The Arabic Language

ARABICbelongs to the Semitic family of languages in which Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, and other tongues of the Middle Past are also members. In the form we know it, Arabic was developed in the sixth century by poets who sang to the Bedouin tribes of north Arabia.It is their verse which forms the body of classical Arabic literature and their usages which are taken as the models for Arabic grammar. The economy of their expression, to those whose familiarity with Arabic is restricted to the lush prolixity of The Arabian Nights, is striking: the task of the poet was to suggest, by an exacting choice of words, the essential features in brilliant, brief snapshots of the desert scene. The poet was led by the structure of the language, which elaborated a triconsonant “root” info various sorts of verbs and nouns by a set pattern of vowel and consonant changes, into meter and rhyme: these in turn tended to lock words into independent verses which in recitation form a staccato of visual images. It was to these images, not to the narrative, that the audience responded; indeed, the subject matter in the earliest-known poems is already so stylized as to indicate that the poet took the framework for granted and devoted his individual genius to sharpening the brilliance of the kaleidoscope.

This was the language from which the Koran emerged in the early seventh century. However, even in the earliest verses where Mohammed stays within the traditional pattern, the reader is conscious of a straining, a forcing of the language into new ranges of thought and reflection. While still retaining the vivid imagery, for example in the description of hell, Mohammed gradually developed a new prose style capable of sustained argument and of expressing the abstract ideas of religion .

In the period of expansion of the Islamic Empire, Arabic was forced to become an imperial language of administration; this it was able to do by Arabicizing Byzantine and Persian terms and by drawing on its immense inner resources of vocabulary and grammatical flexibility. Its last major stimulation was the contact with Hellenism when Arabic was forced to develop a fully articulated rationalizing language. the latter, however, was never the language of poets and writers but was only a sort of jargon, like a medical language, which faded as Hellenism ceased to stimulate Arabic culture. And, without new sources of inspiration, Arabic was left to live off its own fat for many centuries.

Connected with the Arab “awakening,” as with the Irish, Turkish, and Jewish revivals, has been a renewed fascination with the linguistic roots of national culture. Individual Arabic scholars, learned academies, government agencies, and even radio stations are attempting to adapt Arabic to the needs of modern society fast enough to prevent the deluge of Western technical terms — names for things like telephone and such wholly new fields as chemical engineering — from reducing Arabic to a lifeless shell of cultural memories. Today the spread of literacy and the increased self-consciousness of Arabic culture are potent forces in this linguistic revival.