Gentilics of Palestinian Toponymy in Ottoman's Jerusalem Court: Linguistic and Analytical Study

Abstract

This research sheds light on the issue of demonyms of Palestinian towns and cities as written down in the archives of Jerusalem's court during the four centuries of the Ottoman era. The significance of this study lies in observing the written Arabic code in these archives. This written code represents the middle language between classical and colloquial Palestinian Arabic. This research shows that some of the demonyms in these archives represent ancient Semitic and non-Semitic linguistic corpora. This study concludes that the writers of those archives did not follow a systematic methodology in coining these demonyms. It should be noted that those demonyms, which were common in the Ottoman era, are no longer in usage these days