Gender and Number Agreement in Early Christian Arabic Manuscripts: A Historically ‘Middle’ Feature

Abstrakt

The topic of gender and number agreement in Arabic has garnered significant interest in recent years, culminating in the recent monograph by Bettega and D’Anna (2023). The picture that has emerged from these studies is of a system, shared by ancient and modern corpora, in which plural heads can trigger either feminine singular or plural agreement, depending on a variety of pragmatic factors (such as, e.g., animacy and individuation). Further, the Classical/Modern Standard Arabic rule of obligatory feminine singular agreement with inanimate plural heads represents a departure from this system. Unlike the significant coverage that corpora like the Quran and modern Arabic dialects have attracted, gender and number agreement in Middle Arabic corpora have received virtually no thorough study. In this paper, I investigate gender and number agreement in five early Christian Arabic manuscripts—four gospel translations and one original composition—showing that, contrary to previous discussions, the distribution attests the same ancient system found elsewhere. I also consider whether Greek, the source language of three of the four translations, had a significant effect on the realization of this feature in Arabic. I argue that it did not. I conclude that this system likely reflects a productive one in the speech communities from which the scribes originated, although with evidence of interaction with another register or registers.