Arabic
Then and Now
By Emily Monroy
In my father’s younger days, secondary school students in Italy
had the choice of studying one of three modern foreign languages:
English, French or German. My father took French, whereas my cousins
chose to learn English. More recently, other languages have been added
to the Italian high school curriculum, including Spanish, Russian
and Arabic. The last of the three may come as a surprise, as it is
not a European language. On the other hand, with 100 million native
speakers and many others who know the language, perhaps teaching Arabic
to young people in the West is not such an outlandish idea.
Unlike the other above-mentioned tongues, all of which are part of
the Indo-European family of languages, Arabic belongs to another family,
the Afroasiatic one. While the Indo-European languages were concentrated
mainly in Europe and the Indian subcontinent (at least until the European
Age of Discovery beginning in 1492), Afroasiatic languages are spoken
largely in the Middle East and North and East Africa. However, because
most are found only in Africa, many scholars, including author Jared
Diamond, believe the Afroasiatic family originated on that continent
and spread from there to the Middle East. It includes - besides Arabic
- Hebrew, Aramaic (spoken by Jesus Christ and his Apostles), Phoenician
(now extinct), Berber, Somali, Amharic and several other languages
of Ethiopia.
______________________
On
the other hand, with 100 million native speakers and many others
who know the language, perhaps teaching Arabic to
young people in the West is not such an outlandish idea.
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Like English, once solely the language of a small island in the Atlantic,
Arabic boasts a rags to riches story. Arabic began as the ìisolated
language of the Arabian Peninsula,"according to linguist Mario
Pei. With the rise of Islam in the 600s, Arabic was spread by conquering
Muslim armies throughout the Middle East and North Africa, replacing
other Afroasiatic tongues like Punic (a form of Phoenician spoken
by the ancient Carthaginians) and the language of the ancient Egyptians,
which died out as an oral medium in the seventeenth century but is
still employed in the liturgy of the Coptic Christian Church. The
Arabs developed their own alphabet, which is used in addition by many
non-Arabic languages whose speakers adopted Islam, such as Farsi (the
language of Iran) and Urdu.
There are two basic forms of Arabic: classical Arabic (the written
form) and spoken Arabic. The latter has diverged into a number of
dialects, including those of Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Syria and Palestine,
Iraq, and Saudi Arabia itself. (Again, a similar phenomenon occurred
with English; witness the differences in the language as it is spoken
in Britain, Ireland, Australia, the United States and the West Indies,
for instance.) Special mention should be given to Maltese, spoken
on the island of Malta south of Sicily. While many linguists believe
Maltese is a dialect of Arabic, it is often considered a language
in its own right. Perhaps this is because Malta is somewhat of an
anomaly: linguistically Arab but culturally Western - so much so that
Maltese is written in the Roman alphabet. Also, due to Maltaís
proximity to Italy and position as a former British colony, a number
of Italian and English loan words have passed into the Maltese language.
The Arabs ruled Sicily from the ninth to eleventh centuries and parts
of Spain from the 700s to 1400s, so it should come as no surprise
that their language has contributed a great amount of vocabulary to
the West. Arabic place names abound in Sicily, Spain and, as a result
of the latter's overseas expansion, the New World. For instance, the
Arabic word for river, “wad,” became “guada” in
Spanish and appears in “Guadalajara” and “Guadalupe”
______________________
There
are two basic forms of Arabic: classical Arabic
(the written form) and spoken Arabic. The latter has diverged into
a number of dialects, including those of Morocco, Algeria, Egypt,
Syria and Palestine, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia itself.
______________________
As the Arab world was technologically more advanced than the West
during the Dark and Middle Ages, many scientific - especially mathematical
- terms trace their origins to Arabic. Examples include “algebra”
(from “al jebr,” literally “the reuniting of broken
parts”) and “cipher” and “zero,” both of
which derive from the word “sifr” (empty). A number of non-scientific
words also entered English and other European languages. “Sharab”
(drink) gave rise to "sherbet"as well as “syrup”
“Amir-al-bahr” (commander of the sea) took an equally interesting
turn. In the West, the “bahr” (sea) was dropped and the
Latin prefix “ad” added, thereby becoming “admiral.”
Because most words of Arabic origin found their way into English indirectly
through Italian, French, or Spanish, some changed meaning as they
travelled from language to language. For example, “alcove”
comes ultimately from “al-qobbah,” which translates as “the
arch” or “the vault.” However, the Arabic root took
on a somewhat different meaning in Spanish as “alcoba,”
or “bedroom” “Magazine” boasts an even more complicated
history. It derives from the Arabic “makhazin” or “storehouse,”
which became “magazzino” (with the same meaning) in Italian
and “magasin” (store, as in corner store) in French. “Magazine”
originally meant “storehouse” in English too, but it later
came to signify “storehouse of information,” which a magazine
indeed is.
I don't think I’ll ever learn Arabic myself. I’m too old
and too lazy to take up another language, let alone one with a different
alphabet. I’ll pay my tribute to the Arab world by eating their
delicious (and healthy) food. But given its sheer number of speakers
and the important political position of the Middle East today, it
might pay to learn Arabic, or, barring that, advise your children
to do so.
* For more information about Arabic and its history, two informative
books are The Story of Language by Mario Pei and Guns, Germs, and Steel
by Jared Diamond.
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