Old South Arabian

Old South Arabian (or Epigraphic South Arabian, or Ṣayhadic) was a group of four closely related languages formerly spoken in the far southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula. There were a number of other Old South Arabian languages (e.g. Awsānian), of which very little evidence survived, however. All those languages were older than Classical Arabic, which developed around the 4th century. It was originally thought that all four members of this group were dialects of one Old South Arabian language, but in the mid-twentieth century Beeston finally proved that they did in fact constitute independent languages.

The Old South Arabian languages were originally classified (partly on the basis of geography) as South Semitic, along with Arabic, Modern South Arabian and Ethiopian Semitic; more recently however, a new classification has come in use which places Old South Arabian, along with Arabic, Ugaritic, Aramaic and Canaanite in a Central Semitic group; leaving Modern South Arabian and Ethiopic in a separate group. This new classification is based on Arabic, Old South Arabic and Northwest Semitic (Ugaritic, Aramaic and Canaanite) sharing an innovation in the verbal system, an imperfect taking the form *yVqtVl-u (the other groups have *yVqattVl); Nebes showed that Sabaean at least had the form yVqtVl in the imperfect.

Even though has been now accepted that the four main languages be considered independent, they are clearly closely related linguistically and derive from a common ancestor because they share certain morphological innovations. One of the most important isoglosses retained in all four languages is the suffixed definite article - (h)n. There are however significant differences between the languages.

The four main Old South Arabian languages were Sabaean, Minaeic (or Madhabic), Qatabanic, and Hadramitic. According to Alice Faber (based on Hetzron's work), together with Ethiopian Semitic languages (such as the contemporary Ge'ez language) and the Modern South Arabian languages (not descended from Old South Arabian but from a sister language), they formed the western branch of the South Semitic languages.

Old South Arabian had its own writing system, the Ancient South Arabian Monumental Script, or Musnad, consisting of 29 graphemes concurrently used for proto-Ge'ez in the Kingdom of D`mt, ultimately sharing a common origin with the other Semitic abjads, the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet. Inscriptions in another minuscule cursive script written on wooden sticks have also been discovered.

The last inscription of these languages dates back to 554 CE, 60 years before Islam.