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Arabic is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā or simply al-fuṣḥā (اَلْفُصْحَىٰ).
The Arabic alphabet, or the Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, of which most have contextual letterforms. Unlike the modern Latin alphabet, the script has no concept of letter case. The Arabic alphabet is considered an abjad, with only consonants required to be written; due to its optional use of diacritics to notate vowels, it is considered an impure abjad.
The Hebrew alphabet, known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze. It is an offshoot of the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet.
Phoenician is an extinct Canaanite Semitic language originally spoken in the region surrounding the cities of Tyre and Sidon. Extensive Tyro-Sidonian trade and commercial dominance led to Phoenician becoming a lingua franca of the maritime Mediterranean during the Iron Age. The Phoenician alphabet spread to Greece during this period, where it became the source of all modern European scripts.
Classical Arabic or Quranic Arabic is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notably in Umayyad and Abbasid literary texts such as poetry, elevated prose and oratory, and is also the liturgical language of Islam. Classical Arabic is, furthermore, the register of the Arabic language on which Modern Standard Arabic is based.
Levantine Arabic, also called Shami, is an Arabic variety spoken in the Levant, namely in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and southern Turkey. With over 54 million speakers, Levantine is, alongside Egyptian, one of the two prestige varieties of spoken Arabic comprehensible all over the Arab world.
Proto-Semitic is the reconstructed proto-language common ancestor to the Semitic language family. There is no consensus regarding the location of the Proto-Semitic Urheimat: scholars hypothesize that it may have originated in the Levant, the Sahara, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, or northern Africa.
The Arabic alphabet is thought to be traced back to a Nabataean variation of the Aramaic alphabet, known as Nabataean Aramaic. This script itself descends from the Phoenician alphabet, an ancestral alphabet that additionally gave rise to the Hebrew and Greek alphabets. Nabataean Aramaic evolved into Nabataean Arabic, so-called because it represents a transitional phase between the known recognizably Aramaic and Arabic scripts. Nabataean Arabic was succeeded by Paleo-Arabic, termed as such because it dates to the pre-Islamic period in the fifth and sixth centuries CE, but is also recognizable in light of the Arabic script as expressed during the Islamic era. Finally, the standardization of the Arabic alphabet during the Islamic era led to the emergence of classical Arabic. The phase of the Arabic alphabet today is known as Modern Standard Arabic, although classical Arabic survives as a "high" variety as part of a diglossia.
Safaitic is a variety of the South Semitic scripts used by the Arabs in southern Syria and northern Jordan in the Ḥarrah region, to carve rock inscriptions in various dialects of Old Arabic and Ancient North Arabian. The Safaitic script is a member of the Ancient North Arabian (ANA) sub-grouping of the South Semitic script family, the genetic unity of which has yet to be demonstrated.
Ancient North Arabian (ANA) is a collection of scripts and a language or family of languages under the North Arabian languages branch along with Old Arabic that were used in north and central Arabia and south Syria from the 8th century BCE to the 4th century CE. The term "Ancient North Arabian" is defined negatively. It refers to all of the South Semitic scripts except Ancient South Arabian (ASA) regardless of their genetic relationships.
Nabataean Aramaic is the extinct Aramaic variety used in inscriptions by the Nabataeans of the East Bank of the Jordan River, the Negev, and the Sinai Peninsula. Compared with other varieties of Aramaic, it is notable for the occurrence of a number of loanwords and grammatical borrowings from Arabic or other North Arabian languages.
Hismaic is a variety of the Ancient North Arabian script and the language most commonly expressed in it. The Hismaic script may have been used to write Safaitic dialects of Old Arabic, but the language of most inscriptions differs from Safaitic in a few important respects, meriting its classification as a separate dialect or language. Hismaic inscriptions are attested in the Ḥismā region of Northwest Arabia, dating to the centuries around and immediately following the start of the Common Era.
Old Arabic is the name for any Arabic language or dialect continuum before Islam. Various forms of Old Arabic are attested in scripts like Safaitic, Hismaic, Nabatean, and even Greek.
Dadanitic is the script and possibly the language of the oasis of Dadān and the kingdom of Liḥyān in northwestern Arabia, spoken probably some time during the second half of the first millennium BCE.
Proto-Arabic is the name given to the hypothetical reconstructed ancestor of all the varieties of Arabic attested since the 9th century BC. There are two lines of evidence to reconstruct Proto-Arabic:
The South Semitic scripts are a family of alphabets that had split from Proto-Sinaitic script by the 10th century BC. The family has two main branches: Ancient North Arabian (ANA) and Ancient South Arabian (ASA).
Old Hijazi, is a variety of Old Arabic attested in Hejaz from about the 1st century to the 7th century. It is the variety thought to underlie the Quranic Consonantal Text (QCT) and in its later iteration was the prestige spoken and written register of Arabic in the Umayyad Caliphate.
Paleo-Arabic is a pre-Islamic Arabian script used to write Arabic. It began to be used in the fifth century, when it succeeded the earlier Nabataeo-Arabic script, and it was used until the early seventh century, when the Arabic script was standardized in the Islamic era.
Ahmad Al-Jallad is a Jordanian-American philologist, epigraphist, and a historian of language. Some of the areas he has contributed to include Quranic studies and the history of Arabic, including recent work he has done on pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions written in Safaitic and Paleo-Arabic. He is currently Professor in the Sofia Chair in Arabic Studies at Ohio State University at the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures. He is the winner of the 2017 Dutch Gratama Science Prize.
Pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions refer to inscriptions from pre-Islamic Arabia, or the Arabian Peninsula prior to the origins of Islam in the early seventh century. They include inscriptions in both the Arabic and non-Arabic languages such as Sabaic, Hadramautic, Minaic, Qatabanic, and others.
References
- ↑ "Arabic in Context | Brill". www.brill.com. Archived from the original on 2017-06-21. Retrieved 2017-06-20.
- 1 2 3 Al-Jallad, Ahmad (January 2015). "Graeco-Arabica I: the southern Levant". In F. Briquel-Chatonnet; M. Debié; L. Nehmé (eds.). Le Contexte de Naissance de l'Écriture Arabe. Écrit et écritures Araméennes et Arabes Au 1er Millénaire Après J.-C., Actes du Colloque International du Projet ANR Syrab (in French). Louvain: Peeters (Orientalia Lovaniensa Analecta).
- ↑ Al-Jallad, Ahmad (2015). "On the Voiceless Reflex of *ṣ́ and *ṯ ̣ in pre-Hilalian Maghrebian Arabic". Journal of Arabic Linguistics (62): 88–95.
- 1 2 3 Al-Jallad, Ahmad (2022). "One wāw to rule them all: the origins and fate of wawation in Arabic and its orthography". In Donner, Fred M.; Hasselbach-Andee, Rebecca (eds.). Scripts and Scripture: Writing and Religion in Arabia circa 500–700 CE. Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. ISBN 978-1-61491-073-2.
- ↑ Al-Jallad, Ahmad (2015). "Echoes of the Baal Cycle in a Safaito-Hismaic Inscription". Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions. 15 (1): 5–19. doi:10.1163/15692124-12341267 . Retrieved 2015-12-09.
- ↑ Fisher, Greg (2015). Arabs and Empires Before Islam. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-965452-9.
