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Classical Arabic
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Classical Arabic (CA), also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times (7th to 9th centuries). It is based largely on the Medieval language of Adnani tribes (Arabic ?????????) (which contrasted somewhat with the speech of the Qahtani tribes Arabic ?????????) Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the direct descendent used today throughout the Arab World in writing and in formal speaking, for example, prepared speeches, some radio broadcasts, and non-entertaining content.
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Encyclopedia
Classical Arabic (CA), also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times (7th to 9th centuries). It is based largely on the Medieval language of Adnani tribes (Arabic ?????????) (which contrasted somewhat with the speech of the Qahtani tribes Arabic ?????????) Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the direct descendent used today throughout the Arab World in writing and in formal speaking, for example, prepared speeches, some radio broadcasts, and non-entertaining content. While the lexis and stylistics of Modern Standard Arabic are different from Classical Arabic, the morphology and syntax have remained basically unchanged (though MSA uses a subset of the syntactic structures available in CA). The vernacular dialects, however, have changed more dramatically. Both CA and MSA are normally called () in Arabic, meaning 'the clearly spoken one' or the 'language of fluency'.
Because the Qur'an is written in Classical Arabic, the language is considered by most Muslims to be sacred. It is the only language in which Muslims recite their prayers, regardless of what language they use in everyday life.
History
Classical Arabic has its origins in the central and northern parts of the Arabian Peninsula known as the Najd region which is now a part of modern day Saudi Arabia , and is distinct from Old South Arabian languages that were spoken in the southern parts of the peninsula, modern day Yemen. The oldest inscription so far discovered in Classical Arabic goes back to 328 AD and is known as the inscription (Arabic: ), written in the Nabataean alphabet and named after the place where it was found in southern Syria in April of 1901 by two French archaeologists, René Dussaud and Frédéric Macler.
With the spread of Islam, Classical Arabic became a prominent language of scholarship and religious devotion as the language of the Qur'an (at times even spreading faster than the religion).Its relation to modern dialects is somewhat analogous to the relationship of Latin and the Romance languages or Middle Chinese and the modern Chinese languages, despite still being intelligible to modern speakers of Arabic.
Morphology
Classical Arabic is one of the Semitic languages, and therefore has many similarities in conjugation and pronunciation to Hebrew, Akkadian, Aramaic, and Amharic. Its use of vowels to modify a base group of consonants resembles similar constructions in Biblical Hebrew.
For example:
- kataba, he wrote
- yaktubu, he writes
- kitab, book
- uktub, write!
- kutub, books (plural)
- maktabah, library
- miktab, writing machine
These words all have some relationship with writing, and all of them contain the three consonants KTB. This group of consonants k-t-b is called a "root" or "al-Huruf al-Asliya." Grammarians assume that this root carries a basic meaning of writing, which encompasses all objects or actions involving writing, and so, therefore, all the above words are regarded as modified forms of this root, and are "obtained" or "derived" in some way from it.
Grammar
Grammar in Arabic (, meaning "rules"), underwent development in the late 700s. The earliest known Arabic grammarian is . The efforts of three proceeding generations of grammarians culminated in the book of the Persian scholar .
Phonology
Classical Arabic had three pairs of long and short vowels: , , and . The following table illustrates this:
| Vowels | Short | Long |
|---|
| High | | | | |
|---|
| Low | | |
|---|
Like Modern Standard Arabic, Classical Arabic had 28 consonant phonemes:
- Non-emphatic may have actually been , shifting forward in the mouth before or simultaneously with the fronting of the palatals (see below).
- As it derives from proto-semitic *g, may have been a palatalized velar:
- is emphatic only in , the name of God, i.e. Allah, except after i or i when it is unemphatic: bismi l-lah ('in the name of God').
The consonants traditionally termed "emphatic" were either velarised or pharyngealised . In some transcription systems, emphasis is shown by capitalizing the letter, for example, is written ‹S›; in others the letter is underlined or has a dot below it, for example, ‹›.
There are a number of phonetic changes between Classical Arabic and modern Arabic dialects. These include:
- The palatals ( ) became postalveolar:
- The uvular fricatives ( ) became velar or post-velar:
() became (Certain Tajweed traditions actually preserve the original value of this sound synchronically.)
See Arabic alphabet for further details of the IPA representations of contemporary Arabic sounds.
Special symbols
A variety of special symbols exist in the Classical Arabic of the Qur'an that are usually absent in most written forms of Arabic. Many of these serve as aids for readers attempting to accurately pronounce the Classical Arabic found in the Qur'an. They may also indicate prostrations (Sujud), surahs (Ayah), or the ends of chapters (Rub al Hizb).
style="font-weight: bold; font-size: 1.1em; margin-bottom: 0.5em"| Qur'anic annotation signs Code | Glyph | Name | | 06D6 | ۖ | SMALL HIGH LIGATURE SAD WITH LAM WITH ALIF MAKSURA | | 06D7 | ۗ | SMALL HIGH LIGATURE QAF WITH LAM WITH ALIF MAKSURA | | 06D8 | ۘ | SMALL HIGH MEEM INITIAL FORM | | 06D9 | ۙ | SMALL HIGH LAM ALIF | | 06DA | ۚ | SMALL HIGH JEEM | | 06DB | ۛ | SMALL HIGH THREE DOTS | | 06DC | ۜ | SMALL HIGH SEEN | | 06DD | | END OF AYAH | | 06DE | ۞ | START OF RUB AL HIZB | | 06DF | ۟ | SMALL HIGH ROUNDED ZERO | | 06E0 | ۠ | SMALL HIGH UPRIGHT RECTANGULAR ZERO | | 06E1 | ۡ | SMALL HIGH DOTLESS HEAD OF KHAH = Arabic jazm • used in some Qur'ans to mark absence of a vowel | | 06E2 | ۢ | SMALL HIGH MEEM ISOLATED FORM | | 06E3 | ۣ | SMALL LOW SEEN | | 06E4 | ۤ | SMALL HIGH MADDA | | 06E5 | ۥ | SMALL WAW | | 06E6 | ۦ | SMALL YAA | | 06E7 | ۧ | ARABIC SMALL HIGH YAA | | 06E8 | ۨ | SMALL HIGH NOON | | 06E9 | ۩ | PLACE OF SAJDAH | | 06EA | ۪ | EMPTY CENTRE LOW STOP | | 06EB | ۫ | EMPTY CENTRE HIGH STOP | | 06EC | ۬ | ROUNDED HIGH STOP WITH FILLED CENTRE | | 06ED | ۭ | SMALL LOW MEEM | | From: |
See also
External links
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