Peace Mozmahe,
You said "So it is in the language of the city dwellers and not the nomads."
I gather from your article that the great reading is written in the Nabatean Aramaic script, but the language is Arabic. From the above, you are saying that the nomads and city dwellers spoke different languages, and, if that is so what are the different languages?
Not different languages but different dialects that were mutually comprehensible. This would be like the typical Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern country today, there were two main vernacular dialects spoken by the common folk. One dialect was spoken in the rural areas (ANA dialects such as Safaitic) and the other (Arabic) was spoken in the towns. The two dialects were largely mutually comprehensible despite their variances. This is much like say the Egyptian Cairienne dialect spoken by city dwellers and Egyptian Sinai dialect spoken by the nomads are mutually comprehensible. Like those modern day dialects, the dialects of the nomads would have been seen as a more ?rough? dialect than the Old Arabic city dialect. One can see some evidence of this ?roughness?, for example, in the Safaitic definite article (h-) having a demonstrative connotation while this is largely subdued in the Arabic definite article.
This would also resolve another paradox. Why do we find thousands of ANA and Safaitic inscriptions in the deserts of Arabia left by the nomads but very few Old Arabic inscriptions?
When the common people in towns needed to write something, they had access to scribes who could write it in the language of prestige. This is why Old Arabic inscriptions are rare. On the rare occasions when Old Arabic was written, the script of the language of prestige that the scribes of that region were using was used to write it.
When the nomads in the desert needed to write something, it didn?t serve any practical purpose but was done as a form of entertainment to kill time during the long hours of solitary nomadic life. This is why the nomads despite being illiterate scribbled thousands of graffiti in the desert of Northern Arabia. Because the purpose was entertainment and had nothing to do with literacy, they used their oral language. Also, since they didn?t have access to scribes, they used the simplest script that required no adjustments or knowledge of writing standards to represent foreign letters. Prestige was not a factor so they naturally used the Arabian Musnad script which had the 28 letters of Arabic represented.
All this and more can be deduced based on the single important observation from the great reading that Jack made. As far as I know, no one has ever considered that the people of the prophet (and thus their language) was from the city and not the desert when forming theories on Classical Arabic. This holds the key to resolving many paradoxes that have challenged researchers for a long time.
Peace,
Ayman
