More Info
The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judaeo-Arabic: A Study of the Origins of Neo-Arabic and Middle Arabic is Joshua Blau's study of how Judeo-Arabic came into being. Blau (1919 to 2020) taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1957 to 1986 and received the Israel Prize for linguistics in 1985.
Blau traces Judeo-Arabic back to the rise of Middle Arabic after the Arab conquests, when the conquered peoples took up Arabic without fully adopting the classical language, and their writing kept features of the spoken dialects. The book looks at the emergence of Middle Arabic, the special characteristics of Judeo-Arabic and the way the dialects show through in Judeo-Arabic texts, drawing on grammar, spelling and manuscripts.
First published in 1965 by Oxford University Press in the Scripta Judaica series, the book later appeared in revised editions from the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem, the third in 1999. For students and scholars of Arabic and Jewish languages.