Tag: Arabic Language

ARABIC LANGUAGE: World Celebrates Arabic, ‘The Language of Poetry and the Arts’

  • UNESCO chooses theme for World Arabic Language Day 2023 
  • Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages, used daily by more than 400m people

Language is a main pillar of any society, and a driving force for connecting communities. As one of the six official languages in the UN, and one of the most spoken languages globally, Arabic is an incubator of culture, science and knowledge.

It is also one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, used daily by more than 400 million people.

World Arabic Language Day has been celebrated by UNESCO every year on Dec. 18 since 2012, the date coinciding with the day in 1973 that the UN General Assembly adopted Arabic as the sixth official language.

UNESCO recently chose “Arabic — the Language of Poetry and Arts” as the theme of World Arabic Language Day 2023 to highlight the role Arabic has played in poetry and art for centuries.

Experts told Arab News that Arabic has many characteristics and aesthetic values, both in written text and spoken discourse.

“Arabic language is very closely linked to the arts, literature and various cultural styles, from poetry to prose, to the rest of the literary genres, such as the story, the novel, the narrative, and poems in various artistic and scientific fields,” Mohammed Alfrih, a member of the board of directors of the Saudi ‎Publishers Association, said.

“We can hardly find another language that mimics the Arabic language in its elegance and its different expressive ability, and it is not surprising that non-native speakers confirmed that, let alone its native speakers,” he said.

Yousef Rabab’ah, a professor of Arabic language and literature at ‎Jordan’s Philadelphia University, said: “The Arabic language is characterized by features and characteristics in derivation, vocabulary, and idiomatic expressions that make it able to keep pace with developments in various fields, and this is proven objectively.” 

Rabab’ah‎, who is editor-in-chief of Afkar Magazine, which is published by the Jordanian Ministry of Culture, said: “The Arabic language has been able throughout its history to influence many arts related to it, for example the arts of decoration, in which the Arabic calligraphy was essential in its formation. Artists were able to adapt the Arabic letters and Arabic calligraphy to produce artistic paintings and beautiful decorations that we see in places of worship, the walls of castles, palaces, and on the covers of books.

“Likewise, Arab voices, and the way they are performed and controlled, have a great role in the arts of singing, music and mirth, and we will not forget the plastic arts that adopt the formations of Arabic calligraphy which enter into the drawings of this type of art,” he said.

According to Hanan ‎Al-Sharnouby, assistant professor of literature and criticism at Alexandria University, the Arabic language has a profound association with various forms of arts, and it is necessary for those seeking to engage in linguistic arts and speech sciences to master the language.

Al-Sharnouby noted that language and art are interconnected, influencing each other. She emphasized that quality content for films, series, and theater necessitates a language that reflects Arab identity effectively and that the rich heritage of Arabic serves as a solid foundation for sophisticated art that fully engages its audience. 

Mohammed Daud, a professor of Arabic language and dean of the ‎Faculty of Linguistics at Sudan University of Science and Technology,‎ said: “There are formative and structural characteristics common to natural human languages, in addition to what is specific to each language.

“The Arabic language is distinguished by these formative and structural characteristics without the rest of the languages. It is represented by the fact that Arabic is concerned with the aesthetic values in the written text and spoken discourse, taking into account the semantic differences between words that appear synonymous in different structural contexts, which enabled it to express the same meaning in different ways and with amazing accuracy.

“This is reflected in its illustrative styles and its individual and collective creative arts, and applies to the ways of thinking of its speakers in their keenness to portray the details of artistic situations and the integrity of their creative production,” he said.

Daud said that the future of the Arabic language is bright due to the stability of its morphological, grammatical and semantic systems, and its ability to derive words and generate meanings through these means.

Tha’er Alethari, a professor of criticism and literature at University of Wasit in Iraq, said: “It is important to realize that Arabic is the only language in the world that has been understood for 2,000 continuous years.

“We read pre-Islamic poetry, understand it, and perhaps quote it on a contemporary issue, and this communication has given the language vitality and the ability to adapt to every era.

“There are two linguistic characteristics that helped it in this, the first of which is the abundance of linguistic roots in it, and the second is its etymological nature. Arabic does not depend on antecedents and suffixes in generating connotations, as is the case with most human languages. subject, noun, adverbs, etc,” he said.

source/content: arabnews.com (headline edited)

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World Arabic Language Day has been celebrated by UNESCO every year on Dec. 18 since 2012. (Reuters)

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ARABIC LANGUAGE

ARABIC LANGUAGE : From Gibraltar to Guadalajara, how the Arabic Language left its mark on the World

Beyond the Middle East, scores of towns and cities owe their names to the region’s far-reaching influence.

In 711, Arab commander Tariq ibn Ziyad led his victorious Berber army across the narrow strait between North Africa and Spain, where he took the first step towards founding what would become the Muslim state of Al Andulus.

To honour his achievement, the mountain where the army had first landed was named after him. They called it Jabal Tariq – Mount Tariq.

More than 1,000 years later, we now call it Gibraltar , the name evolving with the centuries that saw the peak regained by Spain, only to later become a British territory.

It is a reminder that Arab influence is often visible in plain sight, sometimes far from the boundaries of the Middle East.

The Mexican city of Guadalajara is known for mariachi music and two football World Cups. It has little to do with river beds or stones, yet that is the origin of its name: Wadi Al Hajarah, translated as the Valley of Stone from Arabic, or possibly the fortified valley.

Guadalajara in Mexico is also a product of conquest. In the 15th century, it was founded by a conquistador who named it in honour of his boss Nuno de Guzman, who had been born in the Spanish city Guadalajara, which once fitted the description. The city in Spain was named during the Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula.

The South Pacific island of Guadalcanal, more than 16,000 kilometres from Spain, was the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War, with more than 30,000 Japanese and American soldiers killed in six months of fighting.

Guadalcanal was part of the British Solomon Islands, now independent, but had been colonised by Spain in 1568 and named after a town near Seville, one of the country’s biggest cities in the south. Seville was originally founded by Arabs as Wadi Al Qanal.

These names mark the rise and fall of empires – Arab, Spanish and British – and the conflicts that shaped our world, from the creation of the Caliphates, which once stretched from Afghanistan to Portugal, to the British Empire, on which it was said the sun never set.

London’s Trafalgar Square honours one of that empire’s great heroes, Admiral Lord Nelson, who defeated the combined might of the French and Spanish naval fleets in 1805.

The square and the column that carries Nelson’s statue take their name from the Cape of Trafalgar, where the famed battle of the same name took place offshore. It was first known as Tarif Al Ghar or Tarif Al Gharb, thought to mean either Cape of the Cave or the West, respectively, in the original Arabic.

It is estimated at least 4,000 Spanish words have their origins in Arabic. Benacazon, another city in Spain, was originally Bani Qasum, or the Sons of Qasum. El Burgo, in Malaga, is simply “the tower”, or “al burj”. In neighbouring Portugal, the popular holiday destination the Algarve was once Al Gharb, or The West.

Granada, the city at the heart of Islamic Spain, was first Garnata to the Arabs, although the meaning of the name is unclear and may be much older. Its famous palace, the Alhambra, comes from the Arabic “al hamra”, or “red one”, after the colour of its walls.

Arab reach in Europe stretched beyond Spain. The Italian island of Sicily was an emirate between 831 and 1091, with the city of Marsala, famous for its wine, probably either Marsa Ali – Ali’s harbour or anchorage – or Marsa Allah. Many smaller towns begin with the prefix “cala”, evolving from the Arabic word “qalat”, or fortification.

In France, the small town of Ramatuelle, close to Saint-Tropez, was once ruled by the Moors, who raided the Rhone Valley in the ninth and 10th centuries. At that period, it was called Rahmatallah, an Arabic phrase meaning “mercy of God”.

The Bosnian town of Gornji Vakuf-Uskoplje derives the second part of its name from the Islamic word “waqf”, meaning a charitable gift.

Thousands of kilometres away, and on another continent, the Comoro Islands in the Indian Ocean, owe their name to the Arabic “qamar”, or moon. The population converted to Islam as far back as the 7th century.

In East Africa, Mozambique was named by Portuguese colonisers after the offshore island of the same name. That Mozambique is actually derived from Mussa Bin Bique, the Arab trader who ruled the island before the Portuguese took over in 1544.

In the Middle East, though, many place names are derived from languages other than Arabic. Baghdad comes from Farsi for “God’s gift”; Byblos is Greek, as is Alexandria in Eygpt, which is named for Alexander the Great.

The city of Aleppo is called Halab, which is originally Aramaic, the language of the Hebrew Bible. Beirut is unclear but possibly a Phoenician word for a “well”.

And Amman, the capital of Jordan? This shows how complex the origin of place names can be. Three thousand years ago it was founded as Rabbath Ammon by the Ammonites, who spoke a Semitic language. Rabbath, originally used to mean “king”, but was dropped as the city eventually became Amman.

For around 50 years though, in the 3rd century, it was part of the kingdom of the Pharaoh Ptolemy II, who renamed it using a combination of the Greek words “brotherly” and “love” – “phileo” and “adelphos” – or Philadelphia.

Nearly 2,000 years later, the Quaker William Penn named a new town he was building in the American colony of Pennsylvania. Inspired by the sentiments of Ptolemy, he also called it Philadelphia in a state which, incidentally, also includes a Damascus, Hebron and Bethlehem.

source/content: thenationalnews.com (headline edited)

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ARAB WORLD