The Modern Arabic Literary Language: Lexical and Stylistic Developments (original) (raw)
Related papers
English Literature and Language Review Arabic Language: Historic and Sociolinguistic Characteristics
2015
Arabic is one of the World's major languages with roughly 300 million speakers in twenty two Arab countries. In 1974, Arabic was attested as one of the sixth United Nation's official languages alongside Chinese, Russian, English, French and Spanish. As a Semitic language, Arabic possesses many unique linguistic characteristics such as writing from the right to the left, the dual number of the nouns which is not found in English, the two genders, feminine and masculine, beside the root, the most salient feature of Semitic languages. Extensively, Arabic philologists have studied the Arabic language in relation to the other Semitic languages in a bid to show the uniqueness of Arabic as compared to the other Semitic languages. Versteegh (1997) mentions that within the group of Semitic languages, Arabic and Hebrew have always been the most-studied languages. He shows that the reason is not only the familiarity of scholars of Semitic languages with the Arabic language and the relative wealth of data about its history, but also its apparent conservatism, in particular its retention of a declensional system (Versteegh, 1997). It stands to reason that language is a living entity that always undergoes the different circumstances of life: change, development, modernization, disappearance and sometimes death. However, Arabic could have retained its unique features throughout the centuries despite some slight changes which happened due to the Arab contacts with non-Arabs causing emergence of new varieties along with Classical Arabic. Turning to the position of Arabic, Arabic has a prestigious status not only in Arabic-speaking countries, but in all Muslim communities. Prestigious position as such goes back to the very early period of Islam where Arabic throughout that period remained the language of prestige that was used for all religious, cultural, administrative and scholarly purposes (Versteegh, 1997). Undoubtedly, Arabic has an abundance of colloquial forms across the Arab World. All such varieties are originally derived from Classical Arabic. Consequently, a wide range of similarities has been noted between Classical Arabic and these different varieties in all linguistic levels. 2. The History of Arabic Arabic has been regarded as a member of Semitic languages which include a number of languages in the Middle East and North Africa. It is originally generated from Afro-Asiatic languages which includes besides Arabic different languages such as Hebrew, Ethiopian and other languages. The first emergence of Arabic as a world language goes back to the seventh century CE. The century of Islam diffusion that followed the death of Prophet Mohammed brought both Islam as a religion and Arabic language to the attention of a world that had possessed only the vaguest notion of what went on in the interior of the Arabian Peninsula (Versteegh, 1997).
III (2003): Arabic Linguistics
We would like to thank our colleagues from abroad for taking part in this second colloquium as well as for their interest in and appreciation of the endeavours of Romanian Arabists.
On March 5-6, 1993, the Seventh Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics was held at the University of Texas at Austin. The symposium was sponsored by the Arabic Linguistic Society, The University of Texas College of Liberal Arts, its Middle East Center, and its Departments of Linguistics and Oriental and African Languages and Literatures, and by the University of Utah's College of Humanities and the Department of Languages and Literature. A total of eighteen papers were presented at the symposium; of these, eight are published in this volume. Two other papers (Safi & Broselow et. al) were presented at the Eighth Annual Symposium but are included here for thematic reasons. The papers presented at the symposium were selected on the basis of an anonymous review of abstracts submitted to the Program Committee. The papers included in the volume were further reviewed by the editor before their final acceptance for publication.
Review of "History and Development of the Arabic Language"
This review has been published in Romano-Arabica XVII (2017): Fictional beings in Middle East Cultures. Muhammad al-Sharkawi, History and Development of the Arabic Language, London and New York, Routledge, 2017, 274 p. ISBN 978-1-138-82152-1
A Cultural History of the Arabic Language (McFarland, 2013)
It is a history of Arabic language in context of world languages and literature. It focuses on that which is unique about Arabic when it is compared to other languages: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, English, or Spanish and the types of historical experience that cultivated its distinctive characteristics. In comparison to other world languages this work illustrates how Arabic emerged from a hub of interaction and mutation of ancient oral traditions of the Middle East that finally distilled into an exceptionally well developed poetic. It demonstrates how Arabic prose expanded and regulated its poetic vision and created clear, penetrating, and comprehensive worldviews. It illustrates that Arabic literature contained as well as elevated ancient poetic by embracing various non-Arabic expressions (Greek, Persian, Hebrew, and Spanish) and this constantly enriched and reinvented literature further nurtured a variety of regional traditions around world.
Review of The Arabic Language, by Kees Versteegh
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2017
This is an author’s manuscript of a book review, which is made available in accordance with the terms of the publishing agreement of Taylor & Francis. The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available on the publishers' website.