HALSPA · Hebrew and Aramaic Lexical Substrate of Palestinian Arabic

Hebrew and Aramaic Lexical Substrate of Palestinian Arabic

Language shift is typically gradual, and earlier languages often leave traces in everyday speech, most clearly in the lexicon. This project explored such traces in Palestinian Arabic, focusing on words that reflected earlier Aramaic and, in some cases, Hebrew layers once spoken in the region. These items were treated as substrate words. Scholars have long recognised that Palestinian Arabic preserves older lexical elements, particularly terms connected to toponyms as well as traditional agriculture, tools, food production, and rural life. Much of this vocabulary, however, is scattered across dialect dictionaries, ethnographic descriptions, glossaries, and older studies, most notably Gustaf Dalman’s Arbeit und Sitte in Palästina (1928–1942). The challenge was not a lack of data, but the difficulty of working with lexical material that was widely dispersed and largely unidentified and bringing it into a single comparative analysis. The project aimed to identify the most plausible substrate words in Palestinian Arabic, analyse them with consistent criteria, and set them in their historical and cultural context. The project also aimed to combine linguistic analysis with visual material, such as photographs and drawings of traditional tools, in order to clarify the relationship between words, objects, and their etymology. The results suggested that Palestinian Arabic preserved a notable layer of vocabulary best explained by in situ inheritance from local Aramaic varieties, and in some cases also preserved earlier Hebrew vocabulary. Recurring phonological and morphological patterns supported this interpretation, including irregular consonant correspondences aligning more closely with Aramaic than with Arabic, and morphological markers visible in productive suffixal formations. Many items also showed phonological and morphological doublets, where more than one substrate form circulated side by side, with small differences in consonants or word formation. This pointed to a more complex history than a single, straightforward lexical inheritance. In some cases, substrate words appear to have been adapted differently across geographical regions. In others, the variation is more consistent with later internal developments within what is now known as Palestinian Arabic, suggesting that substrate words remained part of the living lexicon and kept changing naturally over time. The results also showed that most substrate words clustered in domains closely tied to traditional rural life and material culture, where continuity of practices and tools supported continuity of terminology. The same applied to local flora and fauna. Finally, the project demonstrated the value of treating linguistic evidence together with material culture, since object-based documentation could reduce ambiguity in etymological proposals.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз