HISTORY OF THE ARABIC LANGUAGE
THE ORIGIN
Named after Shem, the son of Noah mentioned in the Bible, the Semitic languages form a linguistic group that has been in use in the Middle East since ancient times. Ranked by number of speakers, the most widely used Semitic languages today are:
- Arabic, with nearly 500 million speakers.
- Amharic, with nearly 30 million speakers.
- Hebrew, with nearly 8 million speakers.
- Tigrinya, with nearly 7 million speakers.
- Maltese, with 400,000 speakers.
These languages are characterised notably by the strong dominance of triliteral roots, as well as emphatic letters (that is, with a stronger resonance) and guttural consonants. Until the 6th century BCE, Aramaic was the most widely used Semitic language. This is precisely why a large number of historians affirm that Christ most likely preached in this language. In the Middle East of that era, Arabic was one of several languages in use.
THE ORIGIN OF THE WORD “ARABIC”
Arabic dictionaries associate the root of the word ‘arab with the notion of “expression”. Some researchers link its etymology to the word arâbâh, which means “desert” in Aramaic. In this sense, it could designate the Bedouins, or men of the desert — the nomadic tribes of the Arabian Peninsula.
MYTHOLOGY OF THE ARABIAN PENINSULA
According to pre-Islamic accounts, the Arabs residing in the south of the peninsula trace their ancestry to a figure known as Qahtan, while their cousins in the north trace theirs to a figure named Adnan. Arab historians also traditionally divide Arabs into two groups: those called ‘ariba (original Arabs) and those called musta’riba (Arabised Arabs). The former are considered Arabs by origin, the latter being peoples who adopted Arabic and speak it perfectly. The oldest transcription of “classical” Arabic dates to the year 328. It is known as the “Namara inscription”, since its discovery in 1901. It is written in the Nabataean alphabet.
ARABIC AS AN OFFICIAL LANGUAGE
Arabic became the official and administrative language of the Umayyad state under ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, replacing Greek. This gave rise to a major effort to translate official documents. Later, at the beginning of the ninth century, the Abbasid state established the celebrated House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma). Based in Baghdad, this institution undertook an immense programme of translating Greek texts, as well as Persian and Indian ones.
ARABIC AS A LITERARY LANGUAGE
Arabic has, in a manner of speaking, always been a language of literature through poetry. Long before the advent of Islam, Arab peoples already produced highly refined poetry, both in terms of metre and themes. The transmission of this heritage was certainly oral, but no less rich for that. Written production developed with the flourishing of Islam, giving life to all the sciences and literary forms we know today.
LEXICOGRAPHY
It is well known that Arabic possesses an extraordinarily rich vocabulary — notably around a hundred words to describe states of love, which some rather loosely treat as synonyms for love itself. Some count nearly 500 words to designate the lion, not to mention the vocabulary for the camel, which exceeds a thousand entries. This latter theme is evidently linked to the importance of the dromedary in Bedouin life. Even if some statistics are somewhat inflated, the richness of the Arabic lexicon remains unquestionable.
According to Maurice Gloton, in his work Une approche du Coran par la grammaire et le lexique, the Qur’an uses precisely 1,726 roots, for a total of nearly 5,000 terms.
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