Nabataean in contact with Arabic: grammatical borrowing

Abstract

This study aims to establish and clarify the influence of Arabic on Nabataean Aramaic in its linguistic context. Less attention is paid to the historical, political, and socio-economic settings of the various contact situations because of their variety. Too often this has been discussed purely in terms of lexica. Well-established in linguistics, lexica can never be decisive in such discussions because of the way that words can easily be borrowed from different languages. Morphology and syntax are far more important and arguably, syntax may tell us most about the linguistic substratum of the writers of the inscriptional material.