Talk:Old Arabic

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Bayer[edit]

The oldest attestation of the Arabic language goes back to Bayer, Jordan written in Ancient North Arabian script …

This sentence was introduced 2021 Apr 08 by Kamal90012345 (who has not been active since). What the heck is Bayer? Is there a place by that name? —Tamfang (talk) 21:13, 5 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hm. Here's the actual ¶ from Al-Jallad that Kamal90012345 is drawing from:

The earliest documented Arabic speakers inhabited North Arabia and the southern Levant, perhaps centered on and around the Ḥawrān, in the early 1st millennium BCE. Little about this stage of the language is known; nearly all surviving fragments consist of personal names and, perhaps, a single proper noun. One inscription from this period and region -- from Bāyir, Jordan at the upper end of the Wādī Sirḥān -- has been discovered: a short prayer in an undetermined Ancient North Arabian alphabet (Hayajneh, Ababneh, and Khraysheh 2015). The text invokes in the Arabic language the gods of ancient Edom, Moab, and Ammon, suggesting a degree of cultural interaction between the Arabic-speakers of the eastern steppe and the Canaanite-speaking kingdoms east of the Jordan.

There's a footnote at the end of the first sentence which cites two works by Israel Ephʿal, one by MCA Macdonald, and one by himself. It seems to me like this slightly—& probably without ill intent—misrepresents Al-Jallad's words: He doesn't say that the inscription from Bāyir is the oldest attestation of Arabic. Rather, he says it's the earliest inscription from the period of earliest attestation. There is other onomastic material from the same period, & Al-Jallad does not compare these materials in age. Pathawi (talk) 23:54, 5 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to edit that sentence to match the source, but actually I don't think it belongs in the lead ¶. Pathawi (talk) 23:55, 5 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]