Poetic awareness in the Makamat of Badee' Al Zaman Al-Hamathani

Abstract

It is a well known fact among Semitics scholars that the Proto-Semitic sound š has changed to s in Arabic. This major sound change resulted in mixing the Semitic š with the original s in Arabic lexical roots. This study attempts to identify the Arabic lexical roots that have s sounds that were changed from the original Semitic š sounds. Our procedure to achieve this is to rely on Semitic lexical data. Precisely to analyze the Arabic roots that contain s sounds in light of their cognates in Semitics that retained the š sound, namely: Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Old South Arabic. Using this method, we were able to identify 352 Arabic roots that we believe had contained the Semitic š sounds in their past history. We consider these result very satisfactory, if viewed in the context of the available Semitic lexical data, and if we took into account that Semitic lexicons were of medium volume that should be compared to al-Ṣiḥāḥ of al-Jawharī and not to the other encyclopedic Arabic lexicons. Also we ought not to forget that a large part of the s sounds in al-Ṣiḥāḥ is the sum total of both the original s and the s<š.