ParaNabataean Spanish

THERE's a clickbait title! Anyway - I am reading UChicago's third volume of the Oriental(ist) Institute's "Late Antique and Mediaeval Islamic Near East" series.

They seem to be free. The third one, despite that, looked awesome, so I bought (more exactly got my bro to buy for me) this. I seem to be a sucker like that. Anyway.

I was struck by what Ahmed al-Jallad had to say about transJordanian protoArabic. It is Semitic of course, using the Aramaic script - and the Nabati elite in fact used the/an Aramaic language, albeit with a full stock of recognisably-Arabic features. This form of Aramaic would fade away from the northwestern deserts over the centuries. In the next chapter Robert Hoyland is coming to describe how, starting AD 570ish, the next form of Aramaic which Christian Arabs shall hear, be Syriac. The LAMINE-3 authors seem unaware of Christian Palaestinian Aramaic but, to be fair, so were the Arabs.

Back to al-Jallad: Nabati Aramaic had the advantage that it jostled with Seleucid-koine Greek. The same names which the Nabataeans wrote in Aramaic, the Greeks also wrote. So we know how these Semites' vowels worked. How the Arabic nouns worked, then and there, was that a masculine name tended to end -o. Al-Jallad then must record how the practice decayed around northwest Arabia. This, al-Jallad conjectures, ends in the Ghassân phylarchy: whose official script treated the -w suffix as orthographic at best, as how we see "'Amr_un" to distinguish against "'Umar", and whose graffiti simply dispensed entirely, as at Jabal [U]says and the Harran.

On the other hand... we have Spanish. Portuguese, too. Where Latin had -us and old-Latin plus Greek had -os; the Romance in Iberia have -o. Assimilation with the Byzantines? Archaism from that Latin which came to Iberia first (dwenos -> bonus v. bueno)?

I'll call that this is speculation. I assert my blog's right to counter-speculate. Maybe the Arabic which came through North Africa was not the Qâric dialect, but held to some of its own archaisms.

The most famous Arabic name in Spain is Ṭāriq bin Ziyād (daddy Ziyād being a Berber mawla himself). This has come down to south-Spanish placenamery as "Torija"; or "Tarixa" or "Tarija". I also see "Torrez" as a given name to conversos and claimed to be like Norman-English "tower" but - I dunno. "Torrico" is claimed Piedmont and Argentine but again: I dunno; I see it in California.

I suspect that some western Arabs still ended the nominative-singular-masculine in -o, beneath the radar of the Quraysh; and certainly beneath that of the classical-Arabic from Iraq, who never got this far west. These met the Latins in Africa and Baetica fresh-off a century-plus-long Byzantine occupation. As creolisation happened, both sides agreed to end a noun -o.