University of Bucharest

A peculiarity of the Jewish dialect of Iskenderun is the emphatic negation
particle lam. This particle occurs only once in my texts to negate the imperfect
form of the verb with the particle am- expressing continued presence:
being
17) lə-knīse msakkara w-lam ambis}īr H minyán H
The synagogue is closed and a Minyan is no longer at all coming into
I ask my informant to give me some other examples for the use of lam, and
I found out that the particle lam negates only the verbal forms in imperfect with or
without the particle am-. The perfect form of the verb and the so called bimperfect
can not be negated by the particle lam but only by the negation particle
ma.
18) bəkra lam yəği
tomorrow he will not come at all
mā bikteb
he does not write
mā katab
he didn't write
I therefore expressed in my book on the Arabic dialects of the Turkish
province of Hatay the opinion that the particle lam in the Jewish dialect of
Iskenderun cannot trace back to classical Arabic lam, which is a negation particle
for the past tense (Arnold 1998: 117). I thought it could probably be a connection
of the two negation particles lā and mā to lāmā, which lost by frequent usage the
word final vowel and then the length of the first vowel in closed syllable.
19) lā + mā >lāmā >lām>lam
The connection of two negation particles would also explain the emphatic
character of the negation particle lam in the Jewish dialect of Iskenderun.
In 2002 Gabriel Rosenbaum published in the Festschrift for Otto Jastrow
his article ―The Particles ma and lam and emphatic negation in Egyptian Arabic‖
(Rosenbaum 2002: 583-598) with many records for the use of lam in colloquial
Arabic from Egypt, Syria and the Lebanon. In colloquial Egyptian Judeo-Arabic
texts from the 19th and even of the twentieth century the negation particle lam
appeared even many times. In contrary to the Judeo-Arabic dialect of the Jews of
Iskenderun lam is used in Egypt to negate the past tense too. While other scholars
argued that the particle lam is a hypo-correction that disappeared in living speech
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