Middle Arabic
Middle Arabic is not a historical language level , but a language level . It denotes an intermediate form between the classical standard Arabic common in the Koran and the Arabic dialects , which have always been reserved for oral use. In Arabic the term al-luġa al-wusṭā (اللغة الوسطى) is used. Written testimonies are mainly received from Jews and Christians who lived under Islamic rule. They wrote in Judaeo-Arabic or in a Christian-Arabic dialect.
Historical and linguistic development
Middle Arabic is the linguistic result of the spread of Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries. These conquests influenced the entire history of the Arabs , their social conditions and their mentality. The Arabic language also went through a fundamental change during this period.
In pre-Islamic Arabia and until the beginning of Mohammed's ministry , the majority of Arabs lived in almost complete isolation from the rest of the world. In search of grazing grounds, they crossed the Arabian Peninsula and engaged in endless tribal feuds. This may explain the fact that the Arabic used at that time was linguistically closer to the archaic Akkadian, which was already extinct in the first century AD , than to the Canaanite or Aramaic . Due to the almost complete absence of external influences and the continuation of the original way of life, the archaic structure of Arabic was retained. Various dialects were spoken at that time, apparently divided into an eastern group around the Persian Gulf and a western group with the dialects of the Hejaz . In addition to these tribal dialects, a poetic, cross-tribal Arabic developed during this period, which is preserved in the poems of the Mu'allaqat .
The spread of Islam after the death of Muhammad led to a radical linguistic upheaval. The language boundary between the eastern and western dialects was blurred as the different tribes camped together on their conquests, and new dialects emerged. The contact of the Arabs with foreign peoples also played a decisive role , often cultivating an urban culture in places like Basra or Kufa in today's Iraq , which arose from military camps. An increasing proportion of the population began to speak a faulty Arabic - not only in pronunciation, but also in syntax . The languages of the peoples subjugated by the Arabs (e.g. Middle Persian in the earlier Sassanid Empire or Middle Greek in Eastern Stream ) had lost their inflection system in the course of history . As in modern Arabic dialects, as a result of these linguistic contacts, the declension and conjugation endings were omitted . Examples are the nunation of nouns or the verbal forms of the apocopy , and the pronunciation of pausal forms has been adapted to the contextual forms . Difficulties in word formation were circumvented by numerous circumscribing phrases.
Middle Arabic texts are mainly from Christian and Jewish authors. They were less committed to the ideal of the Koranic language and ʿArabīya than Muslim Arabs. ʿArabīya (عربية) originally and fundamentally means “Arabic language”, but means in a transferred meaning established by Arabic philologists that the language codified in the Koran and the classical works of literature is considered unchangeable and is the only one allowed to be written down. Examples of this are the Judeo-Arabic translation of the Pentateuch by Saadia Gaon , which has only been found incompletely to this day, and the Kitāb al-Anwār ("Book of Lights") by the Karaite Yaʿqūb al-Qirqisānī from the first half of the 10th century, which contains a compilation of Karaean religious regulations and an overview of religious movements within Judaism. Christian-Arabic texts are mainly translations from Greek and Syriac , which were copied in monasteries in Judea and are mostly kept in St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai . However, there are also some texts by Muslim authors in which a dialectal influence can at least be assumed. This includes the hadith collectionالجامع al-Jamiʿ by ʿAbdallāh ibn Wahb , in which the absence of the Hamza is strikingin the edition published by Jean David-Weill in 1939.
The simultaneous use of colloquial language and classic written language has led to a diglossia in the Arab world to this day . In Central Arabic texts, this special form of bilingualism often leads to pseudo-corrections , which arise from the faulty effort to improve the originally colloquial style. The most famous text example of Middle Arabic, however, is the first Arabic translation, probably from the 8th century, of the stories from 1001 nights .
Individual evidence
- ^ Joshua Blau: The Renaissance of Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic: Parallels and Differences in the Revival of Two Semitic Languages. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981. p. 7.
- ↑ Joshua Blau: A Handbook of Early Middle Arabic. P. 99 and 107.
- ↑ Joshua Blau: A Handbook of Early Middle Arabic. P. 72.
- ↑ Joshua Blau: A Handbook of Early Middle Arabic. Pp. 61-62.
- ^ Bengt Knutsson: Studies in the Text and Language of Three Syriac-Arabic Versions of the Book of Judicum, with Special Reference to the Middle Arabic Elements . Brill, 1974. S. XI. Online partial view
- ^ Jürgen Leonhardt : Latin: History of a world language. CH Beck, 2009. ISBN 978-3-406-56898-5 . P. 180. Online partial view
literature
- Joshua Blau : The Emergence of Middle Arabic. Chapter I in: The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judaeo-Arabic: A Study of the Origins of Neo-Arabic and Middle Arabic . Oxford University Press 1965. 2nd edition 1981. ISBN 965-235-010-9 .
- Joshua Blau: Studies in Middle Arabic. Magnes Press, The Hebrew University Jerusalem 1988. ISBN 965-223-683-7 .
- Joshua Blau: A Handbook of Early Middle Arabic. Max Schloessinger Memorial Foundation, The Hebrew University Jerusalem 2002. ISBN 965-7258-00-6 .
- Yosef Tobi: Written Judeo-Arabic. Colloquial versus Middle Arabic. In: Liesbeth Zack and Arie Schippers (eds.): Middle Arabic and Mixed Arabic: Diachrony and Synchrony. Brill, 2012. ISBN 978-90-04-22229-8 -, pp. 265-277.