Marijn van Putten The history of the Maltese short vowels Abstract: This paper examines the developments of the Proto-Arabic short vow- el system as it develops up to its reflexes in modern Maltese. The analysis focus- es on establishing regular correspondence from underived primary nouns. From there it is shown that several developments in the verbal system cannot be the result of regular sound change, and instead have undergone analogical devel- opments. Finally, through these regular sound correspondences, it becomes clear that the alternation of jeHCeC and jahCeC verbs in Maltese must reflect a continuation of the ancient alternation in the verbal prefix of Proto-Arabic which was lost in Classical Arabic. Keywords: historical linguistics, Arabic, Barth-Ginsberg, vowels 1 Introduction The Maltese language ultimately comes from Arabic and shares many of the innovations that are considered typical of the Maghrebi dialects of North Africa. But due to its relatively early split away from the other North African varieties and subsequent isolation, it has taken on a considerably different character from other North African dialects. In many ways it is considerably more archaic than the modern North African dialects (and in other ways more innovative), and as such it is an important source of data when studying the history of Ara- bic, and especially this dialect bundle. This paper aims to account for the development of the short vowels in Mal- tese. We will establish the sound laws that operated on the short vowels of Mal- tese, and try to draw parallels with the modern Arabic dialects whenever possi- ble. It will be clear that Maltese shares many of its developments with Tunis Arabic, which will often be used to give corroborative evidence to our analyses, and to show that these two varieties evidently shared a common ancestor in the past which underwent several key shared innovations that make Maltese the way it is today. For the lexical material consulted of Maltese, I have made use of Aquilina (1999) and for the lexical material of Tunis Arabic I have made use of  Marijn van Putten: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, University of Leiden, Postbus 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands. E-mail: m.van.putten@hum.leidenuniv.nl.