Arabic
Created | Updated Mar 15, 2004
Arabic is one of the world's six most widely spoken languages and one of the official UN languages, and is well worth learning. It is official in most of the Middle East, all of North Africa, and (long story) the Comoro Islands off Madagascar. As the language of the Qur'an, it is also widely learned as a foreign language in large parts of West Africa, Central and South Asia, and Indonesia, not to mention less frequently here in the West. It is a Semitic language, closely related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Babylonian (Akkadian), Ethiopic (Geez), and many others (although more conservative grammatically than most.)
Arabic is divided into disparate dialects to a much greater extent than English is. The literary language, used in books or on the media, is the same everywhere, and has not changed substantially for 1500 years; however, the spoken language has been simplified considerably, and differs a lot across the Arab world (to the extent that non-Arabs often consider the dialects as separate languages, and Moroccans can scarcely understand Kuwaitis without switching to the literary language.) The main dialects are North African, Egyptian, Sudanese, Levantine, Iraqi, Gulf, and Yemeni, but there are plenty more refinements... Egyptian and Levantine Arabic are the most widely known spoken dialects (thanks to their film and music industries.)
The most interesting difference of the language from English is that it often marks changes of a word - plurals or participles, for instance - by changing the vowels inside a word, as well as adding prefixes or suffixes like English. So for instance, we have, from the stem k-t-b, "write":
kataba, he wrote => kutiba, it was written (imposing the vowel pattern -u-i-)
yaktubu, he writes (adding ya- and imposing the vowel pattern --u--u)
kaataba, he exchanged correspondence (imposing -aa-a-a)
maktuub, written
kitaab, book => kutub, books
maktab, office => makaatib, offices
kaatib, writer
and similarly from j-m-3, "gather" (3 is meant to indicate a "pharyngeal" consonant with no English equivalent):
jama3a, he gathered => jumi3a, it was gathered
yajma3u, he gathers
majmuu3ah, total
jamaa3ah, association
jam3, plural
mujtama3, society
jamii3, all
jumu3ah, congregational prayer (and thus Friday)
etc... It also has a dual number - as well as, like English, having an ending indicating more than one thing (in English, -s), you also have a special suffix for two things.
Most root words contain three consonants, and, as you can see, a large variety of new words can be formed from a single root. If this sounds challenging, there are some compensations: the language has only two tenses, for instance, and the changes, though weird-seeming to an English speaker, are mostly rule-governed.
The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters - all consonants, except for 3 long vowels - and another 7 optional marks that go above or below letters to mark short vowels or doubled consonants. It is written right to left. Its letters change shape depending on which letters are before or after them, like in American or Continental handwriting. The big dots are part of the letters. It can be modified in many remarkable ways: calligraphy is a major Arabic art! However, you can learn to read normal print quite easily.
There is a huge amount of literature in Arabic - 1500 years worth! - so one shouldn't really even attempt a summary; however, here goes...
Some of the most famous poets are the pre-Islamic writers of the Mu'allaqat (as the poems that were then considered good enough to hang on the Kaaba, the central shrine at Mecca, were called) including Imru' ul-Qays and Antar ibn Shaddad; the medieval poet al-Mutanabbi, considered probably the greatest Arab poet of all time; and modern poets like Nizar Qabbani or Khalil Gibran or Mahmoud Darwish. Arabic poetry rarely translates well into English, since (as with any poetry) its sound as well as its meaning plays an essential role in its beauty, and the sonority of Arabic is very hard to imitate in a language as different-sounding as English. There are a variety of well-known metres for Arabic poems (and nowadays, of course, blank verse as well). Usually, they also rhyme, if only in the final short vowels.
The commonest themes of Arab poetry are probably love, praise, and insults. Arab poets - the so-called 'Udhari school especially, as seen in early medieval romances such as Kalilah wa Dimnah - are said to have been the first to make romance in the strict sense (ie courtly love, chivalry, lots of sighs and pure devotion to unattainable beloveds) into a standard literary device. From them it eventually reached Europe, via Arab Spain and the troubadours of Provence. As for praise and insults, while poems of praise (to patrons or kings) were common in the West at one time, poems of insult seem to have become a very much debased form (satirists such as Swift or Voltaire generally preferring prose for their more vicious attacks) resurfacing now in little besides rap lyrics; in the early medieval Arab world, however, they were refined to a high art form, which could affect the prestige of entire families.
The Qur'an is traditionally considered to be a form of writing unto itself, neither prose nor poetry but combining the best elements of both. While in Arabic it derives much of its effect from its poetic elements - the rhyme scheme, the rhythm, the alliteration - this very rarely comes through in translations; the best attempt (from a literary standpoint) that I am aware of is Arberry's 1955 translation. In many ways, the Qur'an plays much the same pivotal role in the development of Arabic literature as the King James Bible in English.
Great medieval prose writers include the essayist al-Jahiz, the founder of sociology Ibn Khaldun, and Ibn Battuta, who travelled more than three times as far as Marco Polo; modern ones include the Nobel Prize-winning Naguib Mahfouz, who chronicles three generations of life in Cairo with a remarkably perceptive gaze that makes clear the way "public" history affected private stories, there as so often in the Arab world. The Arabian Nights, while famous in the West, is regarded as little more than a series of popular fables in the Arab world, along with a variety of other mainly oral epics, such as the exploits of Amir Hamza, or Antar ibn Shaddad.
Arabic is divided into disparate dialects to a much greater extent than English is. The literary language, used in books or on the media, is the same everywhere, and has not changed substantially for 1500 years; however, the spoken language has been simplified considerably, and differs a lot across the Arab world (to the extent that non-Arabs often consider the dialects as separate languages, and Moroccans can scarcely understand Kuwaitis without switching to the literary language.) The main dialects are North African, Egyptian, Sudanese, Levantine, Iraqi, Gulf, and Yemeni, but there are plenty more refinements... Egyptian and Levantine Arabic are the most widely known spoken dialects (thanks to their film and music industries.)
The most interesting difference of the language from English is that it often marks changes of a word - plurals or participles, for instance - by changing the vowels inside a word, as well as adding prefixes or suffixes like English. So for instance, we have, from the stem k-t-b, "write":
kataba, he wrote => kutiba, it was written (imposing the vowel pattern -u-i-)
yaktubu, he writes (adding ya- and imposing the vowel pattern --u--u)
kaataba, he exchanged correspondence (imposing -aa-a-a)
maktuub, written
kitaab, book => kutub, books
maktab, office => makaatib, offices
kaatib, writer
and similarly from j-m-3, "gather" (3 is meant to indicate a "pharyngeal" consonant with no English equivalent):
jama3a, he gathered => jumi3a, it was gathered
yajma3u, he gathers
majmuu3ah, total
jamaa3ah, association
jam3, plural
mujtama3, society
jamii3, all
jumu3ah, congregational prayer (and thus Friday)
etc... It also has a dual number - as well as, like English, having an ending indicating more than one thing (in English, -s), you also have a special suffix for two things.
Most root words contain three consonants, and, as you can see, a large variety of new words can be formed from a single root. If this sounds challenging, there are some compensations: the language has only two tenses, for instance, and the changes, though weird-seeming to an English speaker, are mostly rule-governed.
The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters - all consonants, except for 3 long vowels - and another 7 optional marks that go above or below letters to mark short vowels or doubled consonants. It is written right to left. Its letters change shape depending on which letters are before or after them, like in American or Continental handwriting. The big dots are part of the letters. It can be modified in many remarkable ways: calligraphy is a major Arabic art! However, you can learn to read normal print quite easily.
There is a huge amount of literature in Arabic - 1500 years worth! - so one shouldn't really even attempt a summary; however, here goes...
Some of the most famous poets are the pre-Islamic writers of the Mu'allaqat (as the poems that were then considered good enough to hang on the Kaaba, the central shrine at Mecca, were called) including Imru' ul-Qays and Antar ibn Shaddad; the medieval poet al-Mutanabbi, considered probably the greatest Arab poet of all time; and modern poets like Nizar Qabbani or Khalil Gibran or Mahmoud Darwish. Arabic poetry rarely translates well into English, since (as with any poetry) its sound as well as its meaning plays an essential role in its beauty, and the sonority of Arabic is very hard to imitate in a language as different-sounding as English. There are a variety of well-known metres for Arabic poems (and nowadays, of course, blank verse as well). Usually, they also rhyme, if only in the final short vowels.
The commonest themes of Arab poetry are probably love, praise, and insults. Arab poets - the so-called 'Udhari school especially, as seen in early medieval romances such as Kalilah wa Dimnah - are said to have been the first to make romance in the strict sense (ie courtly love, chivalry, lots of sighs and pure devotion to unattainable beloveds) into a standard literary device. From them it eventually reached Europe, via Arab Spain and the troubadours of Provence. As for praise and insults, while poems of praise (to patrons or kings) were common in the West at one time, poems of insult seem to have become a very much debased form (satirists such as Swift or Voltaire generally preferring prose for their more vicious attacks) resurfacing now in little besides rap lyrics; in the early medieval Arab world, however, they were refined to a high art form, which could affect the prestige of entire families.
The Qur'an is traditionally considered to be a form of writing unto itself, neither prose nor poetry but combining the best elements of both. While in Arabic it derives much of its effect from its poetic elements - the rhyme scheme, the rhythm, the alliteration - this very rarely comes through in translations; the best attempt (from a literary standpoint) that I am aware of is Arberry's 1955 translation. In many ways, the Qur'an plays much the same pivotal role in the development of Arabic literature as the King James Bible in English.
Great medieval prose writers include the essayist al-Jahiz, the founder of sociology Ibn Khaldun, and Ibn Battuta, who travelled more than three times as far as Marco Polo; modern ones include the Nobel Prize-winning Naguib Mahfouz, who chronicles three generations of life in Cairo with a remarkably perceptive gaze that makes clear the way "public" history affected private stories, there as so often in the Arab world. The Arabian Nights, while famous in the West, is regarded as little more than a series of popular fables in the Arab world, along with a variety of other mainly oral epics, such as the exploits of Amir Hamza, or Antar ibn Shaddad.
