Machine summary:
The demoniac endings of the lines which most often had the same sound (raioiyya) exerted a deep effect, musical and sensuous at the same time, upon the audience and gained the appellation of qafi)!ya or "skull breaking" and sometimes the persons who had become the target of a pungent satirical verse, prostrated themselves in order to escape the hurt of the poetical missile directed towards them, so little could the Arabs disting• uish between the dart and the mortal word.
The chief difference between these pre-Islamic Northern Arabic dialects for instance is the article, which in Thamudiyya and Safawiyya (called respectively after the people ofThamud in Nejd and North Arabia, also mentioned by Roman writers as ''equites Thamudeni," and after the mountain of Safat in the Syrian desert) is ha, while in Nabatiyya al, dividing the two groups into ha, and al, dialects, similarly the two great groups of Turkish, namely rand z dialects e.
Scholars from the oldest times have investigated the trend of the evolution which Arabic, as a member of the Semitic group and as a pro• minent distinct language has taken in the course of its history, and have tried to elucidate the marvellous growth and richness of the literary form as opposed to the simple and diversified structure of the dialectically spoken idiom and reached very strange results.
. and propounded the absurd theory that the uniformity of ancient Arabic poetry is due to the work of the reciters and scholars a century or more after· its time of origin and that even the language of the Qur'an came down in the popular form and was artificially forced into its literary form.