Arabian imperialism

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Nov 30, 2011 at 10:32

SO wrote

>O.K. Dhimmi,Your articles are indicative of scholarship in your subject. Please answer these questions. What is the degree of similarity, ancient or modern between Arabic and Hebrew [Ivrit] ??

It is no secert that Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac have much in common as they are all Semitic languages and there is no doubt that Aramaic left its marks on all three languages keeping in mind that Syriac and Aramaic are almost one and the same

>I ask because it is impossible to get a straight or polite answer from Muslims at a nearby university.

You live in England right? Well most Muslims in England are not Arabs could this be why?

>Basically,which came first,which is the mother language

This you have to ask a linguist however there is no doubt that Aramaic was the major language of the Levants and even the Jews spoke Aramaic and even parts of the OT were written in Aramaic

As for the Arabs before Islam in the Levants, they spoke Arabic and Syriac and wrote their literary texts in Syriac or in Garshouni (Arabic written using Syriac alphabet) and yes we have very few literary texts in defective Arabic or Arabic/Syriac before islam

And the most important source of foreign words in the Qur'an is Syro-Aramaic and not Hebrew and even proper names in the Qur'an are loan names from Syriac and not Hebrew

>,Has the adoption of Islam stultified the original Arabic.

Good point. The first dictionary in Arabic was written 600 years after the death of Muhammad and it is called Lisan al-3Arab and it is really Middle Arabic as no one did speak the so called classical Arabic as the Arabic language changed after the Arab invasion through the contact between the invading Arabs and the superior civilizations that they invaded and the end results was that the civilized be it the Persians or the Syrians and the Egyptians affected the written as well as the spoken Arabic and most significant event was the translations of the Greek learning by Nestorians in Baghdad at Dar al-Hikma in the early 9th century CE by the likes of Ishaq Ibn Hunein and the introduction of many Arabized Greek words that did not exist in Arabic and I suspect by the time Ibn Manzur wrote his dictionary Lisan al-3Arab the Arabic language would have been very different to Muhammad and his generation

>Was Picture artistry "allowed" before Mohammed "realised" it offended Allah, unlike convoluted calligraphy which became the norm.

Well I happen to believe that there is no extant evidence to attest to the fact that there was a historical Muhammad and that the whole story of al-Hijaz and Mecca was made up by later generations. So the answer to your questions is that the dislike of dogs and pictures and arts in islam is a later creation by the Ulama and no more

I hope I helped

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