[Introduction to Arabic]
ـ[بَحْرُ الرَّمَل]ــــــــ[02 - 11 - 2010, 11:49 ص]ـ
[Introduction to Arabic]
Note: The following extraction is freely cited from the concise encyclopedia of languages of the world. (page 42,43)
Arabic
Arabic is the official language of 21 countries(*)in the Middle East and North Africa, from Oman in the east to Mauritania in the west. This includes Israel, where Arabic is, after Hebrew, the second official languag Significant Arab minorities exist in Iran, Turkey,Chad, and Nigeria, as well as in western Europe and the Americas. With approximately280 million native speakers
, Arabic is by far the largest living representative of the Semitic language family. Because it is the language of the Koran and thus the liturgical language of Islam, Arabic also plays an important role for more than 1billion Muslims worldwide.
History of the Language
Arabic is an offshoot of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages. According to the traditional classification of Semitic, Arabic is part of its southern subdivision and grouped with Ethiopic and South Arabian . some linguists proposed placing Arabic with Aramaic and Canaanite in a ‘Central Semitic’ group The problem of the affiliation of Arabic within the Semitic languages continues to be discussed Although people labeled Arabs are attested as early as the 9th century B.C.E. in Assyrian sources, the history and development of their language before the emergence of Islam, 1.5 millennia later, is largely unknown. Doubtless Arabic originated in the central and northern parts of the Arabian peninsula,later spreading northward to the edges of the Fertile Crescent. The first evidence of a language akin to Arabic are the so-called Ancient North Arabian inscriptions (5th century B.C.E. to approx. 4th century C.E.): these consist of thousands of short, and therefore linguistically scarcely informative, graffiti in a script derived from the South Arabian writing system and found mainly in western Arabia and southern Syria. There are traces of Arabic in the Aramaic inscriptions of the Nabateans and Palmyrenes – both certainly Arab people. Textual evidence of pre-Islamic Arabic is also found in a handful of inscriptions in early Arabic script from the 2nd to 6th centuries C.E. Our richest source of pre-Islamic Arabic is a large corpus of orally transmitted poetry from the 6th and 7th centuries C.E., later compiled by Arab philologists.The language of these poems and, although not exactly identical to theirs, that of the Koran (proclaimed by Muhammad between circa 610 and 632) is usually termed ‘Old Arabic.’ These texts although a kind of poetic koine`, contain phonetical, 42Arabic morphological, and lexical inconsistencies that reflect the actual dialectal differences between the spokentribal vernaculars of the era The expansion of Arab territory during the Islamic conquests (7th–8th centuries) made Arabic the language of communication, administration, and liturgy for an empire that stretched from central Asia to the Atlantic. The form of Arabic described, systematized,and canonized by the Arab grammarians and lexicographers between the 8th and 10th centuries is called Classical Arabic (CA). It remains the only universally accepted standard of the language. During the Golden Age of the Abbasid caliphate (9th–10th centuries) CA became the linguistic vehicle of a highly developed civilization that brought forth a rich literature, including belles-lettres and religious and scientific works. The hegemony of Arabic during the Middle Ages, and its prestige as the ‘sacred’ language in which the holy book of the Koran had been revealed to humankind, have influenced the languages of all Muslim people, written and unwritten. Thus, the lexicon of languages such as Persian (Western Farsi), Urdu, Turkish, or Swahili include numerous CA words. In many Muslim countries, Arabic has continued to be the language of religious treatises, and the teaching of it forms part of school curricula.