THE FEMININE ENDING -AT IN SHAMMARI ARABIC: A RESPONSE TO MARIJN VAN PUTTEN.

Attempting to interpret palatalization of the feminine marker -at to -ay in the Shammari dialect of Najd, Putten (2017) assumes that such change constitutes evidence that this dialect cannot be derived historically from Classical Arabic, and that its development did not participate in the at > ah change in all positions. In this response, I view this change to follow the same path Classical Arabic came across, but with an additional internal change peculiar to this variety. I argue for an intermediate stage of -at > -ah > -ay in the Shammari dialect of Najd. Therefore, I consider this phenomenon an initial stage of imāla (an incipient imāla) wherein palatalization diffuses within certain lexically-conditioned categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]