The Origins of Arabic Explained

what a busy day [Music] oh arabic i think the best way to describe arabic as a language is legendary we have this lovely anecdote by muawiyah the first umayyid caliph who asks his tutor who are the arab and who are the arab mustariba and he responds the tudor responds well their ad tamud tasm gadis and the first among them was yarub he spoke arabic and everyone took it from him in other accounts jarob is considered the father of yemen what's fascinating about this anecdote is that at this moment in the history of arabic speakers arabic speakers became interested in their very distant past where did this all come from where does the language that we speak come from what is and it's obviously beyond the horizon of memory and so you have stories like this coming about abraham carried off his son ishmael from his land and made him settle a mecca and he learned arabic there from gorham and those are the arab mustariba there are other accounts for example for example ibn al-khalbhi well he says the first to speak arabic he doesn't mention yaro the first to speak arabic or the great giants who traveled to arabia from babylon and they and guruhum are the arab the language of ancient giants which is also very very eighth century would say antiquarian folklorist completely different idea of where arabic came from god revealed arabic with its 29 letters to the prophet so not it's not even a terrestrial language anymore it is something divinely inspired arabic at this moment had gone from being a language of nomads who on the world scene were probably not that important to becoming the language of the largest empire the world had seen to that moment that is legendary and a legend like that deserves an epic past and so there is no shortage of stories like this to explain where arabic came from the question we have is a bit different if we wanted to tell arabic story based only on examinable evidence evidence that we can study that we can date that we can scrutinize what would that story look like [Music] this is what pre-islamic arabia looked like traditionally to those who talked about it it was a blank canvas an empty desert with no sources because the ancient arabs of course were illiterate and isolated and so they produced nothing that could be studied by later generations and so because it was an empty canvas of this sort you could creatively paint all kinds of stories and narratives to explain your present condition on it the earliest sources that our that the early scholars up until really the 19th century had to scrutinize the history of arabic were of course the quran and the oral poems we couldn't see beyond this point if we focused on uh examinable evidence but there were clues there were clues for something more ancient something pre-arabic in arabia for example in alhamdani who's a ninth century geographer and his book mentioned the existence of another language in arabia there was arabic but there was also something called himyaritik himari the the the ancient civilization of yemen spoke a language distinct from arabic and they had a different script this is the script of himyar or what we call today the south arabian script the musnad it seems that hamdani here really did know the letters of this ancient alphabet very very nice example the fact that this knowledge survived quite late but sometimes thereafter sometime after this period knowledge was forgotten but everything we've looked at all of this rich beautiful uh written heritage of the arabic language it all is a dead end none of this all of everything we looked at dies off none of these scripts none of these traditions become the way to write arabic the way to write arabic happened here in the nabatean kingdom here we have arabic speakers who are the elite and ruling a kingdom that span from the southern and its wise from the southern levant into north arabia up to hijr and but they unlike the nomads on their borders did not write their language they did all of their business administration public inscriptions using the aramaic language and the aramaic script so they used a foreign language a language that was different from what they spoke day to day to conduct their business and as time goes on so the nabataeans are conquered the romans take them over the nabataeans fall their political influence disappears but their script and writing tradition survives and continues in north arabia and continues to be used by arabic speakers an arabic words are coming into the language as well they're starting to abandon the aramaic and use more arabic and as we get finally when we start to realize arabic we finally when we get to the end of the 5th century and the 6th century we start to see the arabic script it had fully evolved and arabic the arabic script as we know it takes shape so this is the writing tradition that survives remember the nebateans were using aramaic for what they were using for business and administration and even though it was a script that wasn't very well suited for arabic as you know it had to be modified later with dots and everything or the other scripts didn't and also it became and and and we'll see that over between the fourth century and forward the other inscriptions at least as far as we can tell the other arabian alphabets in north arabia seem to disappear it doesn't mean that arabic is disappearing no arabic is just universally being written in a new script in the north and it is this script the late nabatean script let's talk about scripts so in the first half and this is the history of arabic we went from the epic past to the evidence-based history the first half of the first millennium bce we have a few examples of arabic being written in these north arabian musnad type alphabets but they're undifferentiated we can't necessarily identify whether it's this kind of famous or that it's very early and the knowledge about that period is very little but once we move to the second half we see an explosion of arabic writing traditions arabic is being written in different ways by different communities across north arabia and the southern levant there are many different kinds of arabics and they're being written with different scripts and in different contexts but then after the fourth and fifth century all we have is this transitional this nabataean arabic script and finally from the sixth century to the present we might primarily have the arabic script now let's look at the story so we did script let's look at the story of language the first half of the first millennium bce we have the southern levant in northwest arabia that's where arabic that's the largest concentration of arabic language that we find but by the second half it's starting to move south we find some arabic or arabic type influences at karyat and this is the same period that we get in the south arabian inscriptions mentioning mentions of arab so so it's the second half of the second millennium so we are looking here at what must have been some kind of migration that's not yemen to syria but it seems to be syria and hijaz to yemen of course there's you don't need to explain why someone would want to migrate south it's a yemen is a very fertile place it's a center of civilization there are a lot of motivations for that and that's what we see in the epigraphic rhetoric the same is here and even the fourth and sixth century najdran even further south we start to see examples of arabic there and then finally in the seventh century arabic seems to be attested all over arabia the entire peninsula is contains examples of arabic so and of course it's easy to explain this historically here right we know what happens in the 7th century that would spread finally arabic everywhere and it is the uh the appearance of islam and the unification of arabia by the prophet and his successors so that concludes the history the evidence-based history [Music] [Music] you

Channel: ILM FILM

Views: 58,036

Keywords: Abu Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdani, Arabic History, History of Arabs, ilm Film Studios, Islamic History Institute, Dr. Ahmed Jallad, Wahb ibn Munabbih, Origins of Arabic, Safaitic, Aramaic, Ancient Arabia, history of Arabia, Himyaritic language, Arab Migration, History of Islam, Spread of Islam, Muslim History, Islamic History, Ancient History, Islamic History Channel, ilm film, history of arabs, history of arabia, himyaritic language, arabic language, world history, Islam

Id: AdxDUnJN3Ns

Length: 9min 56sec (596 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020