Back in 2013, I produced one of the strangest videos on YouTube. A video about Arabic in Japanese with English subtitles, and me teaching an Arabic lesson to Japanese viewers at the end. Lots of people were bewildered.
Today, I'm gonna try again. Hello everyone, welcome to the Langfocus channel and my name is Paul. Today's topic is the Arabic language, or...
it is also the liturgical language of 1.7 billion Muslims around the world. Most of those people don't speak Arabic, but many have some knowledge of Arabic for reading and for reciting prayers and religious study. Speaking about Arabic can be confusing because there are many different varieties of the language. One of the main varieties is the classical Arabic of the Quran. This is considered by many to be the most perfect form of Arabic.
And some say it's the only true Arabic, because it was the language in which God revealed the Quran to Muhammad. Then there's Modern Standard Arabic, which is the form of Arabic used as an official language today. It's the modern form of literary Arabic, which was based on the classical Arabic of the Quran, but with some adaptations and a greatly expanded vocabulary to make it more suitable for modern times. It's not exactly the same as classical Arabic, but both of them are referred to by Arabs as alfusha, meaning eloquent speech. Modern Standard Arabic is the language of books, media, education, and formal situations, but not as the language of everyday speech.
For everyday speech, Arabic speakers use their local dialects, or I'm me. which can differ quite significantly from country to country, and even from one place to another within a single country. Arabic is a Semitic language. Arabic and other Semitic languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, and Phoenician all developed from the same proto-Semitic language.
Arabic forms one branch of Central Semitic, while another branch of Central Semitic includes Hebrew, Aramaic, and Phoenician. Old Arabic. Numerous Semitic languages related to Arabic were spoken in Arabia between the 13th and 10th century CE, but they don't have features that would classify them as Arabic. The earliest evidence of people referred to as Arab is in an Assyrian inscription from the 8th century BCE, but it just mentions the Arabs.
It doesn't give any examples of their language. From the 6th century BCE to the 4th century CE, we have inscriptions showing evidence of an early form of Arabic. Some of those inscriptions are written in that early form of Arabic, and others are written in Aramaic, but show some influence from Arabic.
Those inscriptions consist mostly of proper names, so they don't give us an awful lot of information about what the language was like. The earliest inscription that is unmistakably Arabic is from the 1st century BCE, and was found at Ein Avdat. It's an Aramaic inscription, but it contains three lines of Arabic. Another inscription was discovered at An-Namada.
120 kilometers southeast of Damascus, dating back to 329 CE. The language of this inscription is nearly identical to classical Arabic as we know it. Even though these inscriptions are unmistakably written in Arabic, they are not written in the Arabic script, but rather the Nabataean script, which derived from the Aramaic script.
But there are also inscriptions from the 4th and 5th centuries CE that are written in a script that's more like Arabic. It's generally thought that the Arabic script developed from the Nabataean script, and these inscriptions might be written in a script that's somewhere between those two. Classical Arabic Before the beginning of Islam, there were numerous dialects of Arabic spoken around the peninsula, but there was also a common literary language used among the different tribes for poetry, a koine, which was a compromise between the various dialects.
The pieces of poetry written in this literary koine are the earliest examples of classical Arabic. The Qur'an was written in the 7th century, when Muslims believed that the Qur'an was revealed to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel. And then it was written down over a 23-year period.
At the time the Qur'an was written, there were seven dialects of classical Arabic. The Qur'an was written in all of them, but the Qurayshi version became the standard upon which the text of today's Qur'an is based. The differences are in pronunciation. not in vocabulary or grammar. The Arabic of the Quran is similar to that of the pre-Islamic classical Arabic poetry, but not exactly.
Beginning during the life of Muhammad and continuing into the 8th century, the Islamic conquest spread the Arabic language into new faraway lands. After the Islamic conquests, there was an important need to standardize the language, because vast numbers of people were beginning to speak it. The script was made more practical, new vocabulary... was created and the grammar and style of prose was standardized.
Neo-Arabic and Middle Arabic. While Classical Arabic was being standardized as a written language, local dialects of Arabic also emerged in the cities of the Arab Empire. These dialects did not descend directly from Classical Arabic, but rather from pre-Islamic Arabic dialects, or from a single Arabic koine, which was the common language of conquering Arab armies.
These new dialects were also influenced by the original languages of areas that were conquered. The dialects of the Levant and Mesopotamia were influenced by Aramaic. The dialects of the Maghreb were influenced by Berber.
The dialects of Egypt were influenced by Coptic, and so on. The early centuries of these newly emerging dialects are referred to as Neo-Arabic. Even though Classical Arabic was standardized, not everybody could write it perfectly.
Writing that contains features of both Classical Arabic and Neo-Arabic, or dialects, is referred to as Middle Arabic. Middle doesn't refer to a time period. but rather these texts were somewhere in the middle between classical and colloquial.
Modern Arabic Over the centuries, the neo-Arabic dialects continued to evolve into the modern colloquial dialects of today. But literary Arabic remained relatively constant because the Arabic of the Quran was always seen as the ideal Arabic to imitate. And this probably had a conservative effect on the dialects, limiting them from changing too much. After Napoleon entered Egypt in 1798, the Arab world entered a period of greater contact with the West. The influx of new Western concepts required the Arabic language to be updated.
In the early 20th century, regional academies of the Arabic language began a process of language reform, focused mainly on expanding and updating the language's vocabulary. These updates culminated in what is now known as Modern Standard Arabic. Arabic is well known for its state of diglossia. Arabic speakers use two distinctly different forms of the language in parallel for different purposes.
Modern Standard Arabic is not learned by anyone as a native language, but it's used in reading and writing, in media, on children's TV shows, and in formal speeches, while the colloquial dialects are used almost universally for daily conversation. As I mentioned before, there's quite a lot of variation amongst Arabic dialects. How well two speakers understand each other depends on the geographic distance of their dialects as well as exposure. Many Arabic speakers have told me that speakers of the Middle Eastern dialects really have no trouble understanding each other, and that the main trouble comes in understanding the Maghrebi dialects, especially Moroccan. But these days with the spread of cable TV and the internet, people are being exposed to a wider range of dialects on a more regular basis, which helps people understand different dialects more.
And of course there's also al-fus'ha, modern standard Arabic. When speakers of significantly different dialects communicate with each other, they can switch to modern standard Arabic, or they can adjust their speech to make it more formal and literary and similar to modern standard Arabic, but not exactly. Another common way for native speakers to bridge the dialect gap is to use something called the white dialect, which is a more formal version of dialectal speech that uses features that are common to most of the different dialects. but it leaves out features that are limited to specific dialects.
This is essentially a modern Arabic koine. So what's Arabic like? Let's take a look at some features of Arabic focusing on modern standard Arabic.
The script. The Arabic script is written from right to left and consists of letters that imitate handwriting. Most letters join to the letter that comes after them.
However, a few letters remain disjoined. The letters that join have two forms. One short form at the beginning or in the middle of words. and another long form at the end of words or when the letter is by itself.
The Arabic script is an abjad, meaning that each letter represents a consonant, and that short vowels are not really written, and that long vowels and diphthongs can be ambiguous. How can we read Arabic without vowels? Well, can you read this? Here, the short vowels are not written, and the others seem somewhat incomplete, but we have a hint about what the vowels are. This is kind of like reading Arabic.
But Arabic has more predictable vowel patterns than English, so it's easier to guess. Also, Arabic can be written with حرقات, which are extra diacritic markings that indicate the short vowel sounds. These are generally only used in texts that are really important to pronounce perfectly, like the Quran or poetry or children's material. Phonology Arabic has a number of consonant sounds which are surprising or challenging for speakers of many other languages.
For example, خ, as in the word خليج. meaning golf. Then there's khaf, as in the word pen. This is like a K, but pronounced further back in your throat.
Then there's the letter ha, like in the word har, meaning hot, ghain. Some say that this is similar to the French R sound. For example, the word meaning room.
Arabic also has a number of emphatic consonants. For example, there's which is like a regular s sound in English, but there is also which is an emphatic s as in the word meaning small. Also notice the in the middle.
To make this sound you have to keep your tongue close to the roof of your mouth. If you want to try it, position your mouth as though you are going to say a K and hold that position, then make an s sound instead. Go ahead, try it. There are three other emphatic consonants too.
An emphatic and ZAW Morphology Arabic words are mostly constructed from three-letter roots or sometimes four and these letters are then inserted into templates consisting of a fixed vowel pattern and some structural consonants If you know the root letters you can identify the core meaning of the word and if you know the template you know what type of word it is Let's take the root which means to go out or to exit and let's put it into this template We get the word which is the noun meaning exit, like a door you exit through. This template indicates a place where the action of the route is done. If we use the route dal, kha, lam, which means to come in, we get medhal, which means entrance.
If we use the route kaf, ta, ba, we get mektab, meaning office. These kinds of recurring templates help you to know how to pronounce words even when the short vowels are not written. If you see the letter mim, followed by three root letters all together with no long vowels, you can guess that the word is in this template and pronounce it with two short A vowels. Verbs in Arabic are part of this same system of roots and templates.
The templates tell us the tense, person, gender, and number of the verb, and the root provides us the core meaning. Again, let's take the root خَرَجِم and pop it into this template here, and we get خَرَجَ And we know what this means. It's the past tense third person masculine singular conjugation. He exited.
خرج من المدرسة. This means he exited the school. Now put the root into this template.
خرجت. This means I exited. This suffix here indicates past tense first person singular.
خرجت من المكتب. This means I exited the office. If we put it into this template.
يخرج. It means he exits. This is the present tense template.
يخرج من المكتب This means he exits the office. يخرجون Means they exit. سيخرجون من المكتب This means they will exit the office.
This sentence is in the future tense. To change the present tense to the future tense, you simply add the suffix س to the beginning of the present tense template. س is used for near future, and a separate particle, س is used for the more distant future.
Arabic has no other verb tenses, only past and present. and future, which uses the present tense conjugation. This Semitic system of roots and templates is really quite intuitive once you get used to it, and it's quite ingenious if you ask me.
Word order. Modern Standard Arabic is a VSO language by default, as opposed to Arabic dialects which are mainly SVO. This means the man is studying Arabic.
Here's the verb, the subject, and the object. These are the definite article al, but before certain letters, The lam or the L sound assimilates to the following letter. So al-rajl becomes ar-rajl.
This is the basic word order. But SVO is also possible. In a sentence with a pronoun, VSO is not possible.
For example, This means, I will study Arabic in the future. You can't say, You can either say it with the pronoun first or with no pronoun. Just, I will study Arabic. Because the verb conjugation tells us that this is the first person singular, so we don't need the pronoun. Cases.
One aspect of standard Arabic is cases. There are three cases in Arabic. Nominative, genitive, and accusative. And nouns take special endings to show their function in the sentence. Let's take the word kitab, which means book.
In nominative, it's kitabu. In genitive, it's kitabi. In accusative, it's kitaba. This means the excellent book.
The noun is in the nominative, and the adjective is also inflected to agree with the noun. This means, I am reading a book. Here, is in the accusative, and it's indefinite.
The sound at the end here indicates that it's indefinite. This means, the author of the book. Here, is in the genitive case. These case endings are not used at the end of a sentence, but only when the word is followed by something. The form at the end of a sentence without a case ending is called the pausal form.
These case endings are often not used used in modern standard Arabic. They're generally only used in prepared texts or prepared speeches. Two more sentences. عادة لا أعمل يوم السبت This means, I usually don't work on Saturday.
Word for word, it's usually, no, I work, day, the, Saturday. لا is the negation particle used for the present tense. عامل is the verb for work, and its root is عين ميم لم And this is the first person singular present tense conjugation.
يوم and السبت are an إضافة. So together they mean the day of Saturday. إضافة is a construction of two nouns side by side to show possession.
Fun fact, the word Sabbath comes from the Hebrew word شباط, which is related to this Arabic word سبت. This means I'll drive my car to the office. Word for word it's will I drive my car to the office.
Remember, sa is added to the present tense verb to form the future. Aqood contains the verb qaf, waw, dal. And this is the first person singular present tense conjugation. Sayarati is the word sayara, with a possessive suffix meaning my at the end.
And when a suffix is added, the letter ha becomes a ta. Ila is a preposition showing direction. The el here, or the lamb, is the definite article al. but the A sound, or the alif, assimilates to the preceding long A. As you can see, Arabic is a fascinating language with lots of interesting features, from its script to its phonology to its root and template system.
It's a language that often seems intimidating to learners, but that's partly because modern standard Arabic materials are aimed at reading and writing and grammar, rather than on communication. Materials for learning Arabic dialects tend to be more fun and communicative. The question that's asked over and over and over is what form of Arabic should I learn? A dialect or modern standard Arabic? In my opinion it's important to learn some modern standard Arabic either before you start to learn a dialect or at the same time.
But if you know some modern standard Arabic it will help you to make sense of different dialects that you encounter and it will help you to understand different registers of speech even when people are speaking in their dialects. But if your main goal is communication, then I don't think it's necessary to learn to speak Modern Standard Arabic at a high level. And that brings me to the question of the day.
To native speakers of Arabic and to learners of Arabic alike, what do you think? Which form of Arabic is the best to learn? Modern Standard Arabic or a dialect? Leave your answers in the comments down below. Be sure to follow Langfocus on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
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