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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
A number of recent studies have examined conditional clauses in Classical Arabic. However, to date I have not seen anything devoted to the study of these structures in a colloquial dialect, although most teaching manuals devote a section to this. The following is an attempt to describe conditional clauses and the related time-clause structures in certain Bedouin dialects. My interest in them originated in the difficulty I myself found in mastering this area of syntax, and from a perception of them as being more complex than such structures in English. A further point of interest which led me to investigate this area was the multiplicity of conditional and time particles including in, lo and āān signifying ‘if’, lamman and yōm signifying ‘when’ and ila signifying ‘if’ or ‘when’. I was interested to find out what factors, if any, conditioned the choice of these particles. The reason for broadening the study to take in time clauses also, is that in this dialect, in one area of conditional sentences, the two types: conditional and time clause, come very close together and are in some cases indistinguishable, or to put it another way, one would not know whether to translate the sentence into English with ‘if’ or ‘when’. The two types of sentence also share various characteristics which will be pointed out below, but in particular, many of them show a marker on both the main and subordinate clause.
1 SeePeled, Y., ‘On the obligatoriness of fa in Classical Arabic conditional sentences’, JSS, xxx, 2, 1985, 213–26Google Scholar; Ŀewin, B.,‘Non-conditional “if” clauses in Arabic’, ZDMG, cxx, 1970, 264–70Google Scholar; Denz, A., ‘Zur Noetik des Arabischen ‘in -Satz Hauptsatzgefüges’, ZDMG, cxxi, 1971, 37–45Google Scholar; Gätje, H., ‘Zur Struktur gestörter Konditionalgefuge im Arabischen’, Oriens, xxv–vi, 1976, 148–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peled, Y., ‘Conditional sentences without a conditional particle in Classical Arabic prose’, ZAL, xvi, 1987, 31–43Google Scholar; Davies, E. E., ‘Some restrictions on conditional imperatives’, Linguistics, xvii, 1979, 31–54Google Scholar.
2 See Wright, W., A grammar of the Arabic language (Cambridge, 1951), n, 330–3.Google Scholar
3 A small number of examples occur with a verb in the perfective. In the bedouin texts which I had examined only one occurred, that in Sowayyan's Shammari material (to appear) namely: rija'na wa al-nāgah ma ba'ad aḍnay ‘we returned and (at that time) the camel had not yet foaled’ or ‘we returned before the camel had foaled’. It seems that the perfective is to some degree incompatible with the ḥāl construction as it conveys a punctual action whereas the other three types of clause occurring in the ḥāl conveys states.
4 Texts from this dialect appear in the writer's Bedouin of northern Arabia: traditions of the Al Dhafir (London, 1986).Google Scholar
5 The examples from other related bedouin dialects are drawn from my own material on the Shammar, , Āl Murrah, , Mutair, , ‘Awazim, ‘Ajmān and Euphrates bedouin and from Johnstone's ‘Ajman material in ‘Some characteristics of the Dosiri dialect of Arabic as spoken in Kuwait’, BSOAS, xxiv, 2, 1961, 249–97Google Scholar [hereafter Johnstone ‘Dōsirī I’] and ‘Further studies on the Dōosirī dialect as spoken in Kuwait’, BS0AS, xxvii, 1, 1964, 77–113Google Scholar [hereafter Johnstone, ‘DōsirīII’]; also Stewart, F. H., ‘A bedouin narrative from Central Sinai’ ZAL, xvi, 1987, 44–92Google Scholar [hereafter Stewart, ‘Central Sinai’]; Palva, H., Narratives and poems from the Hesbān: Arabic texts recorded among the semi-nomadic l-'Ağārma tribe (al-Balqā’ district, Jordan) (Gothenburg, 1978)Google Scholar; Sowayyan, S. A., ‘A poem and its narrative by Riḏda ibn Ṭarif aš-Šammari’, ZAL, VII, 1982, 48–73Google Scholar. A number of examples also occur from an as yet unpublished work by Sowayyan, The sālfih of Hidhlūl ash- Shuwëhri. These are marked Sowayyan (to appear). I am very grateful to him for giving me the opportunity to peruse this interesting material. In examples taken from these and other sources, the transcription has been changed to conform to the system used in my own examples, for which I beg the indulgence of the authors. The article also includes a number of examples from the dialect of Riyadh. These were recorded from the Saudi Radio programme Suwar Masmū'a, which is produced in a generalized Saudi dialect approximating to that of Riyadh. While in Egypt in 1988–9 I was able to record about six hours of this programme which proved to be a very valuable source of supplementary material. It was more varied in the syntactic patterns that it contained than my other material, being composed mainly of dialogue. In general it confirmed the picture shown in my bedouin material.
6 The difference between the Najdi and other systems is not so much apparent in the form of the items involved since most Arabic dialects show the particles in, lo and iḏa, the latter corresponding to the Najdi ila, and most dialects contain the word yōm, the basic meaning of which is ‘day’ and the word kān (pronounced ćān in Najdi) meaning ‘was’. The difference is rather in the function of these within the system and the possibility of their occurrence with different clause types.
7 These numbers relate to the order of treatment in the body of the article below.
8 But see below pp. (51–2) as regards the Open Stative conditional with ćān and p. 49 as regards lo in Open Punctual conditions.
9 Although the two Arabic sentences given here are of the same syntactic form, i.e. marked by ila with a perfective verbal form in both the subordinate and the main clause, they have different time references. The first refers to General Present Time in a radio play where two girls are complaining about their father's stinginess and the second is from a narrative about events happening in the late 18th century. The form of the verb occurring (the Perfective) is one which in isolation and in most other circumstances would be taken to have Past time reference.
10 Compare however type (2) Open Habitual below, which only has general present or general past reference.
11 ulā kinh or ulā kinnih is the equivalent, of Classical via lā ka'annahu ‘it is as though it is not’.
12 The element ila also occurs in the forms la, ilya, lya and ya and may also be preceded by the copula w- ‘and’ giving wila and wilya. The form iḏa also occurs presumably as a result of borrowing from the koinè or Classical. The particle lamma or lamman can also occur in place of ila preceding a perfective with this function. Comparatively few examples of this occurred in the material in the more central Najdi dialects. Johnstone, ‘Dōsiri II’, 101, gives one examples flamma jēthum ‘when I come to them…’. The Dhafīr texts yielded only one example ibn si'dūn yabi yaḏbaḥham lamman jiblūh laham ‘Ibn Sa'dūn will kill them, when you bring him to them’. The forms lamma and lamman are more common in dialects of other areas of the Middle East and thus may be used more often in interdialectal conversation.
13 The word rifīź meaning literally ‘companion’ can be used in the speech of the Ḍhafīr and perhaps also that of other bedouin to mean ‘each other’. One knows in these contexts that it does not mean ‘friend’ since the activity as in the above case is often distinctly unfriendly. The context of the above was one where, on the secession of the period of a truce, each person would be free to pursue his adversary.
14 In Najdi speech the word int ‘you’ can be used to indicate a new 3rd person in a narrative or to distinguish one 3rd person from another, as though the narrator is pointing to the participants in a story and singling them out, which he will often physically do, as if the participants were there in front of him, saying ‘you, O Ibn Suwait did this and you O Ibn ‘Urai'ir did that’ when the actors in the drama actually died over a century ago. This usage of the 2nd person as a deictic with actual reference to a 3rd person is also shown in the use of the imperative to mark 3rd person past actions in dramatic passages in narrative. This has been termed the ‘Narrative Imperative’ see Blanc, , ‘The Arabic dialect of the Negev bedouins’, [hereafter Blanc, ‘Negev’], Proc. Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, iv, 1970 [1] 112–[39] 150Google Scholar; also Palva, H., ‘The descriptive imperative of narrative style in spoken Arabic’, Folia Orientalia, xvii, 1970, 5–26Google Scholar, also Stewart ‘Central Sinai’, 48.
15 In this dialect, as also in the related dialect of Najrān, see Prochazka, Th. Jr., Saudi Arabian dialects (London, 1989), 24Google Scholar; the –i of the 2nd person suffix is softened to -h as in šarēt- ant > šarēhant.
16 The above examples are from Stewart, ‘Central Sinai’, 56, 72, 72, 76 and 84 respectively.
17 The particle kān with the meaning ‘if’ is also found in Libyan Arabic as in kānak ‘aṝfa’ if you know it’. Gaddafi, A. M., ‘A study of discourse rules in Libyan spoken Arabic’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis University of London, 1990 (p. 109)Google Scholar.
18 The particle can also be followed by the personal pronoun suffixes giving forms such as ćān-u ‘if he’ can-ak ‘if you m. sg.’ etc.
19 The prefix bi- occurring here is a contraction of tabi ‘you want’ and should not be confused with the bi- which marks the indicative in dialects of the Eastern Mediterranean region.
20 This term is used by Blanc, H., ‘Negev’, [34], 145Google Scholar and by Stewart, F. M., ‘Central Sinai’, 56Google Scholar. Johnstone, , ‘Dōsīri II’, 93–5Google Scholar refers to these particles mainly from the etymological point of view in connection with the dialect of the ‘Ajmān. He gives numerous examples in his text.
21 Sowayyan, ‘A poem and its narrative’, 53 gives much the same description of this type of clause: ‘The verb of the subordinating clause introduced by yōm is generally (but not always) in the perfect. If the verb of the following main clause is in the perfect then no particles intervene between the two clauses;... but if the verb of the main clause is in the imperfect or if the main clause is nonverbal then it is separated from the subordinate clause by such particles as ṯari, ilya tari, ilya mēr, ilya mēr ṯari’. This differs from my account only in that my material shows that if the verb of the main clause is in the imperfect there will be a presentative only if the verb is preceded by a noun subject. If it is not preceded by a noun subject it is usually preceded by the linking w– and a subject pronoun as in: yḏm sam'ah w hu yaṭwi bětu wyšīl, ‘when he heard it (the news), he folded up his tent and moved camp’.
22 jāy-ak ‘coming [to you]’; this use of the 2nd person pronoun as a way of involving the listener In the narrative is common in bedouin speech in dramatic situations. For further examples and discussion see Stewart, ‘Central Sinai’, pp. 48–9 and Palva, , Narratives and poems from the Hesban, Orientalia Gothoburgensia 3, Göteborg, 1978), 54Google Scholar.
23 The partiple mēr also occurring in the form mār in some dialects is peculiar to the Najdi iialects. It can also occur in isolation with the meaning ‘but’. See Blanc ‘Negev’, [35], 146 for its jccurrence in the dialect of the Negev bedouins.
24 ‘Dōosirī II’, 94.
25 Ingham, , “Notes on the dialect of the Āl Murrah of Eastern and Southern Arabia”, BSOAS, CLIX, 1986, 2, 281Google Scholar.
26 Stewart, , ‘Central Sinai’, p. 58, line 18.Google Scholar
27 Johnstone, ‘Dōsirī II’, 93 f. gives a similar use of this particle in the ‘Ajmān dialect.