Sabaic, sometimes referred to as Sabaean, was a Ṣayhadic language that was spoken between c. 1000 BC and the 6th century AD by the Sabaeans. It was used as a written language by some other peoples of the ancient civilization of South Arabia, including the Ḥimyarites, Ḥashidites, Ṣirwāḥites, Humlanites, Ghaymānites, and Radmānites. Sabaic belongs to the South Arabian Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Sabaic is distinguished from the other members of the Sayhadic group by its use of h to mark the third person and as a causative prefix; all of the other languages use s1 in those cases. Therefore, Sabaic is called an h-language and the others s-languages. Numerous other Sabaic inscriptions have also been found dating back to the Sabean colonization of Africa.
Sabaic is very similar to Arabic and the languages may have been mutually intelligible.Robin, C. J. (2010). Langues et écritures. In A. Al‐Ghabban (Ed.), Routes d’Arabie. Editions du musée du Louvre. Pp. 123–124.
Script Sabaic was written in the South Arabian alphabet, and, like Hebrew and Arabic, marked only consonants, the only indication of vowels being with matres lectionis. For many years the only texts discovered were inscriptions in the formal Masnad script (Sabaic ms3nd), but in 1973 documents in another minuscule and cursive script were discovered, dating back to the second half of the 1st century BC; only a few of the latter have so far been published.
The South Arabian alphabet used in Yemen, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Ethiopia beginning in the 8th century BC, in all three locations, later evolved into the still-in-use Geʽez script. The Geʽez language however is no longer considered to be a descendant of Sabaic or of Sayhadic;Weninger, Stefan. "Ge'ez" in Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: D-Ha, p.732. and there is linguistic evidence that Semitic languages were concurrently in use, being spoken in Eritrea and Ethiopia as early as 2000 BC.Stuart, Munro-Hay (1991). Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity page 57. Edinburgh: University Press.
Sabaic is attested in some 1,040 dedicatory inscriptions, 850 building inscriptions, 200 legal texts, and 1300 short graffiti (containing only personal names).N. Nebes, P. Stein: Ancient South Arabian, in: Roger D. Woodard (Hrsg.): The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2004 No literary texts of any length have yet been brought to light. This paucity of source material and the limited forms of the inscriptions has made it difficult to get a complete picture of Sabaic grammar. Thousands of inscriptions written in a cursive script (called Zabur) incised into wooden sticks have been found and date to the Middle Sabaic period; these represent letters and legal documents and as such include a much wider variety of grammatical forms.
Varieties
Sabaic: the language of the kingdom of Saba and later also of Ḥimyar; also documented in the kingdom of Da'amot;A. Avanzini: Le iscrizioni sudarabiche d'Etiopia: un esempio di culture e lingue a contatto. In: Oriens antiquus, 26 (1987), Seite 201–221 very well documented, c. 6000 inscriptions Old Sabaic: mostly boustrophedon inscriptions from the 9th until the 8th century BC and including further texts in the next two centuries from Ma'rib and the Highlands. Middle Sabaic: 3rd century BC until the end of the 3rd century AD. The best-documented language. The largest corpus of texts from this period comes from the Awwam Temple (otherwise known as Maḥrem Bilqīs) in Ma'rib. Amiritic/Ḥaramitic: the language of the area to the north of Ma'īn Central Sabaic: the language of the inscriptions from the Sabaean heartland South Sabaic: the language of the inscriptions from Radmān and Ḥimyar "Pseudo-Sabaic": the literary language of Arabian tribes in Najrān, Ḥaram and Qaryat al-Fāw Late Sabaic: 4th–6th centuries AD. This is the monotheistic period when Christianity and Judaism brought Aramaic and Greek influences.
In the Late Sabaic period the ancient names of the gods are no longer mentioned and only one deity Raḥmānān is referred to. The last known inscription in Sabaic dates from 554 or 559 AD. The language's eventual extinction was brought about by the later rapid expansion of Islam, bringing with it Classical Arabic (or Muḍarī Arabic), which became the language of culture and writing, totally supplanting Sabaic.
The dialect used in the western Yemeni highlands, known as Central Sabaic, is very homogeneous and generally used as the language of the inscriptions. Divergent dialects are usually found in the area surrounding the Central Highlands, such as the important dialect of the city of Ḥaram in the eastern al-Jawf.Rebecca Hasselbach, Old South Arabian in Languages from the World of the Bible, edited by Holger Gzella Inscriptions in the Ḥaramic dialect, which is heavily influenced by North Arabic, are also generally considered a form of Sabaic. The Himyarites, whose spoken language was Semitic but not South Arabian, used Sabaic as a written language.Norbert Nebes and Peter Stein, op. cit
Phonology
Vowels
Since Sabaic is written in an abjad script leaving vowels unmarked, little can be said for certain about the vocalic system. However, based on other Semitic languages, it is generally presumed that it had at least the vowels a, i, and u, which would have occurred both short and long ā, ī, and ū. In Old Sabaic, the long vowels ū and ī are sometimes indicated using the letters for w and y as matres lectionis. In the Old period this is used mainly in word-final position, but in Middle and Late Sabaic it also commonly occurs medially. Sabaic has no way of writing the long vowel ā, but in later inscriptions, in the Radmanite dialect the letter h is sometimes infixed in plurals where it is not etymologically expected: thus bnhy ('sons of'; constructive state) instead of the usual bny; it is suspected that this h represents the vowel ā. Long vowels ū and ī certainly seem to be indicated in forms such as the personal pronouns hmw ('them'), the verbal form ykwn (also written without the glide ykn; 'he will be'), and in enclitic particles -mw, and -my probably used for emphasis.Rebecca Hasselbach, in Languages from the World of the Bible (ed. by Holger Gzella), pg. 170
Diphthongs In the Old Sabaic inscriptions the Proto-Semitic diphthongs aw and ay seemed to have been retained, being written with the letters w and y; in the later stages the same words are increasingly found without these letters, which leads some scholars (such as Stein) to the conclusion that they had by then contracted to ō and ē (though aw → ū and ay → ī would also be possible)
Consonants Sabaic, like Proto-Semitic, contains three sibilant phonemes, represented by distinct letters; the exact phonetic nature of these sounds is still uncertain. In the early days of Sabaic studies, Sayhadic was transcribed using Hebrew letters. The transcriptions of the alveolars or postvelar fricatives remained controversial; after a great deal of uncertainty in the initial period the lead was taken by the transcription chosen by Nikolaus Rhodokanakis and others for the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (s, š, and ś), until A. F. L. Beeston proposed replacing this with the representation with s followed by the subscripts 1–3. This latest version has largely taken over the English-speaking world, while in the German-speaking area, for example, the older transcription signs, which are also given in the table below, are more widespread. They were transcribed by Beeston as s1, s2, and s3. Bearing in mind the latest reconstructions of the Proto-Semitic sibilants, we can postulate that s1 was probably pronounced as a simple [s] or [ʃ], s2 was probably a lateral fricative [ɬ], and s3 may have been realized as an affricate [t͡s]. The difference between the three sounds is maintained throughout Old Sabaic and Middle Sabaic, but in the Late period s1 and s3 merge. The subscript n did not start appearing until after the Early Sabaic period. The Middle Sabaic Haramitic dialect often shows the change s3 > s1, for example: ˀks1wt ("clothes"), normal Sabaic ks3wy.
The exact nature of the emphatic consonants q, ṣ, ṭ, ẓ and ḍ also remains a matter for debate: were they pharyngealized as in Modern Arabic, or were they glottalized as in Ethiopic (and reconstructed Proto-Semitic)? There are arguments to support both possibilities. In any case, beginning with Middle Sabaic the letters representing ṣ and ẓ are increasingly interchanged, which seems to indicate that they have fallen together as one phoneme. The existence of bilabial fricative f as a reflex of the Proto-Semitic *p is partly proved by Latin transcriptions of names. In late Sabaic ḏ and z also merge. In Old Sabaic the sound n only occasionally assimilates to a following consonant, but in the later periods this assimilation is the norm. The minuscule Zabūr script does not seem to have a letter that represents the sound ẓ, and replaces it with ḍ instead; for example mfḍr ("a measure of capacity"), written in the Musnad script as mfẓr.
Sabaic consonants Bilabial Dental Alveolar Post-alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Pharyngeal Glottal Plosive ? ? Fricative ? ? Nasal Lateral ? Rhotic Semivowel
Grammar
Personal pronouns As in other Semitic languages Sabaic had both independent pronouns and pronominal suffixes. The attested pronouns, along with suffixes from Qatabanian and Hadramautic are as follows: Pronominal suffixes Independent pronounsSabaicOther languagesSabaic SingularFirst person -n ʾnSecond person m. -k -kʾnt; ʾtSecond person f. -k Third person m. -hw, h -s1w(w), s1 h(w)ʾ3rd Person f. -h, hw -s1, -s1yw (Qataban.), -ṯ(yw), -s3(yw) (Hadram.)hʾ Dual2nd Person -kmyʾtmy 3rd Person com. -hmy -s1mn (min.), -s1my (Qataban.; Hadram.)hmy3rd Person m. -s1m(y)n (Hadram.) Plural1st Person -n 2nd Person m. -kmw ʾntmw2nd Person f. 3. Person m. -hm(w) -s1m hmw3. Person f. -hn -s1nhn
No independent pronouns have been identified in any of the other South Arabian languages. First- and second-person independent pronouns are rarely attested in the monumental inscription, but possibly for cultural reasons; the likelihood was that these texts were neither composed nor written by the one who commissioned them: hence they use third-person pronouns to refer to the one who is paying for the building and dedication or whatever. The use of the pronouns in Sabaic corresponds to that in other Semitic languages. The pronominal suffixes are added to verbs and prepositions to denote the object; thus: qtl-hmw "he killed them"; ḫmr-hmy t'lb "Ta'lab poured for them both"; when the suffixes are added to nouns they indicate possession: bd-hw "his slave").The independent pronouns serve as the subject of nominal and verbal sentences: mr' 't "you are the Lord" (a nominal sentence); hmw f-ḥmdw "they thanked" (a verbal sentence).
Nouns
Case, number and gender Sayhadic nouns fall into two genders: masculine and feminine. The feminine is usually indicated in the singular by the ending –t : bʿl "husband" (m.), bʿlt "wife" (f.), hgr "city" (m.), fnwt "canal" (f.). Sabaic nouns have forms for singular, dual and plural. The singular is formed without changing the stem, the plural can however be formed in a number of ways even in the very same word: Inner ("Broken") Plurals: as in Classical Arabic they are frequent. ʾ-Prefix: ʾbyt "houses" from byt "house" t-Suffix: especially frequent in words having the m-prefix: mḥfdt "towers" from mḥfd "tower". Combinations: for example ʾ–prefix and t-suffix: ʾḫrft "years" from ḫrf "year", ʾbytt "houses" from byt "house". without any external grammatical sign: fnw "canals" from fnwt (f.) "canal". w-/y-Infix: ḫrwf / ḫryf / ḫryft "years" from ḫrf "year". Reduplicational plurals are rarely attested in Sabaic: ʾlʾlt "gods" fromʾl "god".