1 - Background topics

Summary

THE EVOLUTION OF THE ARABIC LANGUAGE

In the first half of the first millennium A.D., the landmass bounded by the fringes of the Anatolian highlands, the eastern Mediterranean seaboard, the coasts of the Arabian Peninsula, and the western escarpment of the Iranian plateau, was the home of a family of languages now commonly termed Semitic. Intruding into the area were Greek-speaking populations within the boundaries of the Roman–Byzantine empire, and Middle Persian within those of the Sasanian empire; outside it, the Aksumite kingdom of Ethiopia also used a Semitic language. While the various members of this language-family are differentiated from each other in detail as sharply as are European languages such as French and Spanish, they exhibit general similarities which set them off, as a group, from languages such as Persian, which belongs to the Indo-European language-family.

By the early centuries A.D., two of the most important members of the Semitic language-family had virtually disappeared from the scene: Akkadian, the ancient language of Mesopotamia, was extinct; and Hebrew remained only as a learned and liturgical language no longer in everyday use. But two other important languages still dominated the area culturally. In the north, there was a cluster of Aramaic dialects, two of which have special significance, namely Syriac (used by the Christian populations of Syria and Mesopotamia) and Nabataean (used by pagan populations centred on the great caravan city of Petra). In the south, present-day Yemen was the home of an antique culture, of which the dominant representative was the kingdom of Saba (Sheba). The Sabaic language of pre-Christian times shows sufficient distinctive characteristics to warrant us in treating it as an independent language within the Semitic family.