Reflections on the linguistic map of pre-Islamic Arabia

At a workshop on 'Civilisations de l'Arabie preislamique' in Aix-en-Provenc e in February 1996, I was asked by the organizers to give a survey of the s tate of our knowledge of the languages and scripts of pre-Islamic Arabia an d to propose a coherent set of definitions and terms for them, in an attemp t to clarify the numerous misapprehensions and the somewhat chaotic nomencl ature in the field. I purposely concentrated on the languages and scripts o f the Arabian Peninsula north of Yemen, and only mentioned in passing those of Ancient South Arabia, since these were to be the subject of another pap er. Unfortunately, four years after it took place, the proceedings of this workshop remain unpublished. In the meantime, the contents of my paper have circulated widely and I, and others, are finding its increasingly frustrat ing having to refer to it as 'forthcoming.' I am therefore most grateful to the editor of AAE for allowing a considerably revised version of my paper to be published here. It should be seen as an essential preliminary ground- clearing for my detailed discussion of the Ancient North Arabian languages and scripts which will appear early in 2001 in The Cambridge Encyclopedia o f the World's Ancient Languages (ed. R.D. Woodard, Cambridge University Pre ss) and my book Old Arabic and its legacy in the later language. Texts, lin guistic features, scripts and letter-orders, which is in preparation.