Talk:Old South Arabian

message: The claim is being made consistently throughout various articles (Yemeni Arabic, Modern South Arabian, South Semitic languages, Old South Arabian) that Old and Modern South Arabian don't form a genetic clade, but rather Ethiopian Semitic and OSA form a clade against MSA.  Is this really the consensus?  Or is this just one researcher's view? (Alice Faber?) We have to be really careful with these claims.  AFAIK the whole genetic tree of the various Semitic languages is quite unclear -- probably in fact, the languages don't really form a tree at all, because of extensive interborrowing at multiple time periods.  Or at least, to the extent that they did branch off at certain points and genetic clades are formed from these branch-off points, there are few if any features that distinguish the clades so formed from any other languages, which would suggest that the cladal divisions are essentially useless.  Hetzron meanwhile groups Ethiopian Semitic with MSA against OSA, and his recent classification doesn't even put OSA in South Semitic at all.  This suggests to me that we should trash the whole "Eastern" vs. "Western" division that seems to be Faber's own work and no one else's, and just follow the consensus of putting MSA, OSA and Ethiopian Semitic as three nodes in South Semitic without further grouping.  This is similar to what's done in Indo-European -- certainly there are proposals with good evidence for e.g. grouping Greek, Armenian and Indo-Iryan as a clade, but we don't use that as the consensus in WP because it isn't the consensus (an alternative view among many groups the Satem languages, i.e. Armenian, Indo-Iryan and Balto-Slavic).  It all depends on which changes you view as areal and which as inherited.  In reality, most "inherited" traits are actually areal.  A good example is with Greek, where increasing evidence indicates that early dialects didn't have many of the features we commonly associate as Greek innovations.  Nonetheless, those areal features eventually spread to all extant dialects, hence we treat them as inherited. Benwing (talk) 23:30, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, the consensus is that Old and Modern South Arabian do not form a clade, they just happen to have similar names (they are not even spoken in the same area). The Eastern-Western distinction is also generally accepted.--Schreiber91 (talk) 08:54, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Epigraphic and Modern South Arabian do not form a clade?  really? 

message: WP guidelines call for using the most common term unless there is really good reason to do otherwise.  "Really good reason" might include having a common term that is ambiguous in that it means different things to different researchers.  But the claim that "Old South Arabian" might be "confusing" isn't good enough.  Some form of "South Arabian" is still the predominantly used term AFAIK, and I don't think most linguists will find the usage excessively confusing -- the word "Arabian" is used precisely to avoid the confusion of "Arabic".  IMO "Sayhadic" is more confusing at this point because it's less recognized.  There are parallels elsewhere -- Ancient Macedonian and Modern Macedonian are totally different languages, and both distinct from Macedonian Greek.  "Tigre" and "Tigrinya" refer to different languages as well, ala "Arabic" vs. "Arabian".  Likewise "Turkish" vs. "Turkic", "Latin" vs. "Ladin" vs. "Ladino", etc. etc. Benwing (talk) 23:39, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  don't rename yet to Sayhadic 

message: I am confused whether to place Old South Arabian in the Central Semitic group as this is the more modern convention; but in that case this will also have to be changed in the little table, and in the articles on the individual languages. If you look at the section on Semitic languages it already classes these languages as Central Semitic on the one hand placing Ethiopic and Modern South Arabic in the South Semitic group.Ducky59 (talk) 23:52, 14 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Classification 

message: #1- (( ancient south Arabians used Arab to refer to Bedouins ))
Response:
this is a wide spread misunderstanding for the Yemeni inscriptions and Arabic language
when South Arabian kingdoms referred to Bedouins, they didn't use the term (( Arab : عرب )) but they used the term (( A'raab : أعراب ))
there's a difference between "Arab" and "A'raab" in Arabic
"Arab : عرب" is the plural form of the word "Arabi : عربي" which means "an Arab person"
while they term "A'raab : أعراب" means the "Bedouin or Nomadic branch of a speciefic group of Arabs
so the the "Arab" is a normal Arab person who lives in a city, while "A'raab" are the nomadic branch of some tribe that lives in the wilderness near that tribe
the idea that some people missed is that there can never be "A'raab" without "Arabs", the "A'raab" are a part of a speciefic group of Arabs, not a distinct or an independent group
so when an Arab tribe says "our A'raab", this means they are saying "our Nomadic branch"
for further help in understanding the dilemma above, please read and understand the following terms:
an Arab person is pronounced in Arabic as "Arabi = عربي" >>>> singular
a group of Arabs or Arabs in general in Arabic are pronounced "Arab = عرب" >>>> plural
a Bedouin Arab in Arabic is pronounced "A'raabi = أعرابي" >>>> singular
a group of Arab Bedouins in Arabic are pronounced "A'raab = أعراب" >>>> plural
#2- ((I'm not even at all sure if the South Arabians ever called themselves Arabs before they were Arabicised and became Muslim; in fact, I would rather doubt it ))
Response:
Himyarite & Qatbanian inscriptions talked about the people who lived in that area, so they mentioned South Arabian kingdoms and tribes, and then mentioned their "A'raab" which means "Bedouins branch of a group of Arabs", so from the South Arabian inscriptions we can see that South Arabians said that those "A'raab" belonged to them, which means that those South Arabians thought of themselves as Arabs and lived with their Nomadic branch down in Yemen
this South Arabian inscriptions says: (( أعربهم طودم و تهامة )), which means (( their "A'raab" in mountains and lower lands" ))  Le Muséon Société des lettres et des sciences (Louvain, Belgium) 1964 3-4 p.429
 
they said those "A'raab" belonged to them, so this means they thought of themselves as Arabs with a Nomadic branch that lives in the mountains and valleys.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Omar amross (talk • contribs) 14:07, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  some corrections about the statements above 

message: I think the phonetic symbols for the "emphatic" consonants need double-checking. The diacritic for emphasis, using the IPA, should be a superscript [ˤ] not [ˀ]. (9abdullah).  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.178.133.14 (talk) 17:13, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Phonetic table correction