Motke: The Arabic language before Islam!

Submitted by dhimmi no more, Feb 17, 2019 at 13:16

Hi Motke,

You wrote:

>Watching that youtube video I couldn't help noticing the ح/خ and ش/س switches when moving between Syriac and Arabic. E.g., Syriac's حمش is Arabic's خمس.
(In other words, Syriac uses the same consonants as in Hebrew (and there's also an 'e' vowel, in the same places).)

Very true. However, Arabic and Syriac have very much in common. Also the Syriac alphabet is the source of the Arabic alphabet.

>Do you happen to know the reason for these switches?

The best to answer to this question would be from the likes of Noam Chomsky.

However, I believe that the extra letters added to the initial 22 letters of the Arabic alphabet was an invention by the early Muslim grammarians and most of them were non Arabs and many were Iranians and their command of Syriac would have been almost zero and at times they were also guessing about the meaning of Arabic words in the Qur'an! Really a disaster

I suspect that Muhammad spoke Syriac after all he was a Tajir (merchant) and traveled often to Syriac. How could he conduct his business without knowledge of Syriac. Also the Qur'an is full of Syriac words and Syriac grammar. How could he understand the Qur'an without knowledge of Syriac?

More? How do we know that the word cave in Arabic is not معارة? After all the ductus of the Qur'an lacked the nuqat and these nuqat were added by the grammarians that were not Arabs. I guess we will never know

>(I also know of the ع/غ switch, in Hebrew <-> Arabic (e.g., Arabic's مغارة is Hebrew's معرة), but I don't know if it exists in Syrian <-> Arabic as well.)

As I explained to you in Syriac the meaning of the word in Syriac is معرتا (using Arabic abgad) and it is the same as in Hebrew

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