Bãq, an Inchoative Marker in Mardini Arabic

Mardini Arabic (spoken in Mardin, a vilayet in Southern Turkey) has a series of prefixes wich, combined with the extratemporal forms of the verb (imperfective and perfective), create an astonishing number of tenses and modes, compared to the classic Arabic or other dialects. There are: - ku - for present: ku-takal (you are eating now); bäq - for inchoative: bäq-takal (you began to eat); - ta - for the future: ta-takal (you will eat); - ka - (with its variants ken, ket, kal) for perfect (ex.: ka-akält - you ate) and past perfect (ex.: ken-ket-akält - you had eaten). The modalities of forming the two tenses are a lot more diverse and com- plicated and they are the subject of an extended study (Grigore, 1999) - ka + ta - for conditional: ka-ta-takal (you would eat); From all those verbal prefixes, I chose to present in this paper the results of my investigation on the development of this inchoative marker - bäq- in Mardini Arabic from the lexical item bäqa (to remain, to stay, to continue, to be;to keep on). This inquiry is based on texts in Mardini Arabic published by Otto Jastrow in 1969 (a and b) and by Hans-Jurgen Sasse in 1971, as well as on the record- ings effected by me among the small Mardini Arabian community in the last ten years in Bucharest.