Linguistic Exaptation in Arabic

Abstract

In contemporary years, there is an interesting linguistic topic that has been attracted by many scholars which is "linguistic exaptation", for example, "functional renewal" (Brinston and Stein, 1993), "semantic reanalysis" (Eckardt, 2011), and "revival" Ghazala (2014). "Linguistic exaptation" is described by those scholars but with different terms. This phenomenon is significant since languages are constantly losing some semantic contents of lexical words, but sometimes retaining the phonetic string to be reused with new semantic content. If languages have fixed linguistic system, there will be no sign of vitality in the language and no room for change. Therefore, the main goal of this study is to concentrate on whether the phenomenon of linguistic exaptation exists in Arabic or not. For the sake of the validity of the analysis and results, the method employed here is based on Arabic dictionaries, articles, and also published books. The results suggest that the phenomenon "linguistic exaptation" occurs in Arabic language and there are many Arabic examples that represent this phenomenon such as sjarah 'car', qitar 'train', dʒaridah 'newspaper', dʒwal 'mobile phone', ħ ari:m 'women', and hatif 'telephone'.