The Place of the Arab People and the Arabic Language Among the Semitic Peoples and Languages – 1

As a result of modern scholarly research, the peoples and languages of the world have been classified into various groupings. The Arab people are counted among the Semitic peoples (The Semites), and the Arabic language among the Semitic languages (Semitic Languages).³⁸ Both terms ultimately derive from the genealogy in the Old Testament in which the three sons of Noah—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—are named, and from which all nations after the Flood are deemed to have descended. The Semitic peoples are regarded as the progeny of Shem, and the languages of these peoples are called the Semitic languages.

Within the Semitic grouping, the more notable peoples and their tongues are the Assyrian, Babylonian, Aramaean, Hebrew, Phoenician, Ethiopian, and Arab.

It has not been definitively determined where the original homeland of the Semites—whence they dispersed to different regions—was located. Various theories identify Armenia, Babylonia, Lower Mesopotamia (the lower Euphrates), Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula as the ancestral home of the descendants of Shem. Some of these hypotheses are now considered quite weak, and no conclusive proof has been adduced for any one of them. Nevertheless, in the judgment of many eminent investigators, the arguments favoring Arabia as the original Semitic homeland are comparatively weightier.

A second important question concerns the root-language from which all the Semitic languages derive. Here, too, certainty is difficult. The upshot of long scholarly debates is that the primal Semitic language (Proto-Semitic)—termed Ursemitisch in Western scholarship—has perished. It is, moreover, commonly accepted that although Arabic, in terms of its earliest attested remains, is younger, it has survived in a comparatively purer state; for that reason, it stands closer to the original than the other Semitic tongues and, above all, preserves more of the original’s distinguishing features.

In brief, the Arab people are the best representatives of the Semitic nations, and Arabic of the Semitic languages. One reason is that Arabia’s geographical environment exhibited a kind of uniformity in which change proceeded very slowly, allowing linguistic and ethnic traits to endure longer in a relatively unalloyed form. Another is that, by virtue of Islam, the Arabs were able to diffuse their traditions far and wide, stamping large parts of the world with their culture—an honor accorded to no other Semitic people. The legacy left by the other Semitic nations is scant and obscure, making it difficult to form a vivid, living picture of them.³⁹ Likewise, among the Semitic languages, the only one to have remained in sustained, continuous use in the full sense is Arabic. Geʿez survives merely as the ecclesiastical language of Ethiopia.⁴⁰ A few remnant dialects of Aramaic in villages around Damascus keep its memory alive.⁴¹ Hebrew, as a dormant language, was transmitted across generations within Jewish religious and scholarly circles until, in the modern period, it was consciously revived;⁴² even for its scholarly study, recourse to Arabic remains indispensable.⁴³ The rest of the languages have altogether vanished. In short, the religious, scholarly, literary, and civilizational resources preserved in Arabic, the distances across which it has spread, and the scale on which it is still used—none of the other Semitic languages has been granted even a fraction of that share.

[To Be Continued]