Introduction to the Arabic language

The feelings of pride and self-gratification one feel when discovering that he
and/or she knows a word or an expression in a foreign language is absolutely
great. The general rule is that “languages borrow from each other”. This is
very true when considering the following example: For native speakers of
English, the words Duke, Dinner and Parliament sound very English. Yet,
linguists, armed with loads of proofs, will argue with you that in actual fact,
these very English like words are in fact French! With the most obvious as the
most English like Parliament, a direct derivative from the French “Parli” (to
speak) and the suffix “Ment” (indicating a place). Hence, the very “English
House of Parliament” is the place where people talk English in French terms.

Such similarities between one language and another are in fact anticipated.
Furthermore, English and French had common history and are in fact near
from each other geographically. No wonder that people sometime joke about
being able to read French in English. But, such common elements of history
or other related geographical characteristics are less apparent between the
United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand,
India, the Philippines and other various islands in the Caribbean Sea and the
Pacific Ocean who all share one common official language; English. Such
diversity of English speaking countries may be attributed to other colonization
and economic factors.

These similarities become strikingly interesting when they spread across a

continent or a particular region. Take for example the French “ami”, the
Portuguese/Italian “amigo”, and the Spanish “amigos” all meaning a ‘friend’.
Yet, again such similarities will come as no surprise to some grammarians and
linguists who will confirm that all these languages originated from a genetically
related “mother language”; Indo-European”. Similarities of that sort are
expected between various languages derived from a mother language. After
all, all these languages use an alphabet system of writing and furthermore;
they all even use the same alphabet with some very minor exceptions.

It is when such similarities occur amongst languages that do not share a

mother language that linguists will raise some eyebrows. Take the Arabic
“Salam” and the Hebrew “Shaloom”, and possibly the Italian “Chaio”. While
Arabic and Hebrew share one mother language, Italian is derived from a
totally different one! English native speakers will be surprised to know that
“Alcohol”, “Alchemy”, “Almanac”, Furnace, Acme and Affidavit are all Arabic
words. But, what do we mean by Arabic words? Who are the Arabs? What is
the Arabic language? How, when and where did it originate? Is it similar to the
English language? How easy is it to learn for English native speakers? How
quick can anybody learn how to speak, read and write Arabic?

Who are the Arabs?

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In prehistoric and pagan times, two races inhabited Arabia (the Arabian
Peninsula): one was largely nomadic who wandered with their flocks over the
great deserts that lie between the Euphrates river and the centre of the
peninsula. The others inhabited the rain-fed uplands in the south (Yemen).
The crucial dividing element was the water. No wonder that the water is still
highly regarded and constantly referred to even in the simplest situation as
the Phrase “ Ahlan wa Sahlan”, Hello and welcome, used to welcome
anybody at your home or workplace suggests. The Arabic Ahlan assures you
that you are going to be treated like a member of the family, “Ahl”, and hence
“Al” a derivative means the “House of”. The Arabic Sahlan confirms that you
have come down a “plain” where there is green, affluence and abundance.

Traditions holds that northern Arabians were ‘Arabicized’ Arabs and direct
descendents from Adnaan, while southern Arabians were ‘pure’ Arabs
descendents from ‘Qahtaan’. Yet, it was the formers who were the ‘Arabs’
mentioned in ancient records. The earliest surviving account of the people of
Arabia is in the tenth chapter of Genesis, which named the sons of Noah.
Noah’s eldest son “Shem, (Arabic Sam) is regarded as the ancestor of the
Hebrews, Arabs and Aramaens. Arabic, therefore, is a Southern-Central
Semitic language formerly called Hamito-Semitic by the German Egyptologist
Karl Richard Lepsius in the 1860s1, Afro-Asiatic by the American linguist
Joseph Greenberg in 1950 and Afrasian by the Russian linguist Igor
Diakonoff. Hamito-Semitic languages are a family of genetically related
languages thought to have been developed from a common parent language
which presumably existed about 6th-8th millennia BC and was perhaps
located in the present day Sahara. Both Sam and Ham (hence Hamito-
Semitic, current Semitic languages and Semitic race) are thought to have
been two sons of Noah who, with their third brother Yafeth, survived the Great
Flood in the famous story of Noah and the Arch. Consequently all languages
are believed to be genetically related and somehow traced back to them. A
theory that could render the Arabic ‘Salam’, the Hebrew ‘Shaloom’ and the
Italian ‘Chaio’ possible.

Origin of the Arabic language

1
Encyclopaedia Britannica (languages of the World: Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic) languages).

2
Arabic belongs to the Semitic group of languages as spoken in a large area
including North Africa, most of the Arabian Peninsula and other parts of the
Middle East. Other living languages of this group are Modern Hebrew,
Amharic and other spoken languages of Ethiopia, Aramaic dialects current in
parts of Syria and Iraq, and Maltese (Haywood & Nahmad 1993). It is the sole
or joint official language of some twenty independent countries with an
estimated 200 million native Arabic speakers (Holes 1995). It is the second
most widely used language in the world (due of course to the faith of Islam).
The Arabic alphabet is also the second most widely used alphabet in the
world after the Latin alphabet. The alphabet is used in such a diverse
languages as Arabic, Urdu and Persian. It is the language of Islam’s holy
book, the Qur’an (a derivative of the Arabic verb Qara’ ‘to read’; hence Qur’an
is ‘The Readings’ or the Recitation, and as such is the religious and liturgical
language of all Muslims, regardless of their origin or mother tongue.

Arabic is an alphabetic language. Like the Hebrew and many other Eastern
languages, Arabic is written from right to left (Stewart 1994). Its script is both
defective -short vowels are not included as independent symbols in the
alphabet- and cursive; letters are joined to each other by means of ligatures.
The Arabic alphabet is phonemic, consists of consonants only with the
exception of three letters which are used as long vowels or diphthongs. These
characteristics are the general norm in all Semitic languages.

When compared with a language like English, the relationship between the
phonologically distinctive features of spoken Arabic, particularly MSA (Modern
Standard Arabic), and the alphabet is close and consistent (Holes 1995). Yet,
surprisingly enough, the Arabic language was met with near enough similar
challenges. Modern literary Arabic can be traced back to the sixth century AD.
Arab tribes at the time spoke a number of local dialects, which showed
variations in phonology and structure (Bakalla 1975, cited in A. Al Nassir
1993), but were basically regional variations of the same language. These
regional variations however still exist until the present time. Similar to their
British counterparts, Arabs give the same indication of their geographical
location once they use their vernacular spoken language. Stewart (1994)
explains “ The Arabic language is that of the religion and law of Mohammedan
states, from the Ganges to the Straits of Gibraltar and the banks of the
Danube; from Cape Comorin to Chinese Tartary; it is not only pronounced in
various ways by these various people, but even near its native deserts, great
differences exist in the sounds given to many of its letters. In the towns, the
pronunciation is far from being as correct as among the Bedouins. Baghdad
discriminates ‫ ض‬, ‫ ذ‬, ‫ د‬and ‫ ظ‬, while Aleppo makes ‫ ظ‬, ‫ ذ‬and ‫ ز‬nearly the
same but ‫ ض‬like ‫ د‬. Egypt sounds ‫ ج‬hard, like g in go , and ‫ د‬in some parts
of Syria is pronounced like ‫ ش‬Markab , or Marshab”. However, there were
two standard dialects, which had been developed and used extensively by
poets and orators. These were the two dialectical groups of the Hijaz who
lived in the west of the Arabian Peninsula and the Najd who lived in the
central and eastern area (Holes 1995). Annual fairs used to be held in Mecca 2
2
Mecca is a holy city for all Muslims worldwide and is situated in Saudi Arabia. It has the Haram
Mosque or Al Qibla (The Destination) which all Muslims face when praying.

3
in Saudi Arabia during the pilgrimage season, notably at a market place
known as Suq Ukaz (Ukaz market) where poets and orators delivered
speeches and poems. This dialect came to be recognized as the prestigious
and highly form of Arabic. It was the practice of the elite families at the time to
send their young descendants to live for a number of years among certain
Bedouin tribes in order to acquire the pure form of Arabic from those tribes as
was believed at the time. It was also customary for different Arab tribes at that
time to have their own poets or orators who would deliver speeches and recite
poems praising their tribes and defending it in poetic competitions. The only
direct evidence we have today of the linguistic structure of Arabic before the
time of the Prophet Muhammad (570-632 AD) is to be found in orally
composed and transmitted poetry dated to the early sixth century AD. [ (Note
to myself, the following section was cut from the introduction and pasted here.
Could be moved to a more appropriate place). According to Stewart (1994),
syllables in Arabic are divided into pure and mixed, the pure consisting of only
one consonant and one vowel; the mixed of two consonants joined by one
vowel. There are no syllables in Arabic either beginning with a vowel or
consisting of one simply].

Arabic and the New Faith

There were two major dialectical groups of Arabic in early Islamic times. The
Qur’an is described as having been revealed to the prophet in the dialect of

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Hijaz, particularly the dialect of Quraysh3 in Mecca. Modern written Arabic is
modeled on that dialect. At that time, almost the whole society conversed and
communicated orally and understood their poetry and the Qur’an without
much formal education. It was simply their first language and mother tongue.
Yet, the situation changed after the wide spread of Islam. Islam was Arabic in
language but universal in scopes (Al Nasir 1993). Many non-Arab speakers
joined the new faith. Those people made mistakes (Anbary1960, cited in Al
Nasir 1993). Leaders of the new faith were concerned about the mistakes,
particularly those mistakes which reversed the meanings of the verses of the
Qur’an. A serious mistake was reported during the reign of the second Caliph 4
Omar5. That mistake was in the following Qur’anic verse:
‫“ "إن ال بريء من المشركين و رسله‬
transliterated : “Inna Llaha bari’un mina lmushrikina wa rasuluhu”
(God and his messenger denounce the infidels)
A man read the last word as “rasulihi” instead of “rasuluhu” with the difference
only in vowels inserted above the last word but with the two words spelled the
same. Such a mistake rendered the meaning as “God denounces the infidels
and his messengers” (Asphahani, Vol. 12 p.299, cited in Al Nasir 1993) which
totally contradicts the correct meaning.

Until then, the Arabic script had a number of symbols, which represented
more than one speech sound. The short vowels were not written in the script.
The system of adding dots above or under the symbols had not yet been
introduced. It is worthy here to quote some observations by Barr (1976, cited
in Henderson 1982) saying: “in scripts like Arabic and Hebrew, vowel markers
were added at a late stage, and their accidental status is attested by the fact
that even then their use was optional and they were added apart from (above
or below) the line of text. Marking of vowels was achieved by the use of a
subset of the consonant signs, mainly h, w, y, aleph. When so used, these
signs carried a different sense from that of their normal consonantal role”.
Arab readers must have depended on their intuition as native speakers of
Arabic to grasp the desired meaning (Al Nasir 1993). They could conclude the
accurate meaning from the context and were able to read without mistakes. A
very old copy of the Qur’an displayed in the British Museum believed to be
written in the eighth century displays such symbols. In this version of the
Qur’an, dots are used with a limited number of symbols and short vowels
have no symbols (No. Or. 2165, ff-67v68r).

There are various accounts as to when and who exactly introduced the
diacritical marks and dots in Arabic for reasons of standardization; notably to
help the non-native Arabic speakers to read the Qur’an without mistakes that
might, as explained earlier, change the meanings. Al Nasir (1993) thinks that it
was not until 688 AD when the fourth Caliph Ali 6 was in Basra in Iraq that he
discussed the problems of misreading the Qur’an with Abu Al Aswad Al
Du’ali7. The Caliph Ali discovered many mistakes in the Arabic of the people of
3
Quraysh was a small tribe from which came the Prophet of Islam Muhammad.
4
Caliph is the title of the Muslim rulers who ruled after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
5
Omar was the second Caliph in Islam to rule after the death of Mohammad.
6
Ali was Muhammad’s cousin.
7
His real name was Zalim Bin Omar, a famous prince and poet (1--69 H.)

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Basra, and he wanted something to be done in order to correct that situation.
Al Du’ali started by writing the description of the Arabic language, which was
approved by the Ali. After the latter’s death, Al Du’ali was asked by the new
ruler of Basra to carry on what he had started. Al Du’ali asked for some
scribes to work with him. First he invented symbols to stand for short vowels
in the script, instructing the scribe to watch him read the Qur’an and write dots
with the characters according to the shape of his mouth. “If you find me
opening my mouth with the letter put a dot above the letter; if I round my
mouth put a dot in front of the letter; if I break my mouth put a dot under the
letter. If I follow the letter by nasality put two dots on the letter” (A. Al Nasir
1993). One copy of the Qur’an in the British Library, is believed to be one of
three oldest copies remaining of the Qur’an, shows these marks in red ink
against the black ink of the script. (No. Or. MS. 1397, f.15b).

Ali Rawi (2000)8 devoted the first chapter of his book (The Arabic Handwriting)
to the origins of the Arabic writing system. Rawi (2000) agrees with Al Nasir
(1993) that it was Abu Al Aswad Al Dou’ali who invented the dots and other
diacritical marks in order to standardize the different readings of the Qur’an at
the time of the Caliph Ali. But Rawi mentioned that it was Al Hajjaj bin Yusuf 9
who was alarmed by the different ways of reading the Qur’an in Iraq at that
time. In order to standardize the form of Arabic for the sake of correct
readings of the Qur’an, Al Hajjaj assigned his two clerks Nasr bin Assim and
Yahya bin Ya’mor to put special signs and marks to differentiate between
similar letters and sounds in Arabic.
In his controversial article published in the British Guardian daily newspaper
entitled ‘Querying the Qur’an’, Dr. Gerd R. Puin, a German academic, attacks
the integrity of the Qur’anic text by giving an example about the different
readings of the Qur’an. He, and as such implicitly implying different readings
of the Arabic letters and diacritical marks, argues that Hajjaj bin Yusuf was
proud of inserting more than a 1000 alifs (first letter of the Arabic alphabet) in
the Qur’anic text. He also argues that it was Hajjaj who was responsible for
putting the diacritical marks in the Qur’an and thus ignoring Abu Al Aswad Al
Du’ali and Al Farahidi10 who were both mentioned in various studies (Holes
1995, Al Nasir 1993, Rawi 2000).

The Arabic Alphabet

Arabic, with its 28-letter alphabet, might seem easy enough to learn since it is
a phonemic alphabet. Of the twenty-eight named letters of the Arabic
conventional alphabet, all but one represent consonantal phonemes (Holes
1995). But the fact that the script is defective so that short vowels do not
appear graphemically in the Arabic script, gives rise to different pronunciation
of the same phoneme. In order to compensate for this lack of vowels in the
8
Ali Rawi is a famous Arabic Calligrapher.
9
Hajjaj bin Yusuf was the governor of Iraq from 40-95 H / 694-714 AD
10
Al Khalil bin Ahmad Al Farahidi, born in 100 H in Oman and educated in Basra in Iraq. Died 170 H.

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script, Arabic makes full use of the diacritical marks. However, these diacritical
marks are not used in every day life Arabic, leaving the reader vulnerable to
his/her own interpretation and/or understanding of the semantic connotation
derived from a given context. The twenty-eighth letter of the alphabet (‘alif)
has no consonantal value of its own, but it has a number of orthographic uses.
One of these uses is to carry the sign for the twenty eighth consonant, the
glottal stop (hamza) which is phonologically a fully functional consonant
despite the fact that it is not often considered a separate letter of the Arabic
alphabet. This, we think plus the cursive nature of the Arabic orthography form
a potential problem for dyslexic readers and learners of Arabic. According to
Holes (1995), this means that words with quite different meanings like
(darasa) he studied, (durisa) it was studied, (dars) lesson, (darrasa) he taught
and (durrisa) it was taught, are homographic in normal handwriting or print.
The high number of inflectional morphemes, the irregularity of the Arabic
conjugation of verbs and the full use of dots to distinguish between different
letters also makes it more difficult for a dyslexic in both reading and writing
Arabic. This is due to the Arabic root system. Wightwick & Gaafar (1998)
argue that the key to understand how Arabic grammar works is in its system
of roots. Once learners understand how roots work, they can start to identify
which are the root letters of a word and understand the patterns they produce.
They also argue that the learners will then be able to form the different
structures following the patterns and use their knowledge to pronounce words
correctly and even to guess the meaning of new vocabulary. Arabic is a
Semitic language whose vocabulary is mostly based on trilateral roots (Asfour
1997). These roots are mostly verbs in the past tense third person singular
masculine gender. Thus ‫ كتب‬transliterated katab (he wrote) consists of three
consonants k-t-b with vowels placed in between. These three consonants
remain in the same order in any word derived from this root; variations in
meaning result from changers in either internal vowels, from doubling one of
the consonants, from affixes or from any combinations of these. The following
are some of the possible derivations of k-t-b:
‫ كتب‬katab ( he wrote) ‫ كتبت‬katbat (she wrote)
‫ كتبت‬kattabat ( she caused someone to write) ‫ كتبنا‬katabna (we wrote)
‫ تكاتبوا‬tkatabu ( they wrote to each other ) ‫كتاب‬ kitab ( book)
‫ كتب‬kutub ( books) ‫ مكتوب‬maktub (written, letter)
‫ كاتب‬katib ( writer) ‫كتاب‬ kuttab (writers)
‫ مكتب‬maktab ( office & desk) ‫مكتبه‬ maktabeh ( library)

It can be seen from the aforesaid expose, that Arabic writing is almost entirely
phonemic. “However, the practice of not writing vowels or other orthographic
signs with phonological significance (a particular target of educators and script
reformers, both Arab and non-Arab) makes it difficult even for educated Arabs
to read with complete accuracy unless they have had a thorough grounding in
normative MSA” (Holes 1995).