Interesting..
The rise of Arabic to the status of a major world language is inextricably intertwined with the rise of Islam as a major world religion. Before the appearance of Islam, Arabic was a minor member of the southern branch of the Semitic language family, used by a small number of largely nomadic tribes in the Arabian peninsula,
with an extremely poorly documented textual history. Within a hundred years after the death (in 632 C.E.) of Muhammad , the prophet entrusted by God to deliver the Islamic message,
Arabic had become the official language of a world empire whose boundaries stretched from the Oxus River in Central Asia to the Atlantic Ocean, and had even moved northward into the Iberian Peninsula of Europe
The unprecedented nature of this transformation--at least among the languages found in the Mediterranean Basin area--can be appreciated by comparisons with its predecessors as major religious/political vernaculars in the region: Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Hebrew, the language which preserved the major scriptural texts of the Jewish religious tradition, had never secured major political status as a language of empire, and, indeed, by the time Christianity was established as a growing religious force in the second century C.E. had virtually ceased to be spoken or actively used in its home territory, having been replaced by its sister Semitic language, Aramaic, which was the international language of the Persian empire. Greek, the language used to preserve the most important canonical scriptural tracts of Christianity, the New Testament writings, had been already long been established as the pre-eminent language of culture and education in Mediterranean pagan society when it was co-opted by Christian scribes. By this period (the second century C.E.), Greek had ceased to be the language of the governmnental institutions. Greek, however, had resurfaced politically by the time of the rise of Christianity as a state religion under the emperor Constantine (d. 337 C.E.,)--who laid the groundwork for the split of the Roman empire into western and eastern (Byzantine) halves. By the time of Muhammad's birth (approximately 570 C.E.) Greek had fully reestablished its position as the governmetnal as well as religious vernacular of the Byzantines usurped the predominance of Greek as a governmental and administrative
language when the Romans unified the region under the aegis of their empire, and it would remain a unifying cultural language for Western Europe long after the Roman empire ceased to exist as a political entity in that region. The main entry of Latin, on the other hand, into the religious sphere of monotheism was relatively minor, as the medium for the influential translation of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the Vulgate, that was the only official version of scripture for the western Christian church until the rise of Protestantism in the sixteenth century
Hebrew, then, was a religious language par excellence. Greek and Latin, on the other hand, while making invaluable contributions to the corpus of religious texts used in both Judaism (the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, was the
scriptual text of choice among the Hellenized Jews of the Roman empire) and Christianity, were each languages that had extensive imperial histories which preceded (and followed) the rise of Judeo-Christian monotheism to prominence in the Mediterranean and had strong cultural links to the pagan world and sensibility of Hellenism. It is only against this backdrop that the truly radical break with the past represented by the rise of Arabic as the scriptural medium for Islam coupled with its adoption by the Umayyad
caliphs as the sole language for governmental business in 697 C.E. can be
appreciated.
Arabic belongs to the Semitic language family. The members of this family have a recorded history going back thousands of years--one of the most extensive continuous archives of documents belonging to any human language group. The Semitic languages eventually took root and flourished in the Mediterranean Basin area, especially in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin and in the coastal areas of the Levant, but where the home area of "proto-Semitic" was located is still
the object of dispute among scholars. Once, the Arabian Peninsula was
thought to have been the "cradle" of proto-Semitic, but nowadays many
scholars advocate the view that it originated somewhere in East Africa,
probably in the area of Somalia/Ethiopia. Interestingly, both these areas are now dominated linguistically by the two youngest members of the Semitic language family: Arabic and Amharic, both of which emerged in the mid-fourth century C.E The swift emergence and
spread of Arabic and Amharic illustrates what seems to be a particularly
notable characteristic of the Semitic language family: as new members of the group emerge, they tend to assimilate their parent languages quite
completely. This would account for the fact that so many members of the
group have disappeared completely over the centuries or have become
fossilized languages often limited to mainly religious contexts, no longer part of the speech of daily life. This assimilative power was certainly a factor in the spread of Arabic, which completely displaced its predecessors after only a few hundred years in the area where Arabic speakers had become politically dominant . Thus all the South Arabian languages and Aramaic, in
all its varied dialectical forms, became to all intents and purposes "dead"
languages very soon after the emergence of Islam in the seventh century C.E.
language of Coptic, which was the direct descendent of Pharaonic Egyptian and still an important literary and cultural language at the time of the Islamic conquest. Today it survives only as the religious language of the
Coptic Christian community of Egypt, who otherwise use Arabic in all spheres of their everyday lives
In contrast, when Arabic has contested ground with Indo-European languages or members of other distant linguistic families, like Turkish (which is a member of the Altaic
family of languages that originated in central Mongolia), its record has not been nearly so successful. For example, when Arabic was introduced into the Iranian Plateau after the fall of the Sassanian Empire to the Arab armies in the 630s C.E., it seemed to overwhelmingly dominate the Indo-European Persianate languages of the region for a while. But by the late 900s, a revitalized form of the Old Persian (Pahlavi) language had decisively re-emerged as not only a spoken language, but also a vehicle for government transactions and literary culture as well. This "new" Persian has remained
dominant in this geographical region throughout succeeding centuries and the modern Persian spoken today in Iran is virtually identical with it
Topic: Tasty languages [Split]