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The Origins of the Arabic Language
🕑 Added 2021-06-18 07:38:43 +0000 UTCMy latest video on the "origins" and early development of the Arabic language. From its earliest attested examples in northern Arabia, through the important period of the Nabataean kingdom and into the Islamic period, where the Qur'an and its codification played a major role in the development of the language.
Don't forget to check out the soruces in the description and Ahmad al-Jallad's excellent lecture which I have also linked there!
Hope you enjoy it!
Comments
Filip Holm
Thank you for the feedback! It's a combination of time concerns but also the fact that this is outside of my field of expertise, so I can't have the same nuanced and broad approach to the topic. I did my best to summarize the research by scholars like al-Jallad and MacDonald, but I am fully aware that there are many aspects and points that I missed!
Wrik Chatterjee
A couple small criticisms: (1) Did you cut out the detail that Semitic itself is a branch of Afroasiatic because of time concerns? Personally I find it a very eye-opening introduction to the phenomenon of language spreads and language shift that Arabic's more distant relatives include the likes of Hausa, Coptic, or Somali. Related to this is the fact that Arabic likely displaced Coptic and the Amazigh languages so successfully because they are distant relatives and share some typological features in common, such as a templatic format involving vowel interchange. Arabic's displacement of Aramaic in the Levant can doubtless also be partly attributed to the fact that they are (closer) relatives. (2) A mention of the Modern South Arabian languages in Yemen and Oman, such as Jibbali or Mehri, would also have been useful in shedding light on other Semitic languages spoken in the Arabian Peninsula. Overall I really liked it!
Filip Holm
Done.
Filip Holm
As I listened with my headphones, I realized that the music is way too loud in some parts. I'll fix it and replace the current video!
