Quranic Arabic

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- moi
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Quranic Arabic
OP - July 20, 2014, 11:14 AM

Recent news noted that North and South Korean are now very different, and a dictionary is being written. The same thing happened in East and West Germany, and is at roots of dialects and differences between British English and American English for example.

Isn't Hebrew reinvented?

I understand quranic arabic is a dead language - no one on the planet has it as a first language or speaks it as their mother tongue.

So isn't something very strange happening with all these folks making these claims about something written in" a dead language?

Isn't the first question to ask someone making Islamic claims "is quranic arabic your mother tongue?"

Could uncle mo and a modern saudi cleric understand each other?

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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Reply #1 - July 20, 2014, 11:19 AM

Quote
Ðunor cymð of hætan & of wætan. Seo lyft tyhð þone wætan to hire neoðan & ða hætan ufan.’

http://public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/english-in-time/old-english-an-overview/

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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Reply #2 - July 20, 2014, 05:31 PM

Actually, I think the first question I would ask is "what exactly is Arabic as a language," and then secondarily, "what is Qur'anic Arabic."

Without satisfactory answers to those questions -- which modern scholars still do not have -- you can't quite get to the point of asking how well any particular person speaks Qur'anic Arabic. *Classical* Arabic is a different matter altogether, and Modern Standard Arabic a different matter still.

Think of it this way, according to Muslim tradition the caliph Uthman allegedly decided to create his codex because Arab soldiers were all reciting the Qur'an in so many different ways and different dialects. This was a mere 20 years after Mohammed died. Where the accounts differed, Uthman ordered his scribes to write down the Qur'an in the dialect of the Quaraysh.

Now, those traditional Muslim accounts are wrong, but more to the point, even if they were right, they illustrate the complete linguistic chaos that prevailed at the time, and the lack of anything resembling a standardized "Arabic" that people understood and spoke. If that was the case a mere 20 years after Mohammed's death, how well do you think people could talk to him 1300 years later, using a language (Classical Arabic) that was first standardized three centuries after Mohammed's death, and which conflicts with Qur'anic Arabic in many respects?
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Reply #3 - September 14, 2014, 05:13 PM

Is Arabic really a single language?

Which side are you on?
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