Lemurian Arabic

In the western ports of the continent of Lemuria, on the old trade route to Uqbar and thence to Atlantis, a dialect of Arabic has been spoken since probably the 6th century AD or so. Its longstanding isolation from other Arabic dialects, and its speakers' bilingualism in neighbouring Lemurian languages, has allowed it to develop some rather unusual features. Like all Arabic dialects, it has lost the final short vowels preserved in Classical Arabic; but, unlike any other surviving dialect, it has largely preserved case and mood marking, thanks to extensive final-syllable ablaut.

For example, the noun "book" is conjugated as follows:

	SG	PL
NOM	kitoob	kitaaboot
ACC	kitaab	kitaabeet
GEN	kiteeb	kitaabeet

One thus says royt ilkitaab "I saw the book", sagatʼ ilkitoob "the book fell", deexil ilkiteeb "inside the book". The resulting system is rather reminiscent of Old Irish, among other languages of our own timeline.

Sadly, a full documentation of this fascinating dialect will forever be wanting, due to the difficulty of travelling to fictional destinations and of getting recording equipment to work properly in fantasy universes. However, I trust that the available data is sufficient to establish that phonetic changes such as the loss of final short vowels need not automatically imply the loss of morphological information that the lost phonemes had encoded.