him’ In sentences like [12]–[14], the subject NP is non-specific in its reference and/ or indefinite: nās ([12]) are ‘some unspecified people’ (as opposed to others); kil wāḥid ‘everyone’ ([13]) is not any named person, but stands for any unnamed individual in a group; the repeated hāḏa . . . hāḏi ‘this . . . this . . .’of ([14]) similarly provides a series of instantiations of a group activity described in the immediately preceding sentence in a VS structure: yigūmūn in-nās farāra wa farāra ‘people went rushing around’. In [15], a succession of three grammatically indefinite nouns, each an alternative example of ‘beings that might eat a dead pearl diver’, precede the same verb. In all these cases, the sentence’s narrative function is not to carry the action forward—there is no new action—but to temporarily halt the story in order to focus on the actor(s), sometimes via exemplifying paradigmatic substitution ([15]), sometimes via syntagms that provide ‘freeze-frame’, snapshot instantiations of a preceding summarising description, such as [14]. Such moves in narratives are common, and always involve a grammatically indefinite noun or a deictic with non-specific reference preceding the verb. They also invariably carry the nuclear stress (boldface). In illustration of this ‘freeze-frame’ NP-initial164 word order interrupting a sequence of Verb-Subject orders in a narrative, note the following extended example, in which the ‘freeze-frame’ elements are in square brackets:165 Verb Subject ṭalaˁ iš-šēx . . . allah yirḥam-əh, šēx ˁīsa, min šēx ˁalī . . . u gara fi ḥabbat ətrāb min yamīn-əh, u haff ˁalēha . . . u min haff ˁalēha, subḥān ir-rabb illi xammadha ˁala ˁibād-əh, u Verb Subject NP Verb NP (Verb) iftakkat il-ˁālam min balā-ha..[lākin waḥda ḍāˁat fyāb-ha, u waḥda mərgad-ha, u 164  ‘NP-initial’ because, in the example quoted, not all of the nouns in the NP-V clauses are Subjects: the thrice repeated waḥda is a topicalised N standing for the pron in an N+pron NP (and note the ellipsis of the verb ḍāˁat in the second and third repetitions of the phrase). However, the point is that exemplificatory ‘freeze-framing’ of this type can front virtually any nominal slot in the sentence (see, e.g. [19] below). 165  From DCSEA II 303.

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NP (Verb) waḥda] . . .  Verb Subject Subject Verb tammo killə-hum masākīn [kil wāḥid yilaffi l-fāni] . . . min baˁad ha-nnamūna ḥaṭṭō lēhum Verb Subject əxyām . . . min baˁad l-əxyām tāli ǧāzō-hum il-ḥukūma . . .  ‘Sheikh ˁĪsā, God have mercy on him, appeared, Sheikh ˁĪsā, the son of Sheikh ˁAlī . . . and he recited (the Qurˀān) over a bit of dust in his right hand, and blew on it. And when he blew on it, all praise to the Lord who put (the fire) out for His servants, and people were relieved of this calamity. [But one woman lost her clothes; another lost her bed; another . . . ] The people were all utterly wretched, [each giving shelter to his neighbour]. After that, they put up tents for them, and after the tents, the government compensated them.’ But in [16]–[18] below, the function of the NP-initial sentence is different. These sentences provide not an instantiation of a previously described general scene, but a commentary on it: (16) justifying the prediction of a calamity that will befall Bahrain, [17] explaining the improved fortunes of a village ruined by fire, [18] explaining what used to happen when a diver died at sea and was brought back to shore. In all these cases there is no dynamic action taking the story forward; the focus (and sentence stress) is on a key factor in the explanation of the scene: [16] kalām amīr al-muˀminīn mā yixtilif (S74–8) ‘The words of the Commander of the Faithful don’t change’ [17] allah rafaˁ ḥaḏ̣ḏ̣-hum (S38) ‘God raised their fortunes’ [18] il-maḥmil dām fīh mayyit mā yimši (S5–3) ‘A boat with a dead man on board doesn’t move ( fast)’ (b) NP-initial, NP as object of the main verb: [19] samač itbūg, ˁēš itbūg (S41–8) ‘Fish she’d steal, rice she’d steal’

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[20] hāḏāk sabbakt, u hāy sabbakt (S60–7) ‘I did this one first, and this one’ [21] isfar nās yixayyiṭūn (S41–19) ‘Some people sewed eating mats’ [22] kill-əh ibarrizūn ahal-na (S19–14) ‘Our families made all of them’ Examples [19]–[22] all involve focus-fronting, in which attention is directed to the object of an action, though the reasons for the focus are slightly different in each case. In [19] the fronted NPs ‘fish’ and ‘rice’ are token instantiations of the category of ‘things that she would steal’ (it having already been established that ‘she’ was a compulsive thief) and examples like this are similar to those exemplified in [12]-[15] with indefinite subjects. Sentences [20]–[22] were answers to questions about things that were either physically present: [20], in answer to ‘Did you plant these all in one day?’; or textually present: [21] was in answer to ‘Did you sew eating mats too?’, and [22] was in answer to ‘Your clothes— who made them for you?’ Clearly, these object NPs were the focus of the conversation at this point, which explains both their position and their attracting nuclear stress. Note that these are uninodal sentences with a single stress on the fronted object and have a falling intonation contour; if they were binodals, the stressed and fronted object would have a ‘topicalising’ (and therefore rising) intonation, there would be a second nucleus on the verb, and there would obligatorily be an object pronoun on the verb referring back to the topic. We will discuss such sentence types below under the section on binodals. (c) Adverbial phrase or other argument is initial: [23] māl awwal mā yiˁalmūn (S19-I-36) ‘In the old days they didn’t inform (them)’ Like [19]–[22], [23] must be distinguished from an otherwise identical, but binodal sentence in which the speaker stresses the head-noun awwal of the adverbial phrase māl awwal (with rising intonation, and a pause before the main clause), as well as the main verb. This is because [23] was a confirmatory echo by the interviewer of something S19 had just said (‘They didn’t tell girls they were going to get married in the old days’) rather than a topicalising one.

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(2) Verbless sentences In the case of simple declarative statements, the normal order is NP-COMP and the stress nucleus is on COMP (the ‘new’ information), e.g. [24] ṣiḥḥiyyat-i zēna (S19–24) ‘My health is good’ [25] rīl-īč xaḍra mub ġabra (S19–5) ‘May your feet be green, not barren’ (congratulatory formula to a bride) [26] hāḏa r-rayyāl mub waḥiš (S19–32) ‘This bridegroom wasn’t rough’ [27] šuġlat-əh xabbāz (S41–16) ‘His job was as a baker’ [28] ana awwal il-lēl (S60–28) ‘I’m on afternoon shift’ Such sentences are actually variants of the V-initial uninodal type illustrated in [1]–[11]: if a modal or auxiliary to mark tense is added, it is normally preposed but the stress remains on the words carrying the ‘new’ information, e.g. iṣīr šuġlat-əh xabbāz ‘he may be a baker’, kānat ṣiḥḥiyyati zēna ‘My health was good’. Similarly, where there is an adverbial ‘existential’ phrase functioning as a ‘dummy verb’ this is also normally preposed and not stressed, e.g. [29] ˁid-na bagar (S41–21) ‘We kept cows’ [30] hast nās yiġūṣūn ˁind-əh (S5–4) ‘Some people dive near him’ [31] fīh falt u fīh māy, ṭarīqtēn (S60-I-43) ‘There’s scattering and (diluting with) water, two methods’ [32] hu nōˁēn badar (S60-I-9) ‘There are two kinds of seed’

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[33] mā lēha kuwwa min il-milūḥa (S60–83) ‘It hasn’t got any strength because of the salinity’ [34] mā miš bēn-əh fačča (S60-I-61) ‘There’s no gap between them (seeds)’ Occasionally in this sentence type there is not even an overt existential phrase, and an adverbial phrase may be fronted. But still COMP attracts nuclear stress: [35] al-ḥīn barāniṣ, u hāḏelēn l-əgṭin, naššāfāt u ṭarābīl (S38) ‘Now, it’s all blankets, these cotton (sheets), towels and rubber covers (for babies’ beds)’ COMP-NP order is also possible. Typically, this inverted ‘marked’ order in verbless sentences is a function of narrative or conversational focus. For example after a description of a village at night time: ‘They say that on that night no donkey brayed, no cock crowed, and not a cow lowed’, the speaker pauses and summarises the situation in two words: [36] ṣāxxa l-bilād (S74–1) ‘Complete silence reigned over the village’ (lit ‘totally silent, the village’) In [37], the COMP is fronted as a token of contrastive emphasis: [37] qalīl hāḏi s-sawālif (S19–37) ‘Such things were rare’ (lit ‘few, these things’, sc not as common as they are now) In examples like [36] and [37], there is stress and a relatively high pitch on the fronted element, which then falls steeply. 5.4.1.2 Uninodal with tail A common variant of the uninodal sentence type is ‘uninodal with tail’,166 in which virtually any element in the sentence (actual or understood) can be repeated with a falling intonation, and is placed after the main part of the sentence, usually in order to clarify or amplify it. The main intonation contour and stress remain on the new information in the main part of the sentence, e.g. 166  ING 40.

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Subject: [38] yiriddūn yiṭiggūn ˁalēha baˁad, iṭ-ṭabābīl (S18–18) ‘They drummed some more for her, the drummers’ [39] hēk-hi lil-ḥīn mawǧūd, il-ġāfṣa (S41–8) ‘She’s still alive, the old trickster’ Object: [40] ha-ṣ-ṣōb ziraˁna rwēd u silk, ha-ṣ-ṣōb (S60–33) ‘This side we’ve sown with radishes and chard, this one’ Pronoun in prepositional phrase: [41] il-maḥmil yintiris min-hum, min ˁarab, intaras (S5–1) ‘The boat was filling up with them, with men, it filled up’ In [41] there are two tails, echoing first the prepositional phrase, then the main verb. 5.4.2 Binodal sentences In the data examined, the binodal sentence type was at least as common as the uninodal. Binodal sentences involve the fronting of virtually any sentence element (an exception is the first noun of a construct phrase) in order to topicalise it. In sentences of this type there are often two intonation contours, a rising one on the topic, and a steeply falling one on the comment made about it, with a stress on some element in each half of the sentence depending on the context. In the following examples, a vertical line (|) shows where the first contour ends and the second begins. There is normally an overt grammatical linkage between the topic and comment. (a) topicalised subject: Example (42) illustrates a topicalised subject in conversational context: [42] – lēn murḏ ̣ aw awlād-na, riḥna b-hum id-daxtar – zēn, fi wēn id-daxtar? – id-daxtar | mā miš illa l-amrīkāni (S41–2) ‘When our children were ill, we took them to the doctor’s.’

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‘Right. Where was the doctor’s?’ ‘The only doctor was only the American (Mission Hospital)’

In the following examples, where necessary I have noted in brackets after the translation the contextual trigger for the focus fronting: [43] hu id-dūlāb | fīh maǧāl (S60–73) ‘There is (enough) space on the farm’ (sc it’s not a problem of space, it’s one of having the time to do the work) [44] bākistāni | mā yifīd (S60-I-56) ‘Pakistanis are no use’ (sc as opposed to local Arabs, in farm labouring work) [45] il-falt | yabġa akṯar (S60-I-46) ‘Scattering requires more (fertiliser)’ (sc compared with diluting it with water) [46] ˁirsi ana | wald ˁamm-i (S18–1) ‘My marriage was to my cousin’ (reply to ‘what was your marriage?’) [47] il-bint | ˁēb ttikallam u tigūl . . . (S19–12) ‘It was shameful for a girl to speak up and say . . .’ (fronting to focus on the special situation of girls) cleft topicalised subject: [48] illi iyi | ˁamm-i (S18–4) ‘The one who came was my uncle’ (answer to ‘who was it that came to ask for you in marriage (sc for his son)?’) (b) topicalised direct object: [49] hāy killəh | akalō-h l-ˁaṣāfīr (S60–40) ‘The birds ate of all of this’ [50] kul samād | mafrūḍ iḥna nxamr-uh (S60-I-84) ‘All manure we must compost’ [51] ana | ˁaṭā-ni ṯrayya (S18–8) ‘He gave me a necklace’ (reply to ‘how much dowry did he give you?’)

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[52] laḥḥad | yixallūn-əh yičūf-ni (S19–24) ‘They would allow no-one to see me’ [53] il-ǧarīš | ˁašar isnīn akalō-h in-nās ǧarīš (S41–12) ‘Milled wheat, people ate it for ten years, milled wheat’. (c) topicalised argument of preposition: [54] awwal širb ihni | inġalabt fīh (S60–85) ‘The first seed-bed here, I was beaten by it’ [55] il-maṣrūf | kill-əh gām bih ˁamm-i (S18–10) ‘The expense, all of that my uncle paid’ [56] kil waḥda | ˁalēha yōm (S41–15) ‘Every woman had her appointed day ( for housework)’ (d) topicalised N co-referential with pron in N+pron: [57] lākin waḥda| ḍāˁat fyāb-ha, u waḥda | mirgad-ha (S38) ‘But one woman lost her clothes, and one lost her bed’ (e) topic formally unconnected: According to Ingham,167 sentences in which there is no grammatical linkage between the fronted topic and comment, as in the Chinese ‘the field, the rice grows well’ are unknown in Arabic. However, sentences [58] and [59], which do not seem to be attributable to performance error, occurred in the data: [58] il-waḍaḥ | iš-širb yikūn il-māy ila ihni (S60–84) ‘And when you water, the water in the seed-bed comes up to here’ (lit ‘the watering, the seed-bed, the water comes up to here’) [59] il-hadiyya | allah yisalm-ič, yiḏibḥūn ḏabāḥ (S18–27) ‘For the gift, they’d slaughter a sheep’ (reply to ‘what kind of gift was it?’) (lit ‘the gift, God save you, they kill an animal’)

167  ING 36.

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In both cases there is no formal, only a semantic connection between the topic and the comment. In fact in [58], there seems to be a double topic-­comment structure, in both cases with no formal linkage: an overarching topiccomment structure introduced by il-waḍaḥ and a further embedded topic-comment structure within this, in which the topic is iš-širb, and which is again formally unconnected with its comment, viz Topic Comment il-waḍaḥ | iš-širb yikūn il-māy ila ihni Topic Comment iš-širb yikūn il-māy ila ihni As Ingham notes,168 quoting studies by Gamaleldin for Cairo169 and El-Yasin for Jordan,170 it is often said that the basic word order in the spoken Arabic dialects is now SVO, and not VSO as in CLA.171 Whatever the merits of such statements for the Arabic dialects of the East Mediterranean, it is clear from this analysis that VSO is still very common in the dialects of Bahrain, as it is in nearby Najd. In fact VSO is the norm in certain uninodal sentence types, though SVO is common, and OVS and OSV are perfectly possible in others: it all depends on the function of the sentence in the text. In binodal sentences, which, on the basis of this study, occur just as frequently as uninodal ones, the order of elements can be very free, and virtually any nominal or adverbial element can be fronted given the right context. It seems therefore arbitrary to regard either of the commonest orders, VSO or SVO, as the ‘unmarked’ one and the other as ‘marked’, on grounds either of theory or statistics. The two word orders perform different kinds of textual function, but only by examining the text-types and contexts in which tokens of them occur carefully, can one discover what these functions are.

168  ING 38. 169  GAM. 170  YAS. 171  Word order in CLA prose, however—whatever we consider ‘CLA’ to be—has never been properly investigated on the basis of a large database that takes account of such factors as text type, period of production and geographical origin. It has always seemed simplistic to regard VSO as the ‘basic’ CLA type of which all other orders are ‘variants’ without any consideration of the types and functions of the sentences in which the various orders occur.

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5.5

Clause Co-ordination

In this section we will look at how free-standing clauses are coordinated in BA. 5.5.1 Conjunctions expressing an additive or sequential relationship The conjunction u (variants wa, wi, w-) is used as in all other Arabic dialects. Its main function is additive or sequential, especially in story-telling where lengthy concatenations of clauses joined by it (in bold below) may occur, e.g. mā nismaˁ illa wagˁat iḍ-ḍaw . . . u igūmūn in-nās farāra wa farāra . . . hāḏa ifirr išīl margad walad-əh, u hāḏi tfirr əb bit-ha u hāḏi itfirr əb ˁēlat-ha, u hāḏi tfirr allah yidfaˁ il-bala ila ǧīran-əh yiwaggiḍ-hum u hāda . . . wēš dīk il-marāgid ˁād ḥālat-hum? illi ˁalēha xēša, ˁalēha xēša, w illi ˁalēha xalaga, ˁalēha xalaga, w illi mā ˁalēha, allah yidfaˁ il-bala, mā ˁalēha . . . (33) ‘Suddenly we heard the commotion of a fire, and people started rushing around . . . this man rushed and snatched up his son’s bed, and that woman would grab her daughter, and this woman her children, and someone else—may God ward off calamity by His might—would rush to his neighbours and wake them up, and so on . . . what were these beds like, exactly?! The ones that had sack on them, had sack on them, and the ones that had a bit of rag on them, had a bit of rag on them, and the ones that had nothing on them—may God ward off calamity by His might— had nothing on them’ As in other varieties of Arabic, u can have an adversative function, equivalent to ‘but’, or ‘although’, e.g. tinˁirif, u hu mā yigūl lik baˁad, in-nōxaḏa (48) ‘It was known (sc that the ship was making for port), but the captain still wouldn’t tell you,’ tiṣtāx wi lā titkallam? mā yiṣīr! (34) ‘You listen but you don’t speak? That won’t do!’ lā giltīn šay u lā ˁaraftīn-əh? (11) ‘You didn’t say anything, even though you didn’t know him?’ (said to a woman who said she had said nothing when told, as a fourteen-year-old, that she was to marry a man she’d never met)

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Perhaps the commonest use of u beyond these uses is to mark so-called ḥāl clauses (‘clauses of attendant circumstance’), in which the clause so-marked describes the circumstances, whether of time, location or manner, which appertained when the action in the preceding main clause occurred (see also 5.11.2.9.), e.g. illi iylisaw yifilǧūn, w in-nōxaḏa yālis hnāk (Manāma 6) ‘The ones sitting opened the clams, while the captain was just sitting there (watching)’ hadd-ha u hum ṣġār (5) ‘He left her when they (= the children) were still small’ asaggi u ākil (1) ‘I do the watering while I’m eating’ 5.5.2 Conjunctions expressing an alternative relationship There are a number of ways of expressing alternatives (‘or’): willa This conjunction is seemingly < wa illa < wa in lā ‘and if not’. It is commonly used in both the A and B (especially the BU) dialects: wi l-bint ˁēb tigūl “lā tizawwiǧūn-ni” willa “mā abbi hāḏi wi lā hāḏi” (Manāma 8) ‘It was shameful for a girl to say “don’t marry me” or “I don’t want him or him”’ awaṣṣil dīnār willa awaṣṣil zāyid, willa ġēr-uh—wēš fīni fayda? (34) ‘Whether I make a dinar, or I make more than that, or something else— what good will it do me?’ əwlidō-č fi l-ḥidd willa əwlidō-č fil-ˁuzal? (45) ‘Were you born in al-Ḥidd or in al-ˁUzal?’ See below for the use of (w)illa in the sense ‘otherwise’. aw aw is commonly used in both A and BU dialects (particularly common in A) but is much less used in the BV, where lō predominates.

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yāxḏūn lēhum gawāṭi anānās aw maṯal ḥfērāt ṣġērāt (45) ‘They would use pineapple tins or, (make) like, little planting holes’ iḏa l-mara ḥmilat aw il-mara marīḏ̣a aw il-mara fīha šay, nḏaraw ˁala bū šāhīn (45) ‘If the woman was pregnant, or if she was ill, or if there was something else the matter with her, they made a vow to Bū Shāhīn’ lō lō ‘or’ is formally identical to lō ‘if’. In the ‘or’ sense it seems to be a B-only usage,172 e.g. ana ǧāy atraǧǧa akidd arbaˁ ānāt, lō ǧāy axassir rūḥ-i? (6) ‘I was beginning to hope that I might earn a bit of cash, or am I just (in fact) going to waste my energy?’ trūḥūn bēt raǧil-kum lō tḍillūn? (33) ‘Did you go to your husband’s house or did you stay in your own?’ min yōm ˁarras-iš abū-š axad raˀy-iš lō mā axad? (11) ‘When your father married you off, did he ask your opinion or not?’ umma or amma . . . aw and umma or amma . . . willa These pairs of coordinators occurred in both A and B dialects, e.g. umma gāˁdīn fi l-bēt nigra aw nrūḥ is-sūg (48) ‘Either we sat at home reading or we went to the market’ iṣ-ṣāyim mā yifṭar illa ˁala umma tamra aw rṭaba (42) ‘A faster only breaks his fast on either a dried date or a fresh one’ kāl lih “taˁāl ḍimm hnāk wiyyā-na, amma murūr willa šurṭi” (19) ‘He said to him: “Come and join up with us there, either as a traffic cop, or as an ordinary policeman” ’

172  See 1.3.1.1, where it is argued that this use of lō may be an element of a non-Arabic substrate.

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Conjunctions expressing an adversative relationship

lākin/balākin/falākin lākin (and lākinn-) ‘but’ is the commonest adversative and used by all. The variants falākin and balākin (possibly both < walākin) are confined to a few BV dialects (12, 19, 41). Examples: kill-əh wasax lākin mā ˁalēh, yamši ḏīč is-sāˁa! (48) ‘All of it (= the food on board ship) was dirty, but never mind, it tasted good then!’ lākinn-əh mi šaġla waḥda ˁind-i fi masˀalat id-dūlāb . . . il-ḥazza agdar asawwi, lākin buṭa mā tikūm in-naxla tāli, mā agdar (34) ‘But I haven’t just got one job on the farm . . . at the moment I can do (it all), but as soon as the palm trees start growing later on, I can’t’ ḥafaḍt-əh, balākin kaˁadt iǧi famān sinīn (19) ‘I learnt it by heart, but I stayed about eight years (in Qurˀān school)’ ē, balākin hu awwal bida lih (12) ‘Yes, but he began it before’ lā, illa hu “kalām”, falākin ilih uṣūl yaˁni (41) ‘No, it does indeed mean ‘speech’, but it has (other) meanings’ bass The basic sense of bass is ‘only’, and it is encountered occasionally as an alternative to lākin, e.g. ida hāda, finǧāl ṣaġīr, ē, bass ˁād mā tistaˁmil hāda tṣubb fīh gahwa (5) ‘If it’s this, a small cup, yes, only (= but) mind you don’t use it to pour coffee into’ umma In addition to its ‘or’ alternative sense noted above, and its use as a conditional particle, umma in the B dialects can be used as an adversative, e.g. umma im dām hi tištaˁil, maḥḥad yidīss bēt-ah (33) ‘But as long as it (= fire) was burning, no one entered their house’

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(w)illa illa has many uses in BA,173 and in its ‘exceptive’ sense can be used as a clause coordinator with the sense ‘otherwise’, ‘if not, then’ to present mutually exclusive alternatives, e.g. ttiraxxaṣ min umm-ə-ha u trūḥ, illa kill-əh fi l-bēt (Manāma 8) ‘She would get her mother’s permission and go, otherwise she was always at home’ il-forma kansal-ha, willa hi māšya (30) ‘He cancelled the form, otherwise it would have been valid’ (wi) lā wi lā can have the sense ‘rather than’ in coordinated clauses: yitwāṭa ˁala ṭ-ṭagg wi lā yibill (Manāma 7) ‘He submitted to the beating rather than get wet (by diving)’ The sense in this example is close to the purposive ‘so that not’ (see 5.9)— the speaker is describing a diver who preferred to pretend to be possessed (and who would routinely be beaten to exorcise the ǧinn) than to accept the captain’s instruction to dive in deep water where there was a chance he would drown. 5.5.4 Asyndetic relationship (no conjunction) As will be illustrated in conditional clauses, where the conditional particle can be dispensed with and conditionality signalled by simple juxtaposition, so in co-ordinated clauses, in which the particle marking alternatives can also be left out, e.g. ē, sāyilō-ni yigūlūn “tibbēn-ah, mā tibbēn-ah?” (11) ‘Yes, they asked me, they said: “Do you want him or not?”’ (lit ‘do you want him, do you not want him?’) The following example illustrates both types of omission:

173  See DCSEA I 15.

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təbba tiˁayyiš, ayyiš bi l-imya . . . ˁ təbba tṣaffi bi l-wāḥid, ˁala hawā-k (6) ‘(If) you want to sell in bulk, sell in bulk by the hundred . . . (or) (if) you want to sell one by one, that’s up to you’ 5.5.5 Coordinated negatives Coordinated negatives are expressed by mā . . . wi lā, and lā . . . wi lā, e.g. lēn čāfaw il-māḥār hāy mā fīh gmāš wi lā fih šay, xaṭaf bi šrāˁ (48) ‘When they saw that these clams had no pearls in them or anything, he (= the captain) sailed on’ mā tiftikirīn fi ḥābbat wilid wi lā ġēr-uh (28) ‘You weren’t thinking about a mid-wife or about anything else’ lā gargaˁna wi lā ˁāyadna wi lā gaṭ min ḥayāt-na marrēna bēt (Manāma 7) ‘We never went trick-or-treating, nor Eid-visiting, nor ever in our lives did we drop in on (s’one’s) house’ 5.6

Subordinate Noun Clauses

In this section, we first examine subordinate noun clauses in the simple sentence: the nature of complementation—whether and when the complementising particle in(n) (variant an(n)-) is used to introduce them—and cases where a verbal noun is preferred. Particles which mark other types of subordinate noun clause, such as reported wh-questions, e.g. kēf/čēf and šlōn ‘how . . .’, š-ḥagg-ah ‘why . . .’, š-/šinhu/wēš ‘what . . .’, min ‘who . . .’ are dealt with in section 5.6.3. Overwhelmingly, and regardless of the type of verb which governs them if they are objects, or which is predicated of them if they are subjects, noun clauses in BA lack the complementising particle in(n) and generally follow the main verb directly, whatever their grammatical function in the sentence. Where in(n) does occur, it is by and large only with a small class of verbs, and its use in these cases may reflect the greater exposure of the user to varieties of Arabic which use a complementiser routinely (especially MSA). The question arises of how verbs which govern their objects with a preposition are complemented in BA if in(n) is not used, since the preposition cannot govern an unadorned noun clause in the way it can a clause introduced by in(n). In such cases, speakers use the verbal noun rather than a noun clause. This is one of the main contexts in BA where a verbal noun is used, the other being where it designates a general activity like ‘driving’, ‘swimming’, ‘cooking’

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and is the object of a few verbs like ‘to teach’ and ‘to learn’, or where the action is passive (see 5.6.4). So for example, in BA the verb sāˁad ‘to help (s’one to do s’thing)’ governs a following noun clause with ˁala, which gives rise to this typical example: il-ḥukūma tsāˁid-k ˁala ḥukm-ah (1) ‘The government helps you to control him’ Here a locution with a verbal noun, ˁala ḥukm-ah, is used rather than ˁala in/ an taḥkum-ah. Similarly, from the same illiterate speaker later in the same conversation: mā twāfig ˁala taˀdīb-ah (1) ‘She won’t agree to discipline him’ rather than ˁala in/an tiˀaddib-ah. Another example, this time from the A community, illustrates the point again: ˁallimt-ič ˁala ṭ-ṭabāx, awwal kān ˁala ṭ-ṭrāša (51) ‘She taught you to cook, but before that to run errands’ Here, the verbal nouns ṭabāx ‘cooking’ and ṭrāša ‘running errands’ are used, not noun clauses involving locutions with ˁala in(n). 5.6.1 Sentence types with a complementiser: in(n) and variants It is not possible to give any hard statistics as to the proportion of sentences in the data base which had the complementiser in(n) compared with those which did not have it in cases where they could have done, but at a rough estimate there must have been 40 to 50 examples without a complementiser to every one with. I give here some typical examples where in(n) did occur. A number of factors may possibly have been influential in this choice of structure. First, semantics: verbs of saying, thinking and knowing, including speech-acts like consenting and swearing account for most of the examples; by contrast, modal verbs/expressions, and verbs expressing wants, wishes, hopes, fears, which are close in their semantic values to modal verbs, hardly ever occurred with a complementiser.174 174  Among the examples where this apparently did happen was: . . . xayfīn ˁala awlād-hum ˁan lā yaḍrub ˁalēhum il-fāliǧ (33) ‘. . . fearing for their children lest they be struck down by polio’

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An additional factor favouring a complementiser may be syntactic: equational noun clauses (here, examples [2], [3], [6], [7], [8], [10], [11])—seemed to favour the use of in(n). Some examples: Verbs of saying: This was the commonest category in which in(n) occurred, though it was still not at all common even here. Examples: [1] baˁḍ-hum yigūl lik in il-inglīz—il-mara tisallim il-mahar! (3) ‘Some people tell you that the English— . . . it’s the bride who pays the dowry!’175 [2] agūl lik in-ha wirṭa! (radio play) ‘I tell you this is a real problem!’ [3] yikūlūn anna dāk muǧīb hōz māl il-gāz (25) ‘They say that it’s like a gas-hose’ [4] āmar yazīd in iyībūn-hum fi maǧlis-ah u yiwagfūn-hum (48) ‘Yazid ordered that they be brought to his majlis and detained there’ Verbs (and phrases) of thinking: [5] lā tḏ̣unn inn-ik taḏ̣wi ḏ̣ayy! (dialect poem) ‘Don’t think that you are so brilliant!’ [6] ḏ̣annat inn-i il-yōm ana ǧifi, mā ˁind-i šay (44) ‘She thought that I was useless, that I had nothing to offer’

However, it is unclear how this example should be interpreted: ˁan lā (see section 5.9 for many other examples) is a common BA conjunction possibly derived historically, via so-called ˁanˁana, from ˀan lā ‘that not’. But it is only ever used in BA pronounced in this way and with this specific sense ‘so that not’, ‘lest’ ‘in order to avoid’, so an alternative explanation could be that it is a combination of the preposition ˁan, which often has the sense of ‘avoiding’ and lā. It functions differently from in(n) and may have no historical connection with it. 175  The speaker meant the bride’s family, which in the UK traditionally pays for the wedding festivities.

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[7] mā ˁabāl-i inn-ah ˁalēha māṣūxa (44) ‘I didn’t realize that it was an obscenity (that I had said) to her’ Verbs of knowing, realizing, believing (facts): [8] baˁad čam min yōm ˁaraft anna l-ˁirs lī (Manāma 8) ‘After a few days, I realised that the wedding (which was being prepared) was mine’ [9] hādi l-wakˁa mā yinˁirif ˁan-ha176 tšibb bi l-lēl aw bi n-nahār (3) ‘This calamity, it isn’t known whether it will start at night or in the day time’ [10] aˁarf il-gawāwīd inn-ah ˁād ṭāyiḥ fīni halayūs! (48) ‘I knew that those bastards (lit ‘pimps’) would give me a real thrashing!’ [11] il-baṣal, adri inn-ah šaġlat-ah šaġla kasīfa (34) ‘I know that working with onions is filthy work’ [12] mā nṣaddig inn-ah maḍa min ˁumr-i il-yōm ha-l-kiṯir (dialect poetry) ‘I can’t believe that today so much of my life has already passed’ Verbs of agreeing, consenting, accepting, swearing an oath: [13] rāḍi ˁalēš inn-ah tīǧi? (Manāma 5) ‘Does he agree that you may come?’ [14] lā yakbal in azirr ḥatta ṭūl šibir! (Manāma 7) ‘He won’t allow me to move even an inch!’ (lit ‘a hand-span’) [15] ṭallag ˁalēhum inn-ah yiḥawlūn killə-hum mā ˁalēhum libs (48) ‘He swore to them he would divorce his wife unless they dived without any (protective) clothing’ An example that apparently goes against this pattern of use is: [16] lizam ˁalēhum in-hum yiḥawlūn (48) ‘He forced them to go down (to the sea-bed)’ 176  ˁan-ha < ˀan-ha.

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Sentence [16] was said by the same ex-pearl-diver who produced example [15], and was an explanatory rephrasing of it. The act of ‘forcing’ here was a verbal one—the speaker swearing to divorce his wife unless a condition was met—so it too was a speech-act, and hence only an apparent exception to the trend in the data for verbs involving verbal performance to be the category in which a complementiser was likely to appear. The related modal derivative lāzim ‘necessary, incumbent’, on the other hand, never governed its complement by means of in(n). 5.6.2 Sentence types with no complementiser This type of construction was overwhelmingly the norm. I give below some typical examples, categorised by the semantics of the main verb, and with a variety of syntactic structures. Some observations on these data: (a) When a pronoun subject in the noun clause is different from the subject of the main verb (e.g. abġī-h yirūḥ ‘I want him to go’), the construction invariably involves suffixing an enclitic pronoun to the main verb to mark the subject of the noun clause (i.e. lit ‘I want him (he) goes’), rather than using an in(n) construction (i.e. abġi in . . . ‘I want that . . .’). (b) The noun clause is normally placed after the main verb, regardless of whether it is its object (the vast majority) or its subject after verbs like yiṭra ˁalay ‘(it) occurs to me . . .’ and non-verbal expressions like ˁabāl-i ‘I think’ (lit ‘on my mind . . .’), bi widd-i ‘I want’ (lit ‘in my desire’), and other modal expressions such as yumkin, lāzim, yiǧūz. Examples: Verbs of saying, ordering, ordain, vowing, truth-telling: gāl ‘to say’ yigūl lik rayyāl yimūt, wāḥid ṯani yinwilid (radio play) ‘They say that (when) one man dies, another one’s born’ . . . walad yikūlūn yxaṭbūn-ah . . . (3) ‘. . . a boy whose engagement they said they’d be arranging . . .’ amar ‘to order’ amarō-na l-ḥukūma nidfin-ha (1) ‘The government ordered us to block it (= a well) up’

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katab ‘to ordain (of God)’ lēn allah yiktib ˁalēh ḏīč is-sāˁa smiča tākl-ah šay, yākl-ah (48) ‘If God has ordained for him that a fish will at that moment eat him or something, it will eat him’ naḏar ‘to vow’ kān ahl-i nāḏrīn ˁalay yigrūn ˁalay mīlad (Manāma 8) ‘My family had made a vow concerning me (at my birth) that they would read over me prayers for the Prophet (at my wedding)’ ṣadag ‘to tell the truth’ ṣādkīn rwēd hast-ə? (41) ‘Are you telling the truth, that there are radishes?’ Verbs of thinking, intending, feeling, sensing, remembering, believing: ḏ̣ann and ˁaḏ̣anna + enc pron ‘to think, be of the opinion’ kint aḏ̣unn mā fōg-i fōg (radio play) ‘I thought that there was no one better than me’ bass fīh yiḥḥ ˁaḏ̣annat-i? (Manāma 6) ‘But I think that there were watermelons? ˁabāl + enc pron ‘to think, have the impression’ ˁabāl-i bi-tbardīn galb-i (radio play) ‘I thought that you were going to allay my fears’ iftakar ‘to think’ aftikir hu hādi lō hadāk, mā aˁruf (17) ‘I think it’s this one, or that one, I don’t know’ ḥasab ‘to think, intend’ ana ḥāsib b-aˁṭī-ha ziyāra (41) ‘I’m thinking of paying her expenses for a visit (sc to the Shīˁī shrines)’

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ˁazam ‘to intend’ in kān hu ˁazam b-yiǧīb badar gatt, ništaġil fi s-sawāyib (34) ‘If he’s intending to bring lucerne grass seed, we’ll work on these seed-beds’ ṭara ˁala ‘to occur to, to remember’ yiṭra ˁalay awwal ana baˁad axayyiṭ ˁala l-fanar il-ˁōd (Manāma 10) ‘I remember that in the old days I still used to sew by the light of the big (kerosene) lantern’ ḥass ‘to feel, sense’ ḥāssa b-aǧīb ṣbay (41) ‘I feel that I’m going to have a boy’ ḥass-ha tiḍirb-ah, il-arḍ (5) ‘He sensed that it was hitting it, dry land’ Verbs of wanting, liking: baġa ‘to want, need’ il-yāhil yabbi yirūḥ id-dikkān (45) ‘The child wants to go to the shop’ ida baġētūn tištirūn . . . (6) ‘If you want to buy . . .’ abbī-ha trūḥ tidarris (48) ‘I want her to go and teach’ ambā-š itgūlīn lī . . . (33) ‘I want you to tell me . . .’ abbā-ha tṣīr ihni xaḍra (11) ‘I want it to be green here’ kāl “tibbēn-ni aṭallik-š?” (28) ‘He said “D’you want me to divorce you?”’

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(bi) widd/wadd + enc pronoun ‘to want, desire’ lākin widd-nā niˁars-ah u iḥna mawǧūdīn (19) ‘We want to get him married off while we’re still alive’ bi widd-i tikammil dirāsāt-ha (28) ‘I want her to finish school’ il-mistaḥibb mā widd-ah yiṭlaˁ min il-madrasa (Manāma 6) ‘The one who likes it doesn’t want to run away from school’ istaḥabb ‘to like’ inti tistaḥibbīn tiḥuṭṭīn šay, trūḥīn tṭālˁīn (Manāma 8) ‘You might like to give something, to go and have a look (at the bride-to-be)’ Verbs of hoping, expecting, fearing: ammal ‘to hope’, taraǧǧa ‘expect, hope for, imagine’ əmˀamlīn baddarō-h (6) ‘They (pigeons) are hoping that they ( farmers) have sewn it with seeds’ titrayya ana fīh ḏ̣rūra? (48) ‘Do you imagine that I’m possessed by spirits?’ xāf ‘to fear’ yixāfūn ˁalēh yingiṭiˁ insim-ah (45) ‘They were afraid that he would run out of air to breathe’ tixāf min is-sayyārāt tiṣīd-ah (Manāma 5) ‘She was afraid that the cars would run him over’ Verbs of agreeing, consenting, daring: riḍa ‘to agree, consent; be capable of’ lā yirḍōn iǧūn (19) ‘They won’t agree to come’

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mā yirḍa yidūb il-mayyit fīha (25) ‘Dead bodies won’t decompose in it’ hāda walad-ah bahīm, mu rāḍi yiḥfaḏ ̣ (30) ‘That son of his is stupid, incapable of learning’ nawas ‘to dare’ maḥḥad yinwas yiṭlaˁ min bēt-ah (33) ‘No one dared to leave their house’ wāǧid mā tinwas tsamr-ah ˁala šaǧara ṣaġīra (14) ‘You’re very reluctant to put fertilizer on it, on a small plant’ Verbs of allowing, letting, causing, forcing: itxallīn bint-ič itxalliṣ madrasa? (48) ‘Are you going to let your daughter complete her schooling?’ xallēnā-h yiguṣṣ il-bēbāt u yiḥuṭṭ il-hōzāt (14) ‘We got him to cut through the (lead) pipes and attach the hose-pipes’ txallūn likum is-samač yimalḥūn-ah? ‘Did you get them to salt the fish for you?’ (Manāma 6) wēš illi xallā-ha tindifin? (17) ‘What caused it (= well) to be filled in?’ min čām sana ˁumur-kum yixallūn-kum tištaġilūn? (48) ‘How old were you when they made you work?’ Modal verbs, modal expressions and auxiliary verbs: Auxiliary verbs such as tamm and ḏ̣all ‘to carry on doing s’thing’ and other aspectual expressions such as gāˁid ‘to do s’thing continuously (see 5.2.9.3.13– 14 for examples, not repeated here) always govern a p-stem verb directly. The same is true of modal verbs and modal expressions. Here we briefly exemplify modal usage.

Syntax

Necessity, obligation: lāzim ‘it is necessary’ mu lāzim trūḥ tāxiḏ sayyāra (5) ‘You don’t have to go and take a taxi’ yiḥtāǧ/yiḥtāy ‘it needs’ u yiṭiggūn-ah, mā yaḥtāy agūl lik, lēn yihalk (48) ‘And they would beat him, I don’t need to tell you, until he died’ Know-how, ability, physical capability: gidar ‘to be able; physically capable’ il-aḥmak mā gidar yiˁālǧ-ah (3) ‘He was unable to cure lunatics’ mā yigdar yamši (3) ‘He is unable to walk’ ˁabbar ‘to be able, know how to’ mā niˁabbir nxalli hādīk (36) ‘We can’t abandon these (date palms)’ mā yiˁabrūn yišīlūn-ha min l-əmḥāfaz u l-əmrāmaḥ (48) ‘They couldn’t carry her because of all her pushing and kicking’ kafu (invariable) ‘able, capable’ ma-ḥna kafu ništiri ˁala xams imya (6) We can’t afford to buy at (a price of) five hundred’ ˁaraf ‘to know how; to be physically able’ inti tiˁarfīn tigrīn? (48) ‘Can you read?’

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lā, mā əˁarf agra ‘No, I can’t read’ mā niˁruf nšil ṣaxīn (1) ‘I can’t even pick up a spade’ (sc ‘I don’t have the strength’) dara ‘to know how’ iḥna nadri nrakkib (11) ‘We know how to graft (plants)’ Possibility: yimkin/yiṣīr/yikūn (all invar) meaning ‘it is possible that’ yumkin šāyf-inn-ik gabil (5) ‘Maybe I’ve seen you before’ hāda l-gatt yiṣīr fīh rubḥ (6) ‘There may be some profit to be had from this lucerne grass’ ṣandiga yikūn timnaˁ il-maṭar (41) ‘A shed is supposed to keep the rain out’ Suitability: ǧāz ‘to suit, be appropriate’ mā ǧāz liyyi asawwi ihni (17) ‘It didn’t suit me to do it here’ 5.6.3 Other complementisers WH-question words in reported speech are governed directly by the main clause verb, e.g. mā adri wēš rang-ah (24) ‘I don’t know what kind it is’

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mā adri minhu b-yāxiḏ-ni (Manāma 8) ‘I didn’t know who was going to marry me’ šift il-ḥubb šlōn maˁnā-h (44) ‘I understood what love really meant’ lēn sāyil wēn rāˁi hāda, yiˁallim-kum (6) ‘If you’re asking where the owner of this ( farm) is, he’ll tell you’ mā yiˁarf š-ḥagg-ah ya (45) ‘He didn’t know why he had come’ taˁallamt čēf yiṭbaxūn (Manāma 5) ‘I learnt how to cook’ (lit ‘how they cook’) Where the question is a yes-no question, there is normally no complementiser and the question is reported in its original form, e.g. sāyilō-ni “tubbēn-ah, mā tubbēn-ah”? ‘They asked me “do you want him or not?”’ 5.6.4 Verbal nouns In addition to the factors which favour the use of verbal nouns over noun clauses noted earlier, there is also a preference for them where what is denoted is a skill or a general activity, e.g. yitˁallam is-siyāka (19) ‘He’s learning to drive’ min wēš mā yitˁallamūn xyāṭa? (33) ‘Why wouldn’t they learn how to sew?’ fi rōḥt-ah u yīt-ah, čam yāxiḏ min waqt? (Manāma 6) ‘How long does it take to go there and come back?’ (lit ‘in its going and its coming . . .’) məˁābal iḍ-ḍana kill-əh ˁalēš intīn (28) ‘Looking after the new-born baby was entirely your responsibility’

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mā faham il-kalām illi tkallam ˁalēh (Manāma 6) ‘He didn’t understand what he said to him’ The following example illustrates the use of the verbal noun of the verb čāf ‘to see’ in an extension of the ‘generalized activity’ use of the verbal noun: to indicate the return of the sense of sight (because there is enough light after total darkness) rather than sighting of some specific thing: aḥāris il-čawāf (Manāma 5) ‘I was waiting for first light (lit ‘being able to see’)’177 Verbal nouns are also often used where the action is passive: hiǧsat iḍ-ḍarb wi t-tamšīk (5) ‘It felt that it was being beaten and ripped apart’ axāf iḍ-ḍarb, tdūs ˁalēna! (3) ‘I was afraid of being beaten—she used to lay into us!’ yabġi lih šayalān (41) ‘It (rubbish) needs to be removed’ hāy timba šagāg (4) ‘This (land) needs to be dug over’ yabġi ǧazāz, yabġi tibnāy, yabġi tasgiya (6) ‘It (= lucerne grass) needs cutting, it needs weeding, and it needs watering’ hādēlēn baˁad yabbōn kalāb arḍiyyat-hum (34) ‘Those (seed-beds) also need their soil turning over’ Verbal nouns with an explicit noun subject or a noun object were very rare in the data. Among the occurring examples was: miˁāmalat ir-rayāyīl ḥagg in-niswān (51) ‘Men’s treatment of women’

177  The speaker had been shipwrecked at night and was waiting to be able to see so that he knew in which direction to swim.

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This sentence was spoken by a semi-literate women from the A community, but it sounds like a structure borrowed from MSA (muˁāmalatu r-riǧāli n-nisāˀa) but performed in the dialect. 5.7

Relative Clauses

As in virtually all other Arabic dialects, relative clauses whose antecedent noun is grammatically definite are marked with the relative pronoun illi, and when that antecedent is the direct or indirect object of the following verb, an anaphoric pronoun which agrees with it in number and gender is obligatorily suffixed to the verb. There is no need to exemplify that here. The relative pronoun illi has other uses: it can be used as a pronoun of generic reference, viz ‘he who . . . /the one which . . .’ and as illustrated earlier (3.1.8), when used repetitively in traditional narrative style has a distributive sense and helps paint a vivid verbal picture, e.g. illi tsabbaḥ, w illi tzabbar (45) ‘Some bathed themselves, some got dressed up’ illi yitḥassan, w illi yitˁaddal (48) ‘Some would shave themselves, some would smarten themselves’ illi yaḥmil fanar, u illi yaḥmil lih šimˁa, u illi yaḥmil lih lēt māl yad (Manāma 7) ‘One would carry a lantern, another would carry a candle, yet another would carry a hand touch’ illi ˁalēha xēša, ˁalēha xēša, w illi ˁalēha xalaga, ˁalēha xalaga, w illi mā ˁalēha, allah yidfaˁ il-bala, mā ˁalēha . . . (33) ‘The ones that had sack on them, had sack on them, and the ones that had a bit of rag on them, had a bit of rag on them, and the ones that had nothing on them—may God ward off calamity by His might—had nothing on them’ illi gtalō-h, igtalō-h, u illi iḏbaḥō-h, iḏbaḥō-h (44) ‘The ones they killed, they killed, the ones they slaughtered, they slaughtered’ There is in BA a range of other relative pronoun variants, all of common gender and invariable for number, found in the speech of some elderly and uneducated

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B dialect-speakers. These variants—iladi, illadi and illi di, of which by far the most common was illadi—all bear a close resemblance to the CLA msng relative pronoun allaḏī. They occurred rarely, always in free variation with the overwhelmingly dominant variant illi, and in the dialects of speakers from BV locations 6, 7, 28, 30, and 41. They were not recorded at all in the A dialects, nor in the majority of BV dialects, and a handful of times in the BU dialect of Manāma 2. This pattern of distribution suggests they are recessive and a vestige of one or more older B dialects. Some speakers (e.g. the one from location (6) below) used more than one of these variants in the course of the same recording. Examples: hādi l-əšrūb illi di ana sawwēt-ha (6) ‘These seeds-beds which I have made’ yābo iladi—. . . hāda mālat ṣandūg (6) ‘They brought the one that— . . . the thing that goes in a box’ walākin hādōl, ḥasbat il-insān ḥasbat il-baṭṭāliyya illadi mā tisgi il-mā (7) ‘But these people, their concept of what it is to be human is the concept of wasters who won’t even give you a drink of water’ w illadi yiġdūn yizūrūn-ha, ˁala čīs il-abu (7) ‘And whoever went to visit her, it was at her father’s expense’ illadi yaˁmalūn li l-aǧar ysawwi lih maksab fi l-ǧanna (7) ‘Those who work for material reward (in this life) store up rewards for themselves in heaven’ daxal iš-šarika fi l-yōm illadi twaffa axū-y (28) ‘He joined the (oil) company the day my brother died’ illadi tuṭlub il-mara . . . (28) ‘Whatever the wife wants . . .’ ˁamm hādāk illadi kān fi d-dayra (30) ‘The paternal uncle of the one who was in the (agricultural extension) office’

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iš-šay illadi— . . . ṣabānix mā ṣabānix, kill-əh ḍāˁ (30) ‘The thing that— . . . spinach and such like, all of it has died’ il-arḍ illadi ilēna (41) ‘The land that belongs to us’ xid illadi yiˁǧib-k, u illadi mā yiˁǧib-k guṭṭ-ah warā-k (Manāma 2) ‘Take what you like, and what you don’t like, cast it aside’ (lit ‘throw it behind you’) illadi rāḥaw mā nitḥačča fīhum (Manāma 2) ‘The ones who’ve died we won’t talk about’ mā ˁind-ha naḍrat illadi yinḍar-ha r-riǧāl (Manāma 2) ‘She didn’t have the right to (express) the opinion that the men did’ This last example is especially interesting, as there is what looks like a definite annexation construction consisting, unusually, of a noun without the definite article + relative pronoun, the annexation being signaled by the performance of the f marker -a of the noun naḍra ‘opinion’ as -at (cf CLA tāˀ marbūṭa). Where the antecedent noun is indefinite, a relative pronoun, as in other varieties of Arabic, is almost never used, e.g. adawwir šuġil—šuġil yirayyiḥ-ni mā fīh kalāfa (radio play) ‘I’m looking for a job—a job that sees me all right (financially) that isn’t hard work’ ˁində-na sāba fānya rāyiḥ baˁad b-azraˁ fīha (17) ‘We have another large seed-bed which I’m going to sow with seeds as well’ mā nḥaṣṣil ˁarabi iḥāčī-na, lazm-an nitˁallam (30) ‘We don’t get any Arabs who speak (Arabic) to us, so we are bound to learn (English)’ mā fīhum wāḥid ṭaggat ḥaṣāt-ah fi l-arḏ ̣ (48) ‘There wasn’t one among them whose (diving) stone reached the bottom’

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hast nās mitwasṭīn yixallōn-ha fi l-bēt (Manāma 8) ‘There were (socially) middle-ranking people who kept her (= their daughter) at home’ ḥaṭṭo ˁalay bšār axḏ̣ar fīh zari (Manāma 8) ‘They put a green dress on me that was braided with gold’ nilbas sarāwla yisammūn-hum xyāṭa (16) ‘We wore trousers which they used to call “sewing”’ . . . walad yikūlūn yxaṭbūn-ah . . . (3) ‘. . . a boy whose engagement to be married they said they’d be arranging . . .’ However, very occasionally, examples of illi with a grammatically indefinite antecedent did occur, e.g. igūl lik mā šaf bahāyim wāyid illi tākil ha-l-gatt (5) ‘He’s telling you that he hasn’t seen many farm animals which eat this lucerne grass’ asawwi li čam min kalla illi ḥakk l-išta (4) ‘I’m making myself a couple of sacks of dates that are for the winter’ But such examples were rare and unsystematic, and may have simply been the result of performance factors: hesitations, false starts, changes of plan in mid-sentence. It is also sometimes difficult to decide whether the connection between an indefinite noun and a following clause is that of a relative clause, or whether the connection is a looser, conjoined one, e.g. in a description of pearl-diving: nōbāt ityi yaˁni mukānāt, maḥār bass min issikk, itḥuṭṭ . . . u mukānāt lā, iytibāˁad il-maḥḥār, taṭrid ihni u ihnāk (48) ‘Sometimes you would come to places in which, as soon as you hit the bottom, you would gather clams . . . and other places where, no, the clams were far apart and you had to rush around here and there’ Here the two instances of mukānāt ‘places’ are both indefinite, and, as usual, there is no illi equivalent to the English relative pronouns of the translation

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‘in which/where’ to link them to the following clause. But the sentences as performed could just as well be analyzed as having a looser connection, and translated accordingly, in the first case by ‘and’ and in the second by no overt element at all: ‘Sometimes you would come to places and as soon as you hit the bottom, you would gather clams . . . and other places, no, the clams were far apart and you had to rush around here and there’ Natural conversational data is full of such loose sequences of clauses. Their connections are difficult to pin down grammatically, though the pragmatics of context usually make it clear how they are linked. 5.8

Clauses of Reason

liˀan/lann-/liˀannThe subject of the clause of reason can be the grammatical subject of the clause, as in the first two examples below, or the ‘dummy’ 3msng enclitic –ah, ‘it’, which roughly means ‘it’s that . . .’, as in the next three: lēn axadtūn hindiyya, ana b-aġdi anāwis-ha, liˀan hindiyya mā tinwas b-rūḥ-ha! (41) ‘If you employ an Indian woman, I’ll come and keep her company, because Indian women aren’t happy by themselves!’ lēn ǧirib in-nās bi-ddišš il-ġōṣ, fannišat, liˀannə-hum māxiḏīn tisgām (Manāma 6) ‘When it was near the time for people to go off pearl-diving, they quit (the oil-company) because they had taken an advance payment for the pearling season’ liˀann-ah zaraˁt al-ḥīn xamsa, b-azraˁ baˁad wiyyā-hum xamsa (17) ‘Because I’ve planted five, and I’m going to plant another five with them’ ˁugub il-ˁaša maḥḥad yiṭlaˁ min bēt-ah liˀann-ah ḏ̣alām (48) ‘After dinner nobody left his house because it was dark’ tigūl lič tġarbalat yallah ṭābat, liˀann-ah mā miš daxātir ˁadla (Manāma 7) ‘She’d just tell you she’d got worse or got better, because there were no proper doctors’

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liǧil/liǧil in liǧil wald ˁamm-i yigūl “ana wāḥid”, mita ana asawwi sēdāt? (29) ‘Because my cousin says “I’m on my own” (so I have to help him), so when am I going to (have the time to) plant in rows?’ liǧil ḏīk il-ayyām yiṭubbūn kill-əh ihni ˁala maḥall dagāg l-ərwēd (6) ‘Because in those days they (= pigeons) kept on landing here, the place the radishes were planted’ liǧil in iš-šēx mā yirḍa, lā? (36) ‘Because the Sheikh won’t agree, will he?’ (in answer to ‘why don’t you leave the farm?’) liǧil in il-ḥaṣa aˁṭī-h wiyya d-dayyīn (48) ‘Because I give him the stones along with the basket’ š-minn-ah This conjunction, recorded only for A speakers, was most often used as a question word meaning ‘why?’ (lit ‘what-from-it’) or ‘from/out of what?’, e.g. š-minn-ah tifakkirīn il-amrāḍ? (51) ‘What do you think illnesses were caused by?’ š-minn-ah tixāf? (45) ‘What was she afraid of?’ byūt-kum š-minn-ah yisawwūn-ha? (45) ‘What did they make your houses out of?’ But it was also used in the sense ‘because’. This may because it functions as a kind of WH-question word, e.g. mub ṣāḥya š-minn-ah baṭn-i maǧrūḥ (Manāma 10) ‘(I’m) not feeling well because my womb is damaged’ (poss < ‘I’m not feeling well. Why? My womb is damaged’) wallah, b-ayi, lākin š-minn-ah baˁīd šway . . . (Manāma 10) ‘I was intending to come, but, because it’s a bit far (I can’t)’ (< ‘I was intending to come. Why (only intending)? It’s a bit far’)

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mā yixāf š-minn-ah lētāt u mā hast (51) ‘He isn’t afraid (of the dark) because there are street-lights and such like’ (< ‘He isn’t afraid. Why not? There are street lights and such like’) This use of š-minn-ah seems oddly reminiscent of Cairene ikminn- ‘because, since’178 sibab/asbāb mā madā-ni azraˁ asbāb l-barbīr illi ziraˁnā-h, l-awwali, rāḥ (1) ‘I haven’t had the time to plant because the purslane I planted, the first crop, died’ yimūt asbāb al-ḥīn al-čilla b-iǧǧi (11) ‘It’s dying because now the cold weather is coming’ in-nōxaḏa yaˁṭī-h bēzāt sibab in-nihma bass (48) ‘The captain gave him money just because of his singing’ bi wāsṭat (in) rāḥ bi wāṣtat in yazwa mā miš (48) ‘It (= pearling) died out because there was no crew’ čēf an This conjunction was recorded rarely, and only for BV speakers, e.g. ana atkallam al-ḥīn čēf an baˁad fīh rūḥ (3) ‘I’m talking now because there’s still breath left (in my body)’ 5.9

Clauses of Purpose and Result

ḥatta and ḥatta in/ḥatta w-inn ‘so that’ The commonest BA conjunction in purpose and result clauses is ḥatta with the variant ḥatta in,179 e.g.

178  H&B 30. 179  GLOS 350 notes ḥattan< ḥatta ˀan.

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git lih “rūḥ lih al-ḥīn!”, kāl “ḥatta yidbaḥūn-ni?!” (6) ‘I said to him “Go there now!” He replied “So that they can kill me?!”’ inta muhub ḏābiḥ lik waḥda ˁumur-ha ˁišrīn sana, ḥatta yisammūn-ha ǧirīma! (radio play) ‘You won’t be killing a woman of twenty, so that they could call it a crime! (implied: the woman to be killed is too old for them to be able (seriously) to call it a crime) š-yiṭlaˁ?! min dašš, ḥatta yiṭlaˁ?! (48) ‘What’s going to “come out”?! Who has gone in, so that he has to “come out”?!’ (sc this is a man’s denial that he needs to have a spirit exorcised from him) axamr-uh u askī-h ḥatta in il-milūḥa tinzil fi l-arḍ (17) ‘I compost it and water it, in order that the salinity in the soil will be reduced’ ḥatta w-inn-ah bāčir fi l-mustaqbal ǧa samād kīmāwi yikūn hādāk-hu (17) ‘So that when tomorrow, in the future, some chemical fertilizer comes here, it’ll be that part (which gets it)’ ḥagg/ḥakk ‘so that, in order to’ This particle, whose main use is as a preposition meaning ‘to, towards, for’ can also be used as a conjunction in the sense ‘so as to, in order to’, e.g. mā ˁində-na waqt ḥagg ənrawwīk (48) ‘We haven’t got enough time in order to show you’ yinzil ˁala l-māy ḥagg yišrab, ḥatta yiṭbax (Manāma 1) ‘He dismounts where there’s water so as to drink, so as to cook’ . . . kill-əh rigg ḥagg yisawwi l-arḍ mīzāniyya (17) ‘. . . all of it (with) a rake, so that the soil gets an even balance (of nutrients)’ ḥatta is also used, as in other Arabic dialects, to mean ‘even’, and in this sense has a variant ḥagga (A dialects)/ḥagg (BU dialects)/ḥakka (BV dialects), e.g.

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ḥagga nās ġēr gāylīn li “rūḥi!” (Manāma 10) ‘Even other people were telling me ‘Go!’ yiguṣṣ ḥagg ḥadīd (Manāma 1) ‘He can even break an iron bar in two (sc with his bare hands)’ ḥakka yōm əḥbilt əb bičr-i, mā afham (3) ‘Even when I got pregnant with my first born, I didn’t understand (the connection between sex and pregnancy)’ The forms ḥagga/ḥakka were, however, not recorded in any BA dialect in the purposive/resultative ‘so that’ sense, which was always expressed by ḥatta. It is possible, however, that their phonetic form is the result of contamination because of the semantic overlap of ḥagg/ḥakk ‘so that’ and ḥatta ‘so that’/‘even’. ˁala šān/ˁašān ‘so that’ This conjunction, common in other Arabic dialects, occurred relatively infrequently. Examples: ˁala šān tṣīr rīl-ha xaḏ̣ra, čattaw māy ward ˁala rīl-ha (Manāma 8) ‘In order that she would be fertile (lit ‘her foot would be green’), they poured rose-water over her foot’ . . . ˁala šān mā tṣīd-hum ˁadwa (radio play) ‘. . . so that they don’t catch an infection’ u ila wālam, tammēt lik mudda ˁala šān tḥaṣṣil sayyāra (26) ‘And if that’s how things turned out, you would spend ages (waiting) in order to get a taxi’ adāḥš-əh, aˁadl-əh ˁašān b-aguṭṭ fīh samād tāli (34) ‘I’ll clean it up, get it straight so that I can put manure on it afterwards’ . . . ˁala šān lā yigūlūn ihni əmǧawwidat-in-kum aw šay (Manāma 1) ‘. . . so that they couldn’t say she had kept you here (against your will) or anything’ an Occasional examples occurred of an in the sense of ‘so that’:

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ṭabbaw bass čiḏi an yiḥallilūn li ḏāk ǧōzt-ah (48) ‘They only dived so that they would make his (= the captain’s) wife lawful to him’180 This usage was much less frequent than its negative analogue ˁan lā: ˁan lā ‘lest’ This very common conjunction is pronounced by all uneducated BA speakers ˁan lā not ˀan lā ‘that not’ and may be an example of so-called ˁanˁana: the tendency, recorded by the early Arab grammarians, for some bedouin to substitute the pharyngeal ˁayn for the glottal stop. Another high frequency BA example where this substitution occurs is ˁaǧal/ˁayal for ˀaǧal ‘so, then’. Whether this is the correct explanation of the form ˁan lā is unclear, as one of the senses of the preposition ˁan by itself in BA is ‘avoidance’, a sense that is clearly close to ‘lest’, e.g. asawwi hāda ˁan nōmat-i (17) ‘I do this so I don’t fall asleep/lest I fall asleep’ iltifti lih lā yirčab ˁan yiṭīḥ (41) ‘Mind that he doesn’t get on, lest he falls off’ It is possible that ˁan lā arose out of constructions such as these, and is, in effect, a ‘double negative’; at all events, ˀan lā and its normal CLA contraction ˀallā do not occur in the ‘uneducated’ BA dialects. Examples of ˁan lā: yigˁad wiyyā-ha ˁan lā tistawḥiš (41) ‘He would stay with her so that she wouldn’t get lonely’ asikk ˁala rūḥ-i d-dār ˁan lā yišūfūn-ni (16) ‘I would shut the (door of the) room behind me so that they couldn’t see me’ yiḥuṭṭūn nawāṭīr ˁan lā yibūg aḥad l-əgmāš (48) ‘They would put watchmen there, so that nobody could steal the pearls’ 180  The context of this statement is that the ship’s captain had sworn that if the divers did not dive, he would divorce his wife, thus making sexual relations between them no longer lawful (ḥalāl). This was a frequently used ruse to get divers to dive in dangerous conditions where they might refuse (e.g. excessive depth of the sea, presence of jelly-fish).

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ṭallaˁnā-ha ˁan lā trūḥ minni u minni (4) ‘We took her out (of school) so that she wouldn’t go here and there (sc out of parental control)’ ilbasu yumma ˁan ir-ramḍa, ˁan lā taḥrig-kum ir-ramḍa-yə? (11) ‘You kids, will you put (your shoes) on to protect you from the hot ground, so that the hot ground doesn’t burn you?’ lā can also be used on its own without ˁan in the sense ‘lest, so that not’; gūmi lā iǧūn yišūfūn-na ˁala ǧulūf it-tamr (5) ‘Get up, lest they come and see us sitting on the date-sacks’ It translates as ‘or else’ in a threat: iṭlaˁ min il-bēt lā aḥibs-ik wasṭ il-ǧilīb! (dialect poetry) ‘Get out of the house, or else I’ll throw you down the well!’ 5.10

Clauses of Comparison and Degree

5.10.1 Clauses of comparison činn-/kaˀann- and variants181 This particle is most often used in the sense of English ‘as if’. Pronominal subjects of the governed clause are suffixed to činn-, e.g. sawwi rūḥ-ič činn-ič abad mā fīč šay (radio play) ‘Behave as if there’s absolutely nothing the matter with you’ ǧawwad qirˀān-ah u gāˁid yigra činn-ah mā sawwa šay (Manāma 2) ‘He grabbed his Qurˀān and went on reading as if he’d hadn’t done anything’ ˁašar rubbiyāt tṣirfīn-ah kaˀann-ič ṣārfa al-ḥīn ˁišrīn dīnar (Manāma 10) ‘You would spend ten rupees, and it was as if you had spent twenty dinars (in today’s money)’

181  See also 5.2.9.1.8.

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il-ˁayūz msayṭira ˁala l-čanna činn-ha xādim (Manāma 6) ‘The mother-in-law bossed her daughter-in-law around as if she were a servant’ . . . ˁibāra kaˀann-ah ḍaḥiyya (34) ‘. . . like, as if it were a pot plant’ činn- is also used, but seemingly only in the in the A dialect, with the extended sense ‘it (= the general situation) looks like/sounds like’, e.g. il-bāb činn-ah yiṭiggūn-ah . . . b-arūḥ ačūf min (radio play) ‘It sounds like someone’s knocking the door . . . I’ll go and see who it is’ mā činn-hum yāklūn (51) ‘They didn’t look as if they had eaten anything’ mā činn-ah ˁində-hum ġōṣ, ˁində-hum ˁirṣ! (48) ‘It was as if they weren’t going pearl-diving, but to a wedding!’ činn-ah ḥāṭṭīn nāṭūr (48) ‘It looks like they’ve hired a watchman’ tigūl tigūl lit ‘you would say’ can also be used in the Gulf dialects in the sense ‘as if’: in kāmat timši fi t-ṭarīk¸ itkūl hādi hadya (7) ‘If she walks down the street, it’s as if she’s fully sighted’ (sc though in fact she’s blind) mūǧīb mā This expression, meaning ‘just like, just as’ occurred a few times, but only in B speech, e.g. gāl “hādi ˁalēha nadar ḥirāsa”—mūǧīb mā gilt inta, “ḥāris” (Manāma 1) ‘He said “This girl has had a vow made on her that’s she’ll have a chaperone (on her wedding night)”—just as you said, “a chaperone” By itself, mūǧīb is used in BV communities as a preposition, e.g. mūǧīb hōz māl gāz ‘like a gas-pipe’ (25)

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miṯil(in)mā, miṯlāt(in)mā, šikil mā These three expressions mean ‘in the same way as’. The optional -in- infix (which assimilates and becomes –im-) occurs only in the BV dialects, e.g. mifil-im-mā inta taˁzim-ni u hāy yiˁzim-ni, ana baˁad abb-aˁizm-ah (19) ‘Just like you invite me and he invites me, I’ll also invite him’ ṭilˁaw u miflāt-im-mā tikūlūn, waṣalaw il-manāma (5) ‘They left and, as you’d say, arrived in Manāma’ nilˁab is-sakkōn šikil mā hāda, šikil il-banāt al-ḥīn mā yilˁabūn (Manāma 2) ‘We played hop-scotch like— . . . like the girls do now’ 5.10.2 Clauses of degree Clauses of degree can be formed by the use of verbal nouns of mensuration, e.g. gadd, kubur, kiṯir¸ followed by mā = ‘so X that . . .’ or preceded by ay ‘however X that . . .’ e.g. min gadd mā hu ˁēb sawwō-h ḥarām (33) ‘It was so shameful that they declared it prohibited’ gadd mā yiḥibbūn-ha gālaw naḍar ˁalēha (Manāma 8) ‘They loved her so much (when she was born healthy) that they made a vow concerning her (sc to put a ‘chaperone’ with her on her wedding night)’ min gadd mā ana mub mištahiya ākil, kint nāwya atˁaḏḏar minn-ič (A dialect, radio play) ‘I was so lacking an appetite that I was intending to apologize to you (sc for not coming to lunch)’ l-əˁyūn tūyaˁ-ah182 min l-əḥriga, min kiṯir mā yifattiḥ ḥagg il-maḥḥār (48) ‘His eyes hurt because of the inflammation, because of how long he had to keep them open (to see) the clams’ fīhum yindallūn min kufur mā yirūḥ¸ yiǧi (Manāma 2) ‘Some of them knew the way from coming and going so often’ 182  < tūǧaˁ-ah from wuǧaˁ ‘to hurt’.

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ay kufur yirmi bēzāt, yaˁṭūn id-dāyāt (3) ‘Whatever amount of money he throws, they give it to the bridesmaids’ Verbal nouns without mā can be used with another parameter of comparison in a similar way: fār kubr il-kalb (dialect poem) ‘A rat as big as a dog’ (lit ‘a rat the size of a dog’) ḏikrayāt kiṯir l-ənyūm fi s-simi (dialect play) ‘Memories as numerous as the stars in the sky’ (lit ‘memories the number of stars . . . ) il-ˁōd ˁala gadd-ič ha-l-lōn mā yiˁarf l-iḥsāb (51) ‘Adults, about as old as you are now, couldn’t count’ š- (A and B dialects) or wēš (B dialects only) is frequently prefixed to verbal nouns to form an equivalent to the CLA mā at-taˁaǧǧubiyya construction, which can be used comparatively, so, e.g. šūfi l-fār da! š-ḥlēla l-fār! (16) ‘Look at that rat! How cute it is!’ kil waḥda digg il-yarīda, u al-ḥīn kil waḥda š-mitin-na u š-ˁariḏ̣-na! (Manāma 7) ‘Every woman was as thin as a rake (lit ‘the thinness of a palm-stick’), but now how fat and how broad we all are! wi lā tyi l-muġarb illa š-ḥalū-hum bārdīn! (Manāma 6) ‘And as soon as you came back in the evening, how lovely and cool (you’d find) that they (= water pots) were!’ ṣīx wēš kubr-ah rayil mā yišīl-ah (9) ‘A (metal) pole so big a man couldn’t lift it’ kil mā/kil min In addition to its more widespread sense of ‘everyone one who . . .’, kil min can also be used to mean ‘the more . . .’ (lit ‘all what’) in the same way as the

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more widely used kil mā, but this use of kil min is confined to the B dialects.183 Generally speaking, the verb in the ‘degree’ clause is in the s-stem regardless of time reference, as is also the norm in Type I conditional clauses (see 5.11.1.1). kil min ga lih, yizīd il-malaḥ (3) ‘The more (the manure) comes into contact with it (= the soil), the saltier it gets’ kil min yimhal¸ yixtarab (4) ‘The more it is delayed, the more it deteriorates’ kil mā lānat il-arḍ . . . (19) The softer the soil gets . . .’ kil mā kubrat il-ǧiffa,184 fuklat185 (19) ‘The older my body becomes, the less supple it gets’ kil mā ṣuġrat in-nagīla, mātat (11) ‘The smaller the seedling is, the more it will (tend to) die’’ kil mā yikbar il-insān, yiqall in-naḏ̣ar (Manāma 8) “The older you get, the worse your eyesight gets’ čil mā twallēt-ha, hi bi-tiġdi barr, mā bi-tiġdi baḥar (5) ‘The more you attack it, the more it will make for the land, not the sea’ kil mā dazzēt rūḥ-ik ḥagg il-marāyil, in-nōxaḏa šway galb-ah yifattiḥ lik (48) ‘The more you pushed yourself to do brave deeds, the fonder the captain became of you’ Sometimes clauses of this type work by simple juxtaposition without the need for a conjunction: 183  A suffix -man with the sense ‘what’ (as well as ‘who’) is also noted by Ingham for the Arabic dialects of Khūzistān in south-western Iran (ING2 16–17). 184  Cf. CLA ǧuṯṯa ‘body’ with B dialect f < ṯ. 185  Cf. CLA ṯaqulat ‘it got heavier’ with B dialect f < ṯ and k < q.

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ṣār il-yibal ḏ̣iˁaf il-ġōṣ (48) ‘The oil company grew (stronger) as the pearling industry grew weaker’ (or ‘The stronger . . . , the weaker . . .’) 5.11

Conditional and Time Clauses

The BA dialects, like those of central and eastern Arabia more generally, have a multiplicity of conditional and time particles. Several of them can be used in more than one type of conditional sentence and some can also function as time particles.186 Where a particle is multifunctional, each function is dealt with below in a separate section. 5.11.1 Conditional clauses Conditional clauses are divisible into three broad types. We will label these I, II and III: Condition I: these are clauses which express an ‘open’ condition, i.e. one which is capable of fulfillment in the present real world or some future possible world, e.g. ‘if (‘whenever’) he goes, we (will) follow’, or, when the condition occurs in a narrative describing a past world which was capable of fulfillment or was actually fulfilled at the time referred to, e.g. ‘if (= ‘whenever’) he went, we would follow/followed’. Condition II: these are clauses which express a ‘hypothetical’ condition, i.e. one which might possibly occur, but is presented as less likely to be fulfilled than an ‘open’ one (typically, in English, signaled by the use of a subjunctive verb), e.g. ‘if he were to go, we would follow’, or a condition which is plainly impossible, e.g. ‘if I were you, I wouldn’t do that’. Condition III: these are clauses which express a ‘counterfactual’ condition, i.e. an event which did not actually occur, so the event contingent on that condition could not have occurred either, e.g. ‘if he had gone (implied: ‘but he didn’t’), we would have followed (but we didn’t)’. Two observations should be made here: firstly, whilst some BA conditional particles are exclusively, or at least strongly associated with one of these types of condition, others may occur in more than one; secondly, in some types of condition, the sequence of tenses in the conditional and main clauses and their time-reference is more or less predictable, but in others it is more variable, 186  For comparative data, see ING2 117–140 for Najd; EADS 150–151; 159–162; 167–168; 172 for the Gulf States.

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and the exact interpretation of the meaning depends on the speech- or realworld context. The example sentences below are drawn from all sections of Bahraini society. There did not seem to be any large communal differences in how conditional clauses worked, though there was some group-specific variation in the form of particular particles and limitations on their use (see, for example, the remarks on certain community-specific uses of lēn). 5.11.1.1 Condition I Condition I is the ‘open’ condition, capable of fulfillment and often equivalent to ‘if and when’ or ‘whenever’. Here the main particles used are in, ila, iḏa (B variant ida), and lēn (of which ilan, ilān, ila ˁēn are BV variants), all more or less interchangeable one with another. As we shall see (5.11.2), ila and lēn can also be used for time clauses. The particle amma, whose main functions are as a topicaliser (‘as for . . .’), an adversative conjunction (‘but . . .’) and as an interjection (‘how . . . !’), is also very occasionally encountered in some BV dialects as a marker of condition I clauses. With all these particles, the verb in the condition I conditional clause is generally s-stem, whatever its real-time reference, which in many cases can only be deduced from context. Where the time reference is to the present or future, the verb in the answering main clause is most often p-stem, and may have a b- prefix if the sense is future. A few examples in the corpus had an active participle as the main verb, or had no verb at all, and in a few cases the typically CLA tense sequence of an s-stem verb in both clauses was used, even where the time reference was clearly present. The phrase (in) čān ‘if it is/were the case (that) . . .’ (always with čān, never kān, and never inflected for person or number) can, like lēn, be used to introduce both condition types I and II, and is exemplified below under each condition type in turn. The particle lō, which is the default particle for ‘hypothetical’ type II conditions, is also used by some speakers in condition I sentences, also exemplified at the end of this section. in Unlike in many ‘mainstream’ Arabic dialects, in occurs frequently in the BA dialects, as it does in Najd,187 and not only in fixed phrases.

187  ING 137.

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in + s-stem verb With present or timeless reference: In a few cases, the verb in both clauses was s-stem, as in the CLA system, e.g. in ḥaṭṭēt lī ˁaṭbat-ik, gaṭṭēt-ik baḥar! (48) ‘If you put your cotton rag under my nose, I’ll throw you overboard188!’ in kāfaḥt warā-h, itgāṣar (17) ‘If you combat it (= rat infestation), it will diminish’ Mostly, however, the pattern was s-stem in the conditional clause, and p-stem in the main clause (if there was a verb): in baġa ḥirma, yimši wiyyā-ha ḥatta tiˁruf aṭbāˁ-ah u yiˁruf aṭbāˁ-ha, lā yiṣīr tāli ǧinǧāl (3) ‘If he wants a wife, he goes out with her so that she knows what he’s like and he knows what she’s like, so there won’t be any quarrelling later’ in ḥarrētī-ha, činn-ič tḥarrīn wild-ič (A dialect, in a radio play) ‘If you give her (= daughter-in-law) a hard time, it’s as if you’re giving your own son a hard time’ in čaddat il-ˁaṣfūr sana, yāčil hāy l-ǧamal fi lukma (14) ‘If the sparrow works for a year, the camel will eat (the result) in one mouthful’ (proverb) intūn ḍarūri dāfˁīn iḍ-ḍumān, in ziraˁtūn-ha aw mā ziraˁtūn-ha (5) ‘You have to pay the lease contract, whether you sow crops on it or not’ hādāk mičwa in ḥaṭṭēt īd-ak ˁala l-waraga (5) ‘It feels (hot) like a branding iron if you put your hand on its leaf’ in riḥt fi l-gēḏ̣, šaybat rās (19) ‘If you go at the height of summer, it’s a real trial’

188  A smoldering cotton rag was formerly used in this way to drive away spirits in exorcisms. This sentence was said by a pearl-diver who was protesting that he did not need this ‘cure’.

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in rāḥ ḥiǧrat-ah, wiyyā-h, u in ya ˁind-i, wiyyā-h (A dialect, in a radio play) ‘If he goes to his room, (she) goes with him, and if he comes to see me, she comes with him’ With past time reference: in allah waffag lēhum maḥḥār, yābō-h (48) ‘If God enabled them to find clams, they brought them up (from the sea-bed)’ In some cases, it was unclear contextually whether past or present was intended, and the sentence could be read either way: in kāmat tamši fi ṭ-ṭarīk, itgūl hāḏi hadya (7) ‘If she walked down the street, it was as if she was fully sighted’ (or ‘If she walks down the street, it’s as if she is fully sighted’) In some BV dialects, a variant im was encountered, in which the/m/may have been the result of spreading labialization before/b/, e.g. im baġētīn il-ˁāfya, hum bi ˁāfya, u im baġētīn il-xēr, hum əb xēr (33) ‘If health is what you want, they were healthy; if wealth is what you want, they were wealthy’ im baġēt tēs willa ġanama, kill-əh wāḥid (33) ‘If you wanted a ram or a ewe, it was all the same’ ila + s-stem verb Like in, ila when used as a conditional particle requires an s-stem verb and has the same range of possible time references as in. The sense, however, is of ‘if and when’ rather than a purely conditional particle, and sometimes the sense is unequivocally ‘when’ as we shall see below. But ila can also function as a ‘presentative’ particle, and thus does a similar overall job to the CLA particle iḏā which also has the same range of conditional and presentative (cf iḏā bi . . .) functions. However, when ila has this presentative sense in BA, the verb, if there is one, is usually, but not always, p-stem. Summing up: whereas ila + s-stem verb most often signals a conditional clause, (or a time clause—see 5.11.2.1 below), it much less often signals a presentative clause; ila + p-stem verb invariably signals a presentative clause.

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ila with present time reference or timeless: ila waṣṣal hna nkayd-ah, ila mā waṣṣal mā nkayd-ah (22) ‘If it comes here, we’ll record it; if it doesn’t, we won’t’ ila ġarrast u ḥamat iš-šams . . . (14) ‘If you plant (a crop) and the sun gets hot . . .’ u ila ḥaffat il-arḍ u insiga n-nagīla šway, tṣīr zēn (11) ‘If the soil dries out and the seedling is watered a a little, it’ll be fine’ With past time reference: ila ana kalt tamar, mā gaṣṣart (5) ‘If I have eaten (your) dates, you haven’t fallen short (of your obligation as a host)’ The context of this example was that the speaker felt his interlocutor might be taking offence because, though he had eaten his dates, he had refused his coffee.189 Here, however, ila could equally well be read in its other function, as a presentative expression (cf CLA iḏā bi . . . ), i.e. ‘Look, I’ve eaten dates, so you haven’t fallen short . . .’. In the next example, spoken by a woman from Sitra, in and ila both occur, but with conditional and presentative functions respectively: ani nādira lēha . . . “in allah fačč ˁawk-i, b-aˁṭī-š ziyāra” . . . w ila fačč ˁawk-i, u ˁaṭā-ni hāda!” (41) ‘I had made a vow to her: “If (in) God relieves my affliction (= childlessness), I will pay for a pilgrimage190 for you” . . . “and now (ila) he has relieved my affliction, and given me this (baby boy)!”’ ila, unlike in, can also simply mean ‘when’ (see 5.11.2.1 below).

189  He didn’t drink coffee because, like some Shīˁa, he regarded it as a miskir, an ‘intoxicant’. 190  The word ziyāra, lit ‘visit’, when used by Baḥārna women in this kind of vow-making context, always means a (by definition meritorious) pilgrimage to one of the Shīˁī shrines of Iraq or Iran.

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iḏā/ida (B variant) With iḏa/ida the verb is usually, but not always, s-stem, but, unlike with in and ila, it is possible for there to be no verb or a dummy verb in the conditional clause. ida/iḏa + s-stem verb With present time reference, or timeless: ida kamal ha-l-ǧisir u salakat-əh is-sayyārāt, əˁruf inna l-wakˁa tšibb! (3) ‘If this causeway is completed and cars go along it, know that the calamity will flare up!’ ida kit lih “ˁaṭ-ni” yiḍrub-ni (7) ‘If I say to him “give me”, he hits me’ ida ṣirt ǧālis, rās-i yiˁawwir-ni . . . ida ǧīt aġōfiǧ, aṣīr aḥsan (3) ‘If I sit down, my head hurts me, but if I potter around, I feel better’ ida ǧa, yiskī-ni l-ġaṣāyiṣ (1) ‘If he comes here, he gives me a really hard time’ iḏa ana ṣaḥḥēt, aˁṭī-h dīnār wāḥid, u iḏa ana mitt mā lih šay (Manāma 1) ‘If I get better, I’ll give him a dinar; but if I die, he’ll get nothing’ ida gaˁad l-əbdayyaˁ, aničl-ah ḥadir fōg (44) ‘If (the population) of Budayyaˁ stays put, I’ll turn the place upside down’ With past time reference: The following two examples were from extended narratives and clearly referred to the past (hence the translations): iḏa tikallimaw, bāčir lēn yaw il-barr mā ˁaṭā-hum (48) ‘If they protested, he didn’t give (them any money) the next day when they came into port’ ida daššētīn b-itšīlīn ḥāǧa, iṭṭubb fīh (33) ‘If you went in to retrieve something, it (= the fire) caught onto it’

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ida/iḏa + p-stem verb (with or without b-) or with no verb In these cases, the time reference is present or is a timeless general statement; with b- there is a sense of proximate intent (‘to be about to’): ida mā yinšāl hāda, mā yimši l-māy (5) ‘If this isn’t removed, the water won’t flow’ ida mā-na hnāk, waṣṣ-hum bass u yigūlūn liyyi (5) ‘If I’m not there, just order (the goods) from them and they’ll let me know’ ida bi-tišrab-ah, xuḍḍ il-ġarša (11) ‘When you go to take it (= medicine), shake the bottle ( first)’ lēn and its variants ilēn, ilan, ilān, ila ˁēn, ila min lēn and its variants are frequently used as conditional particles in both types I and II conditional sentences, as well as in time clauses with the senses ‘when’ (5.11.2.1) and ‘until’ (see 5.11.2.8). However, the use of lēn and its variants as conditional particles seems to be limited to the B dialect speakers; A speakers use them in a temporal sense only. The verb of the conditional clause is normally s-stem, but it is possible for there to be other types of verb or no verb at all. The time reference, as with the other conditional particles, depends on context: tikūl bəhri ilēn šift-ah (3) ‘You’ll think he’s a Bihari if you see him’ (or ‘You’d think he was a Bihari if you saw him’) amma lēn ḍall ha-š-šahar, b-iyzīd (19) ‘But if it (= bull) remains (unsold) this month, it’ll go up (in price)’ lēn mā ˁaṭēt-ni inta, minh illi yaˁṭī-ni? (7) ‘If you won’t give me (sc a woman to marry), who will?’ lēn axadtūn hindiyya, ana b-aġdi anāwis-ha (41) ‘If you employ an Indian maid, I’ll come and keep her company’ ilēn riḥt aǧīb-ah, sitta dīnār mā iǧī-k (1) ‘If I go to get him (= a day labourer), he won’t come (for) six dinars (a day)’

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ilēn ǧibt walad u haddēt-ah, fakadt-ah (1) ‘If you have a son and leave him to his own devices, you’ve lost (or ‘you’ll lose’) him’ lēn kil wāḥid ǧā-k bi-tgahwī-h mā b-itsawwi šuġil (5) ‘If you’re going to give coffee to everybody who visits you, you’ll never get any work done’ kit lēh: “ilān ṭallaktə-ni, b-āxid li wāḥid atfāham wiyyā-h” (28) ‘I told him: “If you divorce me, I’ll go and marry someone I can get along with!”’ lēn ǧibtīn bnayya, taˁṭī-ni ay šō? (41) ‘If you have a baby girl, what will you give me (as a present)?’ lēn ṣādə-na l-ḥarr wāyid, xaḏēna l-mahaffa (41) ‘If we were hit with a heat-wave, we used a hand fan’ ila min ištaġalt, taḥt-ah dīb! (3) ‘If I set to work, compared to him I’m a wolf!’ ilan tākil minnah, iṣīr wāǧid kuwwa fīh (6) ‘If you eat some of that, you’ll get great strength in it (= your body)’ mā adri ˁād miš – lēn miš, aǧīb lik (5) ‘I don’t know if there’s still any left—if there is, I’ll bring you some’ (in) čān/in kān (in) čān + s-stem verb Where there is a verb in the conditional clause, s-stem can refer to past time or to present time: Past time: in čān yaw bi l-inšūr, il-ˁalam maḥṭūt, ginna əhummə mistānsīn (45) ‘If they came back with flags flying, with the standard hoisted, we said “they’re happyˮ’

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čān ˁāšat, nxalli ˁalēha ḥarrāsa lēlat il-ˁirs (Manāma 8) ‘If she (= a baby girl) lived, we (vowed to) put a chaperone with her on her wedding night’ čān mā ˁaṭō-na, ngūl “knār?! ˁasā-kum in-nār!” (51) ‘If they didn’t give us anything, we said “(You’re giving us only) lotus fruit? May you burn in Hell!”’ in čān islimt il-awwal, al-ḥīn mā aslim (6) ‘If I escaped safely the first time, this time I won’t’ čān mā daˁwalō-h . . . (24) ‘If they haven’t (already) thrown it away . . . .’ In the above examples, the sense is ‘in the case where X actually happened’, and could not be construed as a condition II meaning ‘were X to happen’. If the latter were the meaning, the main clause verb would normally be marked by a preposed čān (see 5.11.1.2 below). Present time: (in) čān/(in) kān with the s-stem can also be used for present time condition I sentences, like other conditional particles, e.g. čān hi ġadat minna, minna, minna—ˁala kēf-ha! (7) ‘If she goes here, there, and everywhere—that’s her business!’ in kān hu ˁazam b-yiǧīb badar gatt, ništaġil fi s-sawāyib (34) ‘If he’s intending to bring lucerne grass seed, we’ll work on these seed-beds’ (in) čān + p-stem verb with or without bi- or + ap Always present time reference. As in other conditional constructions, the use of the bi- prefix indicates proximate intent (cf English ‘going to’): in čān tibġa ṣ-ṣidk . . . (41) ‘If you want the truth . . . (= ‘to tell you the truth . . . .’)’ čān titrayya ana fī-ni ḍrūra, mā miš ḍrūra yā-bū-k! (48) ‘If you imagine I’m possessed, I’m not, sonny!’ šlōn kānat madrasat-kum awwal, čān ttiḏakkarīn-ha? (Manāma 6) ‘What was your school like in the old days, if you (still) remember it?

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čān itgūlūn hādi sinnat ˁīsa, ˁīsa mā tzawwaǧ (3) ‘If you are saying that this was the tradition of Jesus, (that cannot be true, because) Jesus never got married’ čān mā tadrūn, hāy arbaˁat ašhur u hu wiyyā-y . . . yallah! čān bi-tistaḥmig, istaḥmig! (7) ‘For your information (lit ‘if you don’t know’), that’s four months he’s been with me (sc having sex regularly). So go ahead—if you’re going to get angry, get angry (sc and see if I care)!’ Examples with the ap also occurred: yimūt asbāb al-ḥīn al-čilla b-iǧǧi . . . illa čān hi ḍārba, tṣīr əmǧāmda (11) ‘It’s dying because now the cold weather is coming . . . except if it has taken root, then it is resistant’ (in) čān + no verb In this case, the time reference of the sentence depends on the context. In the following examples, which are all taken from extended accounts of life at sea spoken by elderly ex-pearl-divers, there is no verb in the conditional clause, with sometimes an s-stem and sometimes a p-stem verb in the main clause, though in all cases what is described is the habitual practices of many decades in the past. S-stem or p-stem verbs in the main clauses of these sentences seem to be completely interchangeable with no difference in meaning: the over-arching narrative context of describing past practices and life experiences determines that the time referred to by the verb, s-stem or p-stem, is always the past. čān ˁind-hum smiča, galō-ha wiyyā-ha (Manāma 7) ‘If they had a fish, they fried it with it (= left-over rice)’ čān hawa, hawa hast, iyībūn-ah . . . čān mā miš hawa, mā iyībūn-ah (48) ‘If there was a wind, a wind, they would bring him (= dead diver) back (to port) . . . if there wasn’t any wind, they wouldn’t’ raddēna nafliǧ, čān maḥḥār wāyid. . . . čān maḥḥār ǧilīl, la, bass (48) ‘We resumed opening (them), if there were many clams . . . if there were few, no, that was it’ čān hast ˁābra, ˁabbar-ah (48) ‘If there was a ferry, he ferried him back’

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Note in the following example that a pronominal enclitic, which is the subject, is attached to in čān. This type of construction occurred occasionally in the data, and is also found in the dialects of Najd:191 in čān-ah ṯiǧīl, iyīb-ah il-barr (48) ‘If it was heavy, they’d bring it back to land’ lō Some speakers, perhaps those at the less educated end of the spectrum, used lō quite freely in condition I sentences, though the sentences where it occurred often also admitted of a condition II sense, e.g. lō ākil ḥašīš u gatt, mā yixālif, wi lā ākil ḥarām (1) ‘If I eat grass and animal feed, it doesn’t matter, just as long as I don’t eat things obtained unlawfully’ (or ‘If I were to eat grass . . . . it wouldn’t matter . . .’) lō bi-ǧǧi tdāgil fōb walad-ha dāk, tākil-k (1) ‘If you make as if to touch the shirt of that son of hers, she’ll eat you’ (or ‘If you were to make as if to . . . . she would . . . .’) lō bi-tgūl lih, yiˀbi, mā iǧi (17) ‘If you ask him, he refuses, he won’t come’ lō waḍaˁṭīn, yaˁni lēn allah ˁāṭ-inn-iš il-ˁāfya, mā tiftikirīn fi ḥābbat wilid wi lā ġēr-uh (28) ‘If you have given birth, I mean, if God has brought you through unscathed, you‘re not thinking about midwives or things of that sort’ amma/umma The conditional use of amma seems to be confined to the B dialects, and occurred only a handful of times: amma bi-təkˁid, yallah, xallū-na nəkˁid . . . bi-tamšūn, yallah imšu! (3) ‘If you’re going to stay, fine, let’s stay . . . (if ) you’re going to go, fine, go!’

191  ING 139.

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amma inta šēx wi lā iˁtarafō bik, ana yiˁtarifūn bī, faqīr ṭarrār?! (30) ‘If you’re a sheikh and they pay no attention to you, are they going to pay any attention to me, a poor beggar?!’ In the following example, the urban speaker ‘translates’ the clause introduced by umma with an equivalent which uses ida, for the benefit of his interlocutor (me) who he thinks may not understand it: umma hazz-ah, ida hazz-ah, nuˁṭi gadd it-tiyal (Manāma 2) ‘If he knocks them, if he knocks them, we give (him) the number of marbles (he hits)’ The conditional senses of amma/umma flow from their basic senses in BA of (a) presenting alternatives and (b) topicalising: in the first example, the sense is ‘as for staying, let’s stay . . . , as for going, let’s go’ and in the second ‘given you are a sheikh, . . .’. Asyndetic (no conditional particle) Type I conditional clauses with no particle occurred often with s-stem verbs, p-stem verbs, dummy verbs or no verbs, e.g. xadamt, akalt . . . mā xadamt. . . . (1) ‘If you work, you eat . . . if you don’t work . . .’ kālat mā tibġā-h, mā yaˁṭōn-ha iyyā-h, mā yiġuṣbūn-ha (32) ‘If she said she didn’t want (to marry) him, they didn’t give her to him, they didn’t force her’ mā yāzat lih, ṭallag-ha (Manāma 6) ‘If she didn’t suit him, he divorced her’ yiˁirfūn-iš, yimaššūn šuġl-iš (Manāma 10) ‘If they know you, they’ll deal with your case quickly’ hawa ṣalīb, nabbi l-bandar (Manāma 6) ‘If there was a strong wind, we made for the port’ mā ˁində-na ūdām, niṭlaˁ lēna əḥla nitrayyag bih (Manāma 5) ‘If we had no fresh meat or fish, we’d bring out some dried fish and breakfast on that’

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lākin əbˁīd, yiḥuṭṭūn lihim sayyārāt (Manāma 9) ‘But if it was far away, they provided cars for them’ 5.11.1.2 Condition II Condition II clauses describe actions in an imaginary or hypothetical world. If there is a finite verb in the conditional clause, it is usually s-stem. The particles most commonly used here are lō and (in) čān, and (B speakers only) lēn and its variants. Descriptions of hypothetical states do not need a finite verb ( for expressing existence kān is possible but not obligatory)—an adjective, an active or passive participle, or a dummy verb (e.g. hast) or prepositional phrase by itself is sufficient. lō With finite verb: lō kān ṭēr mā yigˁad ˁala šaǧara hna (5) ‘If he were a bird, he wouldn’t alight on a tree here’ lō kān hast msāˁad li z-zrāˁa, l-izrāˁa aḥsan min ǧimīˁ l-ašġāl (1) ‘If there were some assistance with farming, farming would be better than all other jobs’ lō ˁind-i damm rāḥaw šālō-h, riḥt əḥlāya! (1) ‘If I had any blood which they came and removed, I’d look like a dried fish!’ lō git lič mā tṣadgīn-ni! (A dialect, radio play) ‘If I were to tell you, you wouldn’t believe me!’ lō kān ənǧāhid, mā b-ygaṣrūn wiyyā-na (3) ‘If we made an effort, they wouldn’t leave us in the lurch’ yā bint al-aǧwād, lō laḥagtīn ˁala abū-y, ida baġa yiḍrub-ni, yidūr ičfāt-i čidi ˁala z-zāǧra (1) ‘Young lady, if you were old enough to have known my father, if he wanted to beat me, he used to tie me like this to the well-derrick’ lō mā rāḥ yōm, iǧǧi lih l-mawātir tāxd-ah . . . ilēn bāt ˁan-na šway, wāldat-ah mā tākil il-akil . . . ilēn mahal ˁan tēm-ah, mā tākil iz-zād (19)

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‘If one day he were to not go (to work), the (police) cars would come for him and take him away . . . and if he were to spend the night away from us, his mother wouldn’t eat . . . if he were late back from work, she wouldn’t touch her food’ In this last (BV) example, it can be seen from the three syntactically identical type II clauses that lō and ilēn are interchangeable as conditional particles in these particular dialects. Participles: lō šārib gahwa u titin mā yišrab, aḥsan (6) ‘If he drank coffee (= ‘if he were a coffee drinker’) but didn’t smoke, that would be better’ Though it is not obligatory, čān often functions (and only in this invariable form) as a marker of the main clause in type II conditional sentences, e.g. lō kunt zām in-nahār, čān əmwālim (17) ‘If I were on the day shift, it would be convenient’ It seems particularly common where the conditional clause itself lacks a full verb e.g. lō ḥast ma ḥlu, čān šift ihni ṭōl (29) ‘If we had sweet water, you’d see an abundance (of crops) here’ ana lo hast kifāḥ wiyyā-yi čān čift ṭarīqat-i ġēr (11) ‘If I had someone to help me, you’d see me doing things differently’ lō hast flūs, čān marratēn falāf (20) ‘If I had the money, (I’d go) twice or three times (sc on pilgrimage)’ lō ˁind-i is-sana kuwwa aštaġil, čān al-ḥīn mā tiǧi ihni u mā miš zirāˁa (1) ‘If this year I had the strength to work, you wouldn’t come here (and find) there’s no planting’ lō mā ˁind-ək baˁad hāda šway gatt, čān inta wēš wuǧūd-ək ihni? (5) ‘If you didn’t have this patch of lucerne grass, what would be the point of your being here?’

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With no verb: lō zād192 zirāˁat-i xarbāna, mā aski! (1) ‘So if my farm were useless, I wouldn’t be watering it!’ ana lō ˁala widd-i, xallēt-ha (28) ‘If it were up to me, I’d let her stay (at school)’ With a p-stem verb: Examples did occur of p-stem verbs in conditional clauses with lō where the proposition was clearly hypothetical, e.g. gāl “lō arūḥ al-ḥīn il-baḥrēn, əˁarf-uh” (6) ‘He said: “If I were to go back to Bahrain now I would (still) recognize it (= a farm abandoned years before)”’ lō yičūfūn waḥda fi š-šāriˁ, b-ikasrūn-ha il-yihāl al-ḥīn (Manāma 10) ‘If they saw one (= a female peddler) in the street, the kids these days would beat her up’ (sc but this is impossible as peddlers no longer exist). lō inta bi-ttābiˁ il-awāmir illi tiṭlaˁ min l-išyūx, ithīm fi l-barr! (3) ‘If you were to follow the instructions that emanate from the religious sheikhs, you’d end up wandering (destitute) in the desert!’ lō yadri ˁumēr, šagg ǧēb-ah (30) ‘If ˁUmēr knew, he would tear his shirt pocket’ (proverb) (in) čān The verb following (in) čan when used in type II conditional sentences is always p-stem, with or without b-: čān b-itsawwi bāṣal . . . (34) ‘Were you to grow onions . . .  čān b-tuˁṭī-ni ḥurma, ana wald ˁašra snīn! (7) ‘If you could find me a wife, I’d be (like) a boy of ten!’ 192  zād here is a BV variant of the particle ˁād ‘then, so’.

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čān iǧǧībūn lēna, čān zēn (19) ‘If you could bring me a few, that would be nice’ In examples such as the three above with a 2nd person addressee, the illocutionary force of the ‘hypothetical’ condition with čān + p-stem is often that of a polite request, piece of advice or wish, as is suggested by the translations. In the following two examples, the conditional clause has no explicit main clause, but rather an implied ‘that would be fine’ followed by an ‘or else . . .’ clause. This is a common way of issuing threats (similar to the CLA construction in a similar context with wa illā . . .) in čān bi-tāxiḏ lī ḥiǧra čiḏi . . . aw yamm-ək b-ayawwid arḏ̣-i u b-aylis! (A dialect, radio play) ‘Either you get me a (private) room like that one, or else I’ll stay put at your place, and remain there!’ (lit ‘If you . . . . (then fine) . . . otherwise . . . ) čān tuˁṭī-na falāfat danānīr, willa mā nǧi (6) ‘Either you give us three dinars or we won’t come!’ (lit ‘If you . . . (then fine) . . . otherwise . . .’) 5.11.1.3 Condition III Type III conditional sentences involve counterfactual propositions. Essentially, they work like type II, but refer to an unreal past. lō is always the conditional particle. As with type II, čān (invariable for number, gender) is commonly used to mark the main clause, but is not obligatory. In many cases, it is only realworld context (or history) that determines whether a conditional clause is to be interpreted as type II or III, e.g.: Type III (and could not be interpreted as type II): lō mā fāzˁo r-rūs, čān rāḥat brīṭanya u rāḥat faransa (Manāma 7) ‘If the Russians hadn’t come to their aid (sc in World War II), Britain would have collapsed and so would France’ (but the known fact is, the Russians did come to their aid). hāda zōǧ-i lō darēt bih, mā axadt-ah (28) ‘If I had known what this husband of mine was like, I wouldn’t have married him’ (Here, the fact is that the speaker had married this particular man)

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aḍunn mu ḍārr . . . lō ḍārr li l-ˁālam čān maḥḥad tamm (30) ‘I don’t think they (= insects) can be harmful . . . if they had been harmful to humans, no-one would have survived’ (Here, the fact is that humans did survive). lō kān qarīb,193 čān mā ačūf-ah (Manāma 9) ‘If he (= marriage suitor) had been a stranger, I wouldn’t have seen him’ (Here, the fact is the speaker married her cousin, so she did/had already seen him) lō ana fī ṯ-ṯōb, čān mitt (32) ‘If I had been wearing (lit ‘in’) the shirt, I’d have died’ (Here, the fact is that the speaker had not put on the shirt, and therefore had not died) lō tzawwaǧ u ǧāb banāt baˁad, čān itgūlīn “hādi sinnat ˁīsa” . . . ˁīsa mā tzawwaǧ! (3) ‘If he had married and had also had daughters, you would have been able to say ‘that was Jesus’s practice’ . . . but Jesus never married!’ In the examples below the context allowed both a ‘counterfactual’ (III) and a ‘hypothetical’ (II) interpretation, since the proposition applied equally to a condition which had not been fulfilled in the recent past, and to one still capable of fulfillment in a hypothetical future world: lō mazrūˁ astir, čān mu ashal lik tabnā-h? (5) ‘If it (= crop) had been planted in rows, wouldn’t it have been easier for you to weed it?’ (or ‘if the crop were to be . . . ., wouldn’t it be . . . ?’, where the speaker is interpreted as talking about a future crop rather than making a point about the current crop) lō šayfīn maraḍ, čān inǧi u kāfaḥnā-h (5) ‘If we’d seen any disease, we’d have come and combated it’ (or, ‘if we were to see . . . ., we would come . . . )

193  q < ġ, as is normal in the A dialects, so qarīb (sometimes voiced, Garīb) = ‘stranger’; ‘relative’ is garīb or ǧirīb via the historical change ǧ < g < q.

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lō rayḥīn il-bēt, čān aḥsan (3) ‘If we’d gone to the house (to drink coffee), it would’ve been better’ (or ‘if we were to go . . . , it would be better’—the sentence was said when it was still possible to ‘go to the house’) in-nihma mā əˁarf lēha—čān yarrabt-ak iyyā-ha (48) ‘I don’t know any sea shanties, (otherwise) I would have let you hear one’ (or ‘or I would let you . . .’) 5.11.2 Time clauses As with conditional particles, certain time particles are multi-functional and cover more than one type of time delimitation, e.g. lēn and its variants can mean both ‘when’ and ‘until’, as well as, as we have already noted, ‘if’, and are dealt with more than once below, under each attested function. Some of the variant forms of particles are community specific, e.g. the -in- infix (pronounced -im-) in compound conjunctions such as awwal-in-mā, ˁugub-in-mā, waqt-in-mā which are exclusively B forms. 5.11.2.1 Past point of time: ‘at the time when’ yōm In BA, yōm is used virtually exclusively with the s-stem in reference to past time, with the sense ‘(at the time/point) when’: yōm yibis, baggašt-ah (11) ‘When it dried out, I turned it (= the soil) over’ yōm ṣādaw ˁalēha wāḥid, kālaw “čēfəh baˁad yā flāna?! (7) ‘When they caught a man on top of her, they said ‘So-and-So, how can this be?!’ ḥakka yōm iḥbilt baˁad əb bičr-i, mā afham inn-i ḥāmil lō mi ḥāmil (3) ‘Even when I conceived my first child, I didn’t understand whether I was pregnant or not’ yōm kibartūn, min gāl lēkum ˁala maḥw il-ummiyya? (Manāma 5) ‘When you grew older, who told you about Illiteracy Eradication?’ ani yōm ˁarrasō-ni, baˁad-ha mā ṭalaˁat il-madrasa hnāk fi d-dēh (9) ‘When they married me off, the school in Dēh hadn’t yet been built’

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mā xamadat illa yōm akalat šarg, ġarb, yamīn, šamāl (33) ‘It (= fire) only died down when it had consumed east, west, south and north’ yōm yīna ihni, isibḥūn il-harīm ḥagg ˁayāl-hum (48) ‘When we arrived back here, the women were swimming in the sea, looking for their children’ If the main clause is verbless following a yōm clause, it is often introduced by the ‘presentative’ ila-, though it does not really have a strong presentative force here, being more in the nature of a marker of the main clause in a complex structure,194 e.g. u yōm yīt, ila-hu čidi (11) ‘And when I came back, it (= my farm) was in this state’ Clauses with yōm need not have a verb, as they are always understood as referring to the past: buxnug iḥna labasna yōm iḥna fatāya (16) ‘We wore a hooded bodice when we were girls’ yōm inti yāhil, šlōn kānat madrasat-kum? (48) ‘When you were a child, what was your school like?’ But note the following example, in which yōm equates to ‘if’ or ‘when’: ḥāḍir! ḥāḍir! yōm hād-inta, ḥāḍir! (41) ‘Yes, sir! Yes, sir! When/if it’s ( for) you, yes, sir!’ (said in a tone of joking sarcasm) min yōm is also used in the sense ‘at the time when’, and can also be used with or without a verb: min yōm maraḍaw awlād-iš fi wēš waddētīn-hum? (16) ‘When your children fell ill, how did you take them (to the doctor)?’

194  The same structure and function is noted in sentences introduced by yōm in Najdi (ING 142–143).

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min yōm inta ṣaġīr killiš . . . (19) ‘When you were very small . . .’ abu-yi ṭallag-ha min yōm ana ˁumr-i sanatēn (Manāma 5) ‘My father divorced her when I was two years old’ min yōm can also be followed by mā: min yōm mā ǧābo l-madrasa . . . (3) ‘The day they opened the school . . .’ yōm can be followed by inn + pronoun enclitic195 with no change in meaning: yōm inn-i ˁala rās lēlat-i . . . (28) ‘When I was on the eve of giving birth . . .’ yōm inn-ah xalaṣ u gaḏ̣a mā riḏ̣a . . . (Manāma 7) ‘When he had finished, and got what he wanted . . .’ yōm can also be followed by the relative pronoun illi: yōm illi zaffō-hum, zaffō-hum ˁala ǧulūf it-tamar (5) ‘When they celebrated their wedding, they did so (with the bride and groom sitting) on date sacks’ lamma/lamman These conjunctions were used relatively infrequently, but similarly to yōm, that is, to denote past time, e.g. lamma waḥda mā ḥafaḍat, tiḍrub-ha (3) ‘When a girl hadn’t memorized (the Qurˀānic verses), she (= the teacher) would beat her’ lamman waṣal, xānaw bih (33) ‘When he arrived, they betrayed him’ But unlike yōm, present time reference with lamma is also possible (see below, 5.11.2.2). 195  Also in Najdi: ING 144.

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waqt(-in-)mā This conjunction is also used for ‘(at the time in the past) when’. The variant form of it, waqt-in-mā, is one of a number of other structurally similar compound conjunctions, xalf(-in-)mā, ˁugb(-in-)mā ‘after’, awwal(-in-)mā ‘when first . . . ‘, mifl(-in-)mā ‘like’ (see below), in which a linker, -in- is inserted by some BV speakers between the nominal and the following mā, which is then assimilated to the following m. The source of this infix may be the adnominal linker (‘dialectal tanwīn’) found on the noun in indefinite noun-adjective phrases, but in another incarnation. Speakers of A dialects do not insert the -in- in these compound conjunctions. waqt-im-mā ana sāfart . . . (11) (B speaker) ‘When I left ( for abroad) . . .’ waqt mā allah rād, yōsal (48) (A speaker) ‘At the time when God decreed, it would arrive’ But it can also be used with p-stem verbs to give the timeless sense of ‘whenever’ (see 5.11.2.2). min This conjunction has several distinct uses. It can, like yōm, be used to describe point-of-time events in the past, or extended but still completed past-time events. The verb in such cases is always s-stem, e.g. min ṭāḥ lā kāl “āx” wi lā “ wēl” (19) ‘When he fell off (his motor bike), he didn’t utter a whimper or a moan’ min ṭāḥ raˀīs-him, fallat dawlat-him (3) ‘When their leader fell, their power ended’ u min haff ˁalēha, subḥān ir-rabb illi xammad-ha (33) ‘And when he blew on it, praise be to the Lord, who extinguished it (= fire)’ min mātat ˁammat-i, ṣārat wāhda dūn-ha, hāk-hi mawǧūda (28) ‘When my aunt died, someone came to replace her (as a mid-wife), and she’s still alive’ min kān abū-y ḥayy, mā xallā-na fi l-madrasa (Manāma 7) ‘While my father was alive, he didn’t allow us to go to school’

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But like waqt-(in-)mā, it can also be used to indicate present time (see 5.11.2.2). ila and lē We noted earlier that ila with the sense ‘if and when’ is used to introduce ‘open’ conditions. Along with its variant lē, it is particularly common in the speech of the A speakers of Muḥarrag (location 48) and al-Ḥidd (location 45)) in time clauses, e.g. lē ya l-ḥarr, əhummə bārdīn? (45) ‘When the hot weather came, were they (= your houses) cool?’ lē ya, tamm ṯalāṯt ayyām (48) ‘When he came back, he would stay for three days’ ila and lē are often used is semi-formulaic ‘framing’ time clauses describing regularly occurring events such as the call to prayer, the seasons, and times of day, when they occur with the verb adda ‘to come’, which is seemingly only used in this restricted set of collocations:196 ila addat iš-šita, bard, ndišš bi l-lēl (20) ‘When winter came, the cold weather, we’d put (to sea) at night’ lē adda l-məġarb . . . (45) ‘When evening came . . .’ lē adda lēlat il-ˁirs . . . (45) ‘When the wedding night came . . .’ ladda197 gaffalo min al-ġōṣ . . . (48) ‘When they finished the pearling season . . .’ lēn When used in a punctual time sense, lēn is virtually interchangeable with yōm. It is used like this by both A and B speakers but, as noted earlier, its use as a conditional particle is confined to the B speakers. 196  In this construction, the conjunctions used by A dialect speakers are always lē and ila; B speakers use lēn, but with the same verb adda. 197  ladda < lē adda, treated here as a conjunction, and followed by a verb, though normally followed by a noun, e.g. ladda ṣ-ṣibḥ . . . ‘when morning came . . .’

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The reference in lēn-clauses when used in a punctual time sense is always to the past, and there is a strong preference for the verb in its clause to be s-stem. If the time reference is past but the action is habitual, the p-stem is possible, both in the lēn-clause and the main clause, but especially in the latter, as in the final example of this section: lēn inzifō-h, ḥammalaw tanki u yābo lihum tiššāla, u ḥammalaw fīh š-šarˁ (48) ‘When they had bailed it out, they loaded the water tank and brought the lighter-vessel to them and transported the sails in it’ lēn tiǧahhaz min hāḏi, yābaw il-miyādīf (48) ‘When it (= the boat) had been kitted out with this, they brought the oars’ lēn waḥda marīḍa, wi čāfat-ha mā ṣārat zēna, əršimat-ha bi rašma fi rās-ha (Manāma 7) ‘When there was a girl ill, and she (= her mother) saw that she was unwell, she branded her on her head’ lēn rāḥat il-māya, nrūḥ nibni lēna byūt fi l-baḥar (Manāma 5) ‘When the tide went out, we’d go and build sand castles in the sea’ wēn trūḥīn lēn yīti tuladīn? (51) ‘Where would you go when you were about to give birth?’ 5.11.2.2 Present and future point of time Several of the particles used for past time reference are also encountered in time clauses with non-past time reference: lamma tšibb u tiṭlaˁ ˁād lamma yikmil ha-l-ǧisir il-ġarbi (3) ‘It (= the fire) will start and spread when that western bridge is completed’ waqt(-in-)mā As well as point-of-time in the past, wakt(-in-)mā can be used for general, timeless statements, or those describing habits, which could refer to the present or the past, depending on context. The verb is always p-stem in such cases:

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wakt-im-mā tibbēn ǧilla willa ǧillatēn, aǧīb liš (28) ‘When(ever) you want a sack or two (of dates), I’ll bring you a couple’ (or ‘When(ever) you wanted . . . I brought you . . .’) waqt-im-mā yibġa, yiksim lēla ˁind hādi lēla ˁind hādi (28) ‘When he wants to, he divides (his time up, spending) one night with this (wife) and one night with that one’ (or ‘When(ever) he wanted to . . . he divided . . .’) min A frequent use of min is also, like wakt(-in-)mā, with p-stem verbs, when it also has the sense of ‘when/whenever’, i.e. typically describing habitual actions. The verb in the main clause in such cases is either a p-stem verb or a participle, and the sense can again be present, e.g. bass min asawwi lēhum xyūṭ, bass, mā yiṭabbūn (6) ‘But when I make nets for them, that’s it, they (= pigeons) don’t land’ min yiˁarsūn, yilabsūn malāfˁa (16) ‘(From the time) when they get married, they wear face-veils’ min itḥūl is-sana, ǧāy yirkuḍ (3) ‘As soon as it’s the New Year, he comes running (sc to pay the charitable ‘fifth’)’ In all of the above sentences, where the verbs in both the time clause and the main clause are p-stem, the translation given reflects the context in which they were actually uttered; but none of them, out of context, have a default time reference. The first for example, could equally well mean ‘whenever I made nets for them, they didn’t land’. However, in the following example, the past time reference was unambiguously signaled by the speaker’s use of s-stem verbs in the main clause only: min tismaˁ ḥissa min il-bāb, itlaḥḥafat bi d-daffa u tġamġamat (Manāma 7) ‘When(ever) she heard the noise of the door (opening), she wrapped herself in her mantle and hid herself’ If, however, as is perfectly possible, the verbs in the main clause of this utterance were changed to the p-stem titlaḥḥaf and titġamġam, the sentence would,

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out of context, still bear either a past time or a present time interpretation. Only the narrative or real-world context of the utterance determines which is intended in such cases. ila and lē ila and lē can also be used in the sense ‘(if and) when’ in reference to present time, the interpretation again depending on speech context: ila xalaṣat in-naxla, wēš itsawwi? (5) ‘When the date season is finished, what will you do?’ This sentence was said to a farmer in reference to the here-and-now, but in another context, for example, in conversation with a retiree, it could equally well be used to mean ‘when the date season was over, what did you do?’ The same thing applies to: lē iṭṭubb u mā miš xyūṭ, yāklūn il-ḥabb kill-əh u yirūḥūn (6) ‘When they land and there are no nets, they (= pigeons) eat the seed and fly off’ 5.11.2.3 Point of time preceding = ‘before’ gabil mā, gabil lā With these conjunctions, the verb in the time clause is p-stem, even if the time reference is past and clearly signaled as such by an s-stem verb or an ap in the main clause, e.g. gabil lā iyi bi yōmēn ṯalāṯa, tḥannēna (45) ‘Two or three days before he came back, I would paint myself with henna’ čam ṣbay ˁarafti gabil lā təˁarfīn-ni? (48) ‘How many boys did you get to know before you got to know me?’ ana gāyil lak gabil lā aḥawwil (48) ‘I told you before I went down (to the sea-bed)’ tilifizyūn kabil mā yimūt mištir-inn-ah (19) ‘He had bought a television before he died’ mā yat illa gabil mā ayi ana bi arbaˁat ayyām (11) ‘It came only four days before I returned’

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(bi)dūn mā yisūg bidūn mā yimdī-h yiḍrub (5) ‘It (= plant) bolts without (= before) having had the time to get established’ 5.11.2.4 Point of time following = ‘after’ ˁugub(-in-)mā, xalf(-in-)mā, baˁad(-in-)mā Where the actions described are habitual, the verb in the time clause is usually p-stem, regardless of the time reference. ˁugubmā yiktib lih ṣaṭir, yigūl lih “itḥaffaḏ̣-ah!” (Manāma 2) ‘After he wrote a line for him, he’d say to him “Memorize it!” ˁukub-im-mā tikarrī-na, nrūḥ il-bēt (32) ‘After she heard us read, we would go home’ baˁad-im-mā nrūḥ l-əˁyūn, nəġsil, nsawwi ḥawāyiǧ-na (33) ‘After we went to the wells (to get water), we’d do the washing, we’d do our chores’ But ‘habitual’ examples with s-stem verbs did occur: arūḥ fi l-mētam xalfmā ṣallēt (10) ‘I go to the funeral house after I have prayed’ Where the action is framed as point-in-time, the verb sequence is s-stem in both the time clause and the main clause, e.g. from a narrative: ˁugubmā tigahwaw, gāl in-nōxaḏa . . . (48) ‘After they had had coffee, the captain said . . .’ 5.11.2.5 During the first part of a period = ‘when first . . .’ awwal(-in-)mā awwalmā dār it-tilifizyūn, yitġaššōn ˁann-əh! (51) ‘When TV first came in, they used to veil themselves from it (sc when watching it)!’ awwal-im-mā xadt-ah, šēṭān! (28) ‘When I first married him, he was awful (to me)’

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5.11.2.6 Sequence = ‘as soon as’, ‘no sooner than’, ‘ever since’ min As well as its vaguer sense of ‘at the time when’, min can have the sense ‘from the very moment when (implied: ‘and continuing to the time of speaking’)’, ‘ever since’: walad-i min ˁarras xaṣṣ nafs-ah bass (1) ‘Ever since he got married, my son has only been concerned with himself’ mā Some speakers also use mā by itself for this function, but it may be an abbreviated version of the mā. . . . illa construction (which follows): mā čāfō-ha, killə-hum ištāgo lēha (Manāma 1) ‘As soon as they saw her, they all desired her’ mā gabaḍ-ha, waˁˁa xwān-ah (Manāma 1) ‘The moment he caught her, he woke his brothers up’ mā yičūf-ək, yizarrig ˁalēk (Manāma 5) ‘As soon as it (= shark) sees you, it’ll come up on you’ mā. . . . illa and lā . . . illa This construction has a number of distinct time-related senses involving ‘immediate sequence’: (a) It gives a sense of one action following immediately on another, and in this sense is very frequently used with the verb ǧa/ya ‘to return’: mā yīt-ah yōm fāni illa ašūf baḥar (11) ‘As soon as I came back to it the following day, I saw there was a flood’ mā ǧīna u ǧābat ˁallām hādāk ir-rubˁatēn ir-rubyān, illa mā miš imminnah šay! (16) ‘No sooner had we returned and ‘Allām brought those two rubˁas of prawns, than (we found that) there were none left!’ wi lā ǧīt baˁad illa hādāk il-ǧinnī, illa hu mārr-in-ni198! (19) ‘No sooner did I return than this little nuisance annoys me!’ 198  From the verb marr ‘to make bitter, annoy’.

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wi lā ǧīt illa mā miš aḥad (41) ‘When I got back, there was no-one there’ (b) It can also have the related sense ‘by the time that . . .’. This interpretation applies when the event or state described by the verb or participle following illa must have begun before the event described by the main verb, i.e. the two events were not sequential, e.g. mā addat l-əḍḥēwa illa hu mčakkar ˁawāyiz (5) ‘By the time mid-morning came, (the room) was full to bursting with things’ mā iyūn nuṣṣ il-lēl illa kil wāḥid šaḥan lih xēša (45) ‘By the time they returned home at midnight, everyone had filled up his sack’ u lā tyī il-muġarb illa š-ḥalu-ha bārdīn! (Manāma 6) ‘By the time you got home in the evening, (you’d find that) they (= water pots) were lovely and cold!’ mā yāxid ləh subūˁ, subūˁēn illa hu fazz (34) ‘It wouldn’t be more than a week or two before it (= the crop) had shot up’ (c) In narratives, and with verbs of perception like simaˁ, šāf, liga, waˁa, the sense of mā . . . illa and lā . . . illa is that something had suddenly happened, which foregrounds the event so described, rather like the use of the English expression ‘the next thing I/he/she knew, . . .’. The verb of perception and the verb in the main clause can be either s-stem or p-stem, seemingly interchangeably, even though such constructions are invariably used to describe past experiences, e.g. mā nšūf illa l-mallāč ǧāy u yimlič ˁalēna u yirūḥ (28) ‘All of sudden the betrothing sheikh came, betrothed us and left’ wa lā ašūf illa kabaḍ-ni (28) ‘The next thing I knew, he had grabbed hold of me’ wi lā šīfna illa ruˁāt in-nəˁēm kil wāḥid yitsāsar wiyya l-fāni (33) ‘All of a sudden, the people from Nuˁēm started whispering to one another’

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wa lā simaˁt illa l-čalb ˁind-ah wakˁa (41) ‘Then the dog suddenly starting barking’ mā tilga illa irkubaw hāḏēla ṯalāṯīn il-ġēṣ illi fi l-baḥar u daššaw nās maḥall-hum (48) ‘Then, in no time, the thirty divers that were in the sea were back up and others had gone down to take their place’ mā waˁēt illa waḥda əmbaṭla l-bāb u dāšša (Manāma 10) ‘The next thing I knew, a girl had opened the door and come in’ mā tūˁa illa tikāmalaw fagāra (48) ‘The next thing you knew, some poor people had gathered together’ u lā wtaˁu199 illa ayādī-hum mḥannaya (Manāma 1) ‘And before they knew it, their hands were covered in henna!’ bass bass, a particle which has multiple uses in BA as in other dialects, can be used as a conjunction with meanings covering the conditional ‘if’ and temporal ‘when’ areas of meaning. A few examples were recorded in BV usage from Sitra (location 41): bass aḥbal, b-aˁṭī-š ziyāra (41) ‘If and when I get pregnant, I’ll pay for a visit (to the Shīˁī shrines) for you’ kilt: “bass iǧǧi maryam, b-itḥibb-ha (41) ‘I said: “If and when Maryam comes, she’ll kiss her”’ But the conditional clauses in these sentences could equally well be translated as ‘as soon as . . .’, ‘the moment that . . .’. The meaning of bass (basic meaning ‘only’) here is not quite the same as ida or ila in that bass conveys an additional sense of the immediacy of what would happen if the condition is fulfilled. So ‘the moment I get pregnant, I’ll pay . . .’/‘as soon as Maryam comes . . .’ are equally possible as translations. A clear example of the temporal use of bass is:

199  Pattern VIII of w-ˁ-y, in which, in the BA dialects, the w does not assimilate to the t. There is no Pattern VIII of this verb in CLA (see 4.1.2.7).

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bass yiṣīr id-darz, mā tigdar tūṭi min ha-ṣ-ṣōb min hīǧ u min kaṣba u ˁitriš u šwēl (34) ‘As soon as it’s spring, you won’t be able to set foot over here because of all the thorn bushes, reeds, long grass and weeds’ buṭa mā The verb buṭa ‘to be late’ (cf CLA baṭuˀa ‘to be slow, take a long time’) has produced in BA a conjunction buṭa mā which has the meaning ‘as soon as’. It was only encountered once in one B village: lākinn-əh mi šaġla waḥda ˁind-i fi masˀalat id-dūlāb . . . il-ḥazza agdar asawwi, lākin buṭa mā tikūm in-naxla tāli, mā agdar (34) ‘But I haven’t just got one job on the farm . . . at the moment I can do (it all), but as soon as the palm trees start growing, I can’t’ 5.11.2.7 Duration = ‘as long as’ im dām/mā dām/min dām/dām mā dām and its variants have a wide range of meanings which have extended well beyond the original ‘as long as’ temporal sense, and include ‘if’, ‘provided that’, ‘given that’, and even ‘because’ (in the same way that ‘as long as’ does in English): (a) temporal usage: im dām hi tištaˁil, maḥḥad yidišš bēt-ah (33) ‘As long as it (the fire) was burning, no one could enter their house’ min dām iḥna fatāya, mistānsīn (16) ‘All the time we were girls, we were happy’ dām fīh mayyit, yamši bi l-ˁadāl (48) ‘All the time there was a dead man on board, he (= the captain) would go slowly’ As a conjugable verb, mā dām can have the sense of ‘to not elapse’, e.g. mā dāmat sanat il-fānya illa ˁind-ha fintēn, banāt fintēn (Manāma 1) ‘Hardly had the second year (of her marriage) ended than (= ‘by the end of her second year of marriage’) she had two, two daughters’

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(b) extended, non-temporal usage: mā dām ḥmār-i ˁind-i, mā atˁab (41) ‘Provided I have my donkey with me, I don’t get tired’ mā dām hu milač, xalāṣ? (51) ‘Provided that he (= the imam) has betrothed (them), is it alright (for them to go out together)?’ mā dām šāyil bēt rabb-ik, yubba, ma yimraḍ (Manāma 4) ‘Given that he is carrying the House of God (on his back), my son, he won’t fall ill’ mā dām il-bēt ˁaylt-əh ifnaˁšar, falāftaˁšar nafar, iǧazzī-ni xamsīn?! (14) ‘Seeing that there are twelve, thirteen people in the family, is fifty (rupees) going to be enough for me (to feed them) ?!’ (= ‘given the fact that that . . .’) 5.11.2.8 Period before = ‘until’ lēn/lēmā/ilēn mā/ilēn-im-mā/l-ilˀēn (mā) With the exception of lēn, the variants listed are restricted to the B dialects; l-ilˀēn (mā) seems to be even further restricted to Manāma 5, one of that city’s exclusively B neighbourhoods. wāḥid miltamm fi bēt-ah, halāč lēn māt (33) ‘One person would stay stuck in his house, starving until he died’ mā yāxid lih iṯnaˁšar yōm lēn inta kālˁ-inn-ah (14) ‘It won’t be twelve days until you’re pulling it up’ (sc the crop, because it is ready) yiṭiggūn-ah lēn yihalk (48) ‘They would beat him until he died’ mā hast madrasa wi lā šay fī ˁāli lēmā ǧat il-madrasa (3) ‘There was no school or anything in ˁĀlī until the (present) school came’ bīˁ u ištar ilēn-im-mā tistuwi ˁind-ək bēzāt! (7) ‘Sell and buy until you get some money together!’ fārakat-ha s-saˁāda šay-in fa šay-in ilēn mā kaffaḍat čill il-umma (5) ‘Good fortune deserted her little by little until the whole clan died out’

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. . . l-ilˀēn ṣirt ˁind-i ṯalāṯtaˁšər sana (Manāma 5) ‘. . . until I was thirteen years old’ yixallōn-ah lī l-ilˀēn mā aǧi (Manāma 5) ‘They used to leave it for me until I got home’ 5.11.2.9 Clauses of attendant circumstance (ḥāl) Unlike in some other Arabic dialects such as Cairene, clauses of ‘attendant circumstance’ (ḥāl) in BA do not normally precede main clauses. In BA, they are commonly used to indicate the time frame within which the action or the state described in the main clause is located, and are often equivalent to English ‘while’: yinham in-nahhām u hummə sāmtīn (48) ‘The singer would sing while they were tightening (the rigging of the sails)’ widd-na niˁars-ah u ḥna mawǧūdīn (19) ‘We want to get him married off while we are still alive’ harab abū-y u baˁad-na ǧihhāl (6) ‘My father fled (from Bahrain) while we were still children’ tiġammiḍ u tisbaḥ? (Manāma 4) ‘Did you close your eyes while you were swimming?’ aski u ākil (1) ‘I water (the crop) while I’m eating’ iṣ-ṣarṣur yinišš fī wēh-ik u inta tāxiḏ tamra (48) ‘Cockroaches would fly up into your face while you were eating a date’ š-tilbas wa hiyya tamši fi š-šāriˁ? (Manāma 7) ‘What was she wearing as she walked down the street?’ Very occasional examples of pre-posed ḥāl clauses did occur: ṭūl il-waqt u əhummə yamšūn, iyabbibūn u ilōlšūn (Manāma 9) ‘All the time they were walking along, they ululated and cried out joyfully’

CHAPTER 6

Style in Spoken Discourse This chapter focuses on linguistic features of oral text which are convention- or rule-governed but not usually thought of as part of grammar. The two main types are: (a) forms of address and other routines by which the speaker ‘involves’ the listener(s) in the events or issues s/he is talking about; and (b) sentential and phrasal patterning which involves forms of syntactic repetition and/or morphological ‘echo’ (ǧinās). These features are typically encountered in the speech of illiterate speakers or those who have had little acquaintance with literate culture. Though they are most commonly encountered in stylised and semi-formulaic oral performance, such as historical narratives, stories, anecdotes and folk-tales, they are by no means confined to them, and often crop up in everyday extempore speech. Much of the material on which this study is based consisted of unplanned conversations studded with accounts of real-life incidents, or which described the daily round of life as it was in Bahrain in the pre-oil era—the domestic routine, marriage, work, childhood, religious festivals, communal strife and so on. Often, these verbal routines entail the manipulation of clause and phrase structure to create drama, to build up narrative tension, or to paint a vivid verbal picture for the listener. Some of these techniques have been found in the same or a similar form in other Arab speech communities far from eastern Arabia, but all generally bedouin in origin. The most exhaustive account of them is to be found in Roni Henkin’s work on Palestinian women’s stories from the Negev;1 in Bruce Ingham’s,2 and Saad Sowayan’s3 works on central Arabian tribal narrative; but also in Heikki Palva’s work4 on what he terms ‘artistic colloquial Arabic’ in the bedouin culture of northern Jordan, and Micheline Galley’s5 study of women’s oral tales from the town of Al-Aṣnām in far-away northern Algeria (whose dialect is also basically bedouin in typology), which all show several stylistic features identical to those described here.

1  HENK; HENK2. 2  SAL. 3  SOW. 4  PAL. 5  GAL.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004302631_007

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Involving the Listener/ Interlocutor

6.1.1 The 2sng ethic dative A frequently employed way of ‘involving’ the listener is by using the so-called ‘ethic’ dative, in which the listener is referred to as the (usually indirect) object of a verb or as its prepositional complement even though he/she took no part in the action. The first three examples below are among many in a description given by an elderly ex-diver of everyday life at sea during the pearl-diving season. The ethic dative is set in boldface in the Arabic, but does not appear in the English translation: yawwō-k ḥagg is-srīdān (48) ‘They came to get the firebox’ gāmaw lik yiṭiggūn ˁalēh kaff (48) ‘They would start rhythmically clapping as they did that’ gāmaw lik yišabšibūn, is-sēb yišabšib (48) ‘They started working really hard, the puller would work really hard’ In these statements, the speaker’s 2msng pronoun seems to be referring not just to himself, who witnessed the events he is describing, but also to the listener, who did not.6 The objective seems to be to make the listener imagine he was there. This is even clearer in the next example, which describes a scene at which even the speaker himself cannot have been present, as it happened, he tells us, when he was around four years old: sīda rāḥat l-əbdayyaˁ u ǧā-k il-gēš il-xamīs (3) ‘She went straight to Budayyaˁ, and then the army came to (Sūq) al-Khamīs’ He says, literally, ‘the army came to you’.7 The next example, in which a woman describes the customs of a traditional Ramadan as she remembers it from her childhood, works similarly. She is talking here from the women’s perspective: 6  This is similar to some uses of ‘you’ in spoken English, as in ‘When I was a student in Oxford, beggars would come up to you and ask you for money’, where ‘you’ refers generically to ‘anybody in that situation’ and thereby performs a similarly inclusive function for the listener. 7  SOW 52–55 gives many examples of this type of usage for central Arabian oral narrative, which he explains as ‘courtesy to the listener’ and which very often occurs with the verb ǧa/

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it was they who did the cooking, and the female children of the time, like herself, who helped. The interlocutor (and imagined participant) was female, and hence is referred to by lič rather than lik: yiḥuṭṭūn lič ǧidir (Manāma 10) ‘They would bring out a cooking pot’ 6.1.2 The ‘reflexive’ ethic dative A formally similar but functionally distinct use of the ethic dative is what might be termed the ‘reflexive ethic dative’. In contrast to the ‘ethic’ use of the 2sng pronoun, in which the verb which it complements is normally 3rd person, in this case the ethic dative pronoun is always the same person and number as the subject of the verb of which it is predicated and to which it refers, i.e. it is in effect a reflexive pronoun. This type of usage is very common in the speech of the uneducated.8 Typical examples: asawwi lī yumkin sabˁ isnīn (44) ‘I was perhaps seven years old’ nišrab lēna ḥalīb (16) ‘We would drink a little milk’ mā nsawwi lēna rīš wēš kufur! (Manāma 1) ‘We wouldn’t let our hair grow really long’ kabaḍt lik ˁašra rubbiyāt, itgūl ana b-arūḥ, b-aġdi, bas čidi, mā yiwālim! (20) ‘If you get a bit of cash (lit ‘ten rupees’) together and then say “I’m going, I’m off (on pilgrimage)”, just like that—that’s not right!’ ˁala l-aqall garēti liš čam min giriyya (48) ‘At least you’ve (learnt to) read a little bit’ sawwētu lēkum əmkadda min il-ḥamām! (6) ‘You’ve made yourself a nice little earner from those pigeons!’ yiǧi ‘to come’. Ingham, in SAL 22–23 notes similar examples in his N Arabian material, and see PAL 132 for examples from N. Jordan. 8  It is rather similar to the colloquial British English use of ordinary pronouns as reflexives in ‘I got me a car’, ‘He made him a cup of tea’, ‘We had us a smoke’ rather than ‘I got myself . . .’ ‘He made himself . . .’ etc.

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hāda mū zēn—yabġi lih ḍarb (5) ‘He’s no good—he needs a thrashing’ mākla lēha iǧi arbaˁa bēn adawāt-ha (17) ‘It (= water-pump) has cost (lit ‘eaten for itself’) about four (thousand) with its accessories’ tammaw lihum arbaˁa, xamsa sābīˁ skūt (44) ‘They kept quiet for four or five weeks’ It is apparent from these examples that the sense of the pronominal phrase is basically reflexive-benefactive, ‘for myself/ yourself/ itself, etc.’, though this sense is often rather attenuated and the pronominal phrase can in all cases be omitted with no loss of meaning (as is also the case with the 2nd person ethic dative). 6.1.3 Bipolar address forms Address forms between family members follow the normal pattern, e.g. (yā) abū-y ‘dad’, (yā) umm-i ‘mum’, (yā) wild-i/ yā əwlēd-i ‘son/ little son’, (yā) bint-i ‘daughter’, (yā) ˁamm-i ‘(paternal) uncle’, yā xāl-i ‘(maternal) uncle’, etc. All of these forms can also be used metaphorically, i.e. when there is no kinship relation between the speakers, and the address form is then used in solidary or hypocoristic reference to an interlocutor. Alongside these there is also a set of so-called ‘bi-polar’ address forms, whose use is a feature of ‘traditional’ speech-styles in BA and the Gulf dialects more generally.9 The function of these address forms is basically to encode the age and status relations which exist between the interlocutors, literal or metaphorical, and they are especially common, as we shall see below, in certain types of conversational ‘move’: in ‘softening’ the correction of a mistake, in mild criticism or rebuke, or in polite chivying, for example. The simplest set of these, the so-called ‘monolexic’10 forms, are used in addressing one’s father or mother, or, metaphorically, any person old enough to be one’s father or mother. The key point, however, is that these address forms are bi-directional, i.e. they are also employed by the father/mother (or by 9   A very similar system of rules of address to that described here is described in HENK2 187–217 for the bedouin dialects of the Negev. 10  This term is borrowed from YASS, in which a system of address forms similar to that described here for Bahrain is described for Kuwait. Some elements of the system were also very briefly noted for Kuwait in EADS 176, 240.

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a ‘metaphorical’ one) to address the child (or person of a similar age to one’s child). These forms are: Speaker/addressee daughter/ son (or age-inferior person) daughter / son (or age-inferior person)

↔ ↔

Speaker/addressee father (or age-superior man) mother (or age-superior woman)

Address form yubba or yā yubba yumma or yā yumma

The basic system is thus that (yā) yubba is used by and to any age-superior male, including father, and (yā) yumma is used by and to any age-superior female, including mother. But there are further extensions to the range of metaphorical usage: (yā) yubba can also be used instead of (yā) yumma by an age-superior woman to younger woman, and a husband can use it to his wife (and vice versa). Here are some illustrative examples.

Actual kin relationships

It is to be noted that there is a certain amount of ‘blurring’ of the lines in the use of bi-polar address forms within kin relationships, which arguably puts some of them in the ‘metaphorical’ category. So, in one of the examples below, a niece (mother’s sister’s daughter) addresses her aunt as yumma, since the aunt occupies a familial role similar to her mother’s via-a-vis the niece; in another, a maternal uncle addresses his nephew as yubba. Age-inferior to age-superior: (a) son to father: lākin yā yubba abbi afham š-fī-ha, wi ēš fi xāṭir-ha (radio play) ‘But, dad, I want to understand what’s wrong with her, what’s on her mind’ (insisting that he needs to know, despite his father’s advice discouraging his questions) (b) son to mother: yā yumma¸ š-ha-l-kalām illi tigūlīn-ah? (radio play) ‘Mum, what is it that you are saying, exactly?’ (polite questioning of what had seemed to him a nonsensical remark)

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(c) daughter to mother: š-lēh, yumma? (45) ‘Why, mum?’ (asking for an explanation of why something unpleasant had to be done) (d) niece to her aunt: gūli lī ˁala tiswāt-ah, yumma (48) ‘Tell me how it was made, auntie’ (recognising the authority of the older woman) Age-superior to age-inferior: (a) father to son: šlōn-ik yā yubba wiyya š-šuġil? (radio play) ‘How is your job going, son?’ (polite, neutral enquiry) (b) mother to son: u ana, yā yumma, mā agdir aṣbir ˁan xawāt-ik u ˁiyāl-hum (radio play) ‘And I, son, haven’t the patience to wait for your sisters and their children to come’ (explaining why the son’s assumption that she would be pleased was wrong) (c) mother to her grown-up daughter: wallah¸ yumma, inrūḥ inrawwi min il-čōčab (45) ‘By God, daughter, we would go and get our drinking water from a (submarine) fresh-water spring’ (polite explanation to someone ignorant of how things were in a previous generation) (d) mother to her five-year-old daughter: yā umēma, lā ttiˁbīn! šawwi čiḏi, lā? yawwidi čidi uḏūn-ič! (Manāma 8) ‘Little darling, don’t worry! Do this, OK? Hold your ears like this! (hypocoristic diminutive form of yā yumma)

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(e) maternal uncle to his nephew: šinhu yimar)ḏ-ah?! mā dām šāyil bēt rabb-ik, yubba, mā yimra)ḏ! (Manāma 7) ‘What would make him fall ill?! If he’s carrying the Lord’s house on his back, sonny, he won’t fall ill!’ (correcting a wrong assumption)

Metaphorical relationships

Note that when address forms are used metaphorically, translating them is next to impossible. The translations given are therefore only intended to conjure up the same kind of tone in English as is conveyed by the Arabic term in Arabic, as far as this is possible. Age-superior to age-inferior: (a) woman Qur’ān school teacher to a girl pupil: d-rūḥi yumma, trayyagay! (11) ‘Off you go, my child, and have your breakfast!’ (the teacher was surprised to discover that the pupil addressed had had no breakfast before coming to school, and took pity on her) (b) woman to a young girl (in a folk-tale): kālat “intīn, yumma, minhi?” (5) ‘She said, “Who, my little one, are you?”’ (encouraging a shy child to speak up; the irony was that the child turned out later in the story to be her real daughter) (c) older man to younger man (both farmers): git “lā yubba, il-badar muhu min čīs-kum” (6) ‘I said, “No, sonny, the seeds won’t be at your expense”’ (correcting a wrong assumption) (d) older woman (pupil at a literacy centre) to younger woman (her teacher): al-ḥīn lā, yubba, al-ḥīn ġēr (51) ‘These days, no, my dear, these days things are different’ (speaking as a person with more experience (even if less education) than the questioner)

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Age-inferior to age-superior: (a) younger man to older man: kāl “taˁāl yubba! daššiš hādēlāk fi l-maxāzin!” (5) ‘He said, ‘Come on, old chap (= a porter), put these (sacks) inside the store’ (polite chivvying of an age superior but a social inferior) yā yubba gūm! (radio play) ‘Come on, my old mate, get to your feet!’ (the addressee had fainted with shock)

Other examples of bi-polar usage

A few examples of the use of the system in other types of relationship were recorded: (a) husband to wife: Here, the husband uses a form which works in the same way as (yā) yubba (i.e. in which he is the metaphorically ‘senior’), but in which the name of the couple’s eldest son, Hasan, is substituted for yubba. This same address form, yā abu ḥasan, is also given back by the wife to the husband, as is, as we saw earlier, the monolexic form ( yā) yubba: allah yihaddī-č yā abu ḥasan! (radio play) ‘Don’t be so silly, my dear!’ (lit: ‘may God guide you, o father of Ḥasan!’) (b) older man (elderly farmer) to non-Arab younger man (myself ): The form yābū-y (lit ‘o my father’), an alternative to (yā) yubba, is also bi-polar, e.g. igdaˁ, yābū-y! 11 ‘Eat, my son!’ (encouraging and endearing) In addition to these ‘monolexic’ forms, and in some cases as alternatives to them, there are also address forms which consist of the prefix yā- followed by a noun which encodes the (kin-) relation of the speaker to the interlocutor 11  The farmer said this to me when he noticed that I was not eating the dates he had served during the course of a farm visit.

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( father, mother, brother, sister), and, via a suffixed 2nd person pronoun attached to it, the addressee. These forms, as we shall see, are also used metaphorically, and in contexts similar to those of the monolexic forms. The forms for Bahrain are in the chart below. Unlike the monolexic items, the ‘father’ and ‘mother’ address forms in this system are mono-directional, being given by the father/mother/age superior to the son/daughter/age inferior but not vice-versa. Instead, the younger speaker may give back the monolexic forms yubba and yumma. The difference between this asymmetrical system and the bi-directional use of monolexic yubba and yumma is that the former system makes explicit superior-inferior power relationships, whether between actual kin or when used metaphorically. Mono-directional Speaker father/ elder male father/ elder male father/ elder male mother/ elder female mother/ elder female mother/ elder female

Addressee his daughter/ a younger female his son/ a younger male his children/ younger people her daughter/ a younger woman her son/ a younger male her children/ younger people

yā-bū-č yā-bū-k yā-bū-kum yumm-ič (< yā-umm-ič) yumm-ik (< yā-umm-ik) yumm-kum (< yā-umm-kum)

However, symmetrical usage occurs between siblings and metaphorical siblings such as perceived age-peers:12 Bi-directional brother/ age equal brother sister/ age equal sister

↔ ↔ ↔ ↔

brother/ age equal sister sister/ age equal brother

yā-xū-k/ yā xwayy-ik not recorded13 yā-xt-ič/ yā xwayt-ič not recorded

12   The feminine forms of these bi-directional forms do not, apparently, occur in Kuwait (see YASS 298–299). Occasional examples of yā-xū-k have been recorded in northern Jordan, e.g. in colloquial poetry (HOL & ABU1 149 n.110). 13   Owing to the circumstances of data collection, the brother-sister and sister-brother pairings are not populated in the chart above, but that does not mean that address forms for them do not exist.

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Examples:

Kin relationships

(a) father to son: – ˁaṭ-ni finyāl gahwa, yā-bū-k! (radio play) – laḥḏ) a yubba – ‘Give me a cup of coffee, son! – Just a moment, Dad’ (b) mother to son: – lā, yumm-ik, mā arūḥ yaˁni mā arūḥ, mā atiˁālaǧ! (radio play) – warā-h yā yumma ˁād? – ‘No, son, (when I say) “I’m not going” I mean “I’m not going”—I’m not going for treatment! – Why not, mum, for goodness’ sake?’ (c) mother to daughter: ḥatta l-iṣyāḥ aṣīḥ, yumm-ič! (45) ‘I even used to break down in tears, my daughter!’ (d) brother to brother: wallah, yā-xū-k, inna zōǧt-i mā tirḏ) a asawwi šay fi l-bēt (radio play) ‘By God, my brother, my wife won’t let me go anything in the house’ Metaphorical (a) older man to younger man: gilt “lā, yā-bū-k, ana mā fīni ḍrūra (Manāma 7) ‘I said, no, young man, I am not possessed by jinn’ (b) older woman to younger woman: aḥsan al-ḥīn, yumm-ič! (51) ‘(Life’s) better now, my dear’

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(c) woman to her foundling children (in a folk-tale): gālat “wallah ṣaḥīḥ, yumm-kum, ṣaḥīḥ ana lāgiṭat-in-kum (5) ‘She said, “By God, it’s true, my darlings, it’s true that I found you” ’

Between age equals

(a) man to man: This was very common in the B community, particularly in BV communities: il-marād kallafnā-k, yā-xū-k, ismaḥ li (19) ‘What I asked for caused you trouble, brother, I’m sorry’ iṣbir, yā-xū-k, il-wāḥid mā yikūm nōba waḥda! (41) ‘Be patient, brother, no-one succeeds straightaway!’ lā, ˁaǧūz tiktil-ni yā-xū-k! (7) ‘No, (if I were to marry one), an old woman would kill me, brother!’ faḍīl mā ˁind-na yā-xū-k (1) ‘I don’t have any to spare, brother’ wallah, yā xwayy-ik, mā gassamt is-samač (16) ‘By God, little brother, I never distributed the fish’ badaˀt ḥayāt-i, yā xwayy-ik, fi l-arbaˁīnāt (radio interview) ‘I began my life, little brother, in the 1940s’ (b) woman to woman: – yallah bīna yā-xt-ič, imšay daffat-ič! (45) – la tistaˁylay yā-xt-ič, š-daˁwa ˁād?! – ‘Come on, sister, get a move on! – Don’t be in such a hurry, sister, what need is there?!’ wi l-bint, yā xwayt-ič, isim-ha nūra (45) ‘And the girl, little sister, was called Nura’ Note that the diminutives yā xwayy-ik and yā xwayt-ič are caritatives, rather than a token of any perceived age difference between siblings/ age-peers.

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Other usages An alternative instead of yā-bū-k for age-superior to age-inferior in male exchanges is yā ˁamm-uk/ yā ˁam-k/ yā ˁamm-i, or yā xāl-k in which the agesuperior puts himself in the role of a paternal or maternal uncle vis-a-vis his interlocutor. One speaker from location (3), aged around 60, was in the habit of giving this address form to a regular visitor of his, an agricultural extension officer aged around 35 and much better educated than him, in what the younger man clearly saw as a rather patronising public show which, in my presence, he gradually lost patience with. The following exchanges occurred in rapid succession in one such conversation: wēš insawwi baˁad yā ˁam-k? (3) ‘What else are we supposed to do, my nephew?’ (implied: ‘you are the “expert”, so tell me’)  . . . yōm hāda l-walad fi ha-l-markaz, yā ˁam-k . . . lākin min aṣl abū-h, abū-h taˁbān ˁala ḥabb, matˁūb ˁala l-ḥabb (3) ‘. . . given he’s now attained such a (high) position, my nephew . . . but that all came from his father, his father took trouble over his seed (sc ‘his son’), he laboured over his seed’ (implied: ‘it’s uneducated fathers like me that should take the credit for the success of their educated sons’) – basīṭ, yā ˁam-k, baṣīt . . . il-xēša bi čam? (3) – bi arbaˁat danānīr – arbaˁa, tafaḍḍal, yā ˁamm-i . . . ˁād bāčir inta tiǧīb-ha bi čubr-ač? – lā, “ana bi kubr-i”—wēš yaˁni, wēš šuġl-i?! – ‘That’s easy, my nephew, that’s easy . . . how much is it per sack? – Four dinars – Four . . . here you are, my nephew . . . so tomorrow, is it you that’ll bring it, your grandness in person? – No, (don’t say) “my grandness in person”! What’s my job (if it isn’t that)?!’ Here, the older man finally oversteps the mark with the jocular sarcasm of bi čubr-ač, roughly ‘your good self in person’/‘your grandness’, and the younger man snaps back. The older man then, in the immediately following exchanges, switches from the age-superior and (here) condescending yā ˁam-k to the agepeer yā-xū-k ‘brother’:

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– lā, lā¸ˁād, yā-xū-k! – šuġl-i hāda – lā ˁād, yā-xū-k! – wāǧib-na hāda . . . čam tibġa? – ‘Don’t (be like that), my brother! – That’s my job! – Don’t (be like that), my brother! – It’s our duty . . . so—how many is it that you want?’ A similar type of exchange occurs in the following, where the user of the agesuperior address form yā xāl-k is at pains to explain that a fellow farmer who had met with an unfortunate accident, and who was also, like himself, older but less educated than his interlocutor, was by no means inexperienced or stupid: – wi n-nār tištaġil fi rās iṯ-ṯāni? – ē, ē, hāy qaḍāya, yā xāl-k . . . mu taww-ah, mu ġašīm, lākin taqdīr (25) – ‘And the fire took hold in the hair of the other man? – Yes, yes, these were real incidents, my nephew . . . but he wasn’t born yesterday, he wasn’t inexperienced—it was just fate’ Finally, the address form yā nasīb-ak was very frequently recorded between BV men. This bi-polar form denotes each speaker’s affiliation to the same social group—here, the (village) Baḥārna—and is a classic token of ritual bi-polar, bi-directional, solidary reference. kabil mā yisāfir yikūl liyyi “tāˁāl, yā nasīb-ak, šūf, il-baṣal māt!” (41) ‘Before he left the country, he says to me, “Come and take a look, my relative, the onions have died!” (cushioning the blow of bad news) – il-kiṣīṣ, yā nasīb-ak, rāḥat (7) – wēn rāḥat? – mā adri, sammarat u rāḥat! – lā, yā nasīb-ak, ˁaṭ-na qiṣṣa waḥda! – ‘The stories, my relative, have gone away (polite refusal to co-operate in telling a story) – Where have they gone? – I don’t know, they’ve just cleared off and gone away! – No, my relative, give us just one story!’ (attempting to persuade despite the interlocutor’s refusal)

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The origins of ‘reversed’ address forms like ‘o your father’ and ‘o your mother’ given by parents to their children are obscure. It has been speculated14 that they may be an ellipsis of phrases like ‘O (I am) your father’, a suggestion that receives some support from alternative phrases which are reported to be still in use in in Kuwaiti Arabic such as: ismaˁ, w ana abūk ‘Listen, my son’ (lit ‘Listen, me being (= because I am) your father’) and between brothers: yā xālid, w ana axūk, . . .  ‘Hey Khalid, me being your brother, . . .’15 Just as possible, however, is that the ellipsis, if that is what lies behind these forms, is of a noun like rūḥ ‘soul’, e.g. yā-bū-k < yā rūḥ abū-k ‘o (you who are) the soul of your father’, etc.16 There are precedents for such ellipsis in other Arabic dialects: in Iraq, address forms like yā baˁad rūḥ-i and yā baˁad ˁēn-i, yā baˁad ˁumr-i lit ‘o after my soul’, ‘o after my eye’, ‘o after my life’ are in common use, and are usually explained as meaning ‘o you who are the dearest thing to me after my soul/ eye/ life’, in which ‘the dearest thing I have’ (ˀaˁazz ˁind-i) has been elided. 6.2

Narrative Techniques

Forms of repetition and recycling: 6.2.1 ‘Back-stitching’ ‘Back stitching’, a phrase coined by Roni Henkin in her study of Palestinian story-telling,17 refers to a common structural feature of oral narratives whereby an event is described in a particular form of words, and these same words are then immediately recycled in an adverbial clause of time which frames the next episode in the narrative. The same technique has been noted in, among other works, Galley’s account of women’s traditional story-telling in northern 14  HENK2 197. 15  YASS 299–300. 16  HENK2 197 n.12. 17  HENK 181.

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Algeria18 and Sowayan’s work on the tribal narrative in Saudi Arabia.19 In Bahrain, it is one of several types of repetitive oral routine, and occurs in both A and B communities’ speech, but particularly in the speech of women. This wide geographical dispersal suggests it may have deep roots in Arab oral culture. The discourse function of ‘back-stitching’ seems to be to close one segment of the narrative and open up another, but it also has the psycho-social function of slowing down the transmission of information, and of giving the narrator time to plan the transition to the next part of the story. Some examples:20 From a folk-tale:  . . . ilēn mā allah sallam-ha u ǧābat il-walad . . . yōm illi ǧabat il-walad, kāl lēha . . . (5) ‘. . . until God brought her through and she gave birth to the baby . . . when she had given birth to the baby, he said to her . . .’ From an account of a village fire and how it was extinguished. The speaker here made very heavy and sustained use of the technique, using it dozens of times in a half-hour narrative. A typical example was: tāli ṭalaˁ iš-šēx ˁīsa, allah yirḥam-ah, u gara fi ḥabbat trāb min yamīn-ah u haff ˁalēha, u min haff ˁalēha, subḥān ir-rabb illi xammad-ha ˁala ˁibād-ah (33) ‘Then Sheikh ‘Īsā, God have mercy on him, appeared, and recited (Qur’ānic verses) over a grain of dust in his right hand, and blew on it . . . and when he blew on it, praise be to the Lord who extinguished (the fire) for his worshippers.’ An ex-pearl-diver describes the preparation of the ship before departure: iyurrūn-hum baḥar . . . iyurrūn-hum il-baḥar u yiguṭṭūn-hum . . . lēn gaṭṭaw, ṭabˁaw . . . tamm lihum yōmēn ṯalāṯa, rāḥaw inizfūn . . . lēn inzifō-h, ḥammalaw tanki (48) ‘They hauled them down to the sea . . . they hauled them down to the sea and pushed them in . . . when they’d pushed them in, they capsized

18  GAL 18. 19  The long text in SOW contains many examples. 20  These are taken from SF 68–69.

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them . . . they would take two or three days and then they went and bailed them out . . . when they’d bailed them out, they loaded the water-tank’ But the technique is not limited to stories. In the next two examples, village women are describing the routine of household chores: baˁadēn aǧi axumm, aġassil u aṭbax, aṣaffiṭ is-simič, aġsil ˁēš u antakī-h . . . ˁakub mā aġsil ˁēš u antakī-h, araččib (10) ‘Then I come and sweep, I do the washing and I cook. I descale the fish, I wash the rice and clean it . . . after I wash the rice and clean it, I cook (lunch).’ kint il-awwal aġassil čidi . . . al-ḥīn maššo lēna sawalēn . . . yōm maššo lēna sawalēn, mā nrūḥ il-makīna (32) ‘Previously I used to do the washing like that . . . but now they’ve laid sewage pipes for us . . . since they’ve laid sewage pipes for us, we’ve stopped going to the (water) pump’ 6.2.2 Fixed frame and varying elements This involves an (often threefold) repetition of a structural template, with different but parallel elements filling the slots in the template. The narrative function of this technique often seems to be to sum up a multi-faceted scene through a set of ‘snapshots’, the technique highlighting what was variable and what was fixed. Relative pronouns (illi) and other pronouns of vague reference (hāḏa min . . .) often feature prominently. Examples: In a description of what happened in a battle between two communities: illi iḏbaḥ-ōh, iḏbaḥ-ōh, w illi igtalō-h, igtalō-h, w illi əslubo amwāl-hum, əslubo amwāl-hum (44)21 ‘The ones they slaughtered, they slaughtered, and the ones they killed, they killed, and the ones whose goods they stole, they stole their goods’. The apparently redundant phrasal repetition lends emphasis and an aura of finality to the description = ‘what happened, happened and there was nothing anyone could do about it’. 21  Cf in Omani Arabic, REIN 30: qtil bu qtil, gruḥ bu gruḥ ‘the ones who got killed, got killed, and the ones who got wounded got wounded’ in which passives rather than 3rd person verbs of vague reference are used; but the function is the same as in the Bahraini example.

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In the next examples, the phrasal repetition acts out mimetically a scene full of similar but different women’s contributions to a festive occasion: illi iyīb ingil¸ ingil, illi yisawwi ˁaṣīd, ˁaṣīd, illi yisawwi manfūr, manfūr (33) ‘Whoever brought salted nuts, (brought) salted nuts; whoever made wheat porridge, (made) wheat porridge; whoever made jelly pieces, (made) jelly pieces’ Such descriptive routines can be long and intricate, beginning with a ‘cue’ followed by several repetitive routines and concluding with a ‘coda’. The following formed part of a description of the domestic round as it would have been in the 1950s. Again, the speaker is from BV community (33). In the space of fifteen minutes of speech she produced half-a-dozen ‘routines’ similar to the one below, symmetrical in their phrasal parallelism and with the same suprasegmental intonation patterns: yigiˁdūn əb ǧamˁat-hum . . . [CUE 1] in čan hi fayat iṣ-ṣibḥ, fayat iṣ-ṣibḥ [ROUTINE 1–3-part] in čān hi fayat il-ˁaṣir, fayat il-ˁaṣir in čān hum bi layawān, layawān . . .  u yigiˁdūn . . . [CUE 2] hādi bi sālfat-ha [ROUTINE 2–3-part] hādi bi sālfat-ha u hādi bi sālfat-ha . . .  u ḍuḥkaw, anāsa u xērāt . . . [CUE 3] hādi min tyīb dallat-ha əb ǧudūˁ-ha [ROUTINE 3–3-part] u hādi min tyīb ġūrī-ha əb ǧudūˁ-ha u hādi min tyīb il-gahwa wi l-čāy . . .  ˁala hawa l-insān! [CODA] ‘They would sit all together . . .  if it was the (the time of the) morning shadow, in the morning shadow; if it was the (the time of the) afternoon shadow, in the afternoon shadow; if they were under the awning, under the awning; . . . 

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and they would sit there . . .  this one with her story; and this one with her story; and this one with her story; . . .  and they would laugh, because of the companionship and the good things (they had each brought): this one brought her coffee-pot and morning snack; and this one brought her tea-kettle and morning snack; and this one brought coffee and tea; . . .  as it took each person’s fancy!’ A related kind of repetitive patterning can also be used to build tension in a story and move the plot forward in a way that is attention-grabbing and imprints itself on the listener’s mind and memory (important in pre-literate cultures). A particular adept here was a woman of about seventy from the B village Bani Jamra (location (5)), who I recorded telling several grandchildren a folk-story which started thus: aṣalli ˁala n-nabi, ˁan-čim wa ˁan hāk ir-raǧǧāl . . . is-sulṭān . . .  is-sulṭānˁind-ah xēr u ˁind-ah əwlēdāt u ˁind-ah ahil u ˁind-ah banāt, xams banāt [PAUSE] . . . hēk il-yōm kāˁid, ila-hu yikūl li bitt-ah l-ˁōda: “minhu yirzik-š yā bitt-i?” kālat “tirzik-ni inta, yā abū-yi” . . . sakat . . . [PAUSE] . . . kāl li bint-ah l-fānya: “minhu yirzik-š yā bitt-i?” kālat “tirzik-ni inta, yā abū-yi” [PAUSE] . . . kāl li bint-ah l-fālfa: “minhu yirzik-š yā bitt-i?” kālat “tirzik-ni inta, yā abū-yi” [PAUSE] . . . kāl li bint-ah l-rābˁa: “minhu yirzik-š yā bitt-i?” kālat “tirzik-ni inta, yā abū-yi” [PAUSE] . . . kāl li bint-ah l-xāmsa: “minhu yirzik-š yā bitt-i?” kālat “allāh! allāh yirzik-ni u yirzik-č, u yirzik il-xalk rabb il-ˁālamīn!” ‘I pray for the Prophet, for your sake and for the sake of that man . . . the Sultan . . .  The Sultan had wealth, and he had children, and he had wives and he had daughters, five daughters . . . That day, he was sitting there, and he suddenly asked his eldest daughter, ‘Who is it that provides your sustenance, daughter?’ ‘You, father,’ she said. He said nothing. He asked his second

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daughter, ‘Who is it that provides your sustenance, daughter?’ ‘You, father,’ she said. He asked his third daughter, ‘Who is it that provides your sustenance, daughter?’ ‘You, father,’ she said. He asked his fourth daughter, ‘Who is it that provides your sustenance, daughter?’ ‘You, father,’ she said. He asked his fifth daughter, ‘Who is it that provides your sustenance, daughter?’ ‘God!’ she said, ‘It is God who provides my sustenance, and provides your sustenance and provides the sustenance of all creation— the Lord of the Worlds!’ The rebellious (and righteous) answer given by the fifth and youngest daughter stands out against the identical sycophantic responses of her four sisters, and punctures the tension built up by the four-fold iteration of the same questionand-answer routine. The Sultan is very displeased. In pronouncing his verdict on the five daughters, he follows the same routine as in the extract quoted above. Each of the first four in turn is told her fate in the same form of words and in 3rd person address: amman hēka, b-aˁṭī-ha wald ˁamm-ha ‘As for this one, I’ll marry her to her cousin’ That is, each will get the socially-sanctioned reward that any obedient daddy’s girl would expect to get. But when it comes to the fifth daughter, the Sultan switches to the more direct, 2nd person form of address and says: amman intīn, mā aˁṭī-š illa al-agraˁ illi fi ǧulūf it-tamr ‘As for you, I’m only marrying you to the bald man with scabby skin who works in the date-sacks’ That is—I sentence you to a fate worse than death. She accepts this with equanimity, and, perhaps needless to say, turns out to be the gutsy heroine of the story. Narrative techniques of this type are of course common in many other cultures, including those of the West. What is unusual though—and this was a general feature of fictive material of this type which I recorded in Bahrain, and which seems to be true also of other areas of the Arab World, particular those with bedouin traditions—is the use of exact verbal repetition in a highly patterned way, rather than in a merely approximate one.

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6.2.3 Aspectual functions of word repetition The repetition of a verb in a narrative, three or more times in succession, serves the purpose of signaling extensive or intensive action,22 e.g. Childbirth: kaˁadat tiṭlik, tiṭlik, tiṭlik ilēn mā sallam-ha allah u ǧābat il-walad (5) (folk-tale) ‘She kept on pushing, pushing, pushing until God brought her through safely and she gave birth to the baby’ Bailing out a boat in preparation for the pearling season: tammaw lihum yinizfūn, yinizfūn, yinizfūn (48) ‘They continued bailing out, bailing out, bailing out’ How the pearl-diver and the rope-puller coordinated their work, the diver on the seabed searching for pearls, the rope-man up on deck whose job was to pull the diver back up when he signaled that he was out of breath by tugging on the rope that connected them: rāḥ, rāḥ, rāḥ . . . nubar . . . #ḏarabt ˁalēh, #ḏarabt ˁalēh, #ḏarabt ˁalēh (48) ‘He went (searching), he went (searching), he went (searching) . . . (then) he tugged on the rope . . . I pulled hard on it, pulled hard on it, pulled hard on it’ A character in a folk-tale composes a poem in his head: fakkar, fakkar, fakkar, fakkar, fakkar . . . gāl taˁāl yā kātib, taˁāl, iktib! (44) ‘He thought, he thought, he thought, he thought, he thought . . . (then) he said ‘Come here, scribe, come here, and write!’ 6.2.4 Morphological echo and rhyme ‘Morphological echo’ and rhyme are common, indeed pervasive features of the language of traditional oral story-telling in Bahraini society, but commonly occur in the ordinary speech of the older generation also. The so-called 22  PAL 133 records a similar example from N. Jordan: ladd, ladd, ladd u yōmin ladd . . . literally ‘he looked, he looked, he looked, and when he looked . . .’ which he liberally translates as ‘in his desperation, he tried to catch sight of somebody’.

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absolute accusative (mafˁūl muṭlaq) is probably the commonest manifestation of the former, in which a verb or a participle, active or passive, is complemented by its own verbal noun. The rhetorical effect is to add emphasis, often with an element of extensiveness or intensiveness to the action described. This trait was found in the speech of Bahraini villagers and urbanites alike, whether from the A or B communities. Some examples, classified by phrase type: 6.2.4.1 Morphological echo Verb + cognate verbal noun ila ihtaddu, yilˁabūn bi ḥāl-ič liˁib (1) < laˁab ‘to play’ ‘When they (= schoolboys) are let out (of school), they really mess you around’ ṣayyaḥ ams! ġarbal-na ġirbāl! (41) < ġarbal ‘to confuse’ ‘He shouted all day yesterday! He drove us mad!’ lō wāḥid yibūk ihnāk fi dīrat-čim bawka . . . (3) < bāg/ bāk ‘to steal’ ‘If someone over there in your village steals the least little thing . . .’ əḥmalat-ni ḥamāl, il-ˁabda (Manāma 7) < ḥamal ‘to carry’ ‘She carried me in, all the way, that black servant’ yizarrig ˁalēk tazrīg, u yākil-k akūl (Manāma 5) < zarrag ‘to overtake’, akal ‘to eat’ ‘It (shark) will come right up on you and bite lumps out of you’ lākin min ḥaṭṭo samād dyāy ˁalēh, ṭār ṭiyarān! (14) < ṭār ‘to fly into the air’ ‘Buy when they put chicken manure on it, it (= crop) simply shot up!’ is-samača il-ˁōda mā tāčil, tisliṭ salāṭ (5) < salaṭ ‘to swallow, gobble up’ ‘The big fish didn’t eat (people), it swallowed them whole’ il-waḥda əb rubbiya, šālō-hum šēl, waḥda ha-l-mitin čidi (20) < šāl ‘to carry off, away’ ‘At a price of one rupee for each (bunch), they snapped them up, (bunches) this big’ ṭaggō-ha ṭagg u gāmaw ˁalēha gōma (Manāma 6) < ṭagg ‘to beat’, gām ˁala ‘to attack’ ‘They gave her a good beating, and really set about her’

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yat, yā ǧamāˁa, u xaṣṣat-ni xaṣṣ (44) < xaṣṣ ‘to pick out, specify’ ‘She came in, my friends, and picked me out, specifically’ taḥammalt ib-hum ḥamālat-in zēna (16) < taḥammal ‘to look after’ ‘I took care of them really well’ nās itṣawwabaw ṣawābāt . . . yikṭaˁūn takṭīˁ (3) < tṣawwab ‘to be hit’, qaṭṭaˁ/ kaṭṭaˁ ‘to cut up’ ‘Some people were (badly) wounded . . . they cut (them) to pieces’ šaraṭ ˁalēhum šarṭ (3) < šaraṭ ‘to impose a condition’ ‘He imposed a condition on them’ nxumm-ah xamm (48) < xamm ‘to sweep’ ‘We would give it (the house) a good sweeping’ lēn yōṣal il-xōr, ismitū-h samta, ṭabb il-xōr (48) < simat ‘to pull, heave’ ‘When it (= boat, being pulled down the beach) reached the creek, they gave it one last big heave, and into the creek it went’ A double ‘echo’ occurred in this example, where subject, verb and object are all from the same root: nahham in-nahhām nihma (48) ‘The singer of songs sang a sea-song’

Participle + cognate verbal noun

Active participle: il-walad əmˀaddi-nn-ah adiya! (41) < adda ‘to cause a nuisance’ ‘His son is giving him a really hard time’ baˁad intūn bālīn rūḥ-čim balāwi (3) < bala ‘to afflict’ ‘And on top if that you’re giving yourselves some real problems’ il-hawa yadwi, yaṭḥan-na, gāyim gōma (Manāma 6) < gām ‘to rise’ ‘The wind was howling, pounding us, rising more and more’ əhumma farḥānīn li āxir faraḥ, mistānsīn li āxir anāsa (45) < faraḥ ‘to rejoice’, istānas ‘to be happy’ ‘They were very joyful, very happy’

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Passive participle: kill-ah māl baḥārna, manhūb nihba! (8) < nahab ‘to plunder, take by force’ ‘It all belonged to the Baḥārna, but it was taken by force!’ al-ḥīn mašgūg šigāg ihni (Manāma 7) < šagg ‘to rip, tear’ ‘Now it’s been ripped open here’ bint mastūra satar (dialect poetry) < satar ‘(of God) to protect’ ‘A really respectable girl’ Other structures: ˁala kōlat il-kāyil, kil šay ilēh rās (41) ‘As the saying (lit ‘as the sayer says’) goes, everything has a starting point’ yabbōn xamsa dīnār ila ˀaddan l-imˀaddin! (19) ‘They want five dinars ( just for working) until the (noon) call to prayer!’ (lit ‘until the caller calls’) in-nās ṣāmat binč il-ḥarr, mōt il-mumīt (33) ‘People fasted at the height of summer, when the heat was killing (lit ‘the killing death’) yiṭarriš ˁalay ṭawāriš (Manāma 6) ‘He would send word to me by messengers’ (ṭarraš ‘to entrust s’one with a message; ṭāriš pl ṭawāriš ‘messenger’. 6.2.4.2 Parallelism and rhyme Rhyme is the counterpoint of morphological echo: here, the root-consonants differ, but the morphological template is the same. Words with antithetical meanings but identical morphology are brought together to achieve local rhetorical effects, e.g. CaCīC: min ġarīb u min garīb u min ˁadu u min ṣadīg (33) ‘. . . strangers, relatives, enemies, friends’ (meaning: ‘all and sundry’, ‘Uncle Tom Cobley and all’)

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kalīl-in maxdūm wa lā kaṯīr-in əmhammal (14) ‘A little done well is better than a lot done badly’ (adage, to point up the difference between two types of farmer) maCCūC: yirūḥūn maˁdūmīn u iyūn mawlūdīn (33) ‘They would go (on pilgrimage) without children and come back having had children’ (the point here was to underline the length of time it took to go on pilgrimage in the days before modern transport) -CāC: ila tākil fi n-nahār, āmil lih in-nār (20) ‘If you eat in the day, expect in Hell to pay’ (moralising adage, on the consequences of breaking the fast in Ramadan without good reason) CaCCāCi: sawwā-h faččāči rabbāṭi, čidi (6) ‘He made it (= protective net for plants) in the form of openings and closings, like this’ (this novel description appears to be mimetic of the structure of a string net, with its alternating ‘openings’ and ‘tyings’. The CaCCāCi adjectival form is used only predicatively, and in BA for bodily positions, or in the description of shapes, e.g. waggāfi ‘standing up’, gaˁˁādi ‘sitting down’, rawwāsi ‘head-first’, sayyāfi ‘sword-shaped’23) Occasionally, speakers would make use of seemingly learnt fixed phrases in which rhyme was an extensive and key element, though it was not clear what the source of such phrases was, e.g. in a discussion of the life of Jesus, with a group of Baḥārna farmers, the following occurred: ˁīsa mā tzawwaǧ . . . ṣār sāyiḥ fi l-barāri, sirāǧ-ah il-kamar wa akl-ah iš-šaǧar, lā mara tiftin-ah wa lā walad yiḥzin-ah (3) ‘Jesus did not marry . . . he wandered in the wilderness, his lamp was the moon, and his food the trees; no woman to tempt him, no child to distress him’ 23  The form also occurs in Baghdad, see BLA 85.

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Another of the same group came out with the following in the context of the ‘calamities’ (wakˁāt) which Bahrain had suffered in its history, and which were not yet at an end: “wēl-un li ǧazīrat ˀuwāl wa mā tukāsi min ahwāl”, ida ḥakam-ha abu l-ˁalam il-aswad . . . mita yṣīr? kāl “fi zaman tarkib il-furūǧ bi s-surūǧ” (3) ‘Woe to the island of ˀUwāl (= Bahrain) and the horrors which it will suffer’, if those who carry the black flag (here = Westerners) rule over it . . . when will that be? He (= ˁAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib) said: ‘In the age when cunts (= women) ride on saddles (= drive cars)’ Rhyme in such cases adds a ‘poetic’, even a ‘magical’ touch to the statements made, perhaps, in the minds of the users, thereby lending them an extra measure of truth. 6.3 Dramatization We noted earlier (6.1.1) the way in which the ethic dative -k can be used in oral narrative to ‘involve’ the listener. There are several other techniques involving 2nd person forms of address which can be used, but here with the objective of dramatizing the events described and making them seem more immediate and vivid for the listener: 6.3.1 Addressing the protagonists It is a not uncommon technique for the story-teller to break off from 3rd person narration and suddenly address one of the protagonists directly. For example, in an account of a dispute between two Bahraini villages, one A and one B, which had occurred around fifty years before, the narrator, from the A village, described the (to him and his listeners) disgraceful spectacle of four of their bedouin forebears being beaten by some Baḥārna villagers and running away to seek reinforcements. In the middle of this account, he suddenly breaks off to address one of the four in the 2nd person by name, and then continues in the 3rd person:  . . . hum arbaˁa, wāḥid yigāl lih šarīd abu ġlēṭa, wallah wāḥid yaˁni baliyya, u wāḥid yigāl lih brāhīm bin šēx, u wāḥid yigāl lih ḥamad id-dīč, u wāḥid yigāl lih buˁēdān . . . iṭ-ṭarīfa inna-hu istuwa baˁad tadri arbaˁa fi blād šattarō-hum bi l-ˁaṣi . . . hāḏi, int, yā šarīd abu ġlēṭa, rayyāl ə#ḏxīm! . . . čāf il-ġalība miṯil mā tgūl yaˁni miṯil aba zēd (44)

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‘There were four of them, one called Sharīd Abū Ġlēṭa, a real giant of a man, one called Ibrāhīm bin Sheikh, one called Ḥamad the Cock, and one called Buˁēdān . . . the upshot was that (these) four, they thrashed them with sticks in a (Baḥrānī) village! . . . This—you, o Sharīd Abū Ġlēṭa, such a huge man!—but he still tasted defeat . . . just like, as you might say, Abū Zayd24 did’ Both Sowayan and Ingham describe the same usage in the oral narrative of Najd,25 Ingham commenting that ‘this has the effect of enlivening the text, since it is as though the participants are there with the speaker . . . it is as though the narrator is orchestrating the action of the story. This is usually done at a point where an important or dramatic phase of the action takes place’. 6.3.2 The narrative imperative In a similar vein, the imperative is sometimes used in narrative instead of a 3rd person s-stem verb. It serves to highlight the actions of the main protagonist and can occur, as in the three examples below, in accounts of dramatic or unusual happenings in everyday life as well as being a feature of the style of traditional oral narrative. In the first example, a woman was describing the antics of one of her friends when they were teenagers and had the chore of washing the dirty clothes, or cleaning rice and other comestibles in the village stream. This friend was in the habit of playing practical jokes on the others by, for example, stealing some of their food:  . . . u ǧat, wi r-rubyān əmkaššar, rāḥat lēha u ġāfalat-ha u xḏi minn-ah in-nuṣṣ u xiššī-h! (16) ‘. . . and she came, when the prawns had been peeled, she came and crept up on her and took half of them and hid them!’ (lit ‘. . . and take (f)half of them and hide (f) them!’) The next example occurred in an account of how a young man, well-known to the speaker, had been killed in a collision with a car while riding his motorcycle. It is noticeable that before the point where the speaker makes the switch into the narrative imperative, all the verbs are s-stem narrative past tense; after the switch, the verbs are all ‘historic present’ p-stems—again, as with the narrative imperative, the historic present achieves a more vivid, dramatic effect: 24  A reference to the hero of the popular oral epic Sīrat Banī Hilāl. 25  SOW 48, SAL 21–22.

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axad is-sāmān u ǧāb-ah, u radd ˁawwad . . . rāḥ ˁala mōtirsēkal ˁind ˁummāl yiṣbaġūn wa ˁalēhum tindēl . . . u rūḥ bass u taˁāl ˁind l-əgfūl, u titˁadda lih sayyāra u tirgaˁ mōtirsēkal u yā ṭēḥat-ah, wa lā ˁalēh sifti, mu marbūṭ zēn u yinbaṭṭ ir-rās . . . (19) ‘He had bought the (building) materials and brought them with him, and had gone back again . . . He went on his motor-bike to visit some labourers who were doing some house-painting, who he was the foreman of . . . he was just going along, coming back into Gufūl, (lit ‘. . . and just go (m) and come (m) in Gufūl’) when a car cuts in front of him, hits his motorbike, and down he goes, not wearing a crash-helmet—it wasn’t fastened properly—and his head splits open . . .’ The effect of the two narrative imperatives is to highlight the fact that the man was ‘just going about his normal business’ when he was killed. In the final example, two women, one of whom wants, but can’t have children, shares a joke with a neighbour about alternative ways she might obtain a child: – ana il-waḥīda illi bēt-ha mā fīh ˁiyāl! – baˁad baṭli l-bāb, daxli ṯintēn ṯalāṯa u sikk-ah! – lā¸ ḏāk il-yōm mā waˁēt illa waḥda mbaṭla l-bāb u dāšša, š-əḥlēlat-ha, bint ǧīrān-na! ḥagga š-šēx xall-ha, sikk il-bāb ˁalēha u xall-ha! yibnā-ha u gaˁˁadt-ha, riḥt yibt lēha bistūg (Manāma 10) – ‘I’m the only woman (in the neighbourhood) whose house has no children in it! – So just open the front door, pull two or three in (off the street) and close it behind you! (laughs) – No, that day, the first thing I knew, a little girl had opened the front door and come in. How pretty she was, our neighbours’ daughter! Even my old man (sc her husband) let her in, closed the door behind her and let her in! (lit . . . ‘. . . let (m) her in! close (m) the door behind her and let (m) her in!’) So we brought her in and I sat her down and went and got her a biscuit’ The point here is that even the woman’s husband, who wouldn’t normally concern himself with such trivial ‘women’s’ matters, was so taken with the beautiful child that he involved himself—it is this unusual turn of events that triggers three imperative verbs to describe his actions, directed by his wife at him.

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6.3.3 Use of ila as a particle expressing suddenness26 or emphasis Outside its use as a conditional particle, (w)ila (occasional var ili) can be used as a particle to introduce a sudden or unexpected turn of events27 (see also section 3.1.5), though before nominal sentences beginning with a pronoun, it usually has a focussing effect similar to inna (and translated in the examples below by ‘just’). It can occur before verbs, nouns, and enclitic pronouns (in which case the final -a is lengthened) and is frequent in the speech of uneducated speakers. Examples: Before a verb: w ila fačč ˁawk-i u ˁaṭā-ni hāda . . . ṣbay! (41) ‘And hey presto! He (= God) has relieved my affliction and given me this . . . a baby boy!’ kām yirṭin iyyā-h, mā afham . . . ila yigūl “ana abbi ḥisāb-i” (19) ‘He started jabbering away in a foreign language that I didn’t understand . . . then all of a sudden he says “I want my money”’ Before nouns and pronouns: ili ḥarīga akalat min farīg iš-šimāli . . . (33) ‘Lo and behold! A fire had consumed part of the northern neighbour­hood . . .’ min xōf-ī min umm ilā-ni mā anwas arūḥ (3) ‘It was that, out of fear of my mother, I just didn’t dare go’ ilā-hu ǧāy-in-ni yōm wāḥid, yigūl lī . . . (30) ‘One day, he just comes up to me, and tells me . . .’ ilā-hum ṭābbīn yidūrūn ˁād (6) ‘They (= pigeons) just come down and walk around (sc eating my crops)’

26  This particle in the form ilā an is attested with the sense ‘suddenly’ in early CLA texts. See BRAV 291–294. 27  As it does in Najdi and all the Gulf dialects, see, e.g. ING 6 (Najd), DOS (II) 93–94 (Kuwait).

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ila bi: As with the CLA particle iḏā, ila can be followed by bi to signal the unexpectedness of an event, e.g. ila bi ǧīˀat lāri maktūb ˁalēh “ǧalīl at-turk” (4) ‘Then all of a sudden there comes a lorry with “Jalīl al-Turk” written on the side’ 6.3.4 lā/mā + sensory verb + illa This construction is another one commonly used as a means of expressing the unexpectedness or suddenness of a new development in the story. It often corresponds to English, ‘all of a sudden’ or ‘the first/ next thing I knew was . . .’, where the English expression, like the BA one, involves a cognitive or sensory verb. The verbs most commonly met with in BA are waˁa, liga, simaˁ, šāf. See also 5.11.2.6 mā . . . illa. Examples: mā waˁēt illa uxt-ha yāya (Manāma 10) ‘Then all of a sudden I realised her sister had come in’ mā tūˁa illa tikāmalaw fagāra ḏāk il-ḥazza (48) ‘Out of the blue, just at that moment, you became aware that some poor people had gathered together’ u lā wtaˁu illa ayādī-hum mḥannaya (Manāma 1) ‘And before they knew it, their hands were covered in henna!’ mā šīft, yōm wāḥid, illa abū-y waddā-ni l-əmˁallim (radio interview) ‘The next thing I knew was that one day my father sent me to Qurˀān school’ mā nismaˁ illa zaˁagat iḍ-ḍaw (33) ‘Then suddenly we heard cries of “fire!”’ mā tilga illa irkubaw hāḏēla ṯalāṯīn il-ġēṣ illi fi l-baḥar u daššaw nās maḥall-hum (48) ‘The next thing you knew, those thirty divers in the sea had come back up on board, and others had gone down to take their place’

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6.4 Affect There are certain stylistic features of spoken BA discourse which can be loosely labelled as verbalised expressions of ‘affect’—the frequent use of diminutives, hypocoristic forms of address, and cursing—which are a characteristic of women’s speech. 6.4.1 Use of diminutives Diminutives are much used by women in everyday discourse, often in words used to refer to children at various stages of their life, e.g. ṣbay (< ṣabi ) ‘(baby) boy’, bnayya (< ibna) ‘(baby) girl’. These two words are also used affectionately to refer to ‘bride and groom’. Words for older, but still small children of either sex are the diminutive plurals wlēdāt and frēxāt both meaning ‘little kiddies’ (the second of the two literally ‘chicks’). ‘Twins’ are often called nṣēfāt (lit ‘little halves’). Self-referencing by the mother is sometimes expressed when talking to children by umayma ‘(your) little mummy’. As we saw in the section on bipolar address forms above, diminutive address forms are often used there too, generally in ‘solidary’ reference, e.g. ǝwlēd-i ‘my son’, xwayy-ik ‘brother’ and xwayt-ič ‘sister,’ but in other contexts the diminutive can be ironic or sarcastic: the diminutive ḥbayyib ahl-ik lit ‘your family’s little darling’ was used in this way by a matriarch to upbraid a young male relative who she thought had been lying to her, but in the next breath, enraged by his glib response, she addressed him as yā xanfā! ‘you queer!’ The following example, from a radio play, also plays on the negative use of such forms. In it, a jealous mother is addressing her son, who, since his marriage, has in her view lavished all his attention on his new wife, and failed to pay for a private room in a hospital for her: lō ana mrayt-ik, čān xaḏt lī ḥiǧra miṯil illi git lik, lākin yā yumma, illa umayma—ǧazā-y ˁala llah! ‘If I were your little wifey, you would have got me a room like the one I told you about, but, sonny, I’m just your old mum, so I have to depend on God for my reward!’ Children’s story-telling by women is a favoured site for the use of diminutives: in a short tale by a 70 year old from BV (5), the following all occurred in quick succession: ǝmrayya ‘a little woman’, ǝḥlēwa ‘a sweet little girl’, ˁuwēnāt ǝmkaḥḥala ‘little eyes painted with kohl’, ṯwēb ‘a little dress’, mrēgdāt ‘little beds’, ˁišēša ‘a little hut’, ṣfēriyya ‘a little cooking pot’, dukēkīn ṣġayyir ‘a little shop’ (in which both noun and adjective are diminutives), even iḍ-ḍḥēwa ‘the little fore-noon’.

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Children’s games28 are another context for diminutive use, e.g. xšēša / xšēšo (< xašš ‘to hide’), ṣumēda (< ṣamād ‘head cloth’)29 and swēd ar-rās,30 all versions of ‘hide-and-seek’, frēsa ‘hobby-horse’ (< faras ‘mare’). 6.4.2 Caritatives The pattern CaCCūC is used for ‘pet’ names, e.g. ammūn < amīna, laṭṭūf < laṭīfa, faṭṭūm < fāṭima, xallūd < xālid, sallūm < sālim, ḥammūd < muḥammad, aḥmad. The suffix -ō or -(a)w can also be used for this purpose, e.g. xalīlō (< xalīl), ǧalīlō < ǧalīl, ḥusnō < ḥasan, zambaw < zēnabaw < zēnab, fiḍḍaw (< fiḍḍa), maryamō < maryam. Such forms are apparently now falling out of favour with younger, more educated speakers. 6.4.3 Divine exhortation Exhortations to God—when greeting, praising, thanking, apologizing, congratulating, correcting, well-wishing, leave-taking, and other speech acts too numerous to mention—punctuate every conversational interaction in traditional Arab societies. The Gulf, which at the time of this research was still a profoundly conservative social space, is no exception, and such exhortations formed an elaborate verbal fandango in almost any spoken transaction, even the most inconsequential. Divine intercession, protection and providence was constantly praised, sought and humbly accepted, even for the seemingly most trivial thing; and for every formulaic question, wish, or hope there was an equally formulaic answer. So, in Bahrain, if one expresses disagreement with someone, one softens the blow by asking God to ‘save’ that person (sallam-k allah); on leaving him one entrusts him to God ( fi amān allah, maˁa s-salāma!), and at the same time one may express the hope that God preserves him (allāh yiḥfaḏ ̣ -k), gives him life (ḥayyā-k allah!), or strength (guwwa!) or enriches him (aġnā-k allah!) if he is hard at work. If one happens to mention a dead person, one invokes God’s mercy on him (allāh yirḥam-ah) and politely wishes that one’s conversational partner will live longer than he did (ˁumr-ak abqā!), and, indeed ṭāl ˁumr-ak! / allah yiṭawwil ˁumr-ak! (‘May you have/ God give you a long life!’) are a couple more of the routine pause-fillers with which BA conversations are liberally besprinkled. Mentioning anything considered 28  See DCSEA II 268–278. 29  It seems the game is so-called because the seeker has to hide his head under a head-cloth while the other players find a place to hide. 30  Lit ‘little black cap’, the name of a type of bird, which (it was explained to me) gave its name to the game because the black-haired heads of the players eventually peep out from their hiding places.

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unclean—shoes, or bodily function such as urinating, for instance—or religiously forbidden activities (ḥarām), such as drinking alcohol, triggers a polite pre-emptive phrase of apology such as tikram! or w intūn bi karāma! or karram allah waǧh as-sāmiˁ! (‘May God honour the face of the listener’). Even if all you do is jog the memory of a forgetful interlocutor, you may receive a phrase in return such as bayyaḍ allah wēh-ik! (‘May God whiten your face!’), or raḥim allah wālidē-k (‘May God have mercy of your parents!’) which are simply more elaborate ways of saying ‘thank you’. There are literally hundreds more of such polite formulas,31 the common patrimony of popular Islamic belief and practice which permeates everyday life. Even against this common background, certain features of women’s speech stood out. Firstly, there was the sheer frequency of divine exhortation in the speech of the less well educated among them. One such middle-aged woman from BV (33) used the phrase allah yidfaˁ il-bala bi hēbat-ah! ‘May God ward off calamity by His might!’ ten times in the space of a few hundred words when giving a dramatic account of two village fires she had witnessed as a girl.32 In another part of the recording, she describes the poverty of her village when she was a child. The questioner asks: il-awwal yibnūn byūt-hum min ḥašīš . . . fi l-išta fi wēš yigaˁdūn? ‘In the old days, they built their houses out of palm-fronds33 . . . what did they live in during the winter?’ Her aunt’s answer (references to divine agency in boldface) began: hāk-ku ummahāt il-barastaǧāt, zafān . . . ummahāt l-ǝkbāra, hāk-ku kabar . . . u abu d-dār . . . mifil iḥna gaˁadna fi dār, allah yidfaˁ ilbala . . . id-dār ǝmṭayyiḥa min naṣīfat-ha, nuṣṣ u nuṣṣ, u iltammēna fīh u ˁišna . . . hāda-ḥna ṣirna niswān . . . min il-faqr, allāh yidfaˁ il-bala, kil wāḥid yixāf min il-fāni . . . awwal mā fataḥna fi d-dinya faqr . . . u tāli, al-ḥamdu li-llāh, allah ṭarraš ˁala ˁibāda bi l-xēr . . . lākin wāḥid miltamm, allah yidfaˁ il-bala, halāč lēn māt . . . wāḥid min allah xallā-h li ǝwlēdāt-ah kubraw u irtafaˁ ḥa)ḏ)ḏ-hum, barakāt allāh, ǝwlēdāt-hum . . .  ‘There were some people who owned huts made of palm-frond sheets . . . and some who owned mud-walled houses with palm-frond 31  Two lengthy volumes have been devoted to cataloguing them (PIA1, PIA2). 32  Part of this account can be found in DCSEA II 302–304. 33  ḥašīš is actually ‘dried grass’, but the questioner has little knowledge of old-fashioned building materials and means ǧarīd ‘dried palm-fronds’.

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rooves, mud-walled houses . . . and some who had stone houses . . . like us, we lived in a stone house, may God ward off calamity  . . . but half the house was hanging off the other half, half and half, but we huddled together in it and we lived our lives.. and now here we are, we’ve become grown-up women . . . but because of poverty, may God ward off calamity, everybody was afraid of other people . . . when we first came into the world, there was poverty . . . and then, praise be to God, God sent his creatures prosperity . . . but (before that) one person would stay cooped up (in his house), may God ward off cala4mity, starving until he died . . . and another, because God saved him for his kiddies, they grew up and they had better luck, their kiddies did, (they had) God’s blessings . . .’ Secondly, compared to men, women had a rather more colourful repertoire of imprecations and curses. Typical (all BV examples) were the following, all of them occurring in stories as ‘quotations’ of what other women, real or fictitious, had said: allāh yiġarbil-č, yā sōdat il-wēh! ‘May God confuse you, o black of face!’34 xannāg yiḥmil-š, intīn u hi! ‘May you choke to death, both you and her!’ (lit ‘may diphtheria carry you off . . .’) čabb35-kum allāh! ‘May God strike you down!’ slēma36 yičibb-čim! ‘May a pestilential wind strike you all down!’ Johnstone37 gives the following extended Bahraini example, addressed, apparently, to a man: slēma itčubb-uk u ddammir-k u tˁamī-k wi ddardim-k wi tikisif-k! ‘May illness put you on your back and destroy you and blind you, and overthrow you and make you unseemly!’ 34  ‘black of face’ = ‘dishonourable’ 35  kabb/čabb ‘to knock over’ 36  Possibly < CLA sulāmā ‘a southerly wind’, winds from the south being popularly considered disease-laden. 37  EADS 152, his translation.

CHAPTER 7

Some Trends in Dialectal Change Since the Mid-1970s This work is essentially a detailed description of the ‘communal’ dialects of Bahrain, those of the ˁArab (A) on the one hand and the Baḥārna (B), on the other as they were in the mid-1970s, represented by speakers who had been least exposed to the linguistic effects of exposure to literacy and other Arabic dialects from outside the Gulf. The many differences between two might be called ‘inter-communal’ differences; but another set of differences, ‘intra-communal’ and within each of these two main groups, was drawn at some points in the exposition:

‧ between the urban (BU) and rural (BV) Baḥārna dialects; ‧ between BU dialects of the old ‘core’ neighbourhoods of Manāma on the

one hand, and those of the newer, more communally mixed outer suburbs on the other; between some groups of villages within the BV dialect group; between the tribally-descended communities of the A group which originated in Central Arabia and the more mixed A communities of the two largest population centres, Manāma and Muḥarrag.

‧ ‧ 7.1

Sociolinguistic Studies of Bahrain in the 1970s

Many of the earlier publications which this research project yielded were sociolinguistic and quantitative in approach1 and based on a comparison of the behaviour of literate and non-literate speakers. They showed several trends, notably: (a) the relative stability of the A dialect across the generations, regardless of level of education and gender, compared with the B dialects, which showed more age-related variation; (b) where communal variants differed from Standard Arabic variants, the shift away from saliently ‘B’ variants by educated speakers (e.g. from /f/< OA/ṯ/ to/ṯ/ in e.g. ifnēn ‘two’, ačfar ‘more’, fālif ‘third’) was much 1  For example, HOL1, HOL2, PATT, SOCMOV. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004302631_008

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stronger than the shift away from saliently ‘A’ variants by educated A speakers (e.g. from /y/to /ǧ/ in e.g. yīt ‘I came’, fayar ‘dawn’, daray ‘step’); (c) there were the beginnings of a shift by educated B dialect speakers, particularly those who worked in a ‘confessionally mixed’ work environment, towards the A dialect, even on variables where the A variant was a non-standard from (e.g. /y/ < OA /ǧ/); (d) non-standard dialectal reflexes shared across the communal divide were relatively resistant to change and replacement (e.g. /č/ in shared items such as čam ‘how much?’, bāčir ‘tomorrow’, simič ‘fish’ was virtually categorical for all speakers, whereas /č/ in non-shared items like BV yāčil ‘he eats’ (A and BU yākil) and A čibīr ‘big’ (all B kibīr) was more vulnerable to replacement, but was especially likely in the B community (as in (b) above)). All of this suggested that ‘covert’ (usually local) dialectal prestige was a more powerful driver of stability or change in spoken Arabic than the ‘overt’ prestige of MSA, a conclusion which has been borne out by many more recent sociolinguistic studies of other Arabic-speaking communities.2 The contemporary distribution of many dialectal features, when seen against what we know about the social history and linguistic geography of the Gulf area, suggested that the dialect situation in Bahrain of the mid-1970s was the result of a long-term process of levelling and homogenization both within and between each of the main communal dialects A and B, and not just a result of the recent, and observable trends (a)—(d) noted in the previous paragraph. The reflex of OA /q/, for example, was /k/ in many BV dialects in the mid-1970s, though many individual BV speakers varied between /k/ and /g/; but in the BU dialects the reflex was overwhelmingly /g/, with just a few elderly BU dialect speakers still occasionally producing tokens of /k/. The explanation of this situation is probably that historically the BU dialect has been ‘levelled’ over a relatively long period of time: some of the original population, BV /k/users, migrated to the city and gradually switched to /g/, which in Bahrain was already establishing itself as the dominant dialect variant even before the Najdis arrived in the 1780s to reinforce it, and was almost certainly already the dominant reflex in the region as a whole. That ‘focusing’ of /g/ in Manāma as the default variant has now gone to virtual completion (though still, in the mid1970s, not quite). A similar type of change seems to be occurring, at the time of

2  A good early Labovian example (based on Jordan) is AJ. A collection of more recent studies covering much of the Arab World is AC. For a recent overarching summary of the issues in Arabic sociolinguistics see AW, especially 251–261.

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writing this, in Oman,3 in this case from the ‘local’ northern and typologically ‘sedentary’ variant /q/ to this regionally dominant /g/. /g/ was already present in Oman as the local variant of the desert areas, but, along with other ‘bedouin’ Gulf features, it is now coming to be reallocated a position as the ‘standard spoken Gulf’ variant ‘trumping’ the local variant /q/ even in Omani urban areas, even though this ‘dialectal’ /q/ sounds exactly like the ‘correct’ MSA variant. A knock-on effect is the shift of Omani ‘sedentary’ /g/ < OA /ǧ/ to /ǧ/. From my personal observations as a one-time long term resident, this was not at all the case even forty years ago, but, as Oman has become more integrated into the Gulf regional community of nations since the late 1980s/ 1990s, it is becoming so. Another example of historical levelling and homogenization in the Gulf more generally would appear to be the now recessive s-stem verb forms of the gālēt ‘I said’, tikallimēt ‘I spoke’ type discussed in Chapter 1, which all the evidence suggests was once a wide-spread coastal (i.e. non-Najdi) A variant in this whole area. This type of s-stem form in hollow and strong verbs has now all but disappeared, though it was commonplace at the time of Johnstone’s research in the late 1950s and still quite widely heard in the A dialects of Manāma and Muḥarrag in the mid-1970s when the field-work for this study was carried out. 7.2

The Work of al-Qouz (2009)

‘Longitudinal’ studies in Arabic dialectology/ sociolinguistics, where the same variables are examined in the same location after a lengthy time gap, are unusual, but this has happened in a partial fashion in the case of Bahrain. Muna al-Qouz’s 2009 University of Essex PhD,4 the field-work for which had been done five to six years previously, analyzed the speech of sample groups of Bahraini school-children aged from 6 to 17, drawn from both the ˁArab and Baḥārna communities of the capital city, Manāma. The raw data consisted of unstructured face-t0-face interviews conducted by al-Qouz with these children in their schools, which revolved mainly around their school-life. Her analysis of the resulting speech data focused on a number of high-frequency 3  The shift to a more ‘Gulf’ style of speech, noticeable in the speech of female Omani students from the Capital Area even in the 1980s when I was teaching at Sultan Qaboos University (1985–7) has become much more noticeable in recent years, particularly in the broadcast media, occasioning negative comment in the local press. See for example the article ‫مفردات‬ ‫‘( ومصطلحات غريبة تغزو نوافذان الإعالمية‬Strange vocabulary and usages are invading our media’) which appeared in the Omani newspaper al-Waṭan in January 2008: http://www.alwatan.com/ graphics/2008/01Jan/13.1/dailyhtml/culture.html#2. 4  QOUZ.

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phonological, morphological and lexical variables, some of which were the same as those analyzed in my sociolinguistic studies of Bahrain,5 based on conversational data from the adult population I had recorded more than thirty years before. Al-Qouz’s subjects were thus all at least one generation removed from mine, and in the case of the youngest informants, two generations. While the methodology of the two studies was not identical, it was similar, and Al-Qouz’s work yielded sufficient data to allow broad trends to be identified in how certain variables had developed in the thirty years between the two studies. The main difference between the two was scope: my work encompassed the whole of Bahrain, while al-Qouz’s was limited to the capital city. Of the variables examined by al-Qouz, we will look here at six high-frequency items which occurred many hundreds of times in her data: Dialectal reflexes of OA: 1) /ǧ/ 2) the interdentals /ṯ, ḏ, ḏ# / Morpho-phonological variants: 3) the B dialect 2fsng pronoun enclitic –(i)š; A dialect –(i)č 4) the B dialect independent pronouns: 1msng ana, 1fsng ani, 2fsng intīn; A dialect 1sng (common gender) āna, 2fsng inti and intay (pausal form) Lexical variants: 5) the B dialect negative particle mu ‘not’; A dialect mub 6) the B dialect preposition iyya ‘with’; A dialect wiyya All of these variables are loci for communal distinctions of various patterns and complexities, and all have been described in this book in the relevant sections of Chapters 2 and 3, though their treatment here, owing to the nature of this particular study, is non-quantitative. Variables 1 and 2, however, were dealt with quantitatively and in exstenso in PATT and HOL2. Many other variables which are also salient markers of community affiliation, however, particularly in the morphology of the verb, are absent from al-Qouz’s study,6 and of course, given that al-Qouz deals only with Manāma, there is no consideration at all in 5  See HOL2 in particular. 6  Examples are the participial –in(n)- infix, and the 2fsng and 2pl s-stem verb inflections –tīn and –tūn. Measurement of variables such as these is more difficult as by their nature they occur more rarely than phonological variables, and thus require a much larger data-base for trends in the data to be reliably captured.

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her work of specifically BV variants in the B pronoun systems,7 which, among the most conservative B villagers, differ radically from the BU system (and, of course, from the A). I will briefly summarise below al-Qouz’s main findings on the above variables. 1) Complete loss or drastic reduction in the use of saliently B forms Phonology It will be remembered that the three interdental consonants of OA, /ṯ, ḏ and )ḏ/ are realised in the vast majority of B dialects as /f, d and ḍ/ respectively. These are thus not only distinctively different from the A dialect reflexes, but also non-standard: in this set the covertly prestigious A dialect and MSA share identical reflexes. This coincidence would be plain to any educated B speaker, and gives the B variants a great deal of ‘negative’ saliency. In al-Qouz’s study, in the speech of young B speakers, two of these B forms, /d/ and /ḍ/, are very considerably reduced by the time they reach the end of their secondary education and one of them, /f/, has disappeared completely. How did this come about? Al-Qouz’s data show that the B forms were dominant in the speech of the 6–7 year age range, i.e. when the main influence on their speech was still most likely parental, but over time this changed—presumably through contact at school with A dialect speakers, and as a result of peer-pressure—so that in the speech of the oldest group sampled, the 15–17 year olds, the retention of the B forms /d/ and /ḍ/ is only around 30%.8 But in the case of the most marked B phonological feature, the /f/ reflex of OA /ṯ/, even the youngest group produced only a few residual examples (in the numerals), with the oldest producing none at all.9 This suggests that, even among the generation of the parents of Qouz’s group of 6–7 year olds, the /f/ reflex had already been ‘levelled out’ in Manāma, since their children had not inherited it.10 It would appear that /d/ and /ḍ/ are heading in the same direction as /f/.

7   See 3.1.1, 3.1.2. 8   QOUZ 186. 9   QOUZ 183–184. 10  There was no doubt, even at the time of my field-research in the 1970s, that the B /f/ < OA /ṯ/ was a powerful shibboleth. One of the jocular phrases used by some A speakers to label the B community—awlād il-ˁafar—‘the boys who say ˁafar—underlines this. ˁafar is the BV pronunciation of the modal particle which in the A dialect is aṯar or ṯari ‘it turns out that . . .’ ‘it might have been that . . .’. See 5.2.9.1.6.

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If al-Qouz’s findings are compared to the relevant data from my studies, based on educated Manāma adults, aged c. 17–30, in the mid-1970s,11 the general trend is the same: recession of dialectal /d/12 and the total loss of /f/. The difference is that in my study, total loss of /f/ in the speech of educated Manāma city-dwellers had not yet occurred, but it had already shrunk to around 22% of tokens recorded in the speech of literates (it was still at 83% in the speech of non-literates). One thus sees in al-Qouz’s study the steady progression of a trend identified in my studies of thirty years before: saliently B variants, especially if they are also non-standard, are very vulnerable. Morphology The morphological variables selected in my studies were different from those in al-Qouz, so no direct comparison is possible, but a switch away from saliently B forms was again the general trend in both. With regard to the form of the 2fsng pronoun enclitic, the shift from heritage B -(i)š → A -(i)č in al-Qouz’s study was relatively weak in the youngest B group, but very strong in the oldest group, again probably as a result of peer-pressure from the A group.13 The same pattern occurred in another highly marked B form, the independent 2fsng pronoun intīn: weak loss in the youngest group and almost total loss at age 15–17, in favour of the A forms inti/intay.14 The switch away from the saliently B 1st person pronoun forms ana (m) / ani (f ) was more complex. The two significant factors here are that (a) the A dialect lacks a gender distinction in the 1st person, having only āna; and (b) it has a backed, rounded and lengthened realisation of the initial vowel in āna (= [ɒ:na], which is every bit as much a marker of the A dialect as /f/ < OA /ṯ/ is of the B. On this variable, the female B subjects in al-Qouz’s study showed a twostage switch away from their heritage variant, the markedly ‘B’ form ani, first to the confessionally ‘neutral’ ana ([ana]) and thence to the saliently A variant āna (ɒ:na]).15 It seems from al-Qouz’s data that the switch to [ana] is the first stage, and then, in the older groups (after age 8), there is a further switch to the characteristically A realisation: by age 15–17, only 4% of tokens were the B/ neutral variant [ana], the rest were [ɒ:na]. The situation for the male speakers was less complex, as for them the switch only involved one stage, from B/ ‘neutral’ ana ([ana]) to [ɒ:na]. The retention of the heritage variant in the young11  HOL2 73, table 11. 12  In my study dialectal /ḍ/ was excluded on the grounds of insufficient data. 13  QOUZ 180, 186. 14  QOUZ 239. 15  QOUZ 246.

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est male age-group, as on other variables, was high (90%), but by age 15–17 it had shrunk to 23%. The trend was the same, but young B women were leading young B men in the abandonment of the B variants. Turning now to two more of al-Qouz’s morphological variables, we observe a less pronounced switch from B to A variants. The BU dialect’s basic particle for negating nouns, pronouns and adjective is mu, the A dialect’s is mub.16 BV speakers have a gender distinction in the singular, mu (m) and mi (f ), which seemed to have been levelled in Manāma even forty years ago.17 In al-Qouz’s data, the same general pattern of a reduced use of the B variant from the youngest to the oldest group is repeated, but with this variable no age-group drops below a 60% use of their heritage B variant.18 An even weaker switch from B iyya to A wiyya was evident, with all age-groups maintaining a roughly two-thirds proportion of the heritage variant. Al-Qouz explains this as a consequence of this variable’s lower saliency—it is not, for example, one of the variables used ‘in the stereotyping or mimicking of B speech’ and nor is the phonetic difference between the two forms ‘which can hardly be noticed in rapid speech’.19 2) Adoption by B speakers of saliently A (even if non-standard) forms We have already seen this in the change from 2fsng –(i)š to –ič, but that involved a switch from one non-standard variant to another. A more remarkable change is what occurs in the case of the reflexes of OA /ǧ/. For all B speakers apart from a handful of villages and the Manāma neighbourhood of Rās Rummān (Manāma 5)), the B ‘heritage’ variant is an alveolar affricate /ǧ/ identical with the normal MSA reflex (see 2.1.2.2). The A speakers, in common with other A dialects of the Gulf, have /y/ < OA /ǧ/ in all ‘core’ vocabulary items.20 So the situation here is the obverse of the interdentals: the main B ‘heritage’ dialectal reflex, urban and rural, ‘agrees’ with MSA, and the A dialect reflex is saliently non-standard. Nonetheless, the pattern of B variant loss in favour of 16  There are variants in both communal dialects—see 3.3.4. 17  In the mid-1970s, I did not record the gender distinction in Manāma speech at all, but it was quite common in B village speech. 18  However, there was a very strong relationship between social class and heritage variant retention, with the strongest retainers being middle (91%) and lower (100%) class children (QOUZ 262). 19  QOUZ 269–270. 20  As noted in HOL1, this excludes recent borrowings from MSA and foreign loan-words like ǧūti ‘shoes’.

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A variant adoption is shown by al-Qouz’s data21 to be very similar to the agerelated pattern of the switch from /d/ to /ḏ/ and from /ḍ/ to /ḏ# /: the retention by B speakers of their heritage variant /ǧ/ becomes weaker with age, falling from 89% in the youngest age-group to 60% in the oldest. This provides further evidence of the powerful influence exerted on the educated B speakers by the norms of the A dialect, even on variables on which their ‘heritage’ variant tallies with the standard variant. This finding accords with the pattern uncovered by my research,22 except that the embryonic tendency of educated B speakers in the mid-1970s to switch to A variants had become much stronger by the 2000’s. 3) Maintenance by A speakers of saliently A forms Compared to the educated B speakers sampled by al-Qouz, who show an agerelated tendency to switch ever more strongly to A dialect variants, even if their ‘heritage’ variant accords with the MSA variant, the A speakers show the opposite behaviour. Maintenance of the saliently non-standard A reflex /y/ < OA /ǧ/ is categorical in all age-groups,23 even in dialectal words like yār ‘neighbour’ and yidīd ‘new’, which have an exact MSA analogue with /ǧ/, and in which the reflex of the other major community, the B speakers, is also /ǧ/. It goes without saying that there is no switching by A speakers either away from A forms which tally with MSA ones, such as /ṯ, ḏ, #ḏ/. To quote al-Qouz: ‘It is as if these young Sunnis do not hear any other variants to any measurable degree in schools to make them change or alter their heritage variants [. . .] the categorical use of the Sunni variants observed in the 6–8 year olds is present in the oldest agegroup, who have experienced at least ten years of interaction with speakers of the Shia variety.’24 This again tallies with my findings in the mid-1970s. 7.3

Further Observations Post-1970s

B dialects Based upon regular short visits to Bahrain through the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s (last visit in 2009), I can add a number of observations on the evolution of the B village dialects to add to al-Qouz’s, which were limited to the sociolinguistic 21  QOUZ 153. 22  HOL2 76–77. 23  QOUZ 127–128. 24  QOUZ 129.

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evolution of the dialect of the capital city, Manāma. In the period since my original period of field-work in 1977–78, there has been a revolution in the Baḥārna economy: the allotment farming on which the B village economies were then in part based has collapsed, and there has been extensive residential and industrial building on what was once farmland. Another change is that the new generations of villagers are much better educated than those of thirtyfive years ago, and traditional manual occupations no longer interest them in any case—white collar jobs in Manāma-based banks, industrial concerns, shopping malls and government ministries are now the norm. From a sociolinguistic point of view, the trends in al-Qouz’s data are, unsurprisingly, also very evident in the rural areas. Bahrain, after all, is very small, distances are short, and as a result, many villages have become dormitories for people whose work is in the city. So whilst the older generations in the villages are still reservoirs of linguistic conservatism, the linguistic landscape inhabited by the under-40s has changed out of all recognition from what it was like in the 1970s. It is now much more difficult to ‘pigeon-hole’ a chance interlocutor as being from the A or B community because of the homogenisation which has been the result of increased inter-sect contact at school and at work. Many of the characteristic features of the BV dialects of forty years ago have now all but disappeared. I would add the following to the losses discussed in this chapter, based on my own recent observations: loss of /k/ < OA /q/ (adoption of /g/) loss of /č/ < OA /k/ in lexical items in which it is not shared with the A group (adoption of /k/) loss of -č (2msg) and -čim (2pl) in favour of -k and -kum loss of the –in(n)- infix in suffixed ap forms (e.g. māxd-inn-ah replaced by māxḏ-ah ‘I/you/he has taken it’) loss of intīn(a) ‘you ( fsng)’ and intūn ‘you (pl)’ and the associated s-stem forms of the verb in –tīn and –tūn (adoption of the A or ‘neutral’ variants, inti/intay and intu) loss of exclusively B vocabulary items forms, such as ġada (→ rāḥ) ‘to go’, kabaḍ (→ axaḏ) ‘to get’ and a huge number of obsolete agricultural terms. A dialects There have of course also been changes in the A dialect, but these are not nearly as noticeable as in the B. The basic phonology and morphology of A remain relatively unchanged, the main difference between the older less well educated speakers and the younger ones being the loss of a lot of now obsolete

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culture words, many of them associated with diving and sea-faring, and a large number of them borrowings, though some survive in modern Bahraini with a changed meaning, e.g. the Persian borrowing nōxaḏa ‘ship’s captain’ is now used in a general sense, and slightly jocularly, to mean the ‘boss’ of anything or any operation; the verb ṭubaˁ ‘to sink (of a ship)’ is now used in the sense of a business ‘failing’ or ‘crashing’. There was comment in Chapter 1 about the recession, since the 1950s, of the non-Najdi urban A dialect s-stem verb conjugation which inserts an /ē/ between the stem and consonant-initial endings in all stem-types, even hollow verbs and strong verbs, e.g. rāḥēt ‘I went’, šayyabēt ‘you have grown old’, tizawwiǧētaw ‘you (pl) got married’. Such forms were common at the time of Johnstone’s research in the late 1950s, but by the time of my research in the 1970s, relatively rare, and they are now virtually defunct. This is a good example of levelling over time within the A community. These days, little-used A dialect features such as this are selected by posters on internet bulletin boards as stereotypical of the speech style of ‘old Bahrain’. An example is the excerpt below, taken from a funny story circulating on the internet,25 at the end of which the poster challenges any non-Muḥarragi to demonstrate that he can understand it: rigdēt fōg il-kirfāya grē)ḏa u gāmēt u baṭṭalēt aṯ-ṯallāǧa u širabt lī ˁaranǧūš u kalēt lī siḥḥa mlaṭṭaxa bi l-hirda kānat . . . umm-i imǧābla l-karxāna tištaǧil u gāmēt u daššēt il-gaṭīˁ arīǧ il-māy . . . ˁugub, ṭilˁēt u rāḥēt il-ḥafīz lābis zinǧifra xāliya . . . istabradēt u baˁdēn rāḥēt gahwat bū xalaf . . .  ‘I lay on my bed for a bit, got up, opened the fridge, drank an ‘orange juice’26 and ate a date smeared with sesame dip . . . my mum was sitting working at her sewing machine . . . I went to the privy where the water smells so fragrant (!) . . . then I left for the office wearing only a vest . . . I chilled out and then went to Bu Khalaf’s coffee house . . .’  What is especially noticeable in this story told in the 1sng are the verb forms: rigdēt, gāmēt, baṭṭalēt, kalēt, ṭilˁēt, rāḥēt, istabradēt and there are another half dozen or so examples before the story ends.27 The story-teller seems to have deliberately selected this as a marker of what the old dialect of Muḥarrag was 25  http://www.mureis.com/vb/showthread.php?t=2683 accessed on 7 January 2015. 26  English loan word, and a euphemism for beer. 27  Another example of the heavy uses of this form is the humorous dialect poem published in 1970 by the recently (March 2015) deceased ˁArab poet from Manāma ˁAbdurraḥmān Rafīˁ, az-zawāǧ al-ˁadil ‘proper marriage’ referred to in Chapter 1 which maintains a rhyme in –ēt over some fifty or so lines, more than half of which make use of verbs of this

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like. There are other typically A dialectal features: /ǧ/< /g/< /q/ in mǧābla ‘sitting opposite’; the Muḥarragi word grēḏ# a ‘a little’. The vocabulary is general ‘old Bahraini’ rather than specifically A, and also seems to have been selected for its obsolescence, e.g. kirfāya ‘bed’,28 hirda ‘sesame dip’,29 siḥḥa ‘a date’, karxāna ‘sewing machine’,30 gaṭīˁ ‘privy, toilet’, ḥafīz ‘office’,31 zinǧifra ‘flannel vest’. All these words were common currency in the 1970s at the time of my field-work. No more—they are now words that you test other Bahrainis’ linguistic knowledge on (some internet respondents knew half of them). General Trends One main effect of 100% literacy and the associated revolution in employment on the younger generations has been the replacement in their speech of the old lexical stock with neologisms from MSA. Even once common, everyday words like mēwa ‘fruit’, ālu ‘potato’, drēwil ‘driver’, sbētār ‘hospital’, krāni ‘clerk’ (all borrowings from Persian, English and Hindi) and hundreds more32 are now simply no longer understood by large parts of the population. The way words of this type once entered the dialect was via work and cultural contact with speakers of other languages. Take, for instance, a description given to me by a man in his 40s in 1977, describing his job at the airport. The words set in boldface, with varying degrees of phonological and morphological accommodation to Bahraini Arabic are all work-related borrowings (here from English): maṯal čayk iṭ-ṭāˀirāt . . . fīh ˁinda-na zām in-nahār il-čayk . . . tayir prayšar māl tayir, il-wīl . . . nčayyik il-anǧin, ayil laval māl anǧin, xalāṣ . . . . zām il- . . . awwal il-lēl, maṯal fi awqāt ṭāˀira yiǧībūn-ha dāxil il-hangar, čayk māl, ḥagg ṯalāṯat ayyām . . . nbaṭṭil il-kawlin māl il-anǧin, inšīl-ah barra, inšīl il-ašya il-xarāb inbaddil-ha ‘Like checking the planes . . . on morning shift we do the checking . . . the tyre pressure in the tyre, the wheel . . . we check the engine, the oil-level in the engine, that’s it . . . on afternoon shift, like sometimes they bring

type. There is little doubt that this rhyme scheme was a deliberate choice intended to add humour and local colour to the poem. 28  A Hindi loan-word, which also produced Anglo-Indian charpoy ‘bedstead’, lit ‘four legs’. 29  < Pers arda ‘sesame flour’. The dip made from it is a favourite accompaniment to dates. 30  An Ottoman word literally meaning ‘factory, place of work’ and, by extension, ‘brothel’, but in the Gulf of former times it was used for ‘sewing machine’. 31  From English ‘office’. 32  For sample lists classified by donor language, see DCSEA I xxx–xxxix.

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a plane into the hangar for a three-day check . . . we take off the engine cowling, take it out, take out the defective parts and change them.’ This kind of Arabic-English code-mixing, and the conditions which produced it, are now largely a thing of the past, in large part because of the ubiquitousness of English in the education system and the globalised, English-speaking world the Gulf States now inhabit. Arabic-English code-switching, called ˁarabīzī (‘Arabish’), which is the product of the much greater mastery of English in the younger population as a whole, is now the order of the day whether in the Gulf work-place or the shopping mall. Here is a recent example from Kuwait33 in which the speaker switches effortlessly between her native Kuwaiti Arabic and faultless American-accented English: ismi ˁayša xālidi, mawlūda wa ˁayša bi l-kwēt and I also lived in English when I was younger, u ˁišt arbaˁ snīn fi amrīka fi l-ǧāmˁa. I’m the sports editor of the Daily Star. I live that job, it’s amazing. I was a journalist major so it really worked out for me . . . ˁumri arbaˁ u ˁišrīn sana u ana ataḥačča ˁarabīzī. That seems an appropriately 21st century note on which to conclude this threevolume study of the dialects, culture and society of eastern Arabia. 33  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SotOp07Fig accessed on 8 January 2015.

Further Addenda and Corrigenda to Volume 1 A further few items of dialectal vocabulary that occurred in the texts but were missed in the compilation of Volume I: Glossary, and were not noted in the Addenda and Corrigenda included in Volume II: Ethnographic Texts are noted here. Also added are new cross-references to other Gulf dialects, particularly Kuwaiti, obtained from locally-published reference works (AHA1 and AHA2) not available to me at the time of writing Volumes I and II and not noted in the works on Kuwaiti by Ḥanafī (HAN) or Shamlān (SHAM) consulted in those two volumes. New cross references to the Emirati dialects in the work of Ḥan#ḏal are to the pagination of the second edition of this work (HANZii), whose first edition (HANZ) was the reference point in Volumes I and II of this study. Page

Root

Correction/ addition

9

ˀ-D-M

31

B-D-D

39

B-R-M-Y-T

39

B-R-Y1

44

B-Ṭ-L2

50

B-K-B-K

50

B-K-R

54

B-L-Y1

62

B-Y-Z

Sub īdām add cross reference to the same word in Kuwaiti with the same meaning. AHA1 203. Sub badd 2 be enough, suffice, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where it has the same meaning. AHA2 82. Sub burmīt (hard) sweets, candy, peppermint, add cross reference to Kuwaiti burmīt ḥārr ‘peppermint’ (< Eng peppermint). AHA1 204. Sub bāra take care of, take pains over, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where it means ‘look after’. AHA2 79. Sub baṭṭāli add cross-reference to Kuwaiti in which this word has the same general sense of ‘useless’. AHA1 44. Sub bačbač /vi/ whimper, whine, snivel, add cross reference to Kuwaiti Arabic tbačbač ‘feign crying, pretend to cry’. AHA1 28. Sub bičir 1 first born child, add cross reference to Kuwaiti Arabic, in which the same word has the same meaning (but can also be applied to animals). AHA2 80. Sub baliyya 2 /adj/ huge, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the word used as an adjective has the same sense. AHA1 316. Sub bīz rag or cloth used for holding hot coffee pot, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the same word means ‘cloth used for picking up hot saucepan’. AHA1 288.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004302631_009

480

Further Addenda and Corrigenda to Volume 1

(cont.) Page

Root

Correction/ addition

67

T-R-K

71

T-N-D-Y-L

79

CH-K-R

80

CH-M-T

80

CH-N-D-L

96

J-W-N-Y-A

102

Ḥ-J-J

110

Ḥ-Z-Z

138

Ḥ-Y-F

139

KH-B-B

142

KH-CH-R-Y

145

KH-R-J

Sub yōm u tark every other day, on alternate days, add cross reference to Kuwaiti which has the same phrase with the same meaning. AHA2 67. Sub tindēl foreman, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the same word with the same meaning is also attested. AHA1 143. Sub čakkar /vn/ fill, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where mčakkir also means ‘full up’. AHA1 70. Sub čamta bag in which a pearl-diver keep his equipment, add cross reference to Kuwaiti šamta ‘builder’s or hunter’s bag for tools’. AHA1 166. Both these items are seemingly variants of šanṭa, čanṭa, ǧanṭa which all denote ‘bag, satchel’. čandal and čandala /n/ roof-beam: the wood from which these beams were made was not, as stated, sandal-wood, but mangrove. The meaning should read ‘mangrove pole, used as a roof-beam’. Sub ǧūniyya/ yūniyya (gunny) sack, esp used for rice, add cross reference to yūniyya with the same meaning in Kuwaiti. AHA1 165. Sub ḥaǧǧa /pl -āt/ eyebrow, add cross reference to Kuwaiti ḥiyyāt ‘eyebrows’. AHA1 136. Sub ḥazz cut notches, slits, add cross reference to Kuwaiti ‘notch cut in wood’. AHA1 96. Sub hāyif 2 tainted, ‘off’ (said of food). This is also used in Kuwaiti to describe food tainted by insects or maggots that have crawled on it. AHA1 199. The Bahraini example given seems also to refer to precisely this form of taint. Sub xabb /vt/ shake, convulse, add cross reference to Kuwaiti xabba ‘tumult, noise’. AHA1 128. Sub xičri ‘stupid’ add cross reference to Kuwaiti dialect where the same word without affrication (xikri) occurs with the same meaning. AHA1 19. Sub xarǧ 1 pocket-money, ex-gratia payment, add cross reference to Kuwaiti xarǧiyya ‘daily expenses’. In Bahrain, the xarǧiyya refers to the smallest of three payments made to pearl-divers, during the furlough between each 60-day ṭarša (qv). AHA1 159.

Further Addenda and Corrigenda to Volume 1

481

Page

Root

Correction/ addition

147

KH-R-Ṭ

154

KH-F-F

154

KH-F-S

157

KH-L-Q

160

KH-M-M

160

KH-M-KH-M

181

D-L-D-GH

187

D-W-GH

196

R-B-SH

209

R-Q-Q

218

R-Y-Q

219

Z-B-L

221

Z-R-Q

222

Z-L-F

224

Z-H-B

Sub xarīṭ add cross-reference to Kuwaiti xriṭi ‘lies, baloney’. AHA1 30. Sub istaxaff 2 be, go feeble-minded, deranged, add cross reference to Kuwaiti mistaxiff with the same meaning. AHA1 78. Sub xaffas crush, smash add cross reference to Kuwaiti xaffas il-gūṭi ‘he crushed the can’. AHA1 87. Sub xalg people, mankind, add cross reference to Kuwaiti xalg allah min xalg ‘large crowd of people’. AHA1 143. Sub maxamma broom, brush, add cross reference to Kuwaiti where the word has the same meaning. AHA1 181. Sub xamxam 2 gobble food up, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, in which this word also occurs with this meaning. AHA1 197. Sub daldaġ /vn/ scratch up, dig up, add cross reference to Kuwaiti Arabic, in which this word means ‘to tickle’. AHA1 69. Add lemma dōġa /n/ kiln for burning limestone. This word is also known in Kuwait. Sub rabša /n/ chaos, tumult, add cross reference to Kuwaiti which has this word with the same meaning. AHA1 128. Sub raggi water-melon, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, in which this word is also used. AHA1 39. Sub rayūg breakfast, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the same usage is found. AHA1 200. Sub zabīl basket made of palm leaves, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the word has the same meaning. AHA1 166. Sub zarrag 2 slip, pass s’thing clandestinely to s’one, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the word has the similar sense of ‘to send s’thing secretly without anyone knowing’. AHA2 367. Sub zilf /n pl zilāf/ side-burns, add cross reference to the Kuwaiti pl zlūf with the same meaning. AHA1 141. Sub zahāb provisions, food, supplies, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, in which this word means ‘food provisions taken with him by a traveller’. AHA1 203.

482

Further Addenda and Corrigenda to Volume 1

(cont.) Page

Root

Correction/ addition

228

Z-Y-L

228

S-A-T-W-L

228

S-A-G-W

231

S-B-K

236

S-R-ˁ

237

S-S-R

237

S-Ṭ-R

246

S-L-M

248

S-M-T

260

S-Y-F

264

SH-T-R

266

SH-KH-Ṣ

267

SH-D-KH

Sub zīla jerry can, add cross-reference to Kuwaiti, where this word is glossed as ‘container in which builders carry water’. AHA1 166. sātūl with same meaning of ‘queue, file of people’ also occurs in Kuwaiti dialect. AHA1 144. Sub sāgū sago pudding, add cross reference to Kuwaiti where the same English borrowing is used with the same meaning. AHA1 193. The example under sibak/ sibač should be entered under SH-B-K on p.264, as s is commonly substituted for š, here masbūč for mašbūč, by B speakers in words in which an alveolar affricate is also present. Another example is saǧara for šaǧara. Sub the phrase misraˁ allah in a hurry, add cross reference to Kuwaiti dialect misriˁ with same sense. AHA1 47. Sub sāsar add cross reference to Kuwaiti dialect, where the vn əmsāsar has the same meaning of ‘whisper to, confer clandestinely with’. AHA1 60. Sub sāṭir side of the cheek, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, which has the same word with the meaning ‘side of the face’. AHA1 136. Sub silm and ṣilm add cross reference to Kuwaiti where ṣulm has the same meaning of ‘pulp of a fruit’. AHA1 201. Add lemma istamat /vi/ become habituated to, do s’thing constantly. kint fi t-takāsi āstamit, wil-yōm iḏa ṭilˁēt mišēt [poet] I used to take taxis all the time, but today, if I go out, I walk. Sub msāyif /adj/ 1 ajar, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where this word and meaning is also attested. AHA1 186. Sub šattar beat, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where this word means ‘to insult publicly’. AHA2 305. Sub mišxaṣ gold coins (used in jewellery), add cross reference to Kuwait, where the word has the same meaning. AHA1 157. Sub šaddāx mousetrap, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where šaddāxa has the same meaning. AHA1 182.

Further Addenda and Corrigenda to Volume 1

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Page

Root

Correction/ addition

267

SH-D-H

271

SH-R-H

273

SH-GH-L

275

SH-Q-Ḥ

275

SH-G-R-D-Y

277

SH-L-KH

277

SH-L-KH

278

SH-L-ˁ

291

Ṣ-B-N

295

Ṣ-R-ˁ

299

Ṣ-F-Q

Sub inšidah be busy, preoccupied, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where inšidah ˁan means ‘to be distracted from’ AHA2 309. Sub šarah complain about, scold, tell off, add cross reference to Kuwaiti where the same verb is used, especially when scolding or finding fault with friends. AHA2 311. Sub šāġūl hard-working, add reference to the same word and meaning in Kuwaiti. AHA2 302. The intensive fāˁūl pattern is heavily used in Kuwait as it is in Bahrain. e.g. lāˁūb playful, lāhūb very hot, ākūl gluttonous. Sub šigaḥ/vi/ jump, leap over, add cross reference to Kuwaiti šigaḥ with same meaning. AHA1 125. Sub šigirdi building labourer, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the same word means ‘strong, quickwitted person who doesn’t hesitate to help others in a crisis’. AHA2 314. Both senses are extensions of the meaning of the same Pers šāgird scholar, apprentice, pupil; boy, servant, groom. Sub šallax lie, tell tall stories, add cross reference to Kuwaiti where the same verb occurs with the same meaning. AHA1 96. Sub šilxa piece, chunk, add cross-reference to Kuwaiti šalx ‘cut in a piece of wood’. AHA1 96. Sub šalaˁ pull out, extract, insert cross reference to same word in Kuwaiti dialect with same meaning. AHA1 98. Sub maṣbina add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the same word occurs with the meaning ‘group of friends, work-mates’ AHA1 144. The word is also attested with the meaning ‘group of boys’ in on-line dictionaries of the dialects of eastern Saudi Arabia and Qatar: http://www .bdr130.net/vb/t480361.html http://www.qtr888.com/vb/showthread.php?t=6320 tiṣarwaˁ also means ‘to be scared to death’ in Kuwaiti. AHA1 29. Sub ṣaffag add the vn ṣaffāg ‘rhythmic clapping’.

484

Further Addenda and Corrigenda to Volume 1

(cont.) Page

Root

Correction/ addition

303

Ṣ-M-M

318

Ṭ-B-N

321 321

Ṭ-R-SH2 Ṭ-R-Ṭ-N-G-Y

321

Ṭ-R-Ṭ-R

322

Ṭ-ˁ-M

324

Ṭ-Q-Q

324

Ṭ-L-L

339 339

ˁ-B-Ṭ ˁ-B-L

Sub ṣammiyya add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the same word also means ‘large smooth block of stone’. AHA1 256. The meaning of ṭaban given, ‘to beat, flap’ is incorrect, and should be ‘to bury’. In the Kuwaiti dialect, this verb is predicated, as it is in the example quoted here, of sea-creatures, and refers to their habit of burying themselves in sand or mud when in danger. This could well be the sense here. The example should be translated: ‘a shark . . . I suddenly saw its fins . . . it was burying its fins (in the mud)’. AHA2 354. Similarly, the sense of inṭuban is more correctly ‘bury oneself’ (in the example given, in the farša, the bridal bed). Add lemma aṭraš /adj fem ṭarša pl ṭiršān/ deaf. ṭirṭangi with the same sense of ‘wastrel, useless’ (applied to a man) also occurs in Kuwaiti. AHA1 21. Add meaning 3 [pearl] sub ṭarṭūr a sleeve made of material, with two openings for the eyes, which divers pull over their heads to protect them from harmful sea-creatures, esp jellyfish. HANZ (ii) idem 238. Sub ṭaˁām 1 animal fodder (often stones from dates and mangoes crushed for this purpose), add cross reference to Kuwaiti, in which the word also means ‘fruit stone’ (AHA2 359), and is used for the same purpose. (AHA1 182). ṭagga/n/ type, kind is also found in this sense in Kuwait: AHA1 348: min ṭaggat flān like so-and-so. ṭall in the metaphorical sense ‘small, light’ in gudūˁ iṭ-ṭall ‘light (i.e. not very nourishing) snack’ also occurs in Kuwaiti dialect in the phrase ˁala ṭ-ṭall ‘(action or words) from which little of use can be expected’. AHA1 72. Addˁubbāṭ /vn/ to entry ˁabbaṭ. Sub ˁābal look after, take care of, add cross-reference to Kuwaiti, which has the same word with the same meaning. AHA1 34.

Further Addenda and Corrigenda to Volume 1

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Page

Root

Correction/ addition

339

ˁ-T-M

344

ˁ-R-B

348

ˁ-Z-B

350

ˁ-SH-SH

351

ˁ-Ṣ-R

354

ˁ-F-S

357

ˁ-K-K

357

ˁ-K-R-F

358

ˁ-K-F

358

ˁ-K-W

365

ˁ-N-J-Y-SH

367

ˁ-N-W

Sub ˁatam spend the evening, add cross-reference to Kuwaiti taˁattam ‘to go out in the evening to someone else’s house’. AHA2 117. Sub ˁarab (pl) 3 men, people, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, in which ˁarab is also used in the generic sense of ‘people, men’ of any origin, not just Arabs. Sub ˁuzūbi bachelor, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where it has the same meaning. AHA2 39. Sub ˁišša hut made from palm-branches and fronds, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the same word is used for the same thing. AHA1 184. Sub taˁaṣṣar have birth contractions, add cross reference to Kuwaiti Arabic, where this word means ‘to strain while defecating’. AHA2 117. Sub ˁafsa and afīsa add cross reference to Kuwaiti Arabic, where these words have the same meanings of ‘chaos, mess’. AHA1 59. Sub ˁakk carry on the back, give a piggy-back, add cross reference to Kuwaiti where the same word has the same meaning. AHA1 93. Sub tiˁakraf /vi/ work, add cross reference to the same word in Kuwaiti glossed as ‘to bend oneself’ AHA2 119. This word in the Bahraini example given may have meant precisely this, i.e. ‘to bend one’s back’ (sc in doing manual labour). Sub ˁaččaf curl and plait hair, add cross reference to Kuwaiti in which mˁaččaf is glossed as ‘braided, plaited (hair)’ AHA1 141. Sub ˁičwa tail (of an animal, bird), add cross reference to Kuwaiti, which has the same word and meaning. AHA2 384. Sub ˁanǧēš edible stone of umm slēm fruit (type of lotus fruit), add cross reference to Kuwaiti, in which ˁangēš is the stone of the apricot (mišmiš). AHA2 359. Add lemma tiˁnā /vn/ care. il-kaḍiyya tibba šway ṣabr u tiˁnā the matter needs some patience and care.

486

Further Addenda and Corrigenda to Volume 1

(cont.) Page

Root

Correction/ addition

374

ˁ-Y-Y

374

GH-B-B

375

GH-B-Q

378

GH-R-F

384

GH-N-D-M

417

Q-D-M

418

Q-DH-L

420

Q-R-Ḍ

420

Q-R-Ḍ

421

Q-R-Ṭ-ˁ

Sub taˁāya /vi/ argue with one another, insert cross reference to Kuwaiti ˁāya ‘to be very argumentative’. AHA1 88. Add lemma istaġabb/vi/ conceive a child. gālaw mistaġabba, gālaw mi mistaġabba some people said she had conceived and some said she hadn’t. The participle mistaġabba in the sense ‘pregnant’ is attested in an on-line forum for Kuwaiti women: http://www.q8yat.com/t598037.html Sub ġabga meal taken at about midnight during Ramadan, add cross reference to Kuwaiti ‘light meal taken in the evening’ (AHA1 200), though another Kuwaiti reference (SAB2 186) confirms the Bahraini usage, that this normally refers to a Ramadan custom. Sub ġurfa upper room in a two-story house, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where it also has this meaning (as opposed to dār and ḥiǧra, which are both ground floor rooms). AHA1 184. Sub mġandim preoccupied, worried, add cross reference to Kuwait mġaldim with the same meaning. AHA1 77. gaddūm and kaddūm (B villages): add an additional pl kadādīm for B villages. Sub giḏla fringe of hair add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where it similarly refers to ‘hair hanging over the forehead’. AHA1 141. garāḍa should be spelt garāda, and listed under the notional root G-R-D on p 445. HAN 310: idem < Pers gard sadness, sorrow. Sub grēḍa /dim n/ bit, small amount add cross-reference to Kuwaiti where it has the sense ‘short period’. AHA1 48. Sub tgarṭaˁ /vi/ pop, burst, crack (of a vein), add cross reference to Kuwaiti titirgaˁ il-aṣābīˁ ‘to pull one’s fingers till the joints pop, crack one’s knuckles’, in which the radicals are metathesised. AHA1 122. (targaˁ jump about, crack, pop also occurs in Bahrain).

Further Addenda and Corrigenda to Volume 1

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Page

Root

Correction/ addition

421

Q-R-ˁ

422

Q-R-Q-SH

422

Q-R-Q-ˁ

425

Q-Ṣ-Ṣ

427

Q-Ṣ-R

430

Q-Ṭ-ˁ

433

Q-F-R

433

Q-F-Ḍ

434

Q-L-L

436

Q-L-Ṭ

439

Q-H-R

453

K-Ḥ-T

456

K-R-F-S

Sub agraˁ 1 having a scabrous skin, suffering from scurf, add cross reference to the same word in Kuwaiti, where it means ‘suffering from alopecia’ (disease causing the hair to fall out). AHA1 134. Sub gargaš add cross reference to the same word in Kuwaiti, in the which the same word also means ‘jingle, rattle’ (e.g. of coins in the pocket). AHA1 131. Sub gargaˁ add cross-reference to the same word in Kuwaiti, where the basic sense is also ‘clatter, bang’. AHA1 130. Sub gaṣṣ 7 play a trick on, swindle, cheat, insert cross reference to Kuwaiti Arabic with same sense: AHA1 30. Sub mgaṣṣar short (European style) shirt, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where it means ‘under-shirt’. AHA2 61. Sub gṭūˁa (payment) in a lump sum, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where it also means ‘payment at the end of work in a single transaction’. AHA1 159. Sub gafīr and ǧifīr type of large basket, often used for sieving, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where a ǧifīr is a basket made of palm fronds. AHA1 181. Sub gaffaḍ 2 tidy, put in order, add cross reference to Kuwaiti dialect where this word is also used in the same sense. AHA1 35. Sub galla sack of dates weighing approx 56 lbs, add cross reference to Kuwait where the same word is glossed as ‘container for dates’. AHA1 164. Sub glāṭa share (of a crop, fish catch), add cross reference to Kuwaiti where the word is noted for the share of a diver in a pearl catch. AHA1 159. Sub inkahar (B villages) /vi/ get annoyed. upset, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where it has the same meaning. AHA2 69. Sub čiḥat abjure, disown, renounce, add cross reference to Kuwaiti čahat ‘expel, kick out’. AHA1 106. Sub karfas knock to the ground, add cross reference to Kuwaiti tikarfas ‘fall to the ground and roll’. AHA1 101.

488

Further Addenda and Corrigenda to Volume 1

(cont.) Page

Root

Correction/ addition

457

K-R-W

458

K-S-R

459

K-S-F

459

K-SH-SH

459

K-SH-KH

464

K-L-K2

465

K-M-CH

466

K-N-D-S

473

L-B-D

474

L-B-S

481

L-F-(Ḏ

484

L-W-T

Sub karwa hire, payment for a service, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the word has the same meaning. AHA1 159. Sub tkassar be worn out, broken, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the word mitkassir is, as in Bahrain, applied to people’s bodies in the sense of ‘infirm, defective’. AHA1 138. Sub kasīf 1 dirty, filthy, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the word means ‘ugly, bad’. AHA2 470. Sub kišša hair, hair style, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the same word means ‘tousled, shaggy hair-do’. This word is used everywhere in the Gulf to describe the long, untidy hair-styles of 60s/70s youth. AHA1 140. Sub tičaššax /vi/ show off. Add cross reference to Kuwaiti kišax ‘to wear fine, smart clothes, become a zigirti’ (‘dandy’, see Vol I: 223). AHA2 470. Sub kallak lie, cheat add cross-reference to Kuwaiti with the same meaning. AHA1 30. Sub kamāč type of (unleavened) toasted bread, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where this word is also used with this meaning. AHA2 475. Sub čandas /vi/ bow the head, lean over, add cross reference to Kuwaiti tčandas ‘to bend over in order to pick something up’. AHA1 125. labad /vi/ hide oneself. Add cross-reference to Kuwaiti, where it has the same meaning. AHA1 54. Sub mlabbas sugar-coated (sweet or nut), add cross reference to Kuwaiti, which has the same word and meaning. AHA1 204. Add lemma lafa#ḏ (u) /vt vn nr/ to remove. iḍ-ḍarrāb yiḍrub ila ma yanbi yilfuḏ ̣ riǧūlah, yišīl rǧūlah the ‘hitter’ hits him until he wants to remove his leg, take his leg away. AHA2 494: idem to spit out. Sub lawwat wrap up, wrap around, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the same word with the same meaning also occurs. AHA2 498.

Further Addenda and Corrigenda to Volume 1

489

Page

Root

Correction/ addition

496

M-S-T-N

502

M-L-ˀ

504

M-N

512

N-T-SH

515

N-KH-SH-SH

518

N-S-L

519

N-SH-SH

520

N-SH-F

522

N-Ṣ-F

524

N-ˁ-Z

530

N-Q-L

544

H-L-K

545

H-M-J

Add lemma mistāni /adj/ homeless, having no place to go. Origin unknown. mall /n/ This is incorrectly glossed as ‘a kind of fever’. It in fact means ‘the bends’, or decompression sickness—the headache, dizziness and joint pains suffered by pearldivers when they ascend too quickly after a series of deep dives. Sub min 8 minnu u fīh solely, add cross reference to Kuwaiti minha u fīha which means ‘(he is) from this land and knows no other’. AHA1 145. Sub tanātīš bits and pieces, trifles, small things, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, in which this word means the same. AHA2 123. Sub naxšūš /pl naxāšīš/ nasal cavity, nostril, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, which has the same word and sense. Sub nisal wash, comb and coiffe hair, add cross reference to Kuwaiti mansūl glossed as ‘combed and flattened (hair)’. AHA1 141. Sub našš fly up, add cross reference to Kuwaiti yinišš ‘he jumps’. AHA1 108. Sub the idiom naššaf rīǧ-i tried my patience, got on my nerves (lit ‘dried my spit’) insert cross reference to Kuwaiti which has the same metaphor. AHA1 91. Sub nāṣfa nuts and sweets given to children who go trick-or-treating during Ramadan, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, which has nāṣfū with this meaning. See AHA1 203 sub mxallaṭ. Sub tinaˁˁaz /vi/ move away from, add cross reference to Kuwaiti which has the same word with the same sense. AHA1 54. Sub ngil and nigal salted nuts and candies presented at social gatherings, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where nugul has the same meaning. Sub halkān add cross reference to Kuwaiti, which has same word and sense of ‘exhausted, worn out through hard work’. AHA1 34. Sub hamaǧi rough, uncultured, ignorant, add cross reference to Kuwaiti hamaǧ /n coll/ ‘uncivilised’. AHA1 147.

490

Further Addenda and Corrigenda to Volume 1

(cont.) Page

Root

Correction/ addition

550

H-Y-M

551

W-A-R

555

W-R-R

565

W-L1

567

W-L-M

Sub hayām place of soft, shifting sand, add cross reference to Kuwaiti, where the same word means ‘sandy earth which does not hold together’. AHA2 582. Sub wār and wāra, unit of measurement: from the nose to the finger-tips of an outstretched arm (= approx a yard). This word, ultimately of Portuguese origin (< vār ‘rod’) is also used in Kuwait. AHA1 162. Sub warra /n/ share, add cross reference to the Emirati dialects which have the same word with the same meaning. HANZ (ii) 379. wāl bi- /part w pron enc/ 1 hardly, scarcely is also attested with the same meaning for Kuwait. AHA2 594. Add to the meanings of lemma wālam: /vn/ wilām/ ūlām correctness, suitability.