The quantity of the vowel <i> in the Sabaic word for God (ʾl): evidence from Arabic and Greek sources 1 Imar Y. Koutchoukali University of Tartu 2019 Summary The Arabic tradition transmits a number of South Arabian elistic personal names of the type verb+<ʾīl>. The way such names appear in the Arabic tradition may lend a valuable insight into the phonological system of the Epigraphic South Arabian languages, particularly that of Late Sabaic. The phonology of these languages has so far mostly been reconstructed on the basis of comparison with other Semitic languages. In this paper, I look at the elistic names s 2 rḥʾl / s 2 rhbʾl and compare them with how they occur in non-Arabic sources. 1. South Arabian elistic names Among some of the most frequently attested South Arabian personal names in the Arabic tradition are šarāḥʾīl and šuraḥbīl, corresponding to the Epigraphic South Arabian forms s 2 rḥʾl and s 2 rḥbʾil. These two personal names are attested in the ESA corpora from the Early Middle Sabaic period onwards up until the end of the Late Sabaic period. A similar elistic name is that of tawbīl, which corresponds to ṯwbʾl in the ESA corpora. 2 In the epigraphic South Arabian inscriptions, these names are invariably spelled with a glottal stop, which appears to have disappeared in the Arabic tradition. Moreover, although the name <ʾl> is typically reconstructed with a long vowel, as far as I am aware, there have been no attempts to justify this reconstruction on language-internal grounds. It seems that reason for this is that the Arabic tradition consistently transmits these theophoric names with a long vowel <ī>. However, the Arabic tradition itself complicates the issue by noting that both the form with a short 1 This paper is an edited and expanded version of a presentation given at the 23 rd rencontres sabéennes at Vienna University, 13 th -15 th of June 2019. I would like to thank dr. Marijn van Putten for his useful input and corrections, as well as professor Mohammed Maraqten for his inspiring comments. 2 The tranmission of <ṯwbʾl> as tawbīl could either suggest that in the spoken language, the interdental // had merged with the stop /t/. Alternatively, the name could have been transmitted through a dialect of Arabic which had merged these phonemes.