Yūnus/Jonah viewed through hapaxes

The Qur'ān is not intended as an account of events. Rather than being organised around narratives, it typically brings up apparently familiar narratives in support of points being made. Yūnus/Jonah, for example, is mentioned by name 4 times, and by epithet another 2 times. Two of these mentions give no details of his story at all (4:163, 6:86). 10:98, 21:87-88, and 67:48-49 only briefly summarise specific aspects of the story. 37:139-148 recounts the story as a whole, but in such an abbreviated form as to presuppose that at least part of the audience had already heard a fuller version. Can anything about that version be determined from the text of the Qur'ān?

Hapaxes - words that occur very rarely or only once in the text - offer an interesting window on the problem (see also previous posts: ضريع, قسورة). Apart from the name Yūnus (Jonah) itself, four words are attested in the Qur'ān only within accounts of Jonah. The oldest attested form of his name is Yônāh, which in Greek yields Iônas (ιωνας) in the nominative (the -s is a widespread Indo-European nominative singular suffix); the final s in Yūnus thus suggests that the audience's knowledge of Jonah came in part via Greek intermediaries at some remove. "Fish" is normally ḥūt حوت in the Qur'ān, including in accounts of Jonah (Standard Arabic samak سمك is unattested in the text), but in 21:87 Jonah is alluded to as ḏā n-nūn ذا النون "he of the fish", the only occurrence in the Qur'ān of the Aramaic loanword nūn. The fish swallowed (iltaqamat التقمت) Jonah in 37:142; the only other mention of swallowing in the Qur'ān uses a word much better attested in modern Arabic dialects, balaʕa بلع (11:44:3). After praying to God for release, he is then cast out onto the shore, for which both 37:145 and 68:49 use the more specific term ʕarā' عراء, ie barren land. Eventually God causes a gourd - yaqṭīn يقطين - to grow over his head; this is the only Qur'ānic mention of the plant in question.

Compare the relevant terms in various early Semitic versions of the Book of Jonah:

	Jonah		fish	swallow	land sp.	plant sp.
Arabic	Yūnus يونس		ḥūt حوت / nūn نون	iltaqama التقم	ʕarā' عراء (barren land)	yaqṭīn يقطين (gourd)
Hebrew	Yônāh יוֹנָה		dāḡ דָּג	bālaʕ בָּלַע	yabbāšāh יַבָּשָׁה (dry land)	qîqāyôn קִיקָיוֹן
Babylonian Jewish Aramaic	Yônāh יוֹנָה		nūnā נוּנָא	blaʕ בְּלַע	yabbeštā יַבֶּשׁתָּא (dry land)	qîqāyôn קִיקָיוֹן
Syriac	Yawnān ܝܘܢܢ		nūnā ܢܘܢܐ	blaʕ	yaḇšā ܝܒܫܐ (dry land)	qar'ā ܩܪܐܐ (gourd)
Geez	Yonas ዮናስ		ʕanbari ዐንበሬ (whale)	wəxṭä ውኅጠ	mədər ምድር (land)	ḥamḥam ሐምሐም (gourd)

One immediately notices that none of them match the Qur'ān as a whole at all well. For "Jonah", only Geez (Ethiopic) offers a similar Greek-influenced term, contrasting with the obvious Aramaic source of nūn for "fish". For "swallow", the Hebrew and Aramaic/Syriac versions all use a word whose direct cognate - balaʕa - is attested elsewhere in the Qur'ān, and is very familiar in Arabic; why then does the more vivid term iltaqama (something like "take in as a morsel") appear? For the land onto which Jonah is cast, the Qur'ān twice uses a specific term incorporating a detail absent from any of these versions of the Book of Jonah, all of which use a generic term for "dry land" or even just "land"; why is this used rather than 'arḍ or even the cognate yābisah?

The conclusion seems obvious: none of these translations were at all prominent for the Arab audience to whom the Qur'ān was first addressed. Whatever its distant roots may have been, the account of Jonah they knew best was something orally transmitted in Arabic, and not directly based on any one of these.

Raisins from Carthage to Siwa

Most Berber varieties have borrowed the word for "raisin" from Arabic, eg Kabyle azbib, or use a compound "dried grapes", eg Shilha aḍil aqurar. However, in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt the situation is rather different, as this Facebook post illustrates:

Location	Word for "raisin"	In Arabic script
Djerba	izummucen
Jadu	iz/ẓemmuken	ايزموكن
Nalut	ijemmusen	ايجموسن
Zuwara	ijemmucen	ايجموشن
Yefren, El-Qalaa	ijummucen, ijemmac	ايجمّوشن, ايجوموشن, اجماش
Siwa	ijeṃṃusen	إجموسن

The variation in the consonants is not completely regular, but note that there is a regular correspondences between k in Jadu and š in Yefren and Siwa (from palatal *ḱ), and that sibilant harmony is a fairly productive process in Berber.

As far as I know, this word's etymology has not previously been investigated, so I was happy to discover it this morning quite by chance. It happens to be attested in an ostracon from about 2000 years ago (give or take), found at the site of Al Qusbat, on the Libyan coast east of Tripoli:

This line in Neo-Punic - that is, the later Phoenician dialect spoken in North Africa - starts ldn`ṭ' `sr kkr' ṣmq, rendered by Jongeling and Kerr (Late Punic Epigraphy, 2005:24) as "for Donatus, 10 talents of dried fruits". As usual for Phoenician, the interpretation relies mainly on its much better documented close relative Hebrew: in this case, the relevant comparison is to the ṣimmuq-îm צִמֻּקִים֙ "raisins", attested 4 times in the Hebrew Bible. In Hebrew, the root of this word, ṣmq, means "to dry up"; in Arabic, the same root yields the rare forms ṣāmiq "thirsty", ṣamaqah "milk that has gone off". The direction of borrowing is therefore clear: from Phoenician into eastern Berber.

Now most of the attestations of this form are in a region where intense Punic influence is completely unsurprising: the coast of Tripolitania and southern Tunisia. However, any Classicist will remind us that Phoenician rule stopped at the Arae Philaenorum: eastern Libya was in Greek hands, and Phoenician never had any significant presence there. What, then, is this word doing in Siwa? The answer is simple, as I discuss in the introduction to my book Berber and Arabic in Siwa (Egypt): modern Siwi seems to derive mainly from a Berber variety spoken much further west, which reached Siwa only during the Middle Ages. There very probably was a Berber language spoken in Siwa before that, but if so, it has left very few traces.

The cross-cultural ambiguity of "nation" in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict

Advance warning: 1. I am no expert on Hebrew, nor for that matter on semantics. 2. Comments relating to word usage are welcome below; attempts to refight the conflict are not.

One thing that's always puzzled me about pro-Israel discourse is the enormous weight it tends to place on the concept of nationhood. Over and over again, you find Zionists insisting that Israel is a nation, that Palestine is not a nation, that Palestine must acknowledge that Israel is a nation - as if nationhood were the key issue at stake. In pro-Palestine discourse, on the other hand, the question of whether either party is a nation hardly arises except in responses; who cares? Recently it struck me that this difference in rhetoric could perhaps be understood in semantic terms. What is a nation? And just how badly does this rather polysemous word translate?

When Netanyahu defends proposals to define Israel as the "nation-state of the Jewish people" (מדינת הלאום של העם היהודי), or declares that "we do not want a bi-national state" (איננו רוצים מדינה דו-לאומית), the word he's using is le'om לאום. In the Hebrew Bible, this word (better transcribed lə'ōm) is fairly uncommon, occurring 26 times in the plural and 5 in the singular (26 of them in the singular), usually in poetry and paired with its far more frequent near-synonym ʕām עָם "people, nation". It occurs in the singular in Proverbs, with general reference, and in Genesis 25, in which Jacob and Esau are each presented as a le'om, implicitly representing the nation made up of his descendants: respectively, Israel and Edom. Elsewhere, it occurs in the plural, especially referring to other nations (eg Psalms 47:3). In a more modern context, le'om is the word used for "ethnic affiliation" on Israeli ID cards: an Israeli citizen's le'om can be Jewish, Arab, or Druze, but, curiously enough, never Israeli.

In Arabic, the "nation-state of the Jewish people" is rendered as "دولة قومية للشعب اليهودي", and "bi-national state" as "دولة ثنائية القومية", both using the word qawmiyy "national", from qawm "nation, people". The latter word is very frequent in the Qur'an, occurring 383 times. Its usage there, however, is rather different. It never occurs pluralised (though it takes plural agreement). Whereas the only le'oms defined by name in the Bible are defined by common patrilineal ancestry, a qawm is defined by name in the Qur'an only in terms of their prophet or (more rarely) leader: qawmu Mūsā "the people of Moses", qawmu Firʕawn "the people of Pharaoh", qawmi Nūḥ "the people of Noah", qawmi 'Ibrāhīm "the people of Abraham"... Otherwise, it is defined in terms of its characteristics: most often, believing (aware, realising, grateful, etc.) or unbelieving (wrong-doing, misguided, self-wronging, etc.)

As might be expected based on this, the noun qawm is hardly ever used to refer to something like a "Palestinian nation", nor to a "Jewish nation", nor even to an "Arab nation" (Google returns derisorily small numbers of hits, in the low thousands or below). If you search for dawlah qawmiyyah "nation-state", what you mostly get is discussion of Israel (along with a few fringe movements). Qawmiyyah, "nationalism", is a more prominent concept in the modern era - above all, al-qawmiyyah al-ʕarabiyyah "Arab nationalism", ie the dream of a single pan-Arab state - but one with a rather ambivalent ring to it at best; there are still Arab nationalists around, but the Arab unity project has had a musty 1960s smell to it for a while, criticised as much from the right as from the left. Even apart from its content, the common Israeli demand for recognition of a "nation-state of the Jewish people" thus translates rather poorly - not because the concepts don't exist, but because they don't have similar connotations. Palestinians aren't normally speaking in terms of a "dawlah qawmiyyah of the Palestinian people", nor for that matter of "the Arab people"; whether Palestine is a nation-state or some other kind of state is a secondary issue.

When Mahmoud Abbas mentions "national institutions" or a "national unity government" in his UNGA speech - or meets with the Palestinian National Council - the word he's using, and the word any Arabic speaker would use, is waṭaniyy وطني, from waṭan وطن "nation, homeland". In the Palestinian declaration of independence of 1988, qawmiyy occurs once (in a token nod to Arab nationalism), whereas waṭaniyy occurs 13 times, in collocations like "national identity", "national independence", "national rights", "national personality", "national will"... The word waṭan doesn't occur in the Qur'an at all; the closest it comes is a single usage of mawāṭin "regions". It unambiguously refers to a land, not to a group of people. And, unlike qawm, it has a profound resonance in the context of Palestinian - and Arab - nationalism, and not just because it provides the adjective used in collocations like "national liberation" or "national anthem". It recurs nostalgically in the poems of Mahmoud Darwish ("What is the waṭan? It is the house, and the mulberry tree, and the chicken coop and the beehive, and the smell of bread and the sky") or Tawfiq Zayyad ("As you were, so you shall remain, my waṭan - present in the leaves of the oleander and the fragrance of jasmine"). Further afield, Nizar Qabbani's remarkable line comes to mind now more than ever: "O my waṭan, have they made you a serial of horror whose events we follow in the evening? Then how shall we see you if they cut the power?" And, of course, waṭaniyyah وطنية "patriotism" has far more positive connotations than qawmiyyah. All of this vocabulary places the emphasis away from notions of ethnic cohesion or common ancestry, focusing on a different common ground: the land itself.

The Hebrew translation of waṭan would appear to be moledet (מולדת) "homeland". This word does occur in the Bible, 22 times - but, like le'om, it carries there a sense much more closely tied to human kinship, referring to "kindred, family" as well as "birthplace, native country". Israel's declaration of independence refers to the land as the "national homeland (moledet)" of the Jews, and there seems to be a good deal of Hebrew poetry on the subject. However, collocations like "national anthem" or "National Council" or "national unity government" or "national liberation" all derive from le'om, not from moledet.

"Nation" in English usage is ambiguous: is a nation united primarily by its attachment to a given area, or by its common ancestry? Either language can express either idea. However, the best-established and most positively viewed terminology in Arabic focuses on the former, while in Hebrew it focuses on the latter. This difference is hardly the source of the conflict, but it does play some small part in impeding mutual understanding.

Arabic right-hemispheric WEIRDness

Recently Language Hat asked for informed reactions to a BBC report claiming that Reading Arabic 'hard for brain'. The papers under discussion are to be found at Eviatar's home page, in particular the 2009 paper "Language status and hemispheric involvement in reading: Evidence from trilingual Arabic speakers tested in Arabic, Hebrew, and English" but also clearly the 2004 paper "Orthography and the hemispheres: Visual and linguistic aspects of letter processing". Now I'm no psycholinguist, but obviously this story smells fishy, so I had a closer look.

At least one glaring mistake seems to be clearly the BBC's fault: it wrongly claims "When the Arabic readers saw similar letters with their right hemispheres, they answered randomly - they could not tell them apart at all." In fact, this seems to conflate two different experiments. Telling letters apart was the first task in the 2004 paper, and the Arabic readers' error rates for similar letters were only 8% (Table 6) - worse than with the left hemisphere, but not nearly so bad. The claim that "there is a specific RH deficit in reading Arabic, because that is the only condition (with bilateral presentation), where these native Arabic speakers responded at chance" comes from the 2009 paper - but the task referred to there was substantially more complicated. They were looking at words/nonwords, not letters; they were presented with two words, one for each hemisphere, one of which was underlined; and they had to decide whether the underlined "word" was a real word or not. Other issues are not so much wrong as stupid: talking as though students could choose which hemisphere to learn with, for example.

However, the BBC cannot be blamed for drawing excessively sweeping conclusions from this experiment. The authors themselves talk of their results as applicable to Arabic in general, which rather overstates the case. In both papers, the Arabic speakers were all also fluent speakers of Hebrew, which they had studied since second grade, and were living in a state where Hebrew is the dominant language. In the 2004 test, at least, they were also all undergraduates studying degrees taught in Hebrew. Obviously, this is a rather unusual situation for Arabic speakers! In particular, it is one where pragmatic (and status-related) motivations to study Hebrew, and opportunities to familiarise oneself with it, are likely to be much greater than for Arabic (especially given the big difference between spoken and written Arabic.) In some types of tests, these speakers's right hemispheres seem to read Hebrew more easily than Arabic. The authors take this to mean that there is a "specific difficulty of the RH with Arabic orthography". But, without further testing elsewhere, it can equally well be taken to reflect the sociolinguistic situation of Palestinian citizens of Israel. This is, in fact, a special case of a much wider problem: most psychology experiments focus on "WEIRD" populations (read the link - it's a concept very much worth remembering when you read the science news.)

Ayin-less in Gaza

Gaza, Arabic غزّة ghazzah, is another extremely old city of the eastern Mediterranean, having been in existence for at least three millennia. After a period of Egyptian rule, it became a member of the Philistine Pentapolis. Its name has been recorded in several forms over the years, including:

• Hieroglyphic: q3d3ti, g3d3y, g3d3tw (says Wallis Budge);
  
• Akkadian (Tell el-Amarna): Az-za-ti;
  
• Akkadian (Assyrian): Kha-az-zu-tu;
  
• Biblical Hebrew: `azzah;
  
• Greek (Herodotus): Cadytis (probably Gaza, but some dispute)
  
• Greek (Septuagint): Gaza (Γάζα)
  
• Latin (Pliny): Gaza

Some sources derive the town's Hebrew name, `Azzah, from the root `zz "be strong". However, this is a folk etymology. The two proto-Semitic consonants *` (pharyngeal voiced fricative/approximant) and *gh (uvular voiced fricative) merged to ` in Biblical Hebrew as we know it; but `zz "be strong" had ` in proto-Semitic (compare Arabic عزّ `azza), whereas Gaza clearly had gh (note that Akkadian had no gh, so a null/kh alternation in transcribing it is expected.) As a matter of fact, the Septuagint provides evidence that some dialects of Hebrew retained the `/gh distinction well into the classical period; some instances of written `ayin are left untranscribed in the Septuagint's Greek (eg Yehoshua` = Ἰησοῦς; Bet-`Araba = Βαιθαραβα), while others are transcribed as gamma (`Amora = Γομορρα; `Azza = Γάζα), clearly suggesting that the pronunciation was still distinguished.

The interesting thing is that Arabic has preserved the gh in Gaza, which would be impossible if it had taken the word from 7th-century Aramaic, which has no gh either (Hebrew was almost surely extinct as a spoken language by the time Islam arrived.) Could it have been borrowed from Greek? Maybe; but, given that Herodotus notes that "Arabians" dominated the coast between Gaza and al-Arish even in his time, another obvious possibility is simply that the word Gaza entered Arabic from one Canaanite language or another well before the loss of the `/gh distinction, and didn't change.

As an interesting coda, the name Gaza may apparently be the source of the English word gauze.

A comparative linguist of the 11th century

Ibn Hazm (994-1064) was a polymathic intellectual of Cordoba, equally well-known for his poetry and his religious commentary. Less well-known are his opinions on Semitic linguistics, which turn out to have been rather impressive. In the quote below, he demonstrates a clearer understanding of the process of historical change than Ibn Quraysh, who seems to have seen the mutual similarities as as resulting as much or more from intermixture than from common ancestry, although both ultimately succumb to the temptation of explaining linguistic family trees in terms of religiously given genealogies. As near as I can translate it off the cuff, he said:

...What we have settled on and determined to be certain is that Syriac and Hebrew and Arabic - that is the language of Mudar and Rabia (ie Arabic as we know it), not the language of Himyar (ie Old South Arabian) - are one language that changed with the migrations of its people, so that it was ground up... For, when a town's people live near another people, their language changes in a manner clear to anyone who considers the issue, and we find that the masses have changed the pronunciation of Arabic significantly, to the point that it is so distant from the original as to be like a different language, so we find them saying `iinab for `inab (grape), and 'asTuuT for sawT (whip), and thalathdaa for thalaathatu danaaniir (three dinars), and when a Berber becomes Arabized and wants to say shajarah (tree) he says sajarah, and when a Galician becomes Arabized he replaces `ayn and Haa with haa, so he says muhammad when he means to say muHammad, and such things are frequent. So whoever ponders on Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac will become certain that their difference is of the type we have described, through changes in people's pronunciation through the passage of time and the difference of countries and the bordering of other nations, and that they are in origin a single language. Having established that, Syriac is the ancestor of both Arabic and Hebrew, and to be more precise, the first to speak this Arabic was Ishmael, upon him be peace, for it is the language of his sons, and Hebrew is the language of Isaac and his sons, and Syriac is without doubt the language of Abraham, blessings and peace be upon him and upon our prophet. (Ihkam Ibn Hazm; see Wikisource for original text, beginning الذي وقفنا عليه وعلمناه يقينا أن السريانية والعبرانية والعربية...)

My attention was originally drawn to this remarkable quote by an article by Ahmad Shahlan, in a rather strange Libyan book fusing pan-Arab nationalism with Semitic philology, at-Tanawwu` wal-Wahdah fi l-lahajaati l-`uruubiyyati l-qadiimati, which probably merits a post in its own right at some point.

A comparative linguist of the 10th century

Yehudah ibn Quraysh was a rabbi of the late ninth/early tenth century from Tahert (modern Tiaret, in Algeria.) Shocked to hear that the Jews of Fez in Morocco were neglecting the study of the Targum (an Aramaic translation of the Bible), he wrote a letter to them intended to establish that they could not and should not get by on the Hebrew alone - because other languages, especially Aramaic and Arabic, are essential in elucidating the Hebrew. In the process, he casually noted most of the correct sound correspondences between Hebrew and Arabic, and ended up writing what amounts to an extensive comparative dictionary of the three languages, even throwing in 9 Berber comparisons and 5 Latin ones at the end. He definitely hedges his bets on the cause of this obvious similarity between the three languages, but seems to come surprisingly close to the correct explanation - common descent - at times... something to bear in mind next time you read about Sir William Jones having founded comparative linguistics in 1798.

Here is what he had to say about it, as far as I can translate it:

I then resolved to put together this book for people with understanding, so that they should know that Syriac [Aramaic] expressions are scattered throughout the whole of the Holy Tongue in the Bible, and Arabic is mixed with it, and occasionally bits of Ajami [Latin] and Berber - and principally Arabic in particular, for in it we have found many of its strangest expressions to be pure Hebrew, to the point that there is no difference between the Hebrew and the Arabic except the interchange of ṣād and ḍād, and gīmel and jīm, and ṭet and đ̣ā', and `ay(i)n and ghayn, and ḥā' and khā', and zāy and dhāl. The reason for this similarity and the cause of this intermixture was their close neighboring in the land and their genealogical closeness, since Terah the father of Abraham was Syrian, and Laban was Syrian. Ishmael and Kedar were Arabized from the Time of Division, the time of the confounding [of tongues] at Babel, and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob (peace be upon them) retained the Holy Tongue from the original Adam. The language became similar through intermixture*, just as in every land adjoining a land of a different language we see intermixture of certain expressions between them and the spread of language from one to another; and this is the cause of the similarities we have found between Hebrew and Arabic...

The original was written in classical Arabic using the Hebrew script; I retranscribe it into Arabic script here:

فرأيت عند ذلك أن أؤلِّف هذا الكتاب لأهل الفطن وذوي الألباب، فيعلمو أن جميع לשון קדש (لغة القداسة: العبرانية) الحاصل في المقرأ (الكتب المقدسة) قد انتثرت فيه ألفاظ سريانية واختلطت به لغة عربية وتشذذت فيه حروف عجمية وبربرية ولا سيما العربية خاصة فإن فيها كثير من غريب ألفاظها وجدناه عبرانيا محضا، حتى لا يكون بين العبراني والعربي في ذلك من الاختلاف إلا ما بين ابتدال الصاد والضاد، والجيمل (حرف عبراني: ڱ) والجيم، والطِت (حرف عبراني: ط) والظاء، والعين والغين، والحاء والخاء، والزاي والذال. وإنما كانت العلة في هذا التشابه والسبب في هذا الامتزاج قرب المجاورة في البلاد والمقاربة في النسب لأن תֶרח (تِرَحْ) أبو אברהם (ابراهيم) كان سريانيا وלבן (لابان: حمو يعقوب) سريانيا. وكان ישמעאל (اسماعيل) وקדָר (قيدار) مستعرب من דוֹר הפלגה (زمان الاختلاف)، زمان البلبلة في בבל (بابل)، وאברהם (ابراهيم) وיצחק (إسحاق) وיעקב (يعقوب) عليهم السلام متمسكين بـלשון קדש (لغة القداسة: العبرانية) من אדם הראשון (آدم الأول). فتشابهت اللغة من قبل الممازجة، كما نشاهد في كل بلد مجاور لبلد مخالف للغته من امتزاج بعض الألفاظ بينهم واستعارة اللسان بعضهن من بعض، فهذا سبب ما وجدناه من تشابه العبراني بالعربي...

(Source: D. Becker, Ha-Risala shel Yehudah ben Quraysh, Tel Aviv University Press, Tel Aviv 1984.)

* I previously mistranslated this, having misread qibal as qabl.

Update: Read more at http://lameen.googlepages.com/ibn-quraysh.html.

Demonstratives in Semitic and beyond

Rishon Rishon just posted a table comparing the words in my previous post to Hebrew. Most of them are correct; mo`ed and g'vul are not cognate, and SaH and loa` I'm not sure about. However, one is particularly interesting: ha- = 'al- "the". You often find this seeming cognate cited in works on Semitic: after all, ha- induces gemination of a subsequent non-guttural consonant - suggesting a lost consonant in the prefix assimilating to the subsequent letter - and Hebrew h- occasionally seems to soften to '- in Arabic (the causative measure hiph`iil corresponds to 'af`ala, for example.) Trouble is, the only letter in Hebrew that regularly assimilates to a following consonant is n (although l does admittedly assimilate in the verb laqaH), and the Safaitic inscriptions seem to reveal an early pre-Islamic northern dialect of Arabic which did have a definite article h- (hn- before gutturals, thus hn'lt for Al-Lat.) So are there any other possibilities?

I think so. ha- corresponds pretty well to Arabic haa "here is", which is also the obligatory prefix to the demonstrative "this" (haadhaa, haadhihi, haa'ula'). Compare also Syriac haanaa "this (m. sg.)" - which appears to reveal an added n which could explain the Hebrew doubling (and the Safaitic form) nicely. Conversely, 'al- corresponds well to Hebrew 'elleh, Arabic haa-'ulaa', Syriac haaleyn "these". The vowel doesn't correspond exactly, but then it doesn't in the certain cognate 'elleh = haa-'ulaa' either. This idea has probably already been put forward (or indeed knocked down) somewhere in the literature, for all I know, but there you go.

In either case, both definite articles would derive originally from unstressed demonstratives - a process so common it's barely worth commenting on. For example, all the Romance languages derive their definite articles from Latin demonstratives - usually illum/illa "that" (before the noun except in Romanian), but istum "that" in Sardinian. Likewise, the Coptic definite article pe- (m.)/te- (f.)/ne- (pl.) derives from the ancient Egyptian demonstrative pn (m.), tn (f.), nn (pl.) "this". Indeed, English "the" derives from the same old English word as "that". Come to think of it, I don't know of any definite articles offhand that don't derive from demonstratives; can you think of any?