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While
most people know that Arabic is the
written and spoken language of more than
~ million inhabitants of the Arab world,
few realize that the Arabic script is
also used by one-seventh of the world's
population.
Millions of people in Africa and Asia
write their languages in the Arabic
alphabet. Farsi-the language of
lran- and Urdu-the language of Pakistan
and some parts of India-are written in
the Arabic script. The Turkish language
employed Arabic characters until the
1920's. In addition, Arabic script is
used today in Afghanistan, Indonesia,
Malaysia, sections of China and even in
the Muslim areas of the Philippines and
the USSR.
The reason for the extensive use of
Arabic dates back to the emergence of the
Islamic faith in 622 A.D. The Qur'an, the
Holy Book of Islam, was revealed to the
Prophet Muhammad and subsequently,
recorded in Arabic. Thus, for the Muslim
Arab of that time, as well as today, his
language and the language of God (Allah)
are identical. Arabic remains the
primary vehicle for prayer in Islam.
As the new believers, or Muslims, spread
out from the Arabian Peninsula to create
a vast empire-first with its capital in
Damascus and, later, in Baghdad-Arabic
became the administrative language of
vast sections of the civilized world. It
drew upon Byzantine and Persian terms and
its own immense inner resources of
vocabulary and grammatical flexibility.
By the eleventh century, A.D., this
language was the common medium of
expression from Persia to the
Pyrenees-the language of kings and
commoners, poets and princes, scholars
and scientists. Arabic became the
principal reservoir of human knowledge,
including the repository for the
accumulated wisdom of past ages,
supplanting previous cultural languages,
such as Greek and Latin. |
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Arabic
belongs to the Semitic family of
languages, of which Hebrew is also a
member; thus, the term
"Semite," referring to anyone
who speaks a Semitic tongue. Arabic
script reads from right to left and its
alphabet contains twenty-eight
characters. While it is universally
written, read and understood in its
classical form, spoken Arabic has
undergone regional or dialectical
variations.
The Arabic language developed through the
early centuries in what is today Saudi
Arabia until, in the era immediately
preceding the appearance of Islam, it
acquired the form in which it is known
today. Arab poets of the pre-Islamic, or Jahiliyyah
period, had developed a language of
amazing richness and flexibility, despite
the fact that many were desert bedouins
(nomads) with little or no formal
education. For the most part, their
poetry was transmitted and preserved
orally. The Arabic language was then, as
it is now, easily capable of creating new
words and terminology in order to adapt
to the demands of new scientific and
artistic discoveries.
As the Empire spread, the Arabic
language-and, indeed, culture-was
enriched by contacts with other
civilizations: Greeks, Persians; Copts,
Romans, Indians and Chinese. During the
ninth and tenth centuries, a great
translation movement, centered in
Baghdad, was in force, in which many
ancient scientific and philosophical
tracts were transposed from ancient
languages, especially Greek into Arabic.
Many were enhanced by the new wisdom
suggested by Arab thinkers; other texts
were simply preserved; only to re-merge
in Europe during the Renaissance.
Modern European languages, such as
Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and
English owe a great debt to Arabic. The
English language itself contains many
words borrowed from Arabic: algebra,
alchemy, admiral, genius, ghoul, mare,
sherbet, soda and many others. |
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