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. 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 Nabataeans or Nabateans were an ancient Arab people who inhabited northern Arabia and the southern Levant. Their settlements—most prominently the assumed capital city of Raqmu —gave the name Nabatene to the Arabian borderland that stretched from the Euphrates to the Red Sea.
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.
Dushara, also transliterated as Dusares, is a pre-Islamic Arabian god worshipped by the Nabataeans at Petra and Madain Saleh. Safaitic inscriptions imply he was the son of the goddess Al-Lat, and that he assembled in the heavens with other deities. He is called "Dushara from Petra" in one inscription. Dushara was expected to bring justice if called by the correct ritual.
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.
Thamudic, named for the Thamud tribe, is a group of epigraphic scripts known from large numbers of inscriptions in Ancient North Arabian (ANA) alphabets, which have not yet been properly studied. These texts are found over a huge area from southern Syria to Yemen. In 1937, Fred V. Winnett divided those known at the time into five rough categories A, B, C, D, E. In 1951, some 9,000 more inscriptions were recorded in south-west Saudi Arabia which have been given the name Southern Thamudic.
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.
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).
Taymanitic was the language and script of the oasis of Taymāʾ in northwestern Arabia, dated to the second half of the 6th century BC.
Nabataean Arabic was a predecessor of the Arabic alphabet. It evolved from Nabataean Aramaic, first entering use in the late third century AD. It continued to be used into the mid-fifth century, after which the script evolves into a new phase known as Paleo-Arabic.
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.
David F. Graf, is an American historian, archeologist, academic and author. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Miami.
Paleo-Arabic is a script that represents a pre-Islamic phase in the evolution of the Arabic script at which point it becomes recognizably similar to the Islamic Arabic script. It comes prior to Classical Arabic, but it is also a recognizable form of the Arabic script, emerging after a transitional phase of Nabataean Arabic as the Nabataean script slowly evolved into the modern Arabic script. It appears in the late fifth and sixth centuries AD and, though was originally only known from Syria and Jordan, is now also attested in several extant inscriptions from the Arabian Peninsula, such as in the Christian texts at the site of Hima in South Arabia. More recently, additional examples of Paleo-Arabic have been discovered near Taif in the Hejaz and in the Tabuk region of northwestern Saudi Arabia.
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 the Safaitic and Paleo-Arabic scripts. 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.
A short Aramaic inscription on basalt was discovered at al-Mal in Syria in 1973. The inscribed basalt block had been cut by builders for use in a modern building. The text is not entirely preserved. It was discovered and photographed by an Israeli expedition following the Yom Kippur War.
