Day 7: Literature and Historical Reflection!

To start off the seventh day of my A-Term, I began to focus on the history of the Arabic language through reading more of the book, Introduction to Arabic: A Modern Literary Language. 

    The part that I was assigned to read today mainly talked in more detail about how the Arabic language developed from classical Arabic to the modern Arabic that's spoken today. One part that I thought was really interesting was how Arabic and the society around it was able to evolve and adapt to the changing world, yet still keeping many of it's classical roots. 

    In addition to this, the author also goes in-depth about how Arabic language can come to terms with modern phenomenon, One of the ways detailed in the book is "analogy" or "Al-Qiyas." For example, the Arabic verb sallata. The classic meaning was to give power or authority. This was thought to be analaogus in modern terms to electricity, which also uses the terms power. 

    In modern Arabic, the verb now means "to charge with electrical current," because power is analaogus to electricity. This was another part of the book that really interested me, since it was something that I've never really knew and/or learned about before reading this book. He also discusses many other terms and methods in the same sense, such as "Al-Naht," which is the formation of compound words. Another method discussed is the assimilation of foreign words in order to create new words; it's called "Al-Tarib." An example of this method is the word "Television," which has been assimilated into the Arabic language. It also has it's own verb, talfaza, which means "to televise."

    These are all methods that are used in order to create a modern lexicon of the Arabic language.

This whole part of Introduction to Arabic: A Modern Literary Language was very fascinating to me because this reading helped introduce to the history and evolution of the Arabic language, which was something that I didn't know much about before starting this book.