The definite article spread areally among the Central Semitic languages and it would seem that Proto-Arabic lacked any overt marking of definiteness. Besides dialects with no definite article, the Safaitic inscriptions exhibit about four different article forms, ordered by frequency: "h-", "ʾ-", "ʾl-", and "hn-". The Old Arabic of the Nabataean inscriptions exhibits almost exclusively the form "ʾl-". Unlike the Classical Arabic article, the Old Arabic "ʾl" almost never exhibits the assimilation of the coda to the coronals; the same situation is attested in the Graeco-Arabica, but in A1 the coda assimilates to the following "d", αδαυρα *"ʾad-dawra" 'the region'.