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صفحة: VIII
derives from a form like Syriac ڑ a ›››› ‘ wax , sealing-wax , a wax light’ ( J . Payne . Smith 1903 : 588 ) 4 . Summing up In view of the wellknown fact that Arab nomads wandered outside Arabia in various parts of the Fertile Crescent throughout the first millennium B . C ., it is very probable that the integration of non-Arabic Semitic elements in the indigenous vernaculars of the Arabian Peninsula have a long history . At all events , contact between Arabic and Aramaic represents an important diachronic stage in the linguistic evolution of Arabic inasmuch as the Aramaic component obtaining in literary and spoken forms of Arabic constitutes , without doubt , the most extensive foreign lexical layer of Semitic origin in the language , sometimes mediating earlier Semitic strata ( Canaanite , Akkadian , etc . ) . My own recent research on Aramaisms in vernacular Arabic has suggested that the distributional profile of Aramaic lexical residues in this language is best determined not on a one-to-one lexical basis but rather by reference to the notion of semantic domains or discourse schemas . Thus , within Eastern Arabic as a whole , discourse on agriculture appears to have enjoyed a fairly stable character since several terms of Aramaic origin in this semantic domain have been retained . The present remarks arose in relation to striking Aramaisms in the Arabic dialect spoken by the Negev Beduin represents an interim report on ongoing research towards a comparative and historical glossary of Beduin Arabic , whose ultimate objective is to portray the culture of present-day Arab nomads through their language . As in my lexical study of the Cypriot Maronites ( Borg 2004 ) , one assumption underlying the aforementioned Beduin Arabic glossary is that the word stock of a particular language embodies an evolutionary narrative that the language historian could ideally endeavour to reconstruct with the help of comparative data from related languages and dialects with the aim of ( i ) identifying the Urheimat of the speaker community in question , and ( ii ) elucidating its relationship with other members of the language family in question . These scientific objectives are of particular relevance to present-day Beduin communities for the following reasons : ( a ) The unfavourable state-of-the-art in research on Beduin Arabic presents a major obstacle to our understanding of Arabic language history since their
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مجمع اللغة العربية
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