LEARNING THE LANGUAGE:
Nowadays, Arabic is used as the main language in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt,
Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar,
Saudi-Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
Arabic is divided into three groups: classical written Arabic, written Modern Arabic
and spoken Arabic.
Classical written Arabic is the Arabic used in the Noble Qur’an; it is highly sophisticated,
so much that even the Arab people have to study it. This is why it is called 'the language
of Allah.
Modern Standard Arabic is a modernization of the structures of classical Arabic. We can
find it in newspapers, books, etc. It is standard, but accessible to the common people. It
includes words defining modern technology and additions from the many dialects all over
the Arabic world.
Spoken Arabic is divided in many dialects spoken inside the frontiers of a same country.
It carries the oral tradition of the country.
Arabic has provided most of the special vocabulary of Islam in use all over the
world and vast numbers of Arabic words have seen adopted in Africa and Asian language
as well as in Europe. Some African and Asian countries even adopted the Arabic
alphabet to transcribe their languages. For instance, Persian as well as Urdu use the
Arabic alphabet for writing their own language. Arabic is also central to other languages
in the Muslim world.
Arabic is difficult to learn, and to remember, but not because of reasons that
spring most people to mind. Arabic writing is easily learned, and Arabic grammar is
simpler and more logical than many Western languages because it has but little
exceptions. But the great challenge with Arabic is the wealth of words. The use of
verbs and nouns in Arabic has reached a level of accuracy, which few Western
languages can match.
Arabic was the language of desert nomads, the most conservative of all people.
The desert protected it from foreign influences in the sense that nomads had few contacts
with foreigners. This linguistic confinement limited its phonetic decay since the words
were not spoken with different accents. This fact prevented its confusion with other
languages, any drop of the meaning and the power of the words, as well as its syntactic
degeneration (words were not misspelled or spoken in an unusual manner).
The need to preserve the Qur’an furthers this concern.
Thus classical Arabic has retained an ancient quality into modern times:
Arabic grammar and syntax avoids subordination and complexity in its
construction. Furthermore, there are very little exceptions. The style is direct. The case
endings (like declensions in Latin) make possible great flexibility in sentence structure
since words of a sentence can be presented in more than one order; the meaning is the
same but points of emphasis can be varied (like stress tone in English).
Even more interesting, in Arabic, almost every word is derived from a simple “root”. It
is usually composed of three letters.
Example:
The word “qur’ân” [
-
-
] is a basic word of three consonants (q-r-n)
[
-
-
] meaning ‘book’; its root can also become “qarâ’” [
] with two
letters (q-r) [
-
], which means ‘to read’.
In these two words, two consonants have been used of the word root: q and r.
Another example:
The word “kitâb” [
] uses three consonants: (k-t-b) [
-
-
]. The word
means also ‘the book’.
“Kataba” [
] (k-t-b) [
-
-
] means ‘to write’.
“Maktab” [
] (m-k-t-b) [
-
-
-
] is the place where we write, it is ‘a
desk’.
Notice that the long ‘â’ [
] is kept in all these words.
In these examples, the nouns are derived from the verbal forms. Words are
understood as concepts; this is why Arabs create many associations between ideas for one
utterance, which makes the relation deeper between people, or people and Allah (by the
means of the Noble Qur’an).
Arabic verbs are declined strictly according to the first (I), the second (you) or the
third (it, she, he, they) persons, the gender, and the number: singular, dualis (2 persons)
and plural. But the good news is there are only two tenses: Perfect (past) and Imperfect
(now), while Futurum is simply made by adding the prefix "sa-" (
) to the Imperfect
form.
Arabic is written with its own alphabet, which is called Arabic alphabet. Arabic
alphabet consists of 28 letters, and is written from right to the left. Only the consonants
and the long vowels are written down; the short vowels appear like strokes on top or
below the consonants that need these vowels to form a complete sound or syllable. But
most of the time, these line strokes do not appear at all, as in newspapers, private letters,
etc. Actually, these strokes did not exist yet at the time of the Islamic Revelation; they
have been added later, but without causing any turmoil as far as the Islamic religion is
concerned.
The strokes (called in linguistics diacritics) are nowadays very useful for a person whose
native language is not Arabic and need to know which vowel to use and when to use a
vowel over the consonants. Diacritics are also very useful for the art of Tajweed.
Tajweed is the recitation of the Noble Qur’an. The diacritics (lines of stroke) are needed
in order to sound grammatically correct while reading the Noble Qur’an since a simple
error in the election of a vowel over a consonant can change the meaning of a word or its
gender, number, or grammatical effect.
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