34 THE EMPTY QUARTER

could not bring myself to play up to his manifest policy of
making a corner in my attention and favours and he was
beginning to be jealous and suspicious of 'Ali, with whom I
was beginning to make satisfactory headway now that the
instinctive caution of his desert-bred soul had begun to thaw
in the give-and-take of daily association with me.

Major Cheesman1 has suggested that the Murra converse
with each other in a dialect which is not intelligible to other
Arabs, but I found nothing in my experiences to justify such
a conclusion. On the contrary their speech is not only un-
questionably Arabic but a particularly beautiful, almost
classical, Arabic at that. In many ways it reminded me
strongly of the language of the Hijaz mountain districts
round Taif, the language of the Quraish and Bani Sufyan,
who share with the Murra the characteristic softening of the
J sound to Y and the labiation of the peculiarly Arabic sound
called Dkad, the DH of our transliteration. I have heard the
Bani Sufyan refer to the capital of Najd as Riyal, while the
Murra pronounce Haral for Haradh, but I shall have to
revert to this subject in connection with the Manasir whose
acquaintance I was yet to make. According to 'Ali Jahman,
and as one would expect, every tribe has its Lughwa or dia-
lectical mannerisms, but the language they all speak—the
Murra, Manasir, 'Awamir, Bani Kathir, Sa'ar, etc.—is
Arabic and they appear to have nothing in the nature of a
true dialect or Eatna. Even the Harasis, he declared, speak
and understand ordinary Arabic, but not the Mahra who have
a dialect which is not intelligible to other Arabs. I can only
speak of my own experience of the true Arab tribes, and,
without trespassing on the more controversial aspects of the
question, I would hazard the conclusion that the dialects of
the south, inevitably exposed to corrupting influences from
overseas and from the ancient neighbouring civilisations of
the Yaxnan and the Hadhramaut, represent a linguistic
hotch-potch of generally Semitic character rather than the
remnants of pure aboriginal tongues of non-Semitic origin.
But the matter is evidently one that merits the closest study,
and it is satisfactory to know that Mr. Bertram Thomas is

1 In Unknown Arabia, p. 225.