# Why is Maltese not Arabic?



## Arabus

Hi,

After reading the Wikipedia article on the language, I understand that Maltese is not considered Arabic because Arabic vocabulary make up only 32%-42% of the language.

However, this 40% represents the core, basic vocabulary. The morphology is almost perfect Arabic, with slight additions like the use of the Italian plural marker _-i_ (in Italian loanwords) alongside the Arabic plural marker -_ijiet_ and the broken plural patterns.

Now I wonder if the large quantity of loanwords is a reason to not consider this language Arabic. English is a Germanic language, but how much of English vocabulary is Germanic? I don't think it will be much more than 40%; but it is the basic vocabulary. I doubt that Moroccan Arabic has more pure Arabic vocabulary than 50%-60%.

I read the sample Maltese text in the Wiki article and I thought it was just like any North African dialect of Arabic, and not a strange one. I am Syrian, and I don't understand of Moroccan Arabic more than I do of Maltese.


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## Frank06

Hi,

The English Wiki-article mentions the following classification:
Afro-Asiatic, Semitic, West Semitic, Central Semitic, South Central Semitic, *Arabic*, *Maghrebi Arabic*, *Siculo-Arabic*, Maltese.
Sounds pretty Arabic to me . Even though classification has little to do with the lexicon, I fail to see the problem...

Maltese, with its alleged 42% of Arabic vocabulary *is* an Arabic language, while Persian, with its alleged 60% of Arabic vocabulary is *not* an Arabic language, and never will be. Classification is so much more than counting words. While on the other hand, the importance of classification shouldn't be too much overrated.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## sound shift

Certain languages seem to have been classified on the basis of politics as well as that of linguistics. Perhaps this is the case with Maltese.


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## berndf

I guess then you had to classify English as a variant of German because the base of English is a German dialect (Saxon). Languages can be closely related yet different.

Until not so long ago many people though the base of Maltese were Punic with Arabic influence. Today this theory has only few followers. The classification as an Maghrebi-Arabic dialect is relatively recent. Traditional classifications left the question open.


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## Hulalessar

Part of the problem is the perennial one of deciding whether you have a language or a dialect. When it comes to Arabic we have the standard language known as "Arabic". This is what I would learn if I went to university in England to "do Arabic". It can be spoken, but is not the everyday day language of anyone. It is essentially a written standard. None of the ways of speaking referred to as dialects of Arabic and spoken from Morocco to Iraq are written down (although of course they can be) and that is the main reason they are referred to as dialects, even though (so far as I understand) the everyday speech of Morocco is unintelligible in Iraq.

The position of Maltese is somewhat different from the other Arabic "dialects" as it has its own written standard. Maltese transcribed into Arabic script would not be Arabic. Of course "Moroccan" written in Arabic script would not be "Arabic" either. The difference is that Maltese is written and "Moroccan" is not. It ought not to be the case that whether or not there is a written form determines whether you have a language or a dialect, but it does tend to be an important factor taken into account.

Linguists regard "dialect" as a relative concept and will indeed often say: "There are no languages, only dialects". Accordingly a linguist looking at Maltese will be inclined to note that, despite the large number of loan words, it is a language that should be classified in the same groupìng as Arabic and not Italian and leave it there. At best, he will concede that _historically_ Maltese is a dialect of Arabic. He may suggest that if we are to insist that Maltese is a dialect of Arabic that Spanish and Italian have to be regarded as dialects of Latin; nobody suggests that - except to make a point when discussing the difficulty of deciding whether you have a dialect or language!

Linguists would I am sure like to be able to classify language on a rigorous scientific basis, but language is messy and gets caught up with politics, nationality, culture, religion and race. That is why linguistics is a social science and not a "hard" science. For any number of reasons a Maltese is keen to emphasise the uniqueness of being Maltese and will call what he speaks "Maltese". A person of any nationality who speaks "Arabic" on the other hand, whilst aware of his nationality, is perhaps inclined to see himself as part of a community that stretches from Morocco to Iraq and is not so worried about giving a separate name to what he speaks as opposed to what he writes.

So, the position of a Maltese who regards Maltese as a language and the position of an  Arabic speaker who regards it as a dialect (on the grounds that it is the same distance from Standard Arabic as any vernacular) are equally justifiable. It all depends on which end of the telescope you look through.


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## Frank06

sound shift said:


> Certain languages seem to have been classified on the basis of politics as well as that of linguistics. Perhaps this is the case with Maltese.


Could you please give an example?

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Alxmrphi

> I guess then you had to classify English as a variant of German because the base of English is a German dialect (Saxon)


Sorry to correct but many many people keep getting this wrong and this is to point out to them that English did not derive from German, but rather Germanic, which is different.

As this family tree points out.. the pathway from Modern English backwards is:
Modern English -> Middle English -> Old English -> (Anglo-Frisian) -> West Germanic -> (Proto) Germanic -> Proto-Indo European. Saxon should be considered as a parallel development from the same source, and not a 'base form'.

Like I said before, I'm certain you knew this already, it was just to avoid confusion with new readers.


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## Hulalessar

Frank06 said:


> Could you please give an example?
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank



Catalan/Valencian

Czech/Slovak

Romanian/Moldavian

Any Scandinavian language (except Icelandic)/Any other Scandinavian language (except Icelandic)

One of several languages spoken in the former Yugoslavia/another one of several languages spoken in the former Yugoslavia


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## sound shift

Frank06 said:


> Could you please give an example?
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank


Well, before I do, please note that I used the word "seem" in my ealier post. That means I am not an expert, from which it follows that I have no axe to grind in a matter that, thanks to the close links between language and "nation", can generate strong feelings.

1) I have read that the language spoken in Belarus is Russian to all intents and purposes and that the government of Belarus  promotes the use of the term "Belarussian" (language) to reinforce the idea that Belarus is an independent state. I don't know the truth of the matter.

2) Letzebürgesch is said to be very similar to the German dialects spoken over the border in Germany, but the Luxembourg authorities don't use the term "Luxembourg German" (in this they are different from the Swiss authorities, who have no problem with "Swiss German"). I assume the stance of the Luxembourg authorities is to some degree political.

I note that Malta, Belarus and Luxembourg are all very small compared with their neighbours and I wonder if the terms used to describe the languages used in those countries are a reflection of this.

I won't go into the question of the possibility that the choice of "neder*lands*" over "neder*duits*" is in part political .

Belated addition: Just look at the way the use of the term "Serbo-Croat" plummeted in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia.


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## Frank06

Hulalessar said:


> Catalan/Valencian
> Czech/Slovak
> Romanian/Moldavian


Ah, okay, I see what you mean. You're talking about the name, I was thinking you meant the classification proper (which in all three cases is almost identical, apart from the fancy labels).

Thanks for the explanation.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## WadiH

berndf said:


> I guess then you had to classify English as a variant of German because the base of English is a German dialect (Saxon). Languages can be closely related yet different.
> 
> Until not so long ago many people though the base of Maltese were Punic with Arabic influence. Today this theory has only few followers. The classification as an Maghrebi-Arabic dialect is relatively recent. Traditional classifications left the question open.



I honestly don't think you need to be some sort of specialist to realize that Maltese is basically the same as Tunisian but with a lot of European loanwords.  The idea that it is an Arabic-influenced version of Punic is as specious as saying that modern-day Egyptians speak an Arabic-influenced version of Coptic.  People believed all kinds of false things a few decades ago; that doesn't give them any validity.


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## berndf

Wadi Hanifa said:


> I honestly don't think you need to be some sort of specialist to realize that Maltese is basically the same as Tunisian but with a lot of European loanwords.  The idea that it is an Arabic-influenced version of Punic is as specious as saying that modern-day Egyptians speak an Arabic-influenced version of Coptic.  People believed all kinds of false things a few decades ago; that doesn't give them any validity.


Only that Punic and Arabic are *much *more closely related than Coptic and Arabic. Given the phonetic simplifications in Maltese it is really difficult to be sure there is not Punic base hidden somewhere.


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## Hulalessar

Frank06 said:


> Ah, okay, I see what you mean. You're talking about the name, I was thinking you meant the classification proper (which in all three cases is almost identical, apart from the fancy labels).
> 
> Thanks for the explanation.



Just for the record I was answering a question you posed of another poster, which perhaps I ought not to have done.

In a sense I think that naming and classifying are the same thing, though a scientific as opposed to an informal classification aims at being, well, scientific. Leaving aside the instances referred to, which linguists deal with by the neat concept of the pluricentric language, not all scientific classifications of languages are without their problems. A case in point is the Romance languages. All the classifications I have seen seem to me to be heavily influenced by geography, so that Catalan is Ibero-Romance whereas Occitan is Gallo-Romance when those two languages are more closely related to each other than Catalan is to Spanish or Occitan to French.


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## Arabus

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> The English Wiki-article mentions the following classification:
> Afro-Asiatic, Semitic, West Semitic, Central Semitic, South Central Semitic, *Arabic*, *Maghrebi Arabic*, *Siculo-Arabic*, Maltese.
> Sounds pretty Arabic to me . Even though classification has little to do with the lexicon, I fail to see the problem...
> 
> Maltese, with its alleged 42% of Arabic vocabulary *is* an Arabic language, while Persian, with its alleged 60% of Arabic vacabulary is *not* an Arabic language, and never will be. Classification is so much more than counting words. While on the other hand, the importance of classification shouldn't be too much overrated.
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank



You are right. I didn't see that. But in the article itself they never say Maltese is Arabic, even under the "classification" section.


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## Frank06

Arabus said:


> You are right. I didn't see that. But in the article itself they never say Maltese is Arabic, even under the "classification" section.


"Classification:
Maltese is a Semitic language descended from Siculo-Arabic,"

Link to Siculo-Arabic:
"Siculo-Arabic (or Sicilian Arabic) was a variety of Arabic spoken in Sicily, Malta, and Southern Italy between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries. It is extinct in Sicily, but it has developed into what is now the Maltese language on the islands of Malta."

I guess this solves the main topic of this thread. 

Maybe it's not a bad idea to start a new thread about the criteria and un/importance of language classification.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## origumi

berndf said:


> Only that Punic and Arabic are *much *more closely related than Coptic and Arabic. Given the phonetic simplifications in Maltese it is really difficult to be sure there is not Punic base hidden somewhere.


But Punic is a descendant of Phoenician, which should be very similar, nearly identical, to "spoken" Biblical Hebrew, at least around 1000 BC. This is thousands years after the Arabic vs. Aramaic/Canaanite/Ugrt split in the Semitic language tree. In later times the distance from Arabic is even larger.

Definite distinction between traces of Biblical Hebrew and Quranic Arabic should be possible. For Punic vs. Maghreb Arabic it must be even easier. Confusion between Arabic and Punic may occur only if the vocablary under discussion contains a very limited number of words common to both languages that suffered minimal sound shift.


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## berndf

origumi said:


> But Punic is a descendant of Phoenician, which should be very similar, nearly identical, to "spoken" Biblical Hebrew, at least around 1000 BC. This is thousands years after the Arabic vs. Aramaic/Canaanite/Ugrt split in the Semitic language tree. In later times the distance from Arabic is even larger.


Sure. But this is still very close compared to the distance between Arabic and Coptic. This was my point.


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## Arabus

berndf said:


> I guess then you had to classify English as a variant of German because the base of English is a German dialect (Saxon). Languages can be closely related yet different.
> 
> Until not so long ago many people though the base of Maltese were Punic with Arabic influence. Today this theory has only few followers. The classification as an Maghrebi-Arabic dialect is relatively recent. Traditional classifications left the question open.



I am sorry but English is Germanic not German. There is big difference between a parent language and a cousin language. What you're saying is like saying that Hebrew is a dialect of Arabic, which is wrong.

The Punic theory sounds weak to me-- what is in Maltese that is Canaanite and not Arabic? Nothing. What is in Maltese that is Arabic and not Canaanite? Almost everything.

This bogus talk about Phoenician reminds me of some Maronite Lebanese who claim that Lebanese Arabic is a Semitic language descendant from Phoenician and influenced by Arabic (the same description used for Maltese), and one of them has actually a website promoting this nonsense. (For those who don't know, Lebanese Arabic is one of the most similar Arabic vernaculars to the literary Classical Arabic.)

I understand what sound shift is saying. In the Arabic sphere we have two prominent examples-- Lebanese Arabic, like I said, is commonly denied  Arabic by the Maronite sect in that country, for political reasons as well as some historical and cultural reasons. The other example is Egyptian Arabic, which is denied as Arabic by some nationalist fanatics, and they have actually started a Wikipedia in the "Egyptian Language." It is funny though that both Lebanese and Egyptian are among the most conservative Arabic dialects, and I have yet to see real evidence of any foreign substratum in these two dialects. The "Coptic influence" often claimed to exist in Egyptian Arabic has almost no real evidence, and the same is true for the "Phoenician influence" in Lebanese.

On the other hand, there are Arabic dialects that show real foreign substrata; but these are all peripheral dialects and Lebanese and Egyptian are not among them. For example, Maghrebin dialects show real influence from Berber, especially in the vocal system and syllabification. Also in peripheral Sudan, peripheral Iraq, and in western Syria where the Canaanite (or western Aramaic) Shift  of _aa _to _oo _is obvious (e.g. _roos _for _raas_ "head") and they use plain Canaanite/Aramaic vocabulary like _aylee _for "my God," etc. Actually such dialects have come much closer towards Standard Arabic in the past century under the influence of education and the media. The dialect at my town, Aleppo, is still hardly intelligible for most Arabs, but Syrians can now generally understand it. However, a hundred years ago, I imagine that most Syrians wouldn't understand it, because it sounded more like an Aramaic/Turkish blend than Arabic. Today the dialect of Aleppo still has the Turkish prosody and some other Turkish features, but it has abandoned much of the original Turkish vocabulary in favor of Arabic loanwords.


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## berndf

Arabus said:


> The Punic theory sounds weak to me-- what is in Maltese that is Canaanite and not Arabic? Nothing. What is in Maltese that is Arabic and not Canaanite? *Almost everything.*


Sorry, but this doesn't sound like a serious* comment given how much Arabic and Canaanite have in common.

As I said. The theory of Punic origin of Maltese has only few followers today. I just wanted to explain why in older texts you find Maltese classified as Semitic but not as Arabic.
_________________________________________
_*My comment about English and German wasn't too serious either, I admit. Sorry for any confusion this provocative remark might have caused. If you are interested we can gladly discuss the nature of the relationship of German and English elsewhere._


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## Arabus

Frank06 said:


> "Classification:
> Maltese is a Semitic language descended from Siculo-Arabic,"
> 
> Link to Siculo-Arabic:
> "Siculo-Arabic (or Sicilian Arabic) was a variety of Arabic spoken in Sicily, Malta, and Southern Italy between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries. It is extinct in Sicily, but it has developed into what is now the Maltese language on the islands of Malta."
> 
> I guess this solves the main topic of this thread.
> 
> Maybe it's not a bad idea to start a new thread about the criteria and un/importance of language classification.
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank



I saw that; but being a "descendant of" Arabic, or a "development from" Arabic is not the same thing as being Arabic, which is what I am talking about.


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## Frank06

Arabus said:


> I saw that; but being a "descendant of" Arabic, or a "development from" Arabic is not the same thing as being Arabic, which is what I am talking about.


So, then what _are_ you talking about?

Frank


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## berndf

Arabus said:


> I saw that; but being a "descendant of" Arabic, or a "development from" Arabic is not the same thing as being Arabic, which is what I am talking about.


The Maltese don't consider their language to be Arabic. Given the fact that there is no sensible scientific criterion to distinguish dialects and languages this is enough of a reason for me.

E.g. the Dutch until the late 18th century regarded their language *a*_ Duits _(=German) language (therefore in English you still say _Dutch_). Now they don't anymore and call it _Nederlands_. And that is perfectly Ok.


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## Arabus

berndf said:


> Sorry, but this doesn't sound like a serious* comment given how much Arabic and Canaanite have in common.
> 
> As I said. The theory of Punic origin of Maltese has only few followers today. I just wanted to explain why in older texts you find Maltese classified as Semitic but not as Arabic.
> _________________________________________
> _*My comment about English and German wasn't too serious either, I admit. Sorry for any confusion this provocative remark might have caused. If you are interested we can gladly discuss the nature of the relationship of German and English elsewhere._


 
No it is a very serious comment. The definite article, the pronouns, the _Imala_, the broken plurals, the negative suffix _-sh_, etc. are all Arabic but not Canaanite. Not to mention of course the vocabulary and roots.

Some of the comments are made by people who do not know Arabic, so they misunderstand things. Arabic is not a language but a group of closely related dialects ... these dialects are similar but not mutually intelligible unless you learn them, which is usually an easy thing to do for a native speaker of one of them. I speak Syrian Arabic but I can't understand Maghrebine Arabic, because I have never learned it. When I was a kid I learned Egyptian and Arabian Arabic (just like how I learned MSA and Classical Arabic), and now I can understand these varieties very well. These varieties are not the same "language" and generally they are not mutually intelligible, but they are too similar to be considered different languages, so they are called dialects.



Hulalessar said:


> Part of the problem is the perennial one of deciding whether you have a language or a dialect. When it comes to Arabic we have the standard language known as "Arabic". This is what I would learn if I went to university in England to "do Arabic". It can be spoken, but is not the everyday day language of anyone. It is essentially a written standard. None of the ways of speaking referred to as dialects of Arabic and spoken from Morocco to Iraq are written down (although of course they can be) and that is the main reason they are referred to as dialects, even though (so far as I understand) the everyday speech of Morocco is unintelligible in Iraq.
> 
> The position of Maltese is somewhat different from the other Arabic "dialects" as it has its own written standard. Maltese transcribed into Arabic script would not be Arabic. Of course "Moroccan" written in Arabic script would not be "Arabic" either. The difference is that Maltese is written and "Moroccan" is not. It ought not to be the case that whether or not there is a written form determines whether you have a language or a dialect, but it does tend to be an important factor taken into account.
> 
> Linguists regard "dialect" as a relative concept and will indeed often say: "There are no languages, only dialects". Accordingly a linguist looking at Maltese will be inclined to note that, despite the large number of loan words, it is a language that should be classified in the same groupìng as Arabic and not Italian and leave it there. At best, he will concede that _historically_ Maltese is a dialect of Arabic. He may suggest that if we are to insist that Maltese is a dialect of Arabic that Spanish and Italian have to be regarded as dialects of Latin; nobody suggests that - except to make a point when discussing the difficulty of deciding whether you have a dialect or language!
> 
> Linguists would I am sure like to be able to classify language on a rigorous scientific basis, but language is messy and gets caught up with politics, nationality, culture, religion and race. That is why linguistics is a social science and not a "hard" science. For any number of reasons a Maltese is keen to emphasise the uniqueness of being Maltese and will call what he speaks "Maltese". A person of any nationality who speaks "Arabic" on the other hand, whilst aware of his nationality, is perhaps inclined to see himself as part of a community that stretches from Morocco to Iraq and is not so worried about giving a separate name to what he speaks as opposed to what he writes.
> 
> So, the position of a Maltese who regards Maltese as a language and the position of an Arabic speaker who regards it as a dialect (on the grounds that it is the same distance from Standard Arabic as any vernacular) are equally justifiable. It all depends on which end of the telescope you look through.


 
Thank you; but your view on the writing thing is new to me and it is not very convincing. I don't think the dialects are called dialects because they are not written down, there are other, much more important reasons for that naming.The word "dialect" is an ancient word in Arabic and there existed many versions of the Qur'an written down in different "dialects" (in fact, back then they were even called different "languages.")

Some Westerners seem to consider the writing system in classification of the language, but in the Middle East this means nothing (Kurdish is written with an Arabic alphabet in Iraq, but with a Latin alphabet in Turkey; Ottoman Turkish with an Arabic alphabet, current Turkish with a Latin alphabet, etc.).

You also seem to be missing my main point-- Maltese morphology is perfect_ current _Arabic and like that of any modern Arabic dialect, the only divergence is in vocabulary. However, Moroccan Arabic has a significant proportion of loanwords too, and it is still called a dialect of Arabic. The analogy with the Romance Languages is inappropriate in this case.

Just to make something clear-- I don't care what everybody think about their language. I am talking here about linguistic classification; and my question has already been resolved since Wikipedia _does _classify Maltese as Arabic.


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## berndf

Arabus said:


> No it is a very serious comment. The definite article, the pronouns, the _Imala_, the broken plurals, the negative suffix _-sh_, etc. are all Arabic but not Canaanite. Not to mention of course the *vocabulary and roots.*


As you very well know, there is a huge overlap in roots between Canaanite and Arabic. How can you say there is nothing Maltese shares with Canaanite?
Perhaps you meant there is no distinguishing mark of Canaanite vis-à-vis Arabic which can be found in Maltese? Maybe. I don't know. But that is not what you wrote.
To make it absolutely clear, let me repeat again: I am not defending the theory of Punic origin of Maltese. I only wanted to make you aware of this theory because it played a role in the traditional classification of Maltese. The theory has not only been discarded for linguistic reasons but also because archeological and historical evidence point in a different direction.



Arabus said:


> Some of the comments are made by people who do not know Arabic, so they misunderstand things. Arabic is not a language but a group of closely related dialects ...


Maybe my comparison with English and German wasn't so bad then. German, in its original sense, also is a group of dialects rather than a language. One of these original dialects was Anglo-Saxon, a mixture of Anglo-Frisian and Saxon, which is the main source and not the cousin of German. Yet no-one with a clear mind would make such a claim ("English be a dialect of German"). German is now identified with *High*-German which is indeed a cousin and not a predecessor of English. It makes no sense to ignore cultural and political realities in linguistic terminology, *especially *because the distinction between dialect and language is not a lingustistic but a political and cultural concept.

If the Maltese say they speak Maltese and not Maltese Arabic then so be it.


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## clevermizo

At the end of the day, what matters most I think is how native speakers of a language view their own language.

Cladistically, Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic and so is in a sense "Arabic" or part of an "Arabic family." 

But if you ask a Maltese speaker if they speak Arabic and they say "No, I speak Maltese" then who are you to argue with them? Speakers of Arabic dialects all say they speak Arabic because they have cultural, political and religious affiliation and at the end of the day they all call their languages ['arabi] in spoken form. The Maltese always refer to Maltese as [malti], so that should really put an end to the matter.

It is not up to non-Maltese speakers to decide what to call Maltese. Scientifically speaking it is definitely a sort of Arabic dialect and I don't think anyone seriously questions this.


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## Hulalessar

Arabus said:


> Some of the comments are made by people who do not know Arabic, so they misunderstand things.



You are quite right that no one ought to give the impression of talking authoritatively about something that they have not investigated. A cursory examination of anything can leave one holding the wrong end of the stick or failing to see the complete picture. I think there are many like myself who have a keen interest in language and, even if they have not studied Arabic or any Semitic language so that they are unable to go into detail, have at least read a bit about them and can hopefully contribute intelligently to a discussion such as this. In my case, apart from what I have read, I have had occasion to talk to quite a few Arabic speakers about how easily they can understand speakers from other countries. The answers I have received have not always been consistent, but the over all impression I have is that the various vernaculars bear roughly the same relationship to each other as the Romance languages bear to each other.



Arabus said:


> Arabic is not a language but a group of closely related dialects ...



Here we run into the difficulty of deciding what is a language and what is a dialect. To an extent it is question of labelling. The dialects are not languages because they have no names and/or because they are referred to as dialects. In the case of Arabic the main reason they are regarded as dialects is because of the huge prestige of the written standard and its association with the Quran.



Arabus said:


> these dialects are similar but not mutually intelligible unless you learn them, which is usually an easy thing to do for a native speaker of one of them.



I think the point of saying that one language/dialect is mutually intelligible with another is that if you know one you can understand the other without having to learn it. We also run into problems when talking about "similarity" and "closely related". It is possible for two languages/dialects to be closely related but not similar enough to be mutually intelligible. Imagine we have language A that splits into two dialects B and C which are initially mutually intelligible. B then splits into B1 and B2. B1 does not move far away from B, but B2 goes off on a frolic and becomes unintelligible to speakers of B1. In the meantime C has remained fairly conservative and is still mutually intelligible with B1. That leaves us with the situation where B1 is more closely related to B2 than C since they both descend from B, but where the speakers of B1 can more easily understand the more distantly related C. 



Arabus said:


> These varieties are not the same "language" and generally they are not mutually intelligible, but they are too similar to be considered different languages, so they are called dialects.



Again this comes down to the question of trying to decide what is a language and what is dialect. Some notion of "distance" comes into it, but the problem is in defining what you mean by distance since differences may be grammatical, lexical or phonological any one may feature more than the other. Even if you think you can measure the distances how wide does the gap have to be before a dialect becomes a language? It is because of these difficulties that to the extent that linguists accept the idea that there can be both languages and dialects the concepts have to be relative.

If the position is not clear in linguistics the waters are well and truly muddied by non-linguists. The word "dialect" can carry connotations of disapproval, suggesting amongst other things a variety that is inferior to some standard. How people feel about the language they speak at home when it differs from the standard that comes out of the TV varies from place to place. Some people get excited about it and others do not.

The position of Arabic today in the Arabic speaking world cannot really be compared to the position of any language in Europe. The nearest comparison in the European context is that of Latin in the Romance speaking countries in the Middle Ages. In those days the various vernaculars were not thought of as distinct languages, but rather as some sort of debased Latin. Dante wrote his "Comedy" in the vernacular, but what he regarded as his serious works in Latin. It was only when the idea of the nation state started to emerge that people began to think that they needed languages to go with states and the vernaculars came to be written down and eventually ousted Latin, though its prestige was maintained for a long time by the Church and men of learning.

If history had been different, it is not too difficult to imagine a scenario where each of what are now the Arabic speaking nations developed its own written language with its own literature just as the French, Portuguese and Italian did. But history is what it is and so whilst "Moroccan" may stand in the same relationship to Classical Arabic as Spanish does to Classical Latin, Moroccan is considered by many to be a dialect, whilst Spanish is considered to be a language. It is all very arbitrary.


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## Arabus

Hulalessar said:


> I think the point of saying that one language/dialect is mutually intelligible with another is that if you know one you can understand the other without having to learn it. We also run into problems when talking about "similarity" and "closely related". It is possible for two languages/dialects to be closely related but not similar enough to be mutually intelligible. Imagine we have language A that splits into two dialects B and C which are initially mutually intelligible. B then splits into B1 and B2. B1 does not move far away from B, but B2 goes off on a frolic and becomes unintelligible to speakers of B1. In the meantime C has remained fairly conservative and is still mutually intelligible with B1. That leaves us with the situation where B1 is more closely related to B2 than C since they both descend from B, but where the speakers of B1 can more easily understand the more distantly related C.



I am not sure I agree with this logic. I would say that B1 is more closely related to C. Have you thought about it like gene inheritance in biology? It doesn't matter who your parent is as much as what genes you carry. I don't know, it feels more about words and their meanings than ideas.

In Semitic, there is a situation where Ugaritic (now commonly identified as a Canaanite language) is much similar to Arabic than to any other Canaanite language. In fact, it was initially thought of as an ancient form of Arabic.

I agree with the other things you said, thanks.


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## WadiH

clevermizo said:


> At the end of the day, what matters most I think is how native speakers of a language view their own language.
> 
> Cladistically, Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic and so is in a sense "Arabic" or part of an "Arabic family."
> 
> But if you ask a Maltese speaker if they speak Arabic and they say "No, I speak Maltese" then who are you to argue with them? Speakers of Arabic dialects all say they speak Arabic because they have cultural, political and religious affiliation and at the end of the day they all call their languages ['arabi] in spoken form. The Maltese always refer to Maltese as [malti], so that should really put an end to the matter.
> 
> It is not up to non-Maltese speakers to decide what to call Maltese. Scientifically speaking it is definitely a sort of Arabic dialect and I don't think anyone seriously questions this.



I have no issue with classifying Maltese as a separate language.  But objectively speaking it is scarcely less Arabic than Tunisian or Algerian, regardless of whether we treat these 3 as separate languages or not.  So, the only convincing answer to Arabus's question is that it is due to cultural (chiefly religious) and political reasons.



Arabus said:


> Some of the comments are made by people who do not know Arabic, so they misunderstand things. Arabic is not a language but a group of closely related dialects



Why do you call them "closely related dialects" and not "closely-related languages?"



> ... these dialects are similar but not mutually intelligible unless you learn them, which is usually an easy thing to do for a native speaker of one of them. I speak Syrian Arabic but I can't understand Maghrebine Arabic, because I have never learned it. When I was a kid I learned Egyptian and Arabian Arabic (just like how I learned MSA and Classical Arabic), and now I can understand these varieties very well.



What makes you so sure that you could have "learned" Maghrebi Arabic in the same way you learned Egyptian or Arabian Arabic?  I think you oversimplify.  Some dialects of Arabic are mutually unintelligible, while others are not.  I have a hard time believing that Lebanese Arabic and Egyptian Arabic are mutually unintelligible.  When put into writing, it can sometimes take several sentences to distinguish between the two.

A few years ago, I spent a few months in the American South, and got to know some African American friends from Georgia.  I had about as much trouble understanding them as I do understanding a person from Morocco or Algeria, if not more.  And I wasn't someone new to English by any means; I began speaking it natively before I even spoke Arabic, had been exposed to many different dialects of English, was immersed in American and British pop culture at the time, and was in the 95th percentile on my SAT's.  So can we say that English is also "not a language but rather a group of mutually-unintelligible dialects?"


----------



## sokol

Arabus said:


> I am not sure I agree with this logic. I would say that B1 is more closely related to C. Have you thought about it like gene inheritance in biology? It doesn't matter who your parent is as much as what genes you carry. I don't know, it feels more about words and their meanings than ideas.


Hulalessar indeed has made a good point, and in fact even in biology - if you insist on this metaphor - there are plenty of such cases of a species A splitting into B and C where B further develops into B1 and B2 (with the latter developping away from both other species) so that B1 and C look very similar but still are less closely related than B1 and B2 with the latter looking vastly different from both B1 and C.
(This is quite off-topic - but just to show that such cases exist: with orchids, formerly Orchid morio was classified as belonging to the same genus as Orchid maculata; nowadays Orchid morio has been renamed Anacamptis morio because it is geneticaly closer related to genus Anacamptis even though it _looks _much more like if it were an Orchid genus.)

But by rights biology metaphors shouldn't be used for languages because languages do not have a DNA - they cannot be measured in more or less exact terms as a biological species can be (in case its DNA is decoded already, of course).
You may find that language relations differ greatly depending on* which elements of a language you think are more relevant* to comparison: and no, there is no rule for which level should have preference over all others; in fact linguists in different countries have different preferences.

So if you compare languages A - to stick to Hulalessar's example - and its modern versions B1, B2 and C then probably ancient, now dead language A and C look like they're very close related if you consider phonology, but considering morphology C might have a drastically simplified system.
On the other hand, B1 could have retained most of A's morphology but developped a vastly different phonolgy and accent.
And B2 could both have reduced its morphology and changed phonology - and lets suppose that this reduction of morphology in B2 has not been due to influence by C as B2 and C aren't even geographically related.

In that case, B1 and B2 would look vastly different and if one puts emphasis on morphology B2 and C would seem to be closer related to each other than B1 and B2.
However, based on phonological analysis the similarity between B1 and B2 would be evident.

Note that in this thought experiment we've only introduced phonology and morphology.
And that even within one level of discription there could be different influences at work; take morphology: in natural languages you oftentimes find examples where derivational morphology has been retained in dialect A but changed in dialects B and C while inflection has been retained more or less in A and B while it has been changed in C: so which should be considered more important, derivational morphology, or inflection?

(And sorry for being so theoretical but as I hardly know anything about Arabic I can't argue the case at hand, that is Maltese and Arabic.)


----------



## berndf

Arabus said:


> In Semitic, there is a situation where Ugaritic (now commonly identified as a Canaanite language) is much similar to Arabic than to any other Canaanite language. In fact, it was initially thought of as an ancient form of Arabic.


First a small remark: Ugaritic is classified as NW Semitic together with Canaanite and Aramaic languages but not as Canaanite. But for your argument this doesn't really matter.

Why are you saying that it is closer to Arabic than to Hebrew or Aramaic? Because it still distinguished 28 consonants and not only 22?

If this is your argument than Ugaritic is B1, Hebrew B2 and Arabic C. According to your logic, Ugaritic would be closer to Arabic than to Hebrew.

Let me put it this way: Linguistic classification systems don't work this way and there is a reason for it: If you want to understand the development history of a language or a group of languages a classification system based on appearant similarities rather than genetic relationship would be more confusing than helpful.


----------



## Hulalessar

Is not part of the problem here that with languages the same name may occur at one level of description and at a level immediately below it? For example: there are a number of dialects spoken in France that have all derived from a common ancestor which for convenience we shall call "Proto-French". One of these dialects (the one that English schoolboys learn) is called "French" (Sense 1). The dialects collectively are referred to as "French" (Sense 2). If we say that Burgundian is a dialect of French what do we mean? Since both Burgundian and French (Sense 1) are descended from Proto-French it ought to mean that Burgundian is a dialect of French (Sense 2). Unfortunately it is often taken as implying that first there was French (Sense 1) and that Burgundian developed from it. There would be no problem if French (Sense 2) was called something else. If we did have a word (say "Frankish") we can make a clear distinction between two different questions:

1. Is Burgundian French? (Answer: no)

2. Is Burgundian Frankish (Answer: yes)

Turning to the question posed in this thread, not only can "Arabic" refer to the standard language known as Arabic and its associated vernaculars, but also to the language from which the standard language and its vernaculars descend. It would be helpful if the three separate things (standard language, vernaculars and parent) all had separate names. We would then have a clear idea of whether what was being asked was:

1. Is Maltese Standard Arabic? 

2. Is Maltese on the same taxonomic level as what are referred to as dialects of Arabic and should it be grouped with them?

3. Do Maltese and what are referred to as dialects of Arabic as well as Standard Arabic derive from the same parent language?


----------



## Kevin Beach

It's fascinating for somebody like me, with hardly any knowledge of Semitic languages but with a keen interest in languages and etymology generally, to read opinions such as these.

From the viewpoint of ignorance, therefore, or euphemistically from the point of view of an interested but unbiased bystander, it seems to me that there is an argument going on between the objective and the subjective.

The Maltese apparently deny that they speak any form of Arabic. They hold their language to be separate and distinct. One can imagine all sorts of emotional reasons for this. That is the subjective viewpoint.

But linguists and others who look for analysis and classification can see such a correlation between Maltese and some forms of Arabic, that they inevitably class Maltese as an Arabic derivative, if not an Arabic language or dialect. That is the objective viewpoint.

There are times when the subjective opinion should hold sway and others when the objective point of view should dominate. Can't the opinions be reconciled by saying that the truth of the classification depends upon its purpose?


----------



## Pedro y La Torre

Would it not be fair to say that Maltese is an "Arabic" language in the same way that French is a Romance one?

From what I've read, I don't think the Maltese deny that their language is Semitic, or descended from Arabic, but rather that it has now changed to such a degree that it deserves separate status as a language outright. That seems eminently acceptable to me, after all, we wouldn't still claim that French is a dialect of Latin, would we?

That said, I'm no expert on this matter, so very much open to correction.


----------



## Hulalessar

Pedro y La Torre said:


> Would it not be fair to say that Maltese is an "Arabic" language in the same way that French is a Romance one?
> 
> From what I've read, I don't think the Maltese deny that their language is Semitic, or descended from Arabic, but rather that it has now changed to such a degree that it deserves separate status as a language outright. That seems eminently acceptable to me, after all, we wouldn't still claim that French is a dialect of Latin, would we?
> 
> That said, I'm no expert on this matter, so very much open to correction.



The problem is, as I suggested above, that the same word can imply different things. If two people are having a discussion and both understand different things by a word that is central to the discussion and either fails to communicate this to the other, the chances of their understanding each other and thus coming to agreement are reduced.

If the word "Romance" did not exist and Romance languages were referred to as Latin languages, and if Italians called Italian Latin, you can see that this may lead to a lively discussion between an Italian who insisted French was Latin and a Frenchman who was inclined to disagree. Even the word "Italian" can be misleading when talking about languages. Is it being used geographically to refer to the languages of Italy, to refer to the standard language or to that and its dialects?

Anyone who asks the question: _Why is Maltese not Arabic?_ whilst he may not need to explain what he means by "Maltese", does really need to explain what he means by "Arabic". Once the explanation is available, the question can start to be answered.

It would be very nice if languages had names that were quite distinct from the names of nations, regions or races. Unfortunately they do not and it causes confusion. To a Maltese _Why is Maltese not Arabic?_ may come across as asking _Why are the Maltese not Arabs?_


----------



## sokol

Pedro y La Torre said:


> Would it not be fair to say that Maltese is an "Arabic" language in the same way that French is a Romance one?


This not only is problematic because the Maltese themselves object to being called "an" Arabic language (amongst more) but also because Arabic native speakers usually think of Arabic as "one" language (if one split into many dialects and national varieties).

So if one would use the term "Arabic language*s*" (plural!) probably not only the Maltese would object but also many native speakers of Arabic.

From a linguistic point of view I think that "Arabic languages" (in plural) would be an acceptable compromise but in real life most likely it isn't easily acceptable for either side.



Hulalessar said:


> If the word "Romance" did not exist and Romance languages were referred to as Latin languages, and if Italians called Italian Latin, you can see that this may lead to a lively discussion between an Italian who insisted French was Latin and a Frenchman who was inclined to disagree.


Well put.
There's no doubt that Maltese is a Semitic language, but to call it Arabic involves identity problems.


----------



## Sepia

sound shift said:


> Certain languages seem to have been classified on the basis of politics as well as that of linguistics. Perhaps this is the case with Maltese.


 


Frank06 said:


> Could you please give an example?
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank


 
Like classifying Celtic languages as "Indogermanic" languages? 

Something which became very popular during the Nazi era - and you still find this classification in a few books.


----------



## berndf

Sepia said:


> Like classifying Celtic languages as "Indogermanic" languages?
> 
> Something which became very popular during the Nazi era - and you still find this classification in a few books.


This is not quite correct. The term _Indogermanic_ is much older and the rationale for the naming was non-racist: It indicated the geographical extremes of the IE language area; from Indic languages spoken in India to a Germanic language spoken in Iceland.

As this name could easily be misunderstood, later generations of linguists prefered to call the group _Indoeuropean_. German linguists clung to the older terminology a bit longer. But this had nothing to do with the Nazis.


----------



## Frank06

Hi,


Sepia said:


> Like classifying Celtic languages as "Indogermanic" languages? Something which became very popular during the Nazi era - and you still find this classification in a few books.


That's just a matter of labeling. _Indogermanisch_ is another word for Indo-European, and the Celtic languages are Indo-European/Indogermanisch.
_Indogermanisch_ is a very old term, which predates Nazi Germany by a few centuries. As far as I know, it was the most widely used term in the era that German universities were the most productive centers of historical linguistic studies (roughly during the entire 19th century and later) which also predates Nazi Germany. If I am not mistaken, it is still widely (if not almost exclusively) used in German publications.

Groetjes,

Frank


----------



## berndf

Frank06 said:


> If I am not mistaken, it is still widely (if not almost exclusively) used in German publications.


Yes, but less and less so, I think. My mother, who studied _Germanistik_ in the 50s but never worked in the field afterwards still uses it.


----------



## berndf

sokol said:


> This not only is problematic because the Maltese themselves object to being called "an" Arabic language (amongst more) but also because Arabic native speakers usually think of Arabic as "one" language (if one split into many dialects and national varieties).


I think main criterion to distinguish a dialect from a (derived) language is the common literary and cultural tradition mediated through a common standard language, even if it is not the language of daily life. If it weren't a matter of course for a Moroccan, Algerian or Tunisian to be able to communicate in _Fusha (al-`asr)_ in order to be called _educated_ then it would be better to talk of the _Maghrebi language_ rather than of _Maghrebi Arabic_.
 
Malta has lost most of its cultural and political ties with the Arabic world (Mithoff tried to revive them, but that is a different matter) and educated Maltese are not normally able to communicate in Fusha. Therefore I find nothing perplexing about calling Maltese a separate language derived from _Maghrebi Arabic._
_ _
_But I understand Arabus' point: It is very normal in the Arabic world to distinguish between __Fusha__ as an individual language and __Arabic__ as a group of closely related languages (and cultures) which we European often don't understand._


----------



## Arabus

Wadi Hanifa said:


> What makes you so sure that you could have "learned" Maghrebi Arabic in the same way you learned Egyptian or Arabian Arabic?  I think you oversimplify.  Some dialects of Arabic are mutually unintelligible, while others are not.  I have a hard time believing that Lebanese Arabic and Egyptian Arabic are mutually unintelligible.  When put into writing, it can sometimes take several sentences to distinguish between the two.



I am familiar with the Arab notion, being Arab myself, that we are all born knowing  all the dialects, but I don't think this is true. I do remember learning the dialects myself (something that almost all Arabic speakers seem to forget; they just seem to learn the dialect and forget that they learned it.)

Anyway, I said the dialect are very similar, and in no way comparable to the Romance languages. However, I wouldn't say they are mutually intelligible given facts like that speakers of Maghrebine Arabic understand eastern dialects (due to media exposure) but not the reverse; and that all Arabs understand Egyptian (due to media exposure) but not the reverse. I am Syrian, and I've met so many Egyptians who could not understand my dialect. Egyptians have just recently started being exposed to other dialects, and before that they generally could not understand neither Syrian nor Lebanese; even though they are very similar dialects like you say. By "not understanding" I mean something like understanding 50%-60% of the talk or less.


----------



## Arabus

sokol said:


> Hulalessar indeed has made a good point, and in fact even in biology - if you insist on this metaphor - there are plenty of such cases of a species A splitting into B and C where B further develops into B1 and B2 (with the latter developping away from both other species) so that B1 and C look very similar but still are less closely related than B1 and B2 with the latter looking vastly different from both B1 and C.
> (This is quite off-topic - but just to show that such cases exist: with orchids, formerly Orchid morio was classified as belonging to the same genus as Orchid maculata; nowadays Orchid morio has been renamed Anacamptis morio because it is geneticaly closer related to genus Anacamptis even though it _looks _much more like if it were an Orchid genus.)
> 
> But by rights biology metaphors shouldn't be used for languages because languages do not have a DNA - they cannot be measured in more or less exact terms as a biological species can be (in case its DNA is decoded already, of course).
> You may find that language relations differ greatly depending on* which elements of a language you think are more relevant* to comparison: and no, there is no rule for which level should have preference over all others; in fact linguists in different countries have different preferences.
> 
> So if you compare languages A - to stick to Hulalessar's example - and its modern versions B1, B2 and C then probably ancient, now dead language A and C look like they're very close related if you consider phonology, but considering morphology C might have a drastically simplified system.
> On the other hand, B1 could have retained most of A's morphology but developped a vastly different phonolgy and accent.
> And B2 could both have reduced its morphology and changed phonology - and lets suppose that this reduction of morphology in B2 has not been due to influence by C as B2 and C aren't even geographically related.
> 
> In that case, B1 and B2 would look vastly different and if one puts emphasis on morphology B2 and C would seem to be closer related to each other than B1 and B2.
> However, based on phonological analysis the similarity between B1 and B2 would be evident.
> 
> Note that in this thought experiment we've only introduced phonology and morphology.
> And that even within one level of discription there could be different influences at work; take morphology: in natural languages you oftentimes find examples where derivational morphology has been retained in dialect A but changed in dialects B and C while inflection has been retained more or less in A and B while it has been changed in C: so which should be considered more important, derivational morphology, or inflection?
> 
> (And sorry for being so theoretical but as I hardly know anything about Arabic I can't argue the case at hand, that is Maltese and Arabic.)



Thank you, valuable post. Regarding the "closely related" thing, I think that evolutionary classification (whether in biology or linguistics) is usually concerned with determining which evolved from which, or at least this is one of the main concerns in such classification systems; but the idea I was thinking of (which is a useless, merely theoretical idea with no practical implications) is the following: imagine that the ancient language C was very similar phonologically and morphologically to the ancient A, and they both were very similar to Proto-A&C. Now we have B1 which is very similar to A, and thus to C, and B2 which has a rather different phonology and morphology from all others.

In this case, would B1 be more closely related to B2 or to C? If my main concern was determining evolutionary paths (as it is usually in science), I would say more to B2, since they are siblings, whereas C is a cousin. But in mere theory, B1 in this case has more genetic resemblance to C than to B2, and they both are similar to the proto-language, so I wonder how B2 can be more "closely related" to B1 than C. I guess it depends on what this phrase exactly means.

I know such situation cannot exist in biology (where genetic resemblance is more to a cousin than to a sibling), but in Semitic languages there is a similar situation, where Ugaritic is very similar to Arabic, a cousin language, but rather different from Hebrew, a supposed sibling, and both Ugaritic and Arabic are very similar to Proto-Central-Semitic.


----------



## berndf

Arabus said:


> However, I wouldn't say they are mutually intelligible given facts like that speakers of Maghrebine Arabic understand eastern dialects (due to media exposure) but not the reverse; and that all Arabs understand Egyptian (due to media exposure) but not the reverse. I am Syrian, and I've met so many Egyptians who could not understand my dialect. Egyptians have just recently started being exposed to other dialects, and before that they generally could not understand neither Syrian nor Lebanese; even though they are very similar dialects like you say. By "not understanding" I mean something like understanding 50%-60% of the talk or less.


I think unintelligibility is greatly overrated as a criterion of remoteness of a dialect. Often very simple sound shifts can render a dialect unintelligible for a standard language speaker.

E.g. most Germans with no exposure to it regard Swiss German (the slightly "lightend" form used in the media at least) as completely unintelligible. In reality it takes a German only a few days, 1 or 2 weeks maximum of careful listening to Swiss German to understand virtually everything (except for some words which are fundamentally different). Swiss German hasn't followed the Modern High German vowel shift and by and large uses the Middle High German vowel system. Once you have understood this it is quite easy for a German to understand Swiss German.


----------



## Arabus

berndf said:


> First a small remark: Ugaritic is classified as NW Semitic together with Canaanite and Aramaic languages but not as Canaanite. But for your argument this doesn't really matter.
> 
> Why are you saying that it is closer to Arabic than to Hebrew or Aramaic? Because it still distinguished 28 consonants and not only 22?
> 
> If this is your argument than Ugaritic is B1, Hebrew B2 and Arabic C. According to your logic, Ugaritic would be closer to Arabic than to Hebrew.
> 
> Let me put it this way: Linguistic classification systems don't work this way and there is a reason for it: If you want to understand the development history of a language or a group of languages a classification system based on appearant similarities rather than genetic relationship would be more confusing than helpful.



Not just the phonology; the similarity between Arabic and Ugaritic is famous and it spans everything from phonology to syntax. When Ugaritic first came out it was thought "Ancient Arabic" by some. Recently it has become common to associate Ugaritic with Canaanite as opposed to Aramaic based on lexical and phonological isoglosses.

I agree with the other things you said.


----------



## Arabus

berndf said:


> I think unintelligibility is greatly overrated as a criterion of remoteness of a dialect. Often very simple sound shifts can render a dialect unintelligible for a standard language speaker.
> 
> E.g. most Germans with no exposure to it regard Swiss German (the slightly "lightend" form used in the media at least) as completely unintelligible. In reality it takes a German only a few days, 1 or 2 weeks maximum of careful listening to Swiss German to understand virtually everything (except for some words which are fundamentally different). Swiss German hasn't followed the Modern High German vowel shift and by and large uses the Middle High German vowel system. Once you have understood this it is quite easy for a German to understand Swiss German.



Absolutely true. The example you mention totally matches the Arabic situation. I learned Iraqi Arabic (the slightly "lightened" form used in the media) by listening to Iraqis on TV after the US invasion. I still understand nothing though of the weird local vocabulary they have.


----------



## Arabus

Hulalessar said:


> Is not part of the problem here that with languages the same name may occur at one level of description and at a level immediately below it? For example: there are a number of dialects spoken in France that have all derived from a common ancestor which for convenience we shall call "Proto-French". One of these dialects (the one that English schoolboys learn) is called "French" (Sense 1). The dialects collectively are referred to as "French" (Sense 2). If we say that Burgundian is a dialect of French what do we mean? Since both Burgundian and French (Sense 1) are descended from Proto-French it ought to mean that Burgundian is a dialect of French (Sense 2). Unfortunately it is often taken as implying that first there was French (Sense 1) and that Burgundian developed from it. There would be no problem if French (Sense 2) was called something else. If we did have a word (say "Frankish") we can make a clear distinction between two different questions:
> 
> 1. Is Burgundian French? (Answer: no)
> 
> 2. Is Burgundian Frankish (Answer: yes)
> 
> Turning to the question posed in this thread, not only can "Arabic" refer to the standard language known as Arabic and its associated vernaculars, but also to the language from which the standard language and its vernaculars descend. It would be helpful if the three separate things (standard language, vernaculars and parent) all had separate names. We would then have a clear idea of whether what was being asked was:
> 
> 1. Is Maltese Standard Arabic?
> 
> 2. Is Maltese on the same taxonomic level as what are referred to as dialects of Arabic and should it be grouped with them?
> 
> 3. Do Maltese and what are referred to as dialects of Arabic as well as Standard Arabic derive from the same parent language?



These issues are not very clear in writings about Arabic, mainly because the linguistic situation in ancient Arabia is not very clear itself. Generally, "Classical Arabic" refers to the old standard language. The old vernaculars have no standard name as their origins are debated or unclear. I think most authors use the word "dialects" to refer to the Arabic vernaculars, the old and the modern, whereas "Arabic" alone means the Standard language, including the old Classical Arabic and the modern MSA. The parent language has no name; some call it Proto-Arabic, which I believe is a general term that can be applied to any proto-language, so we can use it. The problem is, however, that the old vernaculars are not entirely descended from Proto-Arabic; this is a matter of debate, but I believe the vernaculars have obvious elements from Ancient South Arabian (which is not Arabic and does not even belong to the same branch as Arabic) and it also has elements from Ancient North Arabian (which is not Arabic according to M.C.A. Macdonald); so the Arabic vernaculars descend actually from an old Arabian koine and not entirely from Proto-Arabic.

Answering your three questions:
1-no.
2-I believe, yes.
3-ultimately, yes, but with immense foreign influence that is different for each variety.


----------



## Arabus

Sepia said:


> Like classifying Celtic languages as "Indogermanic" languages?



I've seen this term in Arabic books too, but they were all old ... funny ...


----------



## Arabus

Frank06 said:


> _Indogermanisch_ is a very old term, which predates Nazi Germany by a few centuries.



I thought the Indo-European Sprachen were first identified as a single family in the 19th century.


----------



## WadiH

Arabus said:


> I am familiar with the Arab notion, being Arab myself, that we are all born knowing  all the dialects, but I don't think this is true. I do remember learning the dialects myself (something that almost all Arabic speakers seem to forget; they just seem to learn the dialect and forget that they learned it.)



Well, leaving aside your strawman, can you tell us what your definition of mutual intelligibility is?  Is the speech of a midwestern American mutually intelligible with cockney for example?


----------



## berndf

Arabus said:


> I thought the Indo-European Sprachen were first identified as a single family in the 19th century.


Yes, you are right. The term was coined in the mid 19th century, about one century (not a few centuries) before the Nazis.


----------



## Kevin Beach

Wadi Hanifa said:


> .........Is the speech of a midwestern American mutually intelligible with cockney for example?


It depends on the exposure that each has had to the other's speech. The British (including Cockneys) have been exposed to many forms of American speech in American films since the 1930s and American TV since the 1950s.

I speak "Received" BrE but was brought up in the South London area, where Cockney and related accents can be heard all the time. Because of the exposure through films and TV, I can often distinguish between New England, New York, Appalachian, deep South and Texan accents, even though I have never been to any of the places where they are generally spoken.

I venture that any Midwestern American with similar exposure to the Cockney accent would easily understand it.

I suspect though that your question carries the implication of "hearing it for the first time", in which case the answer is probably "no". However, the same answer would be given if the question was about many pairs of different speakers within the UK itself, including Cockneys, Liverpudlians, Glaswegians, North Yorkshiremen, Welshmen, East Anglians, the Cornish etc.

Doesn't all comprehension of language come with degrees of learning?


----------



## Sepia

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> That's just a matter of labeling. _Indogermanisch_ is another word for Indo-European, and the Celtic languages are Indo-European/Indogermanisch.
> _Indogermanisch_ is a very old term, which predates Nazi Germany by a few centuries. As far as I know, it was the most widely used term in the era that German universities were the most productive centers of historical linguistic studies (roughly during the entire 19th century and later) which also predates Nazi Germany. If I am not mistaken, it is still widely (if not almost exclusively) used in German publications.
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank


 

I am aware it predates the Nazis - and it is probably exclusively used in Germany, at least I've never seen it anywhere else. And it is probably still used by habit by some who haven't given it any thought that there were political reasons for the Nazis to stick to this theory.

It is a bit like the definition of "Caucasian" as a race, which is absolute BS too.

Therefore it is a good idea to look for political motives that may influence the way languages are classified.


----------



## berndf

Sepia said:


> And it is probably still used by habit by some who haven't given it any thought that there were political reasons for the Nazis to stick to this *theory*.


Which theory? As we explained, the naming describes the *current*** *geographical extend of the IE language area and nothing else. There is no theory behind the terminological difference between _Indogermanic_ and _Indoeuropean_.

The term "Caucasian" is different. This is indeed based on a theory where IE-speaking peoples originated and that they belong to one "race".
__________________________
_*Excluding expansion through modern-era colonialism, of course._


----------



## sokol

I'll reduce this to the essentials else no one will be able (or willing to try to ) to follow our reasoning:


Arabus said:


> In this case, would B1 be more closely related to B2 or to C? If my main concern was determining evolutionary paths (as it is usually in science), I would say more to B2, since they are siblings, whereas C is a cousin. But in mere theory, B1 in this case has more genetic resemblance to C than to B2, and they both are similar to the proto-language, so I wonder how B2 can be more "closely related" to B1 than C.


The point is that genetic relationship doesn't work in historical linguistics - the earyly comparative linguists thought that an evolutionary path would work but they're long since disproven.

So if you have *ancient *(!) languages A and C which are closely related to each other and *modern *(!) languages B1 and B2 (which is, I think, what you meant here) where B1 is rather conservative while B2 developped away from B1, and where it is *not quite clear* wether A *or *C or influences of *both *A and C*) were the predecessors of B1 and B2, then of course you would not stand a chance anyway to prove any "genetic" relationship.

There exist probably only a very few cases where it is possible to prove beyond doubt that language A was the predecessor of language B except if there is clear evidence through historical documents of a language.

With Maltese this seems not to be the case, so in order to establish relationship with other Semitic languages you need to make do with what you have (that is, the few historical documents there are and what is known about its history, plus modern Maltese and its structure).
I'm only hypothetising here obviously as I don't know Semitic languages; but here it is, my hypothesis:
- Let's suppose your language A is Akkadian (significantly different from Arabic), and C is ancient Arabic or Proto-Arabic. B1 is Maghrebine Arabic, and B2 is Maltese.
- B1 then definitely is rather close to C, and B1 historically should be the closest relative of Maltese as far as we know (other theories aside), or Maltese should have emerged from a (any) Maghrebine dialect.
- B1 however, Maghrebine, shows influences of Berber languages (and probably others?) and thus has not only "one mother" but at least two, or a father and a mother if you like. So B1, genetically, isn't a pure descendant of C but still closely related.
- B2 now, the offshoot of B1, again underwent significant change through influence of other languages - to a degree that isn't (or at least not easily) mutually intelligible with Magrhebine Arabic.

This then would tell us that:
- A (Akkadian) is related to C (Arabic), and also B1 (Maghrebine) and B2 (Maltese), but not closely to either (closest most likely to C);
- B1 is closely related to C but not very close to A;
- B2's closest relative definitely is B1 but it is not very close to C and even further detached from A;
- the closest relative of B1 (Maghrebine) is definitely C (Arabic) even though its offshoot B2 has no closer relative than B1.

Again, that is just how it *could *be - as I'm not very well informed about Semitic languages it might well be different.

Anyway, I hope you see how it would *indeed *be possible in theory for B2 being *much *closer to B1 than any other language even though B1's closest relative would be C.
I don't see how anybody could argue in the case of Maltese that it were closer to (standard or eastern dialects of) Arabic than Maghrebine Arabic, based on what I read about this on Wikipedia. So if I didn't get this wrong then Maltese indeed should be the closest sibling to Maghrebine Arabic which itself should have either classical Arabic or a Mashriq dialect (or a mix of both?) as its closest relative

*) Possibly in a substratum/superstratum relationship, or any other (loan relationship, mixed dialects, whatever).


----------



## Arabus

What about the other end of "Indo-European," the "Indo-?" Isn't it racist to call Iranian, Armenian, Anatolian, etc. all Indo-? I think no body has complained about that, but they have complained about the Germanic end of the term. I am not a fan of racism, but I think it is racist to always think racism whenever we see the word German. Does national pride, for example, mean racism? Maybe the ones who coined that term were happy about being German, not necessarily racist. Do you know that in many Arabic books the word Semitic is not used at all: they call Semitic languages the "Arabic languages," based on the fact that they originated in Arabia.


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## Arabus

Wadi Hanifa said:


> Well, leaving aside your strawman, can you tell us what your definition of mutual intelligibility is?  Is the speech of a midwestern American mutually intelligible with cockney for example?



As I have told you, when you have somebody who can understand you (a Moroccan person) but you can't understand them, this means two clear things:


Your dialects are not mutually intelligible.
The other person has learned your dialect.
This is what I am talking about-- we learn the dialects and this is why we understand them. Because we don't learn Moroccan, we don't understand it; but Moroccans still understand us because they learn our dialects.

I would say Syrian is mutually intelligible with Egyptian if the following is possible to happen-- an illiterate man born in a village in Syria and never exposed to Standard Arabic or any media can understand Egyptian. Do you think there is any chance that this happens? Of course not. As I have already said, I've seen many Egyptians who can't understand Syrian even though they were taught MSA.

We all are fluent in MSA, and everyone of us gets exposed to a couple of other dialects in childhood (especially in a country like Saudi Arabia), so no wonder that we can learn any new dialect quiet fast that we actually don't realize that we're learning it.


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## sokol

Arabus said:


> What about the other end of "Indo-European," the "Indo-?"


Well, the idea was, with Indo-European, to name the family about the two branches which are spoken furthest east (= Indo-Aryan) and the furthes west (= European).
"Indo-*Germanic"* put much emphasis on Germanic languages even though the most distant rather were Celtic languages geographically, and also as Nazis used "Indogermanic" excessively this name now is coming slowly out of use (some older comparative linguists still use it). The term "Indo-Germanic" as such of course was coined long before the Nazi era and isn't a Nazi term as such, only one that has become instrumentalised by them.

But please keep it on topic, and let us return to *Arabic*. 


Arabus said:


> Do you know that in many Arabic books the word Semitic is not used at all: they call Semitic languages the "Arabic languages," based on the fact that they originated in Arabia.


Interesting. No, I didn't know that, and by the way this of course is misleading as Akkadian, to give but one example, of course is not (and never was) Arabic.


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## Frank06

Arabus said:


> What about the other end of "Indo-European," the "Indo-?" Isn't it racist to call Iranian, Armenian, Anatolian, etc. all Indo-?


Nope, because both the Indo and the European refer the location. And nope, this term didn't get adjusted when Tocharian A and B were found to Sino-Indo-European for rather obvious reasons. But maybe it's racist to put Indo before European and not the other way round (I think we can go on like this ad absurdum).



> I think no body has complained about that, but they have only complained about the Germanic end of the term. I am not a fan of racism, but I think it is racist to always think racism whenever we see the word German. Does national pride, for example, mean racism? Maybe the ones who coined that term were happy about being German, not necessarily racist.


_Germanic_ and _germanish_ refer to the Germani, not to the Germans.



> Do you know that in many Arabic books the word Semitic is not used at all: they call Semitic languages the "Arabic languages," based on the fact that they originated in Arabia.


Okay, back on topic (more or less).
But in order not to waste too much time on semantic games, as earlier in this thread, what do you exactly mean by "Arabia"?


Frank


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## clevermizo

Arabus said:


> Do you know that in many Arabic books the word Semitic is not used at all: they call Semitic languages the "Arabic languages," based on the fact that they originated in Arabia.



This is incredibly off-topic but I have to say that Semitic languages' originating in the Arabian peninsula is not a fact. The origin of Proto-Semitic (or whatever it was) speakers is debated, but believed to be in Africa. I'm sure people are taught your claim (I was taught in an Arabic class once that the Ammonites who established the city of Amman where an Arabic-speaking tribe from the Peninsula) but it's patent nonsense and obviously political in nature.

Anyway, no matter how you look at it, there is no "fact" concerning where Semitic languages originated.


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## clevermizo

sokol said:


> I don't see how anybody could argue in the case of Maltese that it were closer to (standard or eastern dialects of) Arabic than Maghrebine Arabic, based on what I read about this on Wikipedia. So if I didn't get this wrong then Maltese indeed should be the closest sibling to Maghrebine Arabic which itself should have either classical Arabic or a Mashriq dialect (or a mix of both?) as its closest relative.




I think one of the reasons why people seem to think Maltese could be more "Eastern" is one particular shibboleth: the pronunciation of etymological /q/. In North Africa this is either [q] or [g] but in Maltese it is [?].

However, to add to the data set, the realization of /q/ as [?] exist(s?)ed in Jewish and Christian dialects of the Maghreb. When you add that piece of the puzzle, given that the Maltese and once Siculo-Arabic speakers were a primarily Christian population, it is no surprise that their /q/ has become [?]. And without Standard Arabic to support it, there would be little impetus to revert any higher register vocabulary to [q] (as is done in the East).

Aside the realization of [q], Maltese shares most of the grammatical features common to its closest relative: Tunisian. The verb paradigm (using n- prefix for first person singular, and n-...-u for first person plural), the raising of a>e>i (the furthest along being Maltese, which of course also exists in Lebanon), negation, verbal constructions, etc. And hey Maltese is even more conservative in some ways than a lot of Arabic dialects. The verb "to see" is _ra_ (standard: _ra?a_) and not _shaaf_ found in most other dialects. 

Anyway, once again Maltese is not "Arabic" because there is no sociocultural reason to deem it so, however it most certainly is part of an Arabic family of dialects.


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## Arabus

clevermizo said:


> The verb "to see" is _ra_ (standard: _ra?a_) and not _shaaf_ found in most other dialects.



This is very important, are you sure? What I know is that the verb  _ra?a_ is not used in vernacular Arabic at all. If Maltese really has this verb, this can be an evidence for non-Arabic substratum in the dialect (of course, Maltese wouldn't be the first dialect to have such substratum).


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## Arabus

Frank06 said:


> Okay, back on topic (more or less).
> But in order not to waste too much time on semantic games, as earlier in this thread, what do you exactly mean by "Arabia"?
> 
> Frank



I think I have been using common terms with well defined meanings-- so no games. What I mean by Arabia is what Arabia means, look it up in Wikipedia.


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## clevermizo

Arabus said:


> This is very important, are you sure? What I know is that the verb  _ra?a_ is not used in vernacular Arabic at all. If Maltese really has this verb, this can be an evidence for non-Arabic substratum in the dialect (of course, Maltese wouldn't be the first dialect to have such substratum).



What? No. Maltese just kept _ra_ while other dialects lost it. The fact that Maltese was culturally separated from the other Arabics and developed on its own is reason enough to explain why it doesn't use _shaaf_. It just means that the use of _shaaf_ to mean to "see" dates likely to the time that Siculo-Arabic/Maltese-speakers became culturally more isolated from the rest of the Arabic speaking world. Which is interesting in and of itself as it puts a date on the spread of _shaaf_ as opposed to _ra_ in the Arabic speaking world (** i.e. at the begin of the 11th century when the Normans took Sicily/Southern Italy and Malta from the Fatimids). 

There is *absolutely no good evidence *to suggest that Maltese developed from any substratum other than Arabic.

And yes I am sure that _ra_ exists. 
It is conjugated this way, and I have transcribed it into Arabic script for those interested:

_jien rajt  _يين ريت
_int rajt _إنت ريت
_hu ra _هو را
_hi rat _هي رات
_aħna rajna _أحنا رينا
_intom rajtu _إنتم ريتو
_huma raw _هما راو

_jien nara_ يين نرا
_int tara _إنت ترا
_hu jara _هو يرا
_hi tara _هي ترا
_aħna naraw _أحنا نراو
_intom taraw _إنتم تراو
_huma jaraw _هما يراو

The letter _j_ in Maltese represents ي, so don't confuse it with ج.

Furthermore, Algerians use the verb را as their present tense verb "to be", so it has still survived in vernacular Arabic, though somewhat altered.


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## Arabus

clevermizo said:


> This is incredibly off-topic but I have to say that Semitic languages' originating in the Arabian peninsula is not a fact. The origin of Proto-Semitic (or whatever it was) speakers is debated, but believed to be in Africa. I'm sure people are taught your claim (I was taught in an Arabic class once that the Ammonites who established the city of Amman where an Arabic-speaking tribe from the Peninsula) but it's patent nonsense and obviously political in nature.
> 
> Anyway, no matter how you look at it, there is no "fact" concerning where Semitic languages originated.



I don't agree with that. There has been a semi-consensus for quiet a long time now that Proto-Semitic originated in the Arabian Peninsula, and I personally believe that the alternative theories are so weak compared to this one. It is almost certain that Pre-Proto-Semitic had reached Arabia from somewhere in Africa (where _Proto-Afro-Asiatic _originated, not _Proto-Semitic_), but there is little doubt that Proto-Semitic speakers lived in Arabia for a considerable time before they gradually  began infiltrating the surrounding regions.

The word "Arabic" has a different sense in the Arabic culture than you know. Anybody who comes from Arabia is called "Arab" عربي-- it doesn't matter what they speak, because Arabians have never spoken one language (today Mehri, Shehri, Harsusi, etc. continue to be spoken in Arabia, and the people who speak them are considered perfect Arabs). Classical Arab writers wrote that many Arabian languages were unintelligible to speakers of Meccan Arabic (they were referring to South and Ancient North Arabian languages), but speakers of those languages were still considered Arabs. All medieval Arabs thought that the Canaanites and Arameans were ancient Arabs, because they originated in Arabia, and this is what Arabs continue to believe today. The word "Semitic" comes from a foreign mythical story and it is not the name of a real race-- so why should Arabs abandon their traditions (which are based on historical, _real _facts) and follow a naming tradition that originates in a foreign myth?


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## WadiH

Arabus said:


> The word "Arabic" has a different sense in the Arabic culture than you know. Anybody who comes from Arabia is called "Arab" عربي-- it doesn't matter what they speak, because Arabians have never spoken one language (today Mehri, Shehri, Harsusi, etc. continue to be spoken in Arabia, and the people who speak them are considered perfect Arabs). Classical Arab writers wrote that many Arabian languages were unintelligible to speakers of Meccan Arabic (they were referring to South and Ancient North Arabian languages), but speakers of those languages were still considered Arabs.



Up to this point, I can agree 100%.  See for example the definition of "Arab" given by _Mu'jam Al-Buldaan_.



> All medieval Arabs thought that the Canaanites and Arameans were ancient Arabs, because they originated in Arabia, and this is what Arabs continue to believe today.



This I'm not sure I agree with.  As far as I know, these were seen as separate races, just like the 'Ibraniyyiin (Hebrews), Suryaan (Syriacs), and NabaT (the Aramaic-speakers of Iraq, not to be confused with the Nabateans).  Do you have any evidence that classical scholars viewed the Canaanites and Arameans as Arabs?

As far as رأى is concerned, I don't know what consequences its existence has for Maltese, but to say that it does not exist in Arabic vernaculars is not entirely true.  The root still exists in the verb "to show": ورّى, راوى, أريتك, etc.  It also exists in the form of ترى, تروا, تراكم, etc. in the Arabian Peninsula, which are used to arouse the speaker's attention at the beginning of the sentence.

I think the reason رأى itself was dropped is a consequence of the general dislike for the _hamza_ in spoken Arabic (hence the dropping of the _hamza _known as تهميز, which Quraysh in particular were said to have practiced).  Usually, the _hamza _is replaced by a ي, و, or ا, or simply omitted, but these options are all a bit awkward when applied to رأى.  Perhaps رأى (with the hamza converted to an aleph or omitted) was a feature of early medieval Arabic in North Africa that was transported to Malta and Sicily but was wiped out from North Africa when the Hilalians and Sulamis arrived in the Fatimid era, those tribes having long replaced رأى with an easier word that they were familiar with i.e. شاف.  That would be my theory.

Actually, there are many features of "Old Arabic" (=CA + the ancient dialects) that we think are extinct in vernacular Arabic, but if you look hard enough you'll often find that they still exist *somewhere* (usually in Arabia itself).  For example, I used to think that the root أتى for "come" was extinct and replaced by جاء, but later found that it was actually an important part of the bedouin dialects of southern Arabia and Yemen (esp. the tribe of Yam in Najran, and its offspring the 'Ijman and Murra on the Gulf coast).

[Speaking of the Murra and 'Ajman, I seem to remember that they do in fact use رأى, but I'm not 100% sure.  Unfortunately, the one page that discusses this word is also the one that Google Books decided to omit from its preview! See bottom of p. 98 here http://books.google.com/books?id=hG...0CAoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=ingham ajman&f=false]


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## Frank06

Arabus said:


> I think I have been using common terms with well defined meanings-- so no games. What I mean by Arabia is what Arabia means, look it up in Wikipedia.


 
Okay, that's clear. Thanks for not playing games this time. Wikipedia is a great tool, isn't it?



> Do you know that in many Arabic books the word Semitic is not used at all: they call Semitic languages the "Arabic languages," based on the fact that they originated in Arabia.


Interesting... But are you sure that's the only reason?

I was also wondering if this doesn't create a huge confusion:
If we'd take a classic family tree, then we'd get:

Arabic languages (in English _Semitic languages_)
West Arabic (in English _West Semitic_)
Central Arabic (_Central Semitic_)
Arabic (_Arabic_)
And going further down to Maltese, according you;
Arabic (_Maghrebi Arabic_)
Arabic (_Siculo-Arabic_)
Arabic (_Maltese_)

At least if I understood well.

This makes me think of a dendrologist looking at a forest with different species of trees of different ages and in an effort to classify them, she all calls them 'tree'.
I mean, what's the point of a classification if you call every branch Arabic?
But maybe I am a bit confused...

Frank


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## WadiH

Arabus said:


> As I have told you, when you have somebody who can understand you (a Moroccan person) but you can't understand them, this means two clear things:
> 
> 
> Your dialects are not mutually intelligible.
> The other person has learned your dialect.
> This is what I am talking about-- we learn the dialects and this is why we understand them. Because we don't learn Moroccan, we don't understand it; but Moroccans still understand us because they learn our dialects.
> ***
> We all are fluent in MSA, and everyone of us gets exposed to a couple of other dialects in childhood (especially in a country like Saudi Arabia), so no wonder that we can learn any new dialect quiet fast that we actually don't realize that we're learning it.



You keep repeating that there is some learning involved when trying to comprehend another dialect, but I've never disputed that at all (perhaps it's my fault for not stating this clearly enough).  In fact, I _do_ remember how I learned to understand Egyptian Arabic, and my memory of it is actually quite vivid. But how much learning are we talking about here, and is it really something out of the ordinary compared to what occurs in, say, English?  I think that in many cases yes it is (e.g. Maghrebi v. Iraqi), but in many others it is not (e.g. Meccan v. Sa'iidi; Damascene v. Cairene; Najdi v. Baghdadi).  Yes there is some learning involved, and yes a knowledge of Fus7a helps, but there is no way on earth that I could have learned Hebrew or Syriac just by watching TV and knowing Classical Arabic, no matter how many hours of Israeli TV I watched and no matter how many Hebrew or Syriac-speaking expatriates lived in Riyadh.  So, basically, unless I've completely misunderstood your premise, I feel you're looking at cases at the extremes (a villager with no exposure to the media or standard Arabic; Magrebi v. Gulf Arabic) and generalizing them.



> I would say Syrian is mutually intelligible with Egyptian if the following is possible to happen-- an illiterate man born in a village in Syria and never exposed to Standard Arabic or any media can understand Egyptian. Do you think there is any chance that this happens? Of course not.



But why introduce these assumptions to begin with?  Shouldn't you be analyzing Arabic on its own terms, as it actually exists?  Why impose the unrealistic requirement of not being exposed to Fus7a when in reality it's always been very rare for an Arab (especially a Muslim one) not to be exposed to *some* Fus7a (I actually don't think the media has as much role as its given credit for, in the sense that most of what you learn about a dialect from the media you can easily and quickly learn just by talking to one individual).

By the way, what are the chances that your hypothetical Syrian villager will understand another Syrian villager living under the same circumstances a few hundred kilometers away?



> As I have already said, I've seen many Egyptians who can't understand Syrian even though they were taught MSA.



Yet Moroccans can understand Syrian or Gulf Arabic just by virtue of knowing MSA?  I think there are cultural factors involved that you're not taking account of that make people from some countries understand more than what they admit they understand.


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## berndf

Arabus said:


> I think I have been using common terms with well defined meanings-- so no games. What I mean by Arabia is what Arabia means, look it up in Wikipedia.


No you have not. "Arabia" is a very loosely defined term with many opportunities for misunderstanding. Therefore you hardly ever find it in learned literature. In geography, "Arabian Peninsula" is a well defined term. It you mean this, please, say so and answer Frank's questions.


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## Frank06

Hi,


berndf said:


> No you have not. "Arabia" is a very loosely defined term with many opportunities for misunderstanding. Therefore you hardly ever find it in learned literature. In geography, "Arabian Peninsula" is a well defined term. It you mean this, please, say so and answer Frank's questions.


Well, I looked at the Wiki article, I'm getting slightly fed up with the ambiguity which seems to dominiate this thread ("Arabia is what Arabia means", please. The same seems to go for "Arabic"), hence my equally slightly ironic comment that it's clear now.

Let's have a look at the Wikipedia entry which should make everything "clear" (I snipped a few parts and a few items):
*Arabia* may refer to: (1) Arab world, (2) Saudi Arabia, (3) Arabian Peninsula, (4) Arabia Deserta, (5) Arabia Felix (modern-day Yemen), (6)Saudi Arabia, (7) Arabia Petraea (a Roman province), (8) Arabia, Finland (I think we can discard this one), (9) 1157 Arabia (idem dito), (10) Arabia (satrapy).

I take it that Arabus refers to (3) the Arabian Peninsula, but even then it's not clear what "Arabia/Arabian Peninusula" is supposed to mean:


> The peninsula's constituent countries are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The northern part of the peninsula is the Syrian Desert, which also includes northeastern Jordan, southeastern Syria, and western Iraq. *Some usage includes the entire subcontinent of Arabia*.


My stress.

Now, which one is it going to be?

Groetjes,

Frank

PS: On a message board we deal with written communication. Which means we can read each others' posts. *Not* each others' minds. Some clarity (clear usage of terms, among other things) would be more than welcome, in order not to loose our time with guessing games.


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## berndf

Frank06 said:


> I take it that Arabus refers to (3) the Arabian Peninsula, but even then it's not clear what "Arabia/Arabian Peninusula" is supposed to mean


I think a more precise definition of the Northern boundaries of the "Arabian Peninsula" as implied by the usual understanding of the term is not required in this context of Arabus' statement ("Arabic languages," based on the fact that they originated in Arabia."). It is just a rough geographical localization.


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## sokol

Arabus said:


> clevermizo said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...
> 
> Anyway, no matter how you look at it, there is no "fact" concerning where Semitic languages originated.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I don't agree with that. There has been a semi-consensus for quiet a long time now that Proto-Semitic originated in the Arabian Peninsula ...
> 
> The word "Arabic" has a different sense in the Arabic culture than you know. ... All medieval Arabs thought that the Canaanites and Arameans were ancient Arabs, because they originated in Arabia, and this is what Arabs continue to believe today. ...
Click to expand...

I would like to point out that we need to interact here *across *cultures - so if no major misunderstandings should occur we should be *very *clear on the terms we use.

Arabus, if you use "Arabic" like it is used in the Arab world there are bound to be misunderstandings as this term is used significantly different elsewhere.  As I pointed out above, linguists cannot (and must not) categorise "Akkadian" as an "Arabic language" because what linguists understand when they speak of "Arabic languages" is the language used in the Quran and its closest relatives/offsprings.
The fact that (as you say) in the Arabian world "Arabic" is used for all Semitic languages has no bearing here as we need to try and understand each other - even across cultures.  And I guess even linguists in the Arabic world will recognise that Akkadian is not a close relative of Arabic (the language of Quran): they might use different terms but that is not the point.

So let us please stick to international terms, else this thread won't end up anywhere (or might end up in Nirvana).
Thus, "Arabic languages" could never include Akkadian nor Aramaic nor Hebrew or any other of the "Non-Arabic" Semitic languages as the term is used internationally: please try and stick to this terminology here - and there will be less cross-cultural misunderstandings.

Also I should emphasise that clevermizo is right concerning the origin of Semitic languages - we do not know exactly where they originated.
There might be a shared consesus in the *Arabic *world that they came from the Arabian peninsula (I'll trust your judgement here) but there's no shared consesus about this internationally, certainly not amongst linguists - and even if there were (which, again, is not the case) this still would be nothing but a hypothesis as there aren't nearly enough facts to nail down the origin of Semitic languages.

And also, I'd like to point out, the origin of Semitic languages definitely is *not *the topic of this thread.  This thread is of course about Maltese and its positioning within Semitic languages which is complicated enough; let's not make it more complicated by introducing the origin of Semitic languages.


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## berndf

sokol said:


> As I pointed out above, linguists cannot (and must not) categorise "Akkadian" as an "Arabic language" because what linguists understand when they speak of "Arabic languages" is the language used in the Quran and its closest relatives/offsprings.


As you point out later in your post, this discussion isn't really affecting the question of the categorization of Maltese. But still let me clarify a few point to bring this detour to an end which is hopefully satisfactory to all.
 
It is indeed frequently held view that the origin of Proto-Semitic (not Arabic), before the branches split, was the Arabian Peninsula. In this context, the definition of the Northern limit of the "Arabian Peninsula" as "South of the Fertile Crescent" is sufficiently precise to differentiate this hypothesis from all its rivals.
 
This theory assumes that the ancestors of the Akkadians migrated from there to Southern and Middle Mesopotamia and the ancestors of Northwest-Semitic speaking peoples (Canaanites, Hebrews, Arameans, …) to the Northern and Western parts of the Fertile Crescent where they lived as nomadic tribes until started to found cities and kingdoms when the Canaanite and Aramaic branches (plus others who were already extinct in antiquity like Ugaritic) started to separate.
 
This was what Arabus referred to when he wrote "There has been a semi-consensus for quiet a long time now that Proto-Semitic originated in the Arabian Peninsula".
 
But from knowledge of the relevant literature it is an exaggeration to speak of a "semi-consensus" though. Rivaling theories locate the Semitic _Urheimat_ in Mesopotamia or stretching from the Mediterranean down to the Red Sea cost.
 
What is consensus is that the Proto-Semitic originated in an area consisting of the Fertile Crescent plus the non-African territories south thereof.


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## Hulalessar

I remembered that I have the Blackwell _Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe_. The entry on Maltese starts:

_A Semitic language, historically a dialect of Arabic (Maghreb group), sufficiently different from other Arabic dialects in script, phonology, lexis, grammar and social status to constitute a distinct language._

This seems to be a reasonable compromise: from a historical viewpoint a dialect of Arabic, but from a sociolinguistic viewpoint a language. (It does of course assume that there is some sort of understanding of what is meant by both "dialect" and "language".)


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## Arabus

clevermizo said:


> What? No. Maltese just kept _ra_ while other dialects lost it. The fact that Maltese was culturally separated from the other Arabics and developed on its own is reason enough to explain why it doesn't use _shaaf_. It just means that the use of _shaaf_ to mean to "see" dates likely to the time that Siculo-Arabic/Maltese-speakers became culturally more isolated from the rest of the Arabic speaking world. Which is interesting in and of itself as it puts a date on the spread of _shaaf_ as opposed to _ra_ in the Arabic speaking world (** i.e. at the begin of the 11th century when the Normans took Sicily/Southern Italy and Malta from the Fatimids).
> 
> There is *absolutely no good evidence *to suggest that Maltese developed from any substratum other than Arabic.
> 
> And yes I am sure that _ra_ exists.
> It is conjugated this way, and I have transcribed it into Arabic script for those interested:
> 
> _jien rajt _يين ريت
> _int rajt _إنت ريت
> _hu ra _هو را
> _hi rat _هي رات
> _aħna rajna _أحنا رينا
> _intom rajtu _إنتم ريتو
> _huma raw _هما راو
> 
> _jien nara_ يين نرا
> _int tara _إنت ترا
> _hu jara _هو يرا
> _hi tara _هي ترا
> _aħna naraw _أحنا نراو
> _intom taraw _إنتم تراو
> _huma jaraw _هما يراو
> 
> The letter _j_ in Maltese represents ي, so don't confuse it with ج.
> 
> Furthermore, Algerians use the verb را as their present tense verb "to be", so it has still survived in vernacular Arabic, though somewhat altered.


 
Well, this is a big discussion.

First let me start by saying that the vernacular verbs _shaaf _(see), _jaab _(bring), and _raa__ħ_(go) are peculiar in at least two respects:


Their meanings and usage: they are quite 'weird' when compared to Classical Arabic.
Their universality: they have entirely 'ousted' the corresponding Standard verbs from all the vernaculars-- as far as I know, there is no trace of the classical equivalents in any vernacular, not even the most isolated vernaculars.
This is why these lexemes have been used (along with other peculiar features of vernacular Arabic) to propose that the vernaculars have a common origin that was _not _Classical Arabic.

I personally believe that it was a 'koine' language spoken all over Arabia, especially sedentary Arabia, that gave rise to the vernaculars. This proto-vernacular language was similar to Classical Arabic, yet it had major distinctions like, for example, the total absence of case inflection. There is much evidence from the early Islamic period to support these assumptions.

Classical Arabic was formulated by the ancient grammarians about a hundred years after Muhammad's death from the conservative dialects of a few Najdi bedouin tribes (about six or seven tribes; their names are mentioned in Islamic literature, see _Al-Muzher_ 1/211). It seems that other than those few Najdi bedouins, no body in Arabia spoke Classical Arabic as a first language.

However, Classical Arabic was commonly used as a prestigious literary language by the 'nobility' in urban centers, like Mecca. We know for sure that the everyday language of Mecca was different from CA-- whether or not it preserved case inflection is a matter of dispute, but it is very possible that it did not. Meccans who had good command of CA were the 'nobility', like e.g. Muhammad, who was sent as a kid into the desert to learn the perfect language. This was a common practice among the noble clans of Mecca.

Back to the original story. Now it is clear why, based on the model I presented, I am not inclined to believe that the vernaculars had originally the verb _ra?aa_. This would mean that this basic verb has totally disappeared without leaving a trace, except in the little island of Malta. Malta lies in the western dialectical zone, and this zone usually shows strict adherence to the vernacular (whereas in Arabia, it is possible to find traces of Classical Arabic), so I wouldn't expect to find traces of CA there. However, nothing is certain about these issues for sure.

The verbs _warraa < *?arraa < ?ar?aa,_ _warjaa < ?arjaa < *?aryaa < ?ar?aa_, _farjaa_, _farraj_, etc. all belong to a different derivational class and they are irrelevant. The interjections _taraa _and _yaa taraa_ are also irrelevant for the same reason. The Algerian auxiliary _raa_ comes from the interjection _taraa_, and it is used in a similar way in the other dialects (e.g. compare Arabian_ taraani atkallam _"I am speaking!" to Algerian _raani ahder_ "I am speaking").

PS: another interesting feature of Maltese seems to be the pronoun _aħna_. In the other vernaculars this is usually _iħna < ni__ħna_. However, this can be easily explained as a regular i > a shift under the influence of the guttural. I don't have sufficient knowledge of Maltese to decide.



Wadi Hanifa said:


> This I'm not sure I agree with. As far as I know, these were seen as separate races, just like the 'Ibraniyyiin (Hebrews), Suryaan (Syriacs), and NabaT (the Aramaic-speakers of Iraq, not to be confused with the Nabateans). Do you have any evidence that classical scholars viewed the Canaanites and Arameans as Arabs?


 

Yes most or all of them did (عرب بائدة), and they still do, look it up. The Jews were never considered Arabs as far as I know. The Canaanites are almost unanimously considered Arabs. The Arabian city mentioned in the Qur'an under the name _Iram _(in other versions: _Araam_, see the _Lisaan_) is an evidence that even the Qur'an considered the Aramaeans Arabs.​





Wadi Hanifa said:


> I think the reason رأى itself was dropped is a consequence of the general dislike for the _hamza_ in spoken Arabic (hence the dropping of the _hamza _known as تهميز, which Quraysh in particular were said to have practiced). Usually, the _hamza _is replaced by a ي, و, or ا, or simply omitted, but these options are all a bit awkward when applied to رأى. Perhaps رأى (with the hamza converted to an aleph or omitted) was a feature of early medieval Arabic in North Africa that was transported to Malta and Sicily but was wiped out from North Africa when the Hilalians and Sulamis arrived in the Fatimid era, those tribes having long replaced رأى with an easier word that they were familiar with i.e. شاف. That would be my theory.​


 

Your explanation is inconsistent because _?ar?aa_ and countless other words also have hamza's but they weren't abandoned. The Maltese have apparently kept _raa _and it wasn't a phonological problem for them (also compare the Saudi verb _jaa _(come) which has exactly the same conjugation as _raa _would have had), so what you say is unlikely in my opinion. As for your ideas about the history of _ra?aa_, they are possible, I don't know; we need evidence.​ 


Wadi Hanifa said:


> You keep repeating that there is some learning involved when trying to comprehend another dialect, but I've never disputed that at all (perhaps it's my fault for not stating this clearly enough). In fact, I _do_ remember how I learned to understand Egyptian Arabic, and my memory of it is actually quite vivid. But how much learning are we talking about here, and is it really something out of the ordinary compared to what occurs in, say, English? I think that in many cases yes it is (e.g. Maghrebi v. Iraqi), but in many others it is not (e.g. Meccan v. Sa'iidi; Damascene v. Cairene; Najdi v. Baghdadi). Yes there is some learning involved, and yes a knowledge of Fus7a helps
> 
> 
> Yet Moroccans can understand Syrian or Gulf Arabic just by virtue of knowing MSA? I think there are cultural factors involved that you're not taking account of that make people from some countries understand more than what they admit they understand.


 
I agree. Let's say: the dialects have variable mutual intelligibility. I think this is a good phrasing.



Wadi Hanifa said:


> Yet Moroccans can understand Syrian or Gulf Arabic just by virtue of knowing MSA? I think there are cultural factors involved that you're not taking account of that make people from some countries understand more than what they admit they understand.


 
I don't understand what that means.


----------



## Arabus

berndf said:


> No you have not. "Arabia" is a very loosely defined term with many opportunities for misunderstanding. Therefore you hardly ever find it in learned literature. In geography, "Arabian Peninsula" is a well defined term. It you mean this, please, say so and answer Frank's questions.


 
"Arabia" returns 85,098 results in Google books. Unless otherwise specified, Arabia = the Arabian Peninsula. Since we're talking history, it is obvious that we're talking about Arabia in its natural (geographic) borders, not the modern political Arabia.



sokol said:


> I would like to point out that we need to interact here *across *cultures - so if no major misunderstandings should occur we should be *very *clear on the terms we use.
> 
> Arabus, if you use "Arabic" like it is used in the Arab world there are bound to be misunderstandings as this term is used significantly different elsewhere.  As I pointed out above, linguists cannot (and must not) categorise "Akkadian" as an "Arabic language" because what linguists understand when they speak of "Arabic languages" is the language used in the Quran and its closest relatives/offsprings.
> The fact that (as you say) in the Arabian world "Arabic" is used for all Semitic languages has no bearing here as we need to try and understand each other - even across cultures.  And I guess even linguists in the Arabic world will recognise that Akkadian is not a close relative of Arabic (the language of Quran): they might use different terms but that is not the point.
> 
> So let us please stick to international terms, else this thread won't end up anywhere (or might end up in Nirvana).
> Thus, "Arabic languages" could never include Akkadian nor Aramaic nor Hebrew or any other of the "Non-Arabic" Semitic languages as the term is used internationally: please try and stick to this terminology here - and there will be less cross-cultural misunderstandings.


 

Thanks, but have you seen me using the Arabic terms? I don't use them, and the vast majority of the modern Arabic linguistic literature doesn't use them either—we use the western terms. Calling the Semitic languages Arabic is found only in a minority of specialized writings (cf. Indo-Germanic), and it is found in popular culture, like clevermizo's story shows. I was just explaining why I can't tell somebody who use the Arabic terms to stop using them.​





sokol said:


> Also I should emphasise that clevermizo is right concerning the origin of Semitic languages - we do not know exactly where they originated.
> There might be a shared consesus in the *Arabic *world that they came from the Arabian peninsula (I'll trust your judgement here) but there's no shared consesus about this internationally, certainly not amongst linguists - and even if there were (which, again, is not the case) this still would be nothing but a hypothesis as there aren't nearly enough facts to nail down the origin of Semitic languages.​


 



I didn't say "certain" or "consensus." I was just saying that a _majority _of scholars have been advocating the Arabian Peninsula as the Semitic homeland for quiet a long time; and they actually have a pretty strong case.​


----------



## berndf

Arabus said:


> "Arabia" returns 85,098 results in Google books. Unless otherwise specified, Arabia = the Arabian Peninsula. Since we're talking history, it is obvious that we're talking about Arabia in its natural (geographic) borders, not the modern political Arabia.


I am glad this is clear now.


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## Arabus

berndf said:


> As you point out later in your post, this discussion isn't really affecting the question of the categorization of Maltese. But still let me clarify a few point to bring this detour to an end which is hopefully satisfactory to all.
> 
> It is indeed frequently held view that the origin of Proto-Semitic (not Arabic), before the branches split, was the Arabian Peninsula. In this context, the definition of the Northern limit of the "Arabian Peninsula" as "South of the Fertile Crescent" is sufficiently precise to differentiate this hypothesis from all its rivals.
> 
> This theory assumes that the ancestors of the Akkadians migrated from there to Southern and Middle Mesopotamia and the ancestors of Northwest-Semitic speaking peoples (Canaanites, Hebrews, Arameans, …) to the Northern and Western parts of the Fertile Crescent where they lived as nomadic tribes until started to found cities and kingdoms when the Canaanite and Aramaic branches (plus others who were already extinct in antiquity like Ugaritic) started to separate.
> 
> This was what Arabus referred to when he wrote "There has been a semi-consensus for quiet a long time now that Proto-Semitic originated in the Arabian Peninsula".
> 
> But from knowledge of the relevant literature it is an exaggeration to speak of a "semi-consensus" though. Rivaling theories locate the Semitic _Urheimat_ in Mesopotamia or stretching from the Mediterranean down to the Red Sea cost.
> 
> What is consensus is that the Proto-Semitic originated in an area consisting of the Fertile Crescent plus the non-African territories south thereof.



This is a good clarification. The Syrian Desert ("South of the Fertile Crescent") = northern Arabia. We need just to add that the rivaling theories are so weak because e.g. it is obvious that there were other nations predating the 'Semites' in Mesopotamia.


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## berndf

Arabus said:


> This is a good clarification. The Syrian Desert ("South of the Fertile Crescent") = northern Arabia. We need just to add that the rivaling theories are so weak because e.g. it is obvious that there were other nations predating the 'Semites' in Mesopotamia.


"Mesopotamia" is only one of the rivalling theories. Anyway, I wouldn't want to take sides in this debate. Scholars arguing either way certainly have good reasons for saying what they say.


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## WadiH

Arabus said:


> Yes most or all of them did (عرب بائدة), and they still do, look it up. The Jews were never considered Arabs as far as I know. The Canaanites are almost unanimously considered Arabs. The Arabian city mentioned in the Qur'an under the name _Iram _(in other versions: _Araam_, see the _Lisaan_) is an evidence that even the Qur'an considered the Aramaeans Arabs.​




I'll come back to discuss your other points later, but I just wanted to comment quickly on this statement.

First of all, even if "Iram"="Aramaeans," that is not evidence whatsoever that the Quran considers them Arabs.  In fact, the Quran never describes any group of people as "Arab."

Second, إرم ذات العماد clearly relates back to عاد in "ألم تر كيف فعل ربك بعاد إرم ذات العماد التي لم يخلق مثلها في البلاد وثمود الذين جابوا الصخر بالواد وفرعون ذي الأوتاد."  No evidence at all that it releates to the Arameaens.  Some exegetists mentioned in passing that Iram may refer to Damascus, others to Alexandria, but clearly the most widely accepted interpretation was that it was simply a further description of عاد.

Third, I checked the entry for إرم in the _Lisaan_, and I couldn't find where he identified إرم with the Arameaens.  Can you point to me specifically where he says this?  I would also be interested to see which authors included the Canaanites among the _'Arab al-Baa2idah_.  Thanks.​


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## WadiH

Arabus said:


> Well, this is a big discussion ...



Indeed.

It depends though on what you mean by Classical Arabic.  If we're talking about the language of the Quraan, meaning the Quraan's preferred diction and choice of words (including words like , ليس, ,رأى, أتى, وضع, etc.), then I think it's clear that it was based on the speech of certain tribes only, and that the descendants of the dialects of the other tribes survive today in Arabia as the modern-day dialects (as do the descendants of the dialects that formed Classical Arabic).  Most of the features of these "other" dialects (call them "Old Arabic") were recorded by the Classical grammarians and given the status of فصيح (even strange things like using the definite article إم!), with the caveat that some usages were more فصيح than others.  That's not the same, though, as saying that all these other tribes spoke a sort of koine, or that they did not employ a case system.  Otherwise, we would expect much greater similarity between the modern Arabian dialects and their non-Arabian, urban counterparts, beyond a handful of words like شاف, جاب, and راح.   I think it’s much more likely that koines were formed in the new provinces themselves, rather than one koine being brought over from Arabia.  After all, there are so many more words that modern Arabian dialects _do _ have in common with Classical Arabic that the non-Arabian dialects do not.  E.g. in my native dialect, we've preserved the verb ما برح, which people from other parts of Najd find funny and provincial; in ‘Asir, people will still tell someone to be quiet by saying صه, etc., etc., etc.

Of course, only a few people from my hometown use ما برح today (mostly old-timers), and within a generation it will be gone completely.  Then a young scholar such as yourself will go on to conclude that the ما برح recorded in the grammar books is a relic of Classical Arabic that has not been part of any vernacular for more than 1500 years.  The point is, words disappear from speech all the time (I often see it in Saudi Arabia myself), especially in urban environments where true koines are formed, and when many synonyms exist.  So, the fact that رأى exists in Malta and not on the opposing African coast is not by itself evidence that it was not spoken on that coast at some point in time.  I’ll give you another example: you probably know that the dialect of Kuwait is based on Najdi Arabic, Kuwait having initially been founded by immigrant Najdi townsmen.  Their dialect preserves words that are no longer in use in Najd itself, but we know that they once were based on testimony from our grandparents’ generations or based on manuscripts and poems from 3 or 4 centuries ago.

So, while I can accept that شاف was probably more common in Arabia than رأى, that does not mean that no tribes ever used رأى, and that some of these tribes did not make their way to North Africa and Malta early on.

This of course assumes that you’re correct when you say that رأى has left no traces anywhere outside Malta.  But actually that’s not true.  Earlier in this thread, I mentioned the Murra and the ‘Ajman of eastern Arabia, who branched off from the Yam tribe of Najran some 2-3 centuries ago.  Well, I’ve found this in a review of Bruce Ingham’s study that I mentioned above:

_“Chapter 5 studies the Bedouin dialect of the Al Murra of eastern and southern Saudi Arabia. There are some lexemes shared with Classical Arabic, which demonstrate the very conservative nature of Bedouin dialects in general (pp. 98-99): ata 'to come', ra a 'to see', but with very limited distribution (first and second person perfect forms only), and dhahab 'go to see' (not 'go')”_

So, here we have the three “Standard” words you have been searching for: أتى (equivalent of جاب, which is just a contraction of جاء بـ anyway ), ذهب (equivalent of راح), and رأى (equivalent of شاف).  And if they exist in the dialect of the Murra (a relatively small tribe numerically), you can be sure that it exists or once existed in the speech of their parent tribe Yam, who now live in Najran but in the medieval era were centered near San’aa, and probably in the speech of other groups in southwestern Arabia as well.  I’ve also heard that أتى (including its conjugations such as the imperative إيت) exists among older people from the Shammar tribe.  Although the Shammar are natives of northern Najd, a major section of the tribe came there from southwestern Arabia some 5 centuries ago.  And of course there are other examples, like وضع (exists in Yemen proper, e.g. ضعه هنا), ليس (exists in Yemen and ‘Asir: لسني أحبه), and so on.

As to the question of what dialects exactly were used to construct Quranic or Classical I suspect it was based mainly on the speech of southwestern Arabia, i.e. of the tribes of the upper Hejaz all the way into northern Yemen, and it seems Quraysh had an input.  Najdi tribes such as Asad, Tamiim, and Qays [well actually Qays were about half and half between Najd and Hejaz] may have been employed for questions of grammar and “obscure” words (as Al-Muzhir states), but in terms of diction, CA bears the closest resemblance to the speech of southern Hejazi and northern Yemeni tribes (which incidentally include Quraysh; but not their famous Meccan section, but rather their modern-day cousins who live in Mecca with the Thaqiif).  I’ve looked at Al-Muzhir, and most of the tribes listed (Huthayl, ‘Ajz Hawazin, Kinana, Thaqiif) are actually Hejazi, not Najdi, and he also mentions two Yemeni tribes.  The author seems to give two separate, contradictory accounts: first he states that غلمان ثقيف were relied upon, then he states that they were considered unreliable.  I think his first account rings truer:

وروى أبو عبيد من طريق الكلبي عن أبي صالح عن ابن عباس، قال: نزل القرآن على سبع لغات منها خمسٌ بلغة العَجُز من هوازن، وهم الذين يقال لهم عُلْيا هوازن، وهم خمس قبائل أو أربع، منها سعد بن بكر، وجُشَم بن بكر، ونَصْر بن معاوية، وثقيف. قال أبو عبيد: وأحسب أفصحَ هؤلاء بني سعد بن بكر؛ وذلك لقول رسول اللّه صلى الله عليه وسلم: أنا أفصح العرب بَيْدَ أني من قريش، وأني نشأْتُ في بني سعد بن بكر. وكان مُسْتَرْضعاً فيهم وهم الذين قال فيهم أبو عمرو بن العلاء: أفصحُ العرب عُلْيا هَوازن، وسُفْلَى تميم.
وعن ابن مسعود: إنه كان يُسْتَحَبُّ أن يكون الذين يكتبون المصاحفَ من مُضَر، وقال عمر: لا يُمْلِيَنَّ في مصاحفنا إلا غِلْمان قريش وثقيف.
وقال عثمان: اجعلوا المُمْلِي من هُذَيل والكاتبَ من ثقيف. قال أبو عبيدة: فهذا ما جاء في لغات مضر. وقد جاءت لغاتٌ لأهلِ اليمن في القرآن معروفةٌ، ويروى مرفوعاً: نزل القرآن على لغة الكَعْبَيْن؛ كعب بن لُؤَيّ وكعب بن عمرو، وهو أبو خزاعة.
وقال ثعلب في أماليه: ارتفعت قريشٌ في الفصاحة عن عَنْعَنَةِ تميم، وتَلْتَلةِ بَهْرَاء، وكَسْكَسَة ربيعة، وكَشْكَشَةِ هَوَازن، وتضجع قريش، وعجر فيه ضبّة، وفسّر تَلْتَلَة بَهْرَاء بكسر أوائل الأفعال المُضَارعة.

This last sentence really is a very good description of Quranic Arabic.


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## berndf

Arabus said:


> The word "Arabic" has a different sense in the Arabic culture than you know. Anybody who comes from Arabia is called "Arab" عربي-- it doesn't matter what they speak, because Arabians have never spoken one language (today Mehri, Shehri, Harsusi, etc. continue to be spoken in Arabia, and the people who speak them are considered perfect Arabs). Classical Arab writers wrote that many Arabian languages were unintelligible to speakers of Meccan Arabic (they were referring to South and Ancient North Arabian languages), but speakers of those languages were still considered Arabs. All medieval Arabs thought that the Canaanites and Arameans were ancient Arabs, because they originated in Arabia, and this is what Arabs continue to believe today. The word "Semitic" comes from a foreign mythical story and it is not the name of a real race-- so why should Arabs abandon their traditions (which are based on historical, _real _facts) and follow a naming tradition that originates in a foreign myth?


Because this creates precisely that situation I described in my first post in this thread, namely were one might arbitrarily call the English Germans because they came from a region that is today Germany. Or call the Germans Swedes because there ancestors came from there or, for that matter, call the Arabs Ethiopians because their ancestors came from East Africa.

You write "medieval Arabs thought", Arabs continue to believe" and "why should Arabs abandon their traditions". You clearly use the term "Arab" as being defined through a common cultural heritage to which neither Akkadians, Canaanites nor Arameans shared and certainly not Jews or Israelis, though they all speak or spoke Semitic languages.

Therefore, the term "Arab" is too culturally and politically biased to be a useful name of the entire language group. The term "Semitic" has the "charm" of not fitting anybodies political agenda and I find it therefore rather practical as a scientific term for the language group.


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## HBZ55

I just wanna clear something up about the ra2aa verb, it's actually still used in colloquial Arabic, at least in Tunisia. It's interchangeable with shaaf, with shaaf being a little bit more common.
I'd also like to point out that I don't like that attitude, especially from Mashreqi Arabs, about Maghrebi dialects. Maghrebi dialects are not farther away from Arabic than Maltese, and the constant mentioning of Mashreqi dialects as being closer to Standard Arabic is not backed by any evidence.
I can honestly say with no prejudice what so ever that I do not find Egyptian Arabic for example any closer to MSA than Tunisian is, and if someone actually tried to spend a week to listen to our dialect he'll realize that.


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## Arabus

HBZ55 said:


> I just wanna clear something up about the ra2aa verb, it's actually still used in colloquial Arabic, at least in Tunisia. It's interchangeable with shaaf, with shaaf being a little bit more common.



This decisively resolves the question of Maltese origin and classification, having such a unique isogloss with Tunisian should make things clearer. It also shows that _shaaf _is indeed not the only verb used in vernacular Arabic. Could you conjugate it for us?



HBZ55 said:


> I'd also like to point out that I don't like that attitude, especially from Mashreqi Arabs, about Maghrebi dialects. Maghrebi dialects are not farther away from Arabic than Maltese, and the constant mentioning of Mashreqi dialects as being closer to Standard Arabic is not backed by any evidence.
> I can honestly say with no prejudice what so ever that I do not find Egyptian Arabic for example any closer to MSA than Tunisian is, and if someone actually tried to spend a week to listen to our dialect he'll realize that.



Me too I hate the paranoid attitude from Maghrebi Arabs; because if you did read our discussion, then you should have known that what we're saying is the total opposite. I have been trying to say that all the dialects are generally equal when it comes to mutual intelligibility-- the only factor affecting this being distance. I also mentioned peripheral Sudanese, peripheral  Iraqi, and peripheral Syrian (including my own speech) as dialects with significant divergences from the main stream. Please try to not be delusional.


----------



## HBZ55

Arabus said:


> This decisively resolves the question of Maltese origin and classification, having such a unique isogloss with Tunisian should make things clearer. It also shows that _shaaf _is indeed not the only verb used in vernacular Arabic. Could you conjugate it for us?
> 
> 
> 
> Me too I hate the paranoid attitude from Maghrebi Arabs; because if you did read our discussion, then you should have known that what we're saying is the total opposite. I have been trying to say that all the dialects are generally equal when it comes to mutual intelligibility-- the only factor affecting this being distance. I also mentioned peripheral Sudanese, peripheral  Iraqi, and peripheral Syrian (including my own speech) as dialects with significant divergences from the main stream. Please try to not be delusional.



I wasn't talking about you, but I was talking about this comment:


> I have no issue with classifying Maltese as a separate language. But objectively speaking it is scarcely less Arabic than Tunisian or Algerian, regardless of whether we treat these 3 as separate languages or not. So, the only convincing answer to Arabus's question is that it is due to cultural (chiefly religious) and political reasons.


Saying that Maltese is scarcely less Arabic than Tunisian or Algerian is flat out wrong, since only 40% of the vocabulary of Maltese is Arabic, and saying that would be like saying Maltese is scarcely less Arabic than Egyptian or Lebanese.


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## WadiH

HBZ55 said:


> I wasn't talking about you, but I was talking about this comment:
> 
> Saying that Maltese is scarcely less Arabic than Tunisian or Algerian is flat out wrong, since only 40% of the vocabulary of Maltese is Arabic, and saying that would be like saying Maltese is scarcely less Arabic than Egyptian or Lebanese.



I see what you mean, but I assure you it wasn't my intention to imply that Tunisian/Algerian are "less Arabic" than Egyptian or Lebanese.  I simply picked Tunisian and Algerian because they are the closest dialects to Maltese (closest phonetically and grammatically, vocabulary aside -- it's enough for me that the core vocabulary of Maltese is Arabic, and I've read that in rural areas the percentage of Arabic vocabulary becomes significantly higher).


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## HBZ55

@Wadi Hanifa:
I think I read somewhere that there was a big number of Maltese settlers who moved back to Malta after the Tunisian independence, could this be the reason contributing to the closeness between Tunisian Arabic and Maltese?


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## WadiH

HBZ55 said:


> @Wadi Hanifa:
> I think I read somewhere that there was a big number of Maltese settlers who moved back to Malta after the Tunisian independence, could this be the reason contributing to the closeness between Tunisian Arabic and Maltese?



That's interesting to know, and if the number of these settlers was large enough, then it could have influenced how Maltese is spoken.  However, if I'm not mistaken, there are written records of Maltese going as far back as the 1500's, and I think those show a dialect that was already similar to Tunisian Arabic (which is just what one would expect given the geographical situation).


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## WadiH

Arabus said:


> This decisively resolves the question of Maltese origin and classification, having such a unique isogloss with Tunisian should make things clearer. It also shows that _shaaf _is indeed not the only verb used in vernacular Arabic. Could you conjugate it for us?



I found something else that might interest you:



> Reflexes of the verb رأى [in the Murra dialect] occur in the perfective, i.e.
> ret, rena, reti. I have not heard 3rd person perfective forms or any imperfective
> forms, but again *Rossi gives a full paradigm for San'a dialect, i.e. ra', ra'at,
> raw, rayn, rayt, rayti, etc.,* and ara' tara', taray, etc.



The Rossi reference he's referring to is:


> E. Rossi, ' L'arabo parlato a San'a ', Roma, 1939



(From Bruce Ingham's _Arabian Diversions_ here.)


----------



## LinguaPhile89

I know I'm a year late but I just came across the subject.
   Personally, I believe that desribing Maltese as a *Language derived from Arabic* is more accurate than a *Dialect of Arabic*.

 Maltese has more than just Arabic vocabulary. The gramatical structures (e.g. plurals, negation, word order,...) are all similar to Arabic, that's why it's still considered a semitic language.

  However, the reason for the divergence of Maltese from Arabic is purely a socio-political one.
 The fact that Arabic was introduced to the island by means of military conquering and the subsequent Italian influence are, in my opinion, two main factors why Maltese is considered a seperate language from Arabic. 
  The same would happen if say, the Lebanese, succumbing to the opinions of the Maronites mentioned earlier, decided to distant themselves from Arabic and establish a new "Lebanese language". In 100 years, there would actually be a distinct language, no matter how close to Arabic it may still be.

We can consider Malta as an extreme case of Lebanon; the desire of the Maltese people to distant themselves from the conquering Arabs surely helped 
in regards to their language. And nowadays, the case seems to be settled, who wants to be associated with the Arab World when the gates of Europe can be open to them?

  I speak the levantine variant of Arabic myself and I had absolutely no problem understading most basic texts in Maltese. Although, claiming the Maltese "is just a little less Arabic than Moroccan or Tunisian" is a bit harsh although the pronounciation is closest to the Maghreb dialects, which is understandable considering the geographical situation of Malta.

  Finally, I'd like to say that Maltese might provide a gloomy "preview" of the future of the dissolution of the Arabic language. Although that would be an extreme case that would be very hard to attain.


----------



## Arabus

I believe your idea was already discussed. As for Lebanese, Lebanese have been _indeed _trying hardly to distance themselves from other Arabic-speakers.

Lebanese obviously has a rudimentary and primitive nature when compared to other dialects. Lebanese is the only dialect as far as I know whose speakers have been deliberately trying to minimize loaning from MSA. For example, they insist on pronouncing /ق/ as a glottal stop even in blatantly MSA words. This only happens in this dialect. It is obviously meant to keep the distinction between the Maronites and Druze who naturally pronounce /ق/ as /q/, and between the Maronites and the Muslims who usually tend to borrow heavily from MSA. Muslims rarely pronounce MSA words with /ق/= glottal stop.

Another example is the _Imala_. Being from Aleppo (a dialect with productive Imala), I can easily see how Lebanese deliberately apply Imala to words that can hardly sustain it. It is very hard for an Aleppine speaker to naturally apply Imala to an MSA word. In Aleppo, we have many minimal pairs between MSA and Aleppine words distinguished only by Imala.

For example:

_jaam3a _(university) vs. _jeem3a _(collecting)
_jihaaz _(instrument) vs. _jheez _(bride outfit)
_ktaab _(book) vs. _kteeb _(marriage)
etc.

In these pairs, the first word comes from MSA, the second is native Aleppine.

There are many other examples of how Lebanese deliberately try to distance their speech from modern speech. However, this seems to be becoming less successful nowadays as people from surrounding areas have started to back-borrow these rudimentary features from Lebanese. It is surprising how much people from Damascus are now inclined to borrow from Lebanese. This phenomenon is just one manifestation of the huge socio-economic change that has taken place during the last 50 years. People of Damascus, who traditionally dominated Lebanon, now look to Lebanon (once a remote rural area) as their example to be copied in everything, even speech. This is a very weird historical phase that we live in.


----------



## Istriano

For language classification the syntax differences are crucial, and that of morphology or *vocabulary *are *not very important*.

For example, Cape Verdean creole has more than 95 % of Portuguese vocabulary yet it's not considered a Romance language because the syntax is 99% WestAfrican.

English syntax is mostly Germanic so the language is classified as Germanic.

Or, using a Tamilian nationalistic tone ironically: ''English is just a dialect of Icelandic, Icelandic being the ''oldest'', and the ''purest'' Germanic language, and therefore identical to Proto-Germanic of yesteryear''.


----------



## WadiH

LinguaPhile89 said:


> I speak the levantine variant of Arabic myself and I had absolutely no problem understading most basic texts in Maltese. Although, claiming the Maltese "is just a little less Arabic than Moroccan or Tunisian" is a bit harsh although the pronounciation is closest to the Maghreb dialects, which is understandable considering the geographical situation of Malta.



How is it "harsh?"  I think people have misconstrued this statement of mine to mean almost the opposite of what I had intended.  I did not mean to say that "Tunisian/Algerian are not very Arabic and Maltese is even less so."  I meant to say that "Maltese is very similar to two bona fide dialects of Arabic."  I'm not an expert on Tunisian Arabic, but I've studied it in passing and read texts in that dialect and it seems to be a rather conservative dialect in my estimation.




> Finally, I'd like to say that Maltese might provide a gloomy "preview" of the future of the dissolution of the Arabic language. Although that would be an extreme case that would be very hard to attain.



I think this outcome has become less likely than ever before with the amount of leveling and cross-influence that the media/communication revolution has created.


----------



## Ben Jamin

Hulalessar said:


> Catalan/Valencian
> 
> Czech/Slovak
> 
> Romanian/Moldavian
> 
> Any Scandinavian language (except Icelandic)/Any other Scandinavian language (except Icelandic)
> 
> One of several languages spoken in the former Yugoslavia/another one of several languages spoken in the former Yugoslavia


 Now you have put quite different languages to one sack. While Serbian and Croatian are 95% alike, Danish and Swedish are hardly mutually intelligible in the spoken form (in the written form about 65% intelligibility).


----------



## Hulalessar

Ben Jamin said:


> Danish and Swedish are hardly mutually intelligible in the spoken form (in the written form about 65% intelligibility).



The point is though that the continental Scandinavian languages are on a dialect continuum. If history had been different and Norway, Sweden and Denmark had been politically united for centuries, we would probably only have one "language".


----------



## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> Now you have put quite different languages to one sack. While Serbian and Croatian are 95% alike, Danish and Swedish are hardly mutually intelligible in the spoken form (in the written form about 65% intelligibility).


I wonder how you measure these percentages. But let's take them as ballpark estimates for now. There are dialects e.g. in Norwegian where the percentage intelligibility is no higher than 65% and within one dialect, 60 year old and 15 year old people probably haven't more than 65% overlap in vocabulary (if this is your measure), yet you wouldn't call them speaking different languages.


----------



## ilocas2

Hulalessar said:


> Catalan/Valencian
> 
> Czech/Slovak
> 
> Romanian/Moldavian
> 
> Any Scandinavian language (except Icelandic)/Any other Scandinavian language (except Icelandic)
> 
> One of several languages spoken in the former Yugoslavia/another one of several languages spoken in the former Yugoslavia



to make
Czech - dělat
Slovak - robiť

to hear
Czech - slyšet
Slovak - počuť

to look
Czech - dívat se
Slovak - pozerať

to speak
Czech - mluvit
Slovak - hovoriť

to kiss
Czech - líbat
Slovak - bozkať

to forget
Czech - zapomenout
Slovak - zabudnúť

liver
Czech - játra
Slovak - pečeň

kidneys
Czech - ledviny
Slovak - obličky

lips
Czech - rty
Slovak - pery

autumn
Czech - podzim
Slovak - jeseň

thirst
Czech - žízeň
Slovak - smäd

And others...
No, Czech and Slovak are not different languages for political reasons.


----------



## berndf

ilocas2 said:


> to make
> Czech - dělat
> Slovak - robiť
> 
> to hear
> Czech - slyšet
> Slovak - počuť
> 
> to look
> Czech - dívat se
> Slovak - pozerať
> 
> to speak
> Czech - mluvit
> Slovak - hovoriť
> 
> to kiss
> Czech - líbat
> Slovak - bozkať
> 
> to forget
> Czech - zapomenout
> Slovak - zabudnúť
> 
> liver
> Czech - játra
> Slovak - pečeň
> 
> kidneys
> Czech - ledviny
> Slovak - obličky
> 
> lips
> Czech - rty
> Slovak - pery
> 
> autumn
> Czech - podzim
> Slovak - jeseň
> 
> thirst
> Czech - žízeň
> Slovak - smäd
> 
> And others...
> No, Czech and Slovak are not different languages for political reasons.


What is that supposed to prove? It is easy to make such lists for German German vs. Austrian German or or British English vs. American English yet they are considered one language, respectively.


----------



## Istriano

The fact that Czech and Slovak speakers may understand each other easily has more to do with the fact they were together for that long than other things.
For speakers of BCS, Slovak is much easier to understand than Czech.
Slovak sounds like an exYU language, Czech sounds more like Polish.


----------



## ilocas2

They have different endings in declension and conjugation. Yes, most of words are very similar but mostly there's some difference. One or two letters.

I only wanted to show, that there are some substantial differences in the basic vocabulary. And the fact that Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligibile is from great part result of television, radio and internet discussions.

EDIT: I think this is off-topic and the discussion should go back to the Maltese. But it had to be said.


----------



## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> I wonder how you measure these percentages. But let's take them as ballpark estimates for now. There are dialects e.g. in Norwegian where the percentage intelligibility is no higher than 65% and within one dialect, 60 year old and 15 year old people probably haven't more than 65% overlap in vocabulary (if this is your measure), yet you wouldn't call them speaking different languages.


 I live in Norway, and the Norwegians claim that they understand all Norwegian dialects perfectly. So the intelligibility is apparently higher than 65%. The difference between 60 year old and 15 year old people which you claim is a wild exaggeration. Even if the youngster speaks a youth slang with his friends, he can express himself in the standard language. 

Returning to the Maltese language, the case is apparently similar to the relation with the relation between the Dutch and German language. The Dutch spoke a German dialect in the Middle Ages, but now have a language of their own, which nobody will call German.


----------



## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> So the intelligibility is apparently higher than 65%.


As you still didn't say what these percentages meant, I can's judge. Why do you think it has to be more than 65% for people to start claiming they understood everything perfectly? 



Ben Jamin said:


> Returning to the Maltese language, the case is apparently similar to the relation with the relation between the Dutch and German language. The Dutch spoke a German dialect in the Middle Ages, but now have a language of their own, which nobody will call German.


This is a perfect example why there aren't linguistic but only political or cultural definitions of what separates a language from a dialect. There are German dialects which are about as far away from Standard German as Dutch is yet it is called a dialect. And the self-reference of Dutch still was _Nederduits_ (_Low-German_) just a bit more than 200 years ago. Dutch is a language and not a dialect because the speakers decided it to be this ways and not because of some obscure percentages of difference.


----------



## Frank06

Ben Jamin said:


> The Dutch spoke a German dialect in the Middle Ages, but now have a language of their own, which nobody will call German.


Dutch as a Germanic dialect, yes, a West-Germanic dialect, yes. But a _German_ dialect no. From what I understood from this thread, it's impossible to compare Dutch/German with Maltese/Arabic.


----------



## DenisBiH

Frank06 said:


> Dutch as a Germanic dialect, yes, a West-Germanic dialect, yes. But a _German_ dialect no.



But I believe that berndf was later arguing precisely about that definition being in domain of politics and culture (and history, I might add). 

On a side note, there still seems to exist that slight confusion over what exactly the first stanza of Het Wilhelmus refers to, "German blood" or "Dutch blood".


----------



## Lars H

Hulalessar said:


> The point is though that the continental Scandinavian languages are on a dialect continuum. If history had been different and Norway, Sweden and Denmark had been politically united for centuries, we would probably only have one "language".



Actually, to some point they were. The three countries were united 1397-1536 but then Sweden left the union.
Norway and Denmark remained united (dominated by Denmark) until 1814 and then followed a new union Sweden-Norway until 1905. 

That didn't help much. On the contrary we went from all speaking "Danish tongue" into three different languages.  

But to bring this to topic. If the three continental very similar Scandinavian languages are accepted as languages, it is difficult to see why anyone should consider Maltese a dialect and not a distinctive language.



> Originally Posted by Ben Jamin
> Danish and Swedish are hardly mutually intelligible in the spoken form (in the written form about 65% intelligibility).


65% intelligibility sounds amazingly low. Is there any source backing up this number?


----------



## Frank06

DenisBiH said:


> On a side note, there still seems to exist that slight confusion over what exactly the first stanza of Het Wilhelmus refers to, "German blood" or "Dutch blood".


For Duytsch see here (and countless other threads).
Even in the light of Bernd's comments, with which I do agree, a statement like "Dutch is a German dialect" doesn't make an awful lot of sense. 
Saying that Dutch is a German dialect would be more or less the same as saying that Portuguese is a Spanish dialect, Spanish a Portuguese dialect. Or, let's not forget, German a Dutch dialect.  

But anyway, I am curious about your findings: Here you can find the Wilhelmus song, the version of 1568. Here you can find the Statenbijbel, published in the a bit later (1637). Here is the German translation of the bible of 1545.

I am sorry for this awfully off topic post.


----------



## Abu Rashid

Frank said:
			
		

> This makes me think of a dendrologist looking at a forest with different species of trees of different ages and in an effort to classify them, she all calls them 'tree'.
> I mean, what's the point of a classification if you call every branch Arabic?



Without wanting to deviate back into that detour taken in this discussion (feel free to branch this if it's off topic, please don't delete it though, as I think it's an issue worth mentioning) this statement is a little far fetched. There seems to be no problem in naming certain language groups after the most prominent member of the group, like for instance the Germanic branch of IE, or the Indo branch of IE etc. Why then is it considered so unthinkable that Arabic would be an appropriate name for Semitic languages? If English naming conventions stuck to the pattern, then what we call Arabic should really be called Arabian or Arabi (to keep it's own native name). Arabic then would refer to the group of languages that are "Arabi-like" or "Arabian-like", which we strangely call "Semitic", even though this is named after a supposedly mythical common ancestral figure, which is usually a no-no in Linguistics or any other kind of scientific field.

The simple fact is that from a logical scientific point of view, Arabic is the most obvious choice as a name for the group, since the lands in which the languages were spoken all centre about the Arabian peninsula, and the language of the Arabs is the best specimen we have of one of those languages, having the fullest phonemic repertoire, best preserved grammar system and largest vocabulary of roots out of any of the surviving members of the group.

I think that like with the main discussion in this thread, it's more about politics and cultural sensitivities than it is about a logical processes of classification, when it's "unthinkable" that the group could be named Arabic.

Note: I'm not suggesting it should be renamed, just making a point that it wouldn't be all that illogical to do so.


----------



## Lars H

Abu Rashid said:


> There seems to be no problem in naming certain language groups after the most prominent member of the group, like for instance the Germanic branch of IE, or the Indo branch of IE etc. Why then is it considered so unthinkable that Arabic would be an appropriate name for Semitic languages?



Germanic is not German, but German is one (of many) Germanic languages. As pointed out before in this thread, I believe. 

And _Indogermanic_ is not such a bad expression after all. All Germanic languages are IE, but all European languages are not. _Suomeksi_ and _Sami_, for instance.
The term Indogermanic points towards the fact that the most western outpost of the IE group (the Americas excepted) is the Germanic Iceland.
I know too little about the _Indo_ part of IE, but I wouldn't be surprised if that part of the name isn't very well found either.

Within the Semitic family of languages, Arabic is only one of many (although very widespread). That's a perfect reason to name the group Semitic and not Arabic. 
Surely the origins of the expression _Semitic_ is far from scientifically clear, but isn't that also true for the origins of _Germanic_, _Slavic_, _Arabic_ or most other languages or language groups?

_Semitic_ is a wide term and it does not mean _Jewish_. The fact that _Antisemitism_ was coined by a German journalist and writer Wilhelm Marr in the 19th century doesn't mean he by any means was right.   
But Arabic on the other hand is closely connected to Arabian and thus not the best name used to label non Arabian languages...


----------



## Abu Rashid

Lars said:
			
		

> Germanic is not German, but German is one (of many) Germanic languages.



Please do point out where I've stated otherwise?

Germanic is a name given to languages which are "German-like", just as Arabic should rightfully refer to languages which are "Arab-like".

My whole point was precisely what you just stated, that Arabian or Arabi should be the name of the language we today call Arabic, and that Arabic languages should refer to the group of which Arabi/Arabian is but one.



			
				Lars said:
			
		

> Within the Semitic family of languages, Arabic is only one of many (although very widespread). That's a perfect reason to name the group Semitic and not Arabic.



You're not making sense now. German is also just one language in the European sub-group. How can you not see that the same logic applies equally to both?



			
				Lars said:
			
		

> Semitic is a wide term and it does not mean Jewish



Again, please feel free to highlight precisely which post you got this idea from.



			
				Lars said:
			
		

> But Arabic on the other hand is closely connected to Arabian and thus not the best name used to label non Arabian languages...



Ditto for Germanic and the plethora of languages which are classified by this name. I'd say the language of the Arabs is far more representative of the Semitic group than German is of the Germanic group. So you're sliding down a very steep hill with that one.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Germanic is a name given to languages which are "German-like"


No absolutely not. "German" is a name the English started to use after the need arose to differentiate between Dutch from the Netherlands and those from the remaining empire when the Netherlands left it in 1648. And as the Dutch (=Deutsch) the English had most contact with where those from the Netherlands they continued to use the term for those people and "invented" a new term for the "others". Other languages who use the term "German" for the language/country/people do it for similar reasons. Before I let this off-topic explanation become too long: The punchline is that the term "Germanic languages" is not derived from German being any kind of "lead language" of the group. On the contrary, German is called German because it is *a* Germanic language for which the English don't have a more specific name.



Abu Rashid said:


> My whole point was precisely what you just stated, that Arabian or Arabi should be the name of the language we today call Arabic, and that Arabic languages should refer to the group of which Arabi/Arabian is but one.


That would be inconvenient because the opposite is already introduced terminology: Arabic is *a* Arabian language. But in principle labels can always be changed. But are there so many languages derived from what one might call "colonial Arabic" outside of the Arabian peninsular which is not regarded by their speakers as an Arabic dialect that it would be called for to make such a big change in traditional terminology?


----------



## Lars H

Abu Rashid said:


> Please do point out where I've stated otherwise?
> Germanic is a name given to languages which are "German-like", just as Arabic should rightfully refer to languages which are "Arab-like".


I think berndf covered your question pretty well. The Scandinavian term for _German _is "tysk" so we don't make the connection _Germanic/German_ as you do. And the same goes for most European languages that have other words for _German _(aleman, duits, Deutsch, nemetski, tedesca, saksan to mention a few). It's only English English and a few other languages that confuses _Germanic/Deutsch_.




Abu Rashid said:


> Again, please feel free to highlight precisely which post you got this idea from.



If we don't trust Wikipedia - and we don't , there are other sources. Like
the Swedish _Nationalencyklopedin _(1990-ies), or _Nordisk Familjebok_ (1890-ies) or britannica.com (today). Please check _semitic languages_ with any written source that you rely on. 



Abu Rashid said:


> Ditto for Germanic and the plethora of languages which are classified by this name. I'd say the language of the Arabs is far more representative of the Semitic group than German is of the Germanic group.



Not really. Since the Germanic language family isn't at all classified by "Deutsch", as proven by berndf, I see no reason why the Semitic family should be classified by Arabian. This said even if a vast majority of the Semitic speakers speak Arabian (as only a (large) minority of the Germanic speakers speaks Deutsch).


----------



## Ben Jamin

Lars H said:


> I think berndf covered your question pretty well. The Scandinavian term for _German _is "tysk" so we don't make the connection _Germanic/German_ as you do. And the same goes for most European languages that have other words for _German _(aleman, duits, Deutsch, nemetski, tedesca, saksan to mention a few). It's only English that confuses _Germanic/Deutsch_.


Not only Eglish. Greek also calls _Deutschland_ 'Germania', and the language 'Germanika'. Also Ivrit (New Hebrew), Georgian, Irish and Romanian) have Germania/Germanic frespectively for the country and the language. In Italian the country is called Germania, but the language Tedesco. An analogous situation is for Russian.


----------



## Lars H

Ben Jamin said:


> Not only Eglish. Greek also calls _Deutschland_ 'Germania', and the language 'Germanika'. Also Ivrit (New Hebrew), Georgian, Irish and Romanian) have Germania/Germanic frespectively for the country and the language. In Italian the country is called Germania, but the language Tedesco. An analogous situation is for Russian.



You have a good point. The land north of the Alps has been called Germania by the people south of the Alps for some two thousand years or so.
To write "Only English..." wasn't the best choice of words, but my point still holds, I believe. 

And for good reasons, we don't speak of "Russianic" or "Spanishic" when we mean Slavic or Romance, althought these two languages are by far the dominating in their respective language family?


----------



## Abu Rashid

Berndf, Lars,



			
				Lars said:
			
		

> It's only English English and a few other languages that confuses Germanic/Deutsch.



Ditto for Arabic/Arabi/Semitic etc. it's just an English based misnomer that has stuck. This is precisely my point, and was precisely the point Arabus seemed to be making. Amongst Arabic-speaking academia, classifying Semitic languages as Arabic is a norm they've practised for possibly a millenium, long before English (or other European-language) speakers ever heard of the term comparative linguistics, and certainly long before they coined the term "Semitic".

I won't continue with the rest of the points so as to keep it brief, but I'll just point out that I was not calling for any naming conventions to be changed. They merely serve the purpose of communicating what it is we're referring to, and so long as the terminology is understood, then I'm fine with it. I just wanted to make the point that if we were to revert to the old Arabic terminology for classifying the Semitic languages, it wouldn't really be all that strange or illogical. Frank's point about calling everything tree was completely inappropriate, since in Arabic, the terminology would not be اللغة العربية (Arabic for "Arabic language") but would be something that roughly means "Arab-like languages".

That might not fit well with some, obviously due to the political/cultural implications of classifying a language like Hebrew as part of an "Arabic group" (something which has also been done before by European linguists mind you), but the fact is it would be no more wrong than the German/Germanic classification (English misnomer granted), in fact probably more right, since Arabic is by far the most widely spoken and prevalent of the group's languages, and is also the most conservative specimen still spoken, and is probably the second most conservative ever attested. Coupled with the fact that about 80-90% of the original area that the Semitic languages were spoken in is the Arabian peninsula, and it would not be illogical at all to make such a classification.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> ...but the fact is it would be no more wrong than the German/Germanic classification (English misnomer granted), in fact probably more right, since Arabic is by far the most widely spoken and prevalent of the group's languages,...


This would be logical, if linguists normally named language groups after certain prominent representatives of that group. But this is not the case and this is also not the origin of the term "Germanic languages". The term "Germanicus" is much, much older than the concept of a German nation or language (which is a comparatively new concept) and refers to the common origin of all Germanic peoples and languages.

The geographical interpretation which you are also suggestion would be inappropriate as Theories about the Semitic _urheimat_ remain highly controversial and should not be the basis for the very definition of the language group.


----------



## Abu Rashid

berndf said:
			
		

> This would be logical, if linguists normally named language groups after certain prominent representatives of that group. But this is not the case and this is also not the origin of the term "Germanic languages". The term "Germanicus" is much, much older than the concept of a German nation or language (which is a comparatively new concept) and refers to the common origin of all Germanic peoples and languages.



Whilst this might be true, it's still an exonym that's applied to a wide range of people and their languages. Arabic could just as well be applied in the same manner, and it'd probably be less inaccurate.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> The geographical interpretation which you are also suggestion would be inappropriate as Theories about the Semitic urheimat remain highly controversial and should not be the basis for the very definition of the language group.



But I didn't state the Semitic homeland was necessarily in any place (perhaps Arabus did??). I merely stated that when we look at the area in which the Semitic languages were originally natively spoken, the vast bulk of that land consists of the Arabian Peninsula.

Here is an image I made of the rough area that was historically the areas where Semitic languages were spoken:

http://www.semiticroots.net/images/Semitic Lands Green.png

I don't know about you, but to me it screams out Arabia.


----------



## berndf

I can't see how these two statements go together:





Abu Rashid said:


> But I didn't state the Semitic homeland was necessarily in any place (perhaps Arabus did??).





Abu Rashid said:


> I merely stated that when we look at the area in which the Semitic languages were *originally natively* spoken, the vast bulk of that land consists of the Arabian Peninsula.


----------



## Abu Rashid

They go quite fine together.

Nowhere did I mention the home of the original Semitic language, but I was referring to the lands in which the Semitic languages were native. If you look to the map I made you will see. It includes all of the regions where Semitic languages were spoken (without taking into account the widespread expansions that they underwent at various stages), Arabian Peninsula, Fertile Crescent, Levantine Coast, Abyssinia. For most of their known history, those lands were largely Semitic-speaking, and they quite clearly seem to centre around the Arabian Peninsula.

My statement was in reference to all Semitic languages, not a theorised homeland for the entire Semitic branch in it's infant stages. This seems to be the misunderstanding you've followed.


----------



## berndf

I see. You are talking about the attested historical region where Semitic languages dominated. But the historically most densely populated area and culturally dominating region within the area in green in the map is Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent and not the Arabian Peninsula. In my opinion, this map doesn't produce a strong case for your proposal.


----------



## Abu Rashid

berndf said:
			
		

> But the historically most densely populated area and culturally dominating region within the area in green in the map is Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent and not the Arabian Peninsula.



Aksum and Saba were quite populous in their day.

But that still doesn't alter the fact that the Arabian Peninsula is the obvious centre of gravity in that map. In fact that map is basically the Arabian Peninsula and it's periphery. The only sides on which it isn't surrounded by a narrow band of fellow Semitic speakers forming a frontier with other language groups is the side on which it borders with the oceans/seas.

Also note that the Fertile Crescent / Levantine Coast band to the north is where the Semitic languages were least conservative, indicating that as a frontier region, they were heavily influenced by the other languages they were in contact with, whilst the bulk of the Peninsula remained virtually untouched from outside influence, the most conservative languages being the Sayhadic (OSA) languages in the very south, the most protected part of the peninsula, which faces the ocean.

Regardless, I still can't see why you'd oppose a language group being named after the area which is, where the language that most speakers speak, originates, and where most of the land it was historically found in seems to _geographically_ centre around. The only conclusion I can draw is that there's a cultural/political motive behind doing so. Otherwise the strong opposition makes absolutely no sense at all.

It's about as strange as someone claiming the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian sub-family of languages shouldn't be named after the land of Iran, because non-Iranians like Kurds & Afghans also speak a language in the branch.


----------



## DenisBiH

I haven't been following your entire discussion, but quite honestly, not seeing the sense in replacing a perfectly good neutral name of a language family with one that is extremely semantically loaded, based mostly on the argument of how big the Arabian desert is compared to the "outlying areas", is quite a neutral stance in my opinion.

On the other hand, I'd consider the ones who would wish to rename it as being primarily politically/culturally motivated.


----------



## Abu Rashid

Dennis said:
			
		

> but quite honestly, not seeing the sense in replacing a perfectly good neutral name of a language family with one that is extremely semantically loaded



Probably best you read it before commenting. As I quite clearly stated:



			
				Abu Rashid said:
			
		

> but I'll just point out that I was not calling for any naming conventions to be changed. They merely serve the purpose of communicating what it is we're referring to, and so long as the terminology is understood, then I'm fine with it.



Nowhere have I promoted the idea of changing the name, merely that if it were to be changed to Arabic (Arabic actually meaning 'Arab-like'), it wouldn't be all that illogical or unusual. There is nothing culturally or politically loaded in the use of the term Arabic, and for centuries it was the term used by the only linguists who bothered to do comparative studies of the languages.


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## DenisBiH

Abu Rashid,

1) Please do note a single "n" in the name, now I'm not sure if you're responding to me or some earlier poster 
2) Also please note that *nowhere* in my post did I refer to you specifically



> On the other hand, I'd consider *the ones* who would wish to rename it as being primarily politically/culturally motivated.


You're saying you were speaking hypothetically. So was I. 

As for who did what and when, I don't know much about early Arabic comparative efforts and linguistics in general, but I suppose that had the Arabs been the ones to bring modern comparative and historical linguistics to the level it is at today, and not Europeans, then Arabic terminology (and specific naming conventions) would now be widely accepted. Since they weren't, and it isn't, only sensible thing that occurs to me is a rather old and somewhat vulgar saying here in Bosnia: "If grandmother had the male parts, she would a grandfather".


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> But that still doesn't alter the fact that the Arabian Peninsula is the obvious centre of gravity in that map. In fact that map is basically the Arabian Peninsula and it's periphery.


I guess it depends on how you learned history then. I see in it Mesopotamia and the fertile crescent with adjecent desert. I don't say this is a better way to look at it. I am just trying to explain that your way to look at it is not so self-imposing.




Abu Rashid said:


> It's about as strange as someone claiming the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian sub-family of languages shouldn't be named after the land of Iran, because non-Iranians like Kurds & Afghans also speak a language in the branch.


The logic of this naming is corners of the area where the group is spoken. It is the same logic as "Indo-Germanic", a term abandoned in most laguages by now (German scholars still use it). You rightly mentioned Kurdish. Accoording to that logic, the group should have been called "Indo-Kurdish". But well.


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## DenisBiH

I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that Iran (and the earlier forms) are parallel in their use to Germanic *theudiskaz and its reflexes, in that it is a very old name whose most recent meaning does not reflect its original meaning, which was not restricted to modern Iran. Or am I wrong?

As for Indo-Kurdish, I don't think that would employ the same principle used for Indo-Iranian. Kurdish is not a language family, but a member of the Iranian family. If you wanted to use Kurdish, it would need to be Bengalo-Kurdish then (or whichever language is the easternmost in Indo-Aryan family). And Indo-European would then need to be Bengalo-Icelandic.


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## Abu Rashid

Denis said:
			
		

> Please do note a single "n" in the name, now I'm not sure if you're responding to me or some earlier poster



No, it was to you, I just couldn't have been bothered scrolling back up again to check if it was 1 or 2 Ns, sorry. 



			
				Denis said:
			
		

> I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that Iran (and the earlier forms) are parallel in their use to Germanic *theudiskaz and its reflexes, in that it is a very old name whose most recent meaning does not reflect its original meaning, which was not restricted to modern Iran. Or am I wrong?



Again, ditto for Arabia/Arabic.

All of these points you keep producing apply just as equally to Arabic, I don't see why you insist on presenting them, when they are not unique to the other examples at all.



			
				Denis said:
			
		

> As for Indo-Kurdish, I don't think that would employ the same principle used for Indo-Iranian. Kurdish is not a language family, but a member of the Iranian family



Not sure you quite understand the point then. That _is_ the point. Kurdish is classified as a member of the Iranian family, why not call it the Central-Asian family to avoid it being too strongly linked with Iran and Iranians?

I'm truly astounded that you still think these are very separate cases, when in fact they're either the same, or are even more so relevant.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> I guess it depends on how you learned history then. I see in it Mesopotamia and the fertile crescent with adjecent desert.



So how do you explain that the Arabian Peninsula is the area flanked on all sides by either Semitic speaking lands or by ocean/sea? If Abyssinia weren't Semitic, and Mesopotamia was flanked on it's north and east by Semitic speakers, then you might have a case. The fact that Mesopotamia burst onto the 'civilisation scene' earlier than Arabia, Yemen, Aksum etc. does not necessarily equate to it being a linguistic centre of gravity as you falsely assume. Mesopotamia was in fact a centre of civilisation prior to it even having Semitic speakers (as I'm sure you're aware, or perhaps it's your understanding of history that should be called into question here?), which could possibly even rule it out as being a valid part of the map. It certainly means it has no extra weight, merely due to the virtue of it having been a centre of civilisation as you suggest.

In fact as far as I'm aware Arabia & Abyssinia are the only lands in the region which have no known pre-Semitic linguistic tradition. Mesopotamia and the Levantine coast both do. So history is certainly not on your side in that respect.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> The logic of this naming is corners of the area where the group is spoken. It is the same logic as "Indo-Germanic", a term abandoned in most laguages by now (German scholars still use it). You rightly mentioned Kurdish. Accoording to that logic, the group should have been called "Indo-Kurdish". But well.



Right then my point stands even stronger now. Arabia is the eastern most area where Semitic languages are spoken, so I guess the super-family should be called Afro-Arabic then, and the eastern branch Arabic. 

Again, I'm not agitating for name change at all, I'm just astounded by the almost reflex-reaction to the mere suggestion of the usage of such a naming convention, and the revelation it was the historical naming convention in the Middle East (ie. the area where Semitic languages are extant). The idea that it's preposterous to even suggest it, is in my mind... preposterous. That's all.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> So how do you explain that the Arabian Peninsula is the area flanked on all sides by either Semitic speaking lands or by ocean/sea? If Abyssinia weren't Semitic, and Mesopotamia was flanked on it's north and east by Semitic speakers, then you might have a case. The fact that Mesopotamia burst onto the 'civilisation scene' earlier than Arabia, Yemen, Aksum etc. does not necessarily equate to it being a linguistic centre of gravity as you falsely assume. Mesopotamia was in fact a centre of civilisation prior to it even having Semitic speakers (as I'm sure you're aware, or perhaps it's your understanding of history that should be called into question here?), which could possibly even rule it out as being a valid part of the map. It certainly means it has no extra weight, merely due to the virtue of it having been a centre of civilisation as you suggest.





Abu Rashid said:


> In fact as far as I'm aware Arabia & Abyssinia are the only lands in the region which have no known pre-Semitic linguistic tradition. Mesopotamia and the Levantine coast both do. So history is certainly not on your side in that respect.


The argument started when I said I wouldn't want to base the name on controversial hypotheses about the origin of the Semitic language group. Then you explained to me you didn't talk in terms of homeland and where the cradle of the language group was and showed me that map. I accepted that and told you what I saw in this map alone without any reference to any hypothetical Semitic urheimat or which areas where code and which were expansion areas.
 
As soon as I do that you start arguing how Semitic languages did spread over the green area in this map. This shows that my initial understanding was right that the proposal is indeed based on an attempt to "sell" a certain, controversial view on the origin of the language group. And that is what I don't like.
 
The classification of Afro-Asian languages into "Semitic" and into a "Hamitic" group (the term "Hamitic" isn't used any more, but that's a different story) is based on the tale that the Canaanites where all the decedents of one of Noah's sons and the Egyptians those of the other. Of course every one today regards this as "just a story" which makes the naming in my understanding quite neutral.
 
I am not against changing terminology as such but I would certainly not want to trade a less biased term for a more biased one.


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## DenisBiH

> Not sure you quite understand the point then. That _is_ the point. Kurdish is classified as a member of the Iranian family, why not call it the Central-Asian family to avoid it being too strongly linked with Iran and Iranians?


Because Iran in the modern sense is a subset of Iran in the ancient sense. Iran in the ancient sense, according to what I've read, includes the parts that are today Kurdish. So, historically speaking, Kurdish is Iranian (in that wider, historical sense).

Here's a quote from Herodotus regarding Medians, a  people from which some Kurds today claim descent (although their claim seems to be disputed by scholars):



> "The Medes were called anciently by all people Aryans"


Unless you have some proof that Semitic speakers in e.g. ancient Mesopotamia used "Arabs" or "Arabic" to refer to themselves or their land, or one of their contemporaries used it when referring to them, there is no parallel here.


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## Abu Rashid

berndf said:
			
		

> As soon as I do that you start arguing how Semitic languages did spread over the green area in this map.



I think it's generally accepted that Semitic languages are not native to Mesopotamia. They spread there as a result of incursions by 'desert raiders' from the West. However, due to the fact they've been there since the dawn of written records pretty much I was willing to just accept it as part of the traditionally Semitic lands, but certainly not the centre of them.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> The classification of Afro-Asian languages into "Semitic" and into a "Hamitic" group (the term "Hamitic" isn't used any more, but that's a different story) is based on the tale that the Canaanites where all the decedents of one of Noah's sons and the Egyptians those of the other. Of course every one today regards this as "just a story" which makes the naming in my understanding quite neutral.



Oh dear, looks like your theological history is just as mixed up. Canaan, according to the Biblical story was a descendant of Ham, not of Shem, so there goes that theory. If anything, that's one of the striking mistakes that the name 'semitic' contains.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> I am not against changing terminology as such but I would certainly not want to trade a less biased term for a more biased one.



Right.. not one which recognises several undeniable facts about the group. The geographical centre of it's primary locations, and the languages which are spoken by the vast majority of it's speakers (by far) and the languages which have the most conservative and stereotypical aspects of the group still present.

Yes I can see why you'd automatically oppose such a name.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Oh dear, looks like your theological history is just as mixed up. Canaan, according to the Biblical story was a descendant of Ham, not of Shem, so there goes that theory. If anything, that's one of the striking mistakes that the name 'semitic' contains.


That is where the naming (Semitic/Hamitic) does come from. That the people how created the terminology might noot have read the bible well is a different matter. Well, I assume it must have originally meant Hebrews as opposed to Canaanites.*



Abu Rashid said:


> Right.. not one which recognises several undeniable facts about the group.


... as well as things which are not. And that matters.
_______________________
* That Hebrew is part of the Canaanite dielect continuum, which we take as a matter of course today, wasn't always clear to pleople.


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