The Levantini Podcast
The Levantini Podcast is a show about the ancient Near East with a focus on biblical archaeology, Judaism and Islam.
The Levantini Podcast
Ancient Cousins of Arabic
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In this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Aaron Rubin, who is The Malvin and Lea Bank Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, Jewish Studies, and Linguistics at Penn State University. Professor Rubin is one of the leading scholars of the Modern South Arabian languages and in this episode we discussed his research on Jibbali and Mehri. In our talk we discuss the history and development of these languages, how they can inform of us other ancient Semitic languages, and their current states.
Welcome to the Forincy Podcast. Forensic.us is a language training website for Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian designed specifically for intermediate to advanced learners. Our daily lessons prepare you to read real foreign language news articles and listen to actual foreign language media on a wide variety of subjects to put you on the path to language mastery. In this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Aaron Rubin, who is the Melvin and Leah Bank Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, Jewish Studies, and Linguistics at Penn State University. Professor Rubin is one of the leading scholars of modern South Arabian languages, and in this episode, we discuss his research on Jibali and Mehdi. In our talk, we discuss the history and development of these languages, how they can form us of other ancient Semitic languages, and their current states. I had a great time speaking with him, and I hope you enjoy the show. I'm here today with Professor Aaron Rubin, who's the Malvin and Leah Bank Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, Jewish Studies, and Linguistics at Penn State University. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me, Alex. So I came across your work when I was doing some research into ancient Arabic, and I found that you've done a significant amount of research into two modern Southern Arabian languages called Mehri and Shehri. I'd love if you can give me a high-level overview of what those are and why you took an interest in it. Sure.
SPEAKER_02Mehri and Shahri, which is also called Jabali, are part of a group of languages called modern South Arabian, which are a sub-branch of the Semitic language family. And the six languages in the modern South Arabian group are Mehri, Shahri, or Jabali, Sokotri, Hobyot, Harsusi, and Bathari, all are spoken in either Oman or Yemen. And all of them are only modern languages, meaning that they've only been attested in the last 200 years or so. And none of them are written languages. They're only spoken, although now with computers and text messaging and Facebook and things, they're being written a little bit more.
SPEAKER_00So when when we say that they're modern, they're titled modern South Arabian languages, they really are ancient languages.
SPEAKER_02It's just that Sure, they they have a long history, but we only know of them in modern times. So unlike, say, Hebrew or Arabic or several other Semitic languages which are tested in antiquity, these languages are tested only in the last two centuries. Right.
SPEAKER_00Just as old as Hebrew and Arabic, of course, but only known recently. Aaron Powell And I'd like if you can briefly talk about, if it's possible to talk about this briefly, the emergence of Semitic languages. So where they emerged from initially, how they spread, and then how these two languages fit into that.
SPEAKER_02We don't know exactly where they began. Probably either somewhere in Arabia or possibly in the Horn of Africa and Ethiopia, that region. There are different theories, and they must have diverged sometime in the fifth or fourth millennium CE. The earliest attested Semitic language is Akkadian, around 3300 BCE, something like that. And by that point, Akkadian and the ancestor of Hebrew and others already were different, so they must have been diverging for hundreds or even thousands of years before that. But we don't know exactly where they came from. But they spread or they are attested in Ethiopia, in Southern Arabia, Greater Syria, Iraq, so across the whole Near East, is the sort of Semitic homeland.
SPEAKER_00And when were the two languages we're going to be talking about today, Mehri and Shahari, when were they first discovered and how old do we think they are?
SPEAKER_02They were first discovered by Europeans in the 1830s. The British stopped in an island called Sukotra in the Indian Ocean, which is on the way to India, and they uh were investigating establishing a naval base there or a place to stop over on the way to India. And uh a couple of gentlemen in the British Navy recorded some words in Socotri and also in Mehri and published them in the late 1830s. Although of the six languages, three of them were not known until the 20th century. So a few were discovered in the 1830s, 1840s, and then a couple others in the 1930s, and then one only in the 1970s. How old are the languages you asked? As old as any Semitic language. We don't know at what point they began to diverge from other forms of Semitic, but probably at least 3,000 years ago, I would say.
SPEAKER_00And even though the part of their name is South Arabian languages, just to be clear, they're not a dialect of Arabic. They're a unique, separate language. Correct. The name is rather misleading.
SPEAKER_02They're not a type of Arabic, they're not any closer to Arabic in terms of their genetic history than they are to, say, Hebrew or Aramaic. To make it more confusing, there are also another set of languages called Old South Arabian by some scholars. These are the languages used by the ancient Arabian kingdoms of Sheba and a few others in and around Yemen, languages tested only, almost only through inscriptions. And they, despite their name being Old South Arabian, are not the ancestors of what we call modern South Arabian. So you're correct that Mehri and Shahri are not dialects of Arabic, although they've been in close contact for so long, there is a lot of Arabic influence in those languages, a lot of borrowed vocabulary, especially.
SPEAKER_00And what first drew you to start researching these? Why were they of interest to you?
SPEAKER_02Well, when I was in graduate school studying about Semitic languages, these were kind of the last unknown group. There had been some publications, but they were not well known. Some still are not well known. And so they didn't really make up part of our curriculum. And then around 2008, I think, I met a French scholar named Antoine Lonet, who had gone to Yemen in the 80s several times and done field work on Mehri, especially, and uh also Sikotri. He started telling me about these languages and all the work he had done, and I just became really interested to learn more. And there had been some texts published in Mehri, and I started trying to read them. And when I discovered there was no grammar out there to refer to, I decided to write one. So really it was just because there was so much to do, there was so little written on these languages, there had been no real grammatical description in a hundred years. And so I felt it was an area in which I could make a contribution. Coming from studying, say, Hebrew, which I love, there's less to do. It's been very well studied. There are dozens of grammars and dictionaries. So I wanted to something more of a challenge.
SPEAKER_00So I'm glad you brought that up because it was a question that I wanted to circle back to later on in the discussion, but we should touch on it now. So, you know, when we're looking at these two languages who have very ancient roots, like Hebrew, but they're not very well documented, what can they tell us about some of the modern Semitic languages that exist now or that are in wider use, but maybe we don't know much about how they originally sounded or things that may have been lost?
SPEAKER_02What can modern South Arabian language tell us about the ancient languages? Is that what you're asking? Yeah. Well, if we look at the sounds of modern South Arabian, for example, just by chance they happen to preserve more faithfully than any other Semitic language the sounds that we reconstruct for ancient Semitic. So when we look at Biblical Hebrew or Akkadian or Aramaic in their ancient varieties, we don't know exactly how they sounded.
SPEAKER_00There are some, there's ancient texts that I believe in in Greek that provide some pronunciations, but they're still not as exact, correct?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we we have clues to their pronunciation from loan words into Greek and from spelling errors that they make, for example. But there are certain sounds that uh we don't know for sure how they were pronounced. The best example is the letter seen in Hebrew. Sene in the later reading traditions is pronounced like samek, it's pronounced like a regular s. They must have been different sounds because they're spelled differently in ancient Hebrew. Later Hebrew they confuse samik and seem, which means they must have been pronouncing the same. And if you look at loan words uh into Greek, they sometimes wrote uh words that had Hebrew scene with an L in Greek. So the Hebrew word kasdi meaning chaldean in Greek has an L D, Chaldean. And so scholars had hypothesized that this ancient Hebrew scene must have sounded something like L, had an L-like sound. And in fact, in modern South Arabian, the cognate letter of Hebrew scene is a voiceless L, a lateral fricative, sh. So what we assume to have been the pronunciation of scene in ancient Hebrew has been confirmed by the pronunciation of s of that letter in modern South Arabian.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. Yeah. So to get into a little bit about the development of, I guess we should just start with one rather than unpacking both of them at the same time. But if we were to start with with Shahari, which is also called Jabali. Tell me about how how that language developed in the role that the landscape and the lives of the people played in in the vocabulary of the language and how it's spoken.
SPEAKER_02Well, we don't know much about its history, prehistory, but the speakers of Jibali have historically been camel herders and not quite Bedouin, but had lived a particular lifestyle. And so their language and their oral histories and their stories often revolve around their traditional lifestyle and their camel culture. And so there are a lot of very interesting words pertaining to that lifestyle, if that's what you're referring to. But as far as the development of the language, the grammar and the sounds, that's really independent from their lifestyle, I think.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell And what about the landscape? So Jibali in Arabic means mountainous, right? Yeah. What role did where these languages are spoken play in and how they were preserved? Right.
SPEAKER_02The area of Oman in which Jibali and Mehri are spoken, the Dofar region in the south of Oman, and Mehri is spoken in the eastern part of Yemen, the Al-Mahra government of Yemen, those regions are quite isolated from the rest of Arabia. They're quite different in their topography. They're actually quite lush in the rainy season, but the mountains really kept that region separate from the rest of Arabia. Of course, Islam came very early, but the isolation of that region is certainly why the natives preserved their languages for so long.
SPEAKER_00It was only really in the last couple of centuries that that region was opened up to the wider world. When you started doing your research into both these languages, did you travel to the region to do some field work?
SPEAKER_02No, I wanted to, and I I had plans to, but the Arab Spring happened in 2012. That kind of derailed my plans. And then for other reasons, I just never was able to make it. So what I did was I found speakers of Jibali in the U.S. through the consulate. I found several college students that were here from Oman. Interesting. Being in in South Carolina and in Florida. And I went there and spent several days with them recording them and eliciting paradigms and vocabulary items. So I did field work, but not in Oman, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_00What was their reaction to you when you initially reached out and then when you arrived? Very enthusiastic.
SPEAKER_02They were very, very happy to share their language and talk about it. I think they were surprised that I knew what their language was called and anything about it.
SPEAKER_00But they were very lovely people and very willing to share stories with me. And how do you even start unpacking that? How do you, when you sit down with them, you only have them for a limited amount of time? Where do you decide to start? Yeah, it was a challenge.
SPEAKER_02I really had to make uh efficient use of my limited time with them. So before I met with them, I had written part of the grammar and I knew a lot about the language and I knew where the gaps were. So I knew, for example, that uh there were certain verb forms or certain types of types of verbs that I was missing the past tense or the subjunctive tense, and I I came with lists of questions, and I also had to figure out how to elicit things indirectly sometimes. Because when I would say to them, I I can't say what's the feminine of this adjective or what's the plural. I say it's it's a red shoe, but well, how do you know if it was a boat, what would you figure out ways. It didn't always work, but the best way to get data is just to record them telling stories or talking, because often the forms they would use naturally were not the same as what they would give me if I asked them directly. And they had to think about it.
SPEAKER_00That's interesting. That's um very similar to what Professor uh Jeffrey Kahn told me when he was documenting uh the last Aramaic speakers all around the world. He would just sit down, start recording them, and then ask, you know, he would usually ask them to start telling a folk story or something that of that sort.
SPEAKER_02Jeffrey is actually one of my idols. And I think I I got into writing grammars of these languages in part to emulate him. He does amazing work. The big difference between his work and my work is that he worked with much older speakers that had no teeth and had other kinds of issues. My speakers were 18, 19 years old. So my problems were they they wanted to sleep in until noon and they wanted to be on their phones and texting their friends.
SPEAKER_00So is it possible for you to recall what made the big the biggest impression on you when you sat down with them and things that that came out of those discussions that you weren't expecting initially?
SPEAKER_02I think the the biggest surprise was one time I met with two young men. They were 18 or 19 years old, they were from different towns. One in the west of the Dophar region, just by the Yemeni border, and one east of the major city called Salala in the region. So maybe I don't know if it's 30 miles apart or 40 miles apart, but not that far from each other, but different parts of that province. And the amount of times they disagreed on answers to my questions kind of surprised me. Say, how do you say this? Or you know, how would you say uh I went, how would you say you went, or how would you say I want to go? I I tried to list some form and they would argue what was the correct form. When we think about languages like English or French, there's usually one right answer, you know, for uh the plural and is men, that's the answer. But uh just two people couldn't agree, sometimes I think because of different dialects, which was interesting, but also because there just there's no standardized form of Chibali or of Mehri. Right. So there is no one right answer to any question.
SPEAKER_00Were there any um vocabulary words that that you discovered that that surprised you in terms of their similarity to a current word in in Arabic or a current word in Hebrew that that you wouldn't have thought would have still carried over? Aaron Powell Not that I can recall.
SPEAKER_02There's no end to how many words you can elicit. There are dictionaries of Mehri in Jibali, but just in a few days, the amount of words that came up, uh we went out for dinner and and I had oysters and said, Oh, and in Chibali that's called this, and it was not the dictionary, or just words came up all the time, and it made me realize how many words must still be out there. And uh there definitely are words waiting to be heard that will provide cognates to Hebrew words or Arabic words. It's back to your earlier question about how these languages can inform our study of ancient languages. There definitely are words in, say, Biblical Hebrew whose meanings are obscure and they can be informed by uh words we find in modern Semitic languages.
SPEAKER_00So things do come up here and there. I can't think of any examples of words that would surprise me. And are there other scholars looking, like studying that topic specifically, so breaking down the dictionaries that exist for these two languages and seeing what they can discover and how it can it can inform us of these other ancient languages?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Not specifically. There are scholars working on uh dictionaries, but not specifically looking at cognates, right. But more trying to preserve these cultural words I mentioned that are slowly disappearing as the regions become more modern.
SPEAKER_00I want to go back a little bit and just ask initially, why did you take an interest in Semitic languages at all when you decided to build your career in academia and study these languages? Why Semitic languages?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Good question. Because I studied Hebrew when I was in high school on my own. When I was about 15 or 16, I started learning Hebrew, and then I studied Arabic during the summer. One summer when I was in college, I did an Upan in Israel. And when I got into linguistics, I first was working mostly on Indo-European languages, and I didn't really see a future there. I wasn't interested in German, say, or in Latin and Greek, especially. And so my interest in Hebrew and Arabic led me to study more about the Semitic language family, and I wanted to study Akkadian and Aramaic, which I did. So I just kind of fell into it because those are the languages I liked the best. I wanted to study. And it seemed like studying New Eastern languages, biblical studies, and history of the Near East was much more appealing than the study of say Indo-European culture.
SPEAKER_00And where does the field stand now? I mean, is it a good time to get into studying Semitic languages and Semitics? I mean, is this a great time for people to be doing this kind of research and work, or is the field struggling in some way at this current moment?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell In some sense, it's a great time because we know more than ever. We're always learning more. It's a great time to study, if you want to study modern South Arabian or modern Aramaic or or modern Arabic dialects, there's lots of work going on that's really interesting and wonderful. Um at the same time, I think that uh the humanities in general are struggling, and there are certainly jobs uh in the humanities and there were. So academia, I'm not so sure. But the field itself, I would say yes, it's I think thriving and there's a lot of great scholarship going on around the world.
SPEAKER_00But like you said, it must be difficult to actually do field work at this time. You know, if you're gonna travel to certain areas of Iraq or other areas of the Middle East, Yemen in particular, it's not the same. Yeah, you do.
SPEAKER_02Yemen is is pretty much off limits, but Oman is actually uh quite safe, and I have close friends and colleagues that uh have gone there and had uh very good experiences. Jeffrey Khan went to Iraq not long ago, and so it is certainly possible to do fieldwork if you were a little bit adventurous.
SPEAKER_00Right. So let's get into the the current state of these languages. My understanding is that the major changes started coming in the 1970s, if that's correct.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Yeah, in 1970 there was a change of government, and the current Sultan of Oman came to power and he really modernized the whole country, revolutionized uh the education system, and so the Daufar region where Mechrin Jabali are spoken really opened up. And that's been wonderful in a lot of ways, but it's meant that Arabic has become more pervasive. And so in the last 40 years or so, the languages have become more infested with Arabic vocabulary. There's still some of the languages still very vibrant and they're being learned by children, but um they've been changing because of the influence of Arabic education, I would say. Of the six languages spoken, three of them are thriving Mehri, Jabali, and Sokotri, with tens of thousands of speakers, maybe a hundred thousand or more for Mehri. The other three, Hobyot, Harsusi, and Badhari, are much worse off. Bhathari, I heard. Last year had 11 speakers left. So that is going to be extinct soon. Harsusi has maybe a few hundred, and Hobyot, which I think is still doing okay, has only a thousand or two thousand. So some of the languages probably won't be around much longer. And the larger ones are certainly changing.
SPEAKER_00And the fact that these are spoken languages plays into that in a big way, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there's there's no written standard to keep them grounded, is that what you mean? Right. Yeah. And it's languages change. It's okay. It's nothing wrong with language changing. Right. If as a as a linguist and as a historical linguist, and I I want to try to figure out the older stages of the language, it gets harder and harder as the languages evolve and vocabulary is lost and so on.
SPEAKER_00But in terms of documenting the history of the language, if it's a purely spoken language, if there's no real literature, then it's very easy for these things to slowly disappear as as the speakers disappear. Aaron Ross Powell Yes.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell And what would be some opposite examples? Of what? Of ancient Semitic languages that didn't disappear when their speakers disappeared because they had written texts and literature.
SPEAKER_02Well, lots of examples. Hebrew, of course, stopped being spoken by about the third century CE and remained a very vibrant written language through today. And same with Standard Arabic, Akkadian, let's say for a while, as a written language after it stopped being spoken. So written languages can certainly have a much longer history after they stopped being spoken. But once a language like Mehri stops being spoken, it just survives in whatever recordings we have.
SPEAKER_00And yes, it fades away much quicker. Right. It's interesting. I when I was looking into that and I was researching it in your work, it reminded me, or didn't remind me, but it made me think of some of the Arabic dialects that exist now, like Levantine dialect or and how these they're still not written down. They're almost purely spoken and they're changing all the time. So it made me wonder, you know, who's documenting these as they exist now? Is that even happening and what does that mean for the future of these dialects?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there are I don't know how many dozens or hundreds of dialects of Arabic we can classify. There are a lot of examples of text collections and grammars of Arabic dialects, but uh they actually are a pretty nice parallel to the modern South Arabian languages in that um they're not written except blogs and text messages. Yeah, things like that. And there are some plays and poetry and things, but for the most part, they're not written. They change more rapidly. Uh it's hard to say what's the correct form of, say, Cairo Arabic. Everyone will have a different answer for what's the correct form of the language. There's no standard. And so um the Arabic dialects are interesting, but there's this written parallel. And so uh there's no equivalent of the Fusha standard Arabic in the South Arabian world.
SPEAKER_00Right. With the South Arabian languages that are dying, you know, just generally when a language starts to go extinct and when it does go extinct, it can be such a big thing to comprehend that I think it's hard for people to understand what humanity loses when that happens. Yeah. You know, what are some of the things that that we lose when a language dies?
SPEAKER_02Well, the native speakers lose an enormous part of their of their culture, of their cultural history, their identity. We lose a whole corpus of oral literature, uh, oral histories, uh, folk tales. We lose specialized vocabulary. As linguists, we lose another piece of the puzzle when trying to reconstruct the ancestor languages or ancestor phases of the Semitic family. So it's hard to say what we lose exactly, but it's it's certainly a lot. And it's certainly sad when the language is no longer spoken.
SPEAKER_00Where does your research stand now in regards to these two languages? What are you working on now, or what do you hope to work on in the future?
SPEAKER_02Right now I'm looking at Harsusi, which is one of those three dying languages that has maybe a few hundred speakers in Oman, a little bit north of the Dhofar province. And there were some texts published about 15 years ago that were collected in this 60s and 70s. And I'm going back to look at those published versions, and I have audio recordings that I'll made in the 70s, and looking at how accurate the published versions are and what might have been missed, and and uh to try to figure out how Harsusi differs from say Mehri, what are some of the unique features, what are some of the interesting developments that uh Harsusi has compared to the other sister languages. Uh so uh there's a lot of really great work being done around the world on all the languages. And so the more data that we have, uh the more we can do comparative work and try to reconstruct the proto-modern South Arabian language, and then see how that informs our reconstruction of Proto-West Semitic and Proto-Semitic. So I'm always looking at the new data that comes out. There was a volume that came out this year uh on Sakotri, a wonderful collection of texts, and there's always new words, new grammatical forms that make me question something in Mehri or Jabali.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's always something new coming out. When you're approaching a new research project like this, do you know what your paper is going to be titled essentially when you start your research, or do you have a goal in mind, or is it usually you get into it and then at some point it appears to you? I think the latter.
SPEAKER_02I think it's always better to see where something takes you rather than have a set idea of what you want to prove. Sometimes I'll go into an article with a pretty good idea of what I think the answer is going to be, but sometimes uh it doesn't work out. That happened recently. I I worked on an article recently with a colleague from France trying to figure out the origin of uh a particular verb form in Mefree, the the suffix used for the feminine past tense. And we had all this data, we had a vague idea of how the different suffixes were used, but we as we delve deeper in the subject, only then did we sort of figure out why these suffixes behave the way they did. So we really had no idea going in what we were looking for until we started looking.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. Well, um, this has been incredibly interesting to me. My wife's gonna be happy that I spoke with you because she's a Penn State alum. Okay. So I get to check that off the list now. But uh definitely keep me informed of of all the work you're doing, and uh I'll continue to research it and read it, and and uh I wish you the best of luck. Well, thanks for your interest in in modern South Arabia. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. Take care. Bye.