Hebrew and Arabic much closer than thought.
I've written about vocalised in Arabic and how this can almost impossible represent the stage of language as it is written. Especially the case endings seem to have not existed in Arabic when the orthography as we know it now was brought into use.
In fact, I believe that the noun cases and nunation are most likely a result of a highly ritualistic language a 'high' language so to speak that was much closer to proto-semitic than the actual Arabic language. I believe that at the time Hebrew and Arabic split, Arabic can't have had case forms in the way we see them today. That's quite a claim, but let me elaborate.
Arabic and Hebrew are close in some ways and very divergent in others. Arabic broken plurals have run rampant for example. Nevertheless the amount of similar shifts that they seem to have undergone after Arabic lost it's noun endings and nunation is so absurdly similar to Hebrew that it's almost as if history redid some shifts it had lying around for those funny Semitic languages anyway.
I don't believe that's the case, I believe endings and nunation must have disappeared and then Arabic and Hebrew (and probably aramaic and a bunch of other languages of which I have too little knowledge) underwent a bunch of common changes.
Let's give some examples. Hebrew masculine plural ending is -īm Arabic masculine plural is nom. -ūna gen./acc. -īna. As we can see a shift of m to n occurred and word final -a was lost. in hebrew while it didn't in Arabic. This makes little sense to me. But now if we look at the 'pausal' and modern pronunciation of these two endings of Arabic we find it without an -a. -ūn/-īn The shift of word final m > n is much more natural than m > n between a long vowel and a.
This word final m > n shift is actually also found in the nunation, which in proto-semitic must have been mimation. I call ritualistic endings that were not part of the real language. But they must have been in use in some contexts. And if a language gets a constraint of final m turning to n it's quite likely that it will abide to this.
But that's just one of many more things I wanted to show. Another point is the loss of the final *t in feminines in both Arabic and Hebrew. These days Arabic has a etymological ة which is simply a h with the dots of a t over it. But dots are a more recent innovation thus only an h was used. The exact same spelling Hebrew uses to write feminines.
The situation is somewhat different though, hebrew always uses a he to write long final a's, while in arabic this orthography is quite restricted. Nevertheless it makes no sense for an Arab to writen a word with a final h if it was pronounced -atun or even -at. Why not write a t? I believe that Arabic and Hebrew both had final *-at that was then simplified to *-a which was later even lengthened in Hebrew to ā.
The accusative indefinite singular -an in Arabic can not be old, unless you feel like an alif is a perfectly logical letter to write -an instead of -ā you'll surely agree. This is not that controversial, it's generally accepted that in Old-Arabic the accusative indefinite singular was probably pronounced -ā and that the -an was reintroduced by analogy of the other cases. I've been told, and I hope someone will back this up, that in colloquial dialects -ā is still the normal pronunciation of the accusative. I personally am unsure whether for Proto-Semitic -an or -ā is reconstruced. But Akkadian has -am. So I guess the development of -ā is a later feature. A feature that Arabic shares with... You guess it, Hebrew!
Now I can hear you guys saying: aha! you made a mistake! And it's true there's no true accusative in Hebrew, but there are some petrified forms. For example BBLH or bāḇĕlā means 'towards Babylon'. Once again then a common feature of Hebrew and Arabic.
This leaves us with one major issue of course. HOW can Arabic have a ritualistic language so much more archaic than the spoken languages alive simultaneously. I'd suggest you go to Egypt, and watch al-jazira while listening to the people around you talking, and you'll find out that this is not all that bizarre as it sounds. It's essentially the same situation as all those years ago.
Luckily there's also some analogies to be made outside of Arabic. What to think of Vedic Sanskrit still existing as an oral tradition well after Classical Sanskrit died, and when the Prakrit languages were alive and kicking?
Or the (somewhat controversial) idea of Runic inscriptions that often look almost proto-germanic while languages must have differentiated into the different germanic languages at the time we find those inscriptions? It's pretty odd that in Old-Norse region not much before the first latin-written attestation we still find runic inscriptions that write the nom. sg. as -az rather than -r.
So this is the point where I ask you: Am I crazy? Am I seeing things? Surely these similarities can't just be coincidence can they? I'm open to all words of praise, critique and whatever else, as long as it doesn't change into a ridiculous mudfight. I want to be proven wrong, or someone to kindly point out that this interpretation has been the status-quo for centuries and has somehow gone past me.
[EDIT]
I should probably add that there's no direct reason to assume that there was no nominative -u and genitive -i or definite accusative -a. Since we also have to account for final vowels in the verbal system to explain certain vocalisms in Hebrew, this must have existed at some point. They may have been lost individually, or around the time that the two groups were starting to move away from each other.
Comments
I don't have any specific facts to offer but the issues you're describing in Proto-Semitic linguistics come from the fact that these dialects didn't branch cleanly à la phylogenetic myth of language change. So the evolution of the southern Semitic dialects, like Arabic, aren't so inseparable from the evolution of other Semitic languages because of waves of post-Semitic isoglosses and shared innovations spreading throughout the community over some seven millenia. It's inevitably messy and complicated but that's what makes this puzzle so much fun to solve.
I've discussed it with my Comparative Semitics professor the other day. And he indeed also went with 'isoglossic messiness' + A more isolated dialect of Arabic that kept many archaisms that had influence on the Arabic poetic language.
That way Arabic can keep separated from Hebrew a bit more, while retaining the possibility to have it affected by those damn isoglosses.
It's interesting to see that these isoglosses still influence Arabic though, while the separation must have already been quite distinct. But it's possible. Just like we see several sound shifts spread throughout Germanic languages at points in time where the languages must at least up to some point have been quite distinct already.