Christian Arabic

Christian Arabic is a dialect spoken and written by people who use a Christian Oriental language, especially Syriac, as the liturgical language. It is characterized by the strong influence of the liturgical language in grammar and lexicons .

Since the Abbasid period , Christian theologians, who were often doctors at the same time, used the Arabic language to write down works of medical, scientific or philosophical content while they wrote their theological works in Syriac. This Arabic was already influenced by Syriac. When Syrian began to decline as a literary language from around the 13th century , Christian Arabic increasingly emerged as an independent dialect. Christian writers who had to copy Syrian works in Syriac script were more skilled in this than in Arabic script. This led to the fact that Arabic texts were also transcribed in Syriac script (with some additional letters marked by diacritical marks). The writing of these texts is called Garschuni .

literature

Joshua Blau : A Grammar of Christian Arabic, Based Mainly on South-Palestinian Texts from the First Millennium , Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1967.
Kees Versteegh : The Arabic Language , Edinburgh University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-7486-1436-2 (pp. 123-125).