The Arabic Language Today

A.F.L. Beeston

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315512792
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Regional Studies

This book, first published in 1970, provides a description of the standard Arabic language used today as the universal means of written communication throughout the Arab world and in formal spoken communication (vernaculars differ both from each other and from the standard language). The principal emphasis is on syntax and morphology of which there exists no comprehensive account. Phonology and lexicon are treated briefly and there is a chapter on the script.

I

INTRODUCTION AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Arabic is the official language of Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, Libya, the United Arab Republic, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and the states of the Arabian peninsula. Within these political frontiers the only substantial bodies of non-Arabic speakers are the Berbers of North Africa (most of whom are now bilingual in Arabic and Berber), speakers of Kurdish (an Iranian dialect) in the north of Iraq and Syria, and the tribal populations of the southern Sudan. Outside of them, Arabic is used in Israel, in the south-western corner of Iran, in some enclaves in the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, and in some areas fringing the south of the Sahara. As the language of the Qurʼān, Arabic is to some extent familiar throughout the Muslim world, rather as Latin is in the lands of the Roman Church; less so in Turkey, where official policy since 1923 has aimed at replacing it by Turkish.

The term ‘Arabic’ is applied to a number of speech-forms which, in spite of many and sometimes substantial mutual differences, possess sufficient homogeneity to warrant their being reckoned as dialectal varieties of a single language. There is one fundamental division of these varieties. On the one hand, we find localized varieties employed in the speech of everyday life, which have been frequently termed ‘the Arabic dialects’, but would be better designated ‘vernaculars’. These form a continuous spectrum of variation, of which the extremities, Moroccan and Iraqi, differ to the point of mutual unintelligibility, but within which one variety shades off almost imperceptibly into the adjoining one. The vernaculars are almost entirely spoken forms of language; a few attempts have been made at rendering them in writing, but Arabic script is ill-adapted for this purpose, and such attempts have no greater linguistic value than an English novelist’s attempts at recording, say, Lancashire dialect. Linguistic descriptions of the vernaculars are invariably in phonetic transcription.

Sharply contrasted with the vernaculars is a variety of language used throughout the whole Arabic-speaking world, and which forms the normal vehicle for all written communication. Many labels have been used for this, none entirely satisfactory. It has been called ‘classical’, though some of its manifestations are difficult to fit into any normal acceptance of that term; it has been called ‘literary’, in spite of the fact that many of its manifestations—newspaper advertisements, for instance—have nothing to do with literature; it has been called ‘written’, and yet it is frequently used as a medium for spoken communication, as in formal speeches and in radio broadcasts aimed at the whole Arab world; it can be called ‘standard’, though even this leads to difficulty when one looks at the language historically and not solely in the light of current circumstances. In default of a more satisfactory term, ‘Standard Arabic’ (SA) is in this work used for this variety of the language.

Up to the present, it is the vernaculars which have attracted most attention from linguists, and there is a very large bibliography devoted to them.¹ Relatively little work has been done, in terms of structural analysis, on SA,² and it is the latter which is the subject of the present book.

Some brief mention should be made of Maltese, which is anomalous. In spite of heavy lexical infiltration from Italian, Maltese is unquestionably an Arabic vernacular. But for nearly a thousand years, Malta has been politically and culturally sundered from North Africa, and from contact with any other variety of the language. At the end of the eighteenth century, when it was first reduced to writing, Latin script was chosen, and it has now evolved (the only Arabic vernacular to do so) into a literary language with its own traditions. In consequence, SA is unused and unintelligible in Malta.

Historical background

Arabic belongs to the language-family commonly called Semitic. Other principal members of the family are Ugaritic and Accadian (both now long dead), Aramaic (surviving only in vestigial form), Hebrew, and the Semitic languages of Ethiopia (Tigre, Tigrina, Amharic, and the church language Geez). In the north and centre of the Arabian peninsula, a range of inscriptions datable from roughly the fifth century B.C. to the fifth century A.D. exhibit a group of dialects which are probably the ancestors of Arabic as we know it, although they cannot be termed Arabic any more than Anglo-Saxon could be termed English. The dialects of pre-Islamic South Arabia are a separate language within the Semitic family, and not in any sense ancestors of Arabic.

The earliest manifestation of a linguistic form which can be identified as Arabic is on a tombstone at Nemara in the Syrian desert, dated A.D. 328, and one or two similar inscriptions from the fifth–sixth century. Round about A.D. 600 there were current in Arabia a number of dialects, roughly classifiable into an eastern and a western group; our information about these dialects is confined to a number of scattered and unorganized remarks by later Muslim philologists. The course of the sixth century, however, had seen the production of a corpus of poetry, preserved initially by oral transmission, and only written down for the first time in the eighth–ninth century; the linguistic status of this poetic corpus is very debatable, but a frequently accepted hypothesis is that it represents a sort of koine or common language used for poetry (and probably for ‘elevated’ diction in general) throughout the peninsula, and not completely identifiable with any one dialect as used for the purposes of everyday life, though on the whole its main features appear to be eastern rather than western.

In the early years of the seventh century the Qurʼān, Islam’s sacred book, was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. The revelations were memorized by his followers and also written down by amanuenses; the Qurʼān is therefore the earliest surviving document of written Arabic, apart from the few inscriptions which have been mentioned above. Its language is unmistakably that of the poetic corpus of the sixth century. Nevertheless, it was first written down in a form reflecting the pronunciation of the western dialect of Mecca, and it was not until nearly a century later that the scholars of Lower Iraq succeeded in imposing on the pronunciation used for its recitation certain features characteristic of the eastern dialects. This they did, not by altering the primitive written text but by adding reading marks to it, a process which has resulted in some of the oddities of Arabic script as used at the present day.

From the early years of Islam we possess a number of written documents, both of a formal kind (inscriptions, tombstones, coins, etc.) and of an informal kind such as letters and contracts. The former evidently aim at being written in Quranic language, the latter often show divergences from it attributable to dialectal influences. Poetic literature continued to be produced and transmitted orally in the same manner as it had been before the advent of Islam. And the vast body of traditions relative to the life and sayings of the Prophet constitute the beginning of a prose literature.

Quite apart, however, from the fact that the Tradition literature includes some material forged at a later date, a linguist must use it with a good deal of caution. For it, like the poetry, was at first transmitted orally and only written down at a later stage; and although later scholars who handled it then laid stress on verbal accuracy, it is manifest that the contemporaries of the Prophet had no such idea, but concerned themselves only with the content of the record, not with its precise linguistic form of expression. We can see this in the fact that traditions are sometimes recorded for us by the later scholars in several forms which, while conveying the same ultimate sense, differ in verbal expression.

Soon after A.D. 700 a great change came over the situation. The Muslim conquests had dispersed Arab settlers over a vast stretch of territory from Spain to Eastern Persia, and this led to a blurring of the old dialectal distinctions; though, therefore, there are isolated features in the modern vernaculars which can be envisaged as stemming from the dialects of the Arabian peninsula in the Prophet’s day, no one modern vernacular can be safely asserted to have developed out of any one ancient dialect of the peninsula.

More important, the Muslim conquests resulted in the adoption of the use of Arabic by vast numbers of non-Arabs, among whom were to be found the intellectual élite of the Muslim world; and this led to a very rapid and significant evolution in the common language itself.

The eighth-century scholars, specially in Lower Iraq, were keenly aware of this development, but greatly apprehensive of it; for they judged that an unhampered evolution of this kind would lead in the end to a loss of ability to understand the Qurʼān and the Prophetic Tradition, just as in fact the evolution of the Romance languages has led to Latin becoming a dead language for most Europeans. Hence were born in that century the sciences of Arabic grammar and lexicography, of which a principal aim was to establish a standard of ‘correct’ Arabic. The grammar taught in the schools of the Arab world today is virtually identical with the grammatical system devised by the eighth-century scholars; and throughout the period from then to now this grammar has been the ideal aimed at by the educated classes for literary expression.

Contemporary with the birth of the grammatical sciences was the efflorescence of a ‘golden age’ of Arabic literature, which stretched on into the eleventh century. The great bulk of all that has been considered best in Arabic literature is the product of this age, in which a series of brilliant writers forged, out of the relatively unsophisticated language of earlier times, an instrument of marvellous subtlety for expressing the finest shades of meaning.

The twelfth–eighteenth centuries were, relatively speaking, an age of decadence, marked only by the occasional appearance of a truly great writer. But in the middle of the nineteenth century a literary renaissance (the so-called nahḍa movement) took place, beginning in Lebanon, spreading to Egypt, and thence to other parts of the Arab world. The founders of this movement looked for their inspiration and models to the great writers of the golden age; and among their main activities were the publication of reliable texts of golden age writers, the ‘rediscovery’ of writers whose works had fallen into oblivion during the decadence, and the compilation of dictionaries of ‘correct’ lexical usage. As a result of this activity, SA is in its main features modelled on the language of the golden age writers.

Yet there is an inherent contradiction here. At the moment when the grammarians set to work, the common language had already changed from that of the Tradition literature, and had probably never been wholly identical with the ‘elevated’ style of poetry and the Qurʼān on which the grammarians mainly based themselves. A purely synchronic analysis of golden age prose writing would probably have resulted in a system differing in some details from that worked out by the grammarians.

But simultaneously with the nahḍa movement, a challenge was facing the Arab world as great as it had encountered in the eighth century. Just as, then, the ancient bedouin Arabian culture was being profoundly modified by urbanization and the consequent demand for expression of new modes of thought, so in the nineteenth century the centuries-old Muslim–Arab culture had to face the challenge of European culture and new modes of thought demanding new modes of expression. Yet while, obviously, these demands have had a tremendous influence on the lexicon, the structural and morphological features of the language have remained remarkably stable—partly because of the emotional appeal of the link with the Prophetic age, and partly because of the excellence of the golden age language as a tool of expression. There is even detectable in some modern writers an archaizing tendency towards re-introducing some features of ancient Arabic which had virtually disappeared from the language of the golden age (see e.g. pp. 100¹, 105).

Notes

¹ The most recent, and probably most generally useful, works on the vernaculars are the series of analytical descriptions published by the Georgetown University Institute of Languages and Linguistics, of which volumes on Moroccan, Syrian and Iraqi have appeared. For Egyptian, the best book available at present is T. F. Mitchell’s Introduction to Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (Oxford University Press, 1956), though this is pedagogical and not systematic as the Georgetown series is.

² But one cannot omit reference to V. Monteil’s very valuable L’arabe moderne.

2

PHONOLOGY

The phonemic repertory

The phonemic repertory of SA consists of the following items:

(1) Three vowel-qualities, open, palatal and lip-rounded.

(2) Twenty-four consonants.

(3) A phonetic feature known to the Arabs as ʼiṭbāq, which occurs simultaneously with four of the consonants, thus raising the effective consonantism to twenty-eight items (the reason for not registering simply twenty-eight consonants will appear below).

(4) The quality of length, applicable to all vowels and all consonants. This is a temporal extension of the duration of the sound; but while this is a full statement in the case of vowels and continuant consonants, such as f, in the case of ‘stops’ the extension affects only the period of ‘closure’ (see below) preceding the faint explosion of breath which occurs when the closure is released. When morphological structure brings two identical consonants into immediate contact, this gives rise to lengthening of the consonant, so that t + t produces a long t and not an articulation with two separate explosions. Nevertheless, from the point of view of Arabic morphological structure, a lengthened consonant has exactly the same value as two consonants.

The Arabic script is constituted on strictly phonemic principles, and provides notation only for sounds with phonemic value. The phonetic realization of the phonemes is a more complicated matter than would appear from the script.

The three vowel qualities cover a wide range of phonetic realizations. To the English ear, the most noticeable case is that of the open quality vowel, which ranges from a pure open /a/ with mouth opened to maximum extent, as in English ‘car’, to a distinctly flattened vowel /œ/ somewhat resembling the vowel of standard southern English ‘cat’. The palatal quality ranges from a narrowly closed vowel similar to that of French ‘pique’, to relaxed varieties resembling the vowel of English ‘pit’ and Russian ы. The lip-rounded quality ranges from a narrowly closed /u/ particularly in its lengthened form, to a more relaxed sound when not lengthened; a fact which leads Europeans often to hear the short variety of the lip-rounded vowel as the /o/ vowel of French ‘Monet’. ...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction and Historical Background
• 2 Phonology
• 3 The Script
• 4 The Word
• 5 Entity Terms: I
• 6 Amplification of Substantives
• 7 Syntactic Markers of Nouns
• 8 Entity Terms: II
• 9 Theme and Predicate
• 10 The Verb
• 11 Amplification of the Predicate
• 12 Clause Conversion
• 13 Functionals
• 14 Conditional Structures
• 15 Word Order
• 16 Lexicon and Style
• Appendix: Script styles
• Bibliography
• Index