The Arabic Language

Qurʾān
. Thus, for 
instance, Nicolaus Clenardus (1495–1542), in his 
Perigrinationum, ac de rebus Macho-
meticis epistolae elegantissimae
(
Most Subtle Treatises of Wanderings and about Matters 
Mohammedan
, Louvain 1551), writes that it would be useless to try to convince 
the ‘Mohammedans’ in Latin of their errors. He had studied Arabic and medicine 
in Granada and strongly felt that the study of Arabic was needed primarily in 
order to polemicise against Muslims in their own language. In this connection, 
a second motive for studying Arabic may be mentioned: the wish on the part of 
the Catholic Church to achieve reunification with Eastern Christianity. Contacts 
with Arabic-speaking Maronites were encouraged, and an increasing number of 
Levantine Christians came to Rome and Paris in order to help in this campaign. 

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4
The Arabic Language
At the same time, these Maronites brought information on Arabic and Islam, and 
became an important source of information on these topics.
Even those scholars whose interest was primarily philological or historical, 
such as Bedwell (1563–1632) in England and Erpenius (1584–1624) in Holland, 
followed the prevailing views of their contemporaries in regarding Islam as a 
false religion. Yet, with their grammars and text editions, they laid the founda
-
tions for the study of Arabic, and their interest in the language itself was probably 
genuine. It may well be the case that they sometimes cited religious motives in 
order to legitimise their preoccupation with the language of the infidels. Erpenius 
also showed a special interest in the writings of the Arab Christians, and was 
convinced that the study of the Arabic translations of the Bible would make an 
important contribution to the 
philologia sacra
, the study of the Bible. Since Arabic 
resembled Hebrew so much, many scholars believed that the study of the Arabic 
lexicon would be rewarding for the understanding of Biblical Hebrew, and accord
-
ingly it became customary to combine the two languages in the curriculum.
In fact, the resemblance between the two languages, especially in the lexicon, 
is so striking that at a very early date scholars had begun to remark on this 
relationship. In the Arab world, the general disinterest in other languages did 
not create an atmosphere in which the relationship could be studied fruitfully, 
although some geographers did remark on it. Hebrew grammarians devoted a lot 
of attention to the relationship between the two, or, if we count Aramaic as well, 
the three languages. Since Jews in the Islamic empire lived in a trilingual commu
-
nity, their native tongue being Arabic and the language of their Holy Scripture 
being Hebrew, with commentary and explanation in Aramaic, they were in an 
ideal situation to observe similarities across the three languages. Yehuda ibn 
Qurayš (probably around 900) wrote a 
Risāla
in which he stressed the importance 
of Arabic and Aramaic for the study of the Hebrew Scripture. The findings of the 
Hebrew philologists in comparative linguistics remained, however, restricted to 
the small circle of the indigenous grammatical tradition and did not affect the 
development of the study of the Semitic languages in Europe.
In Western Europe, as early as the sixteenth century, philologists working with 
Hebrew were not completely unaware of the relationship between Hebrew and 
other Semitic languages, which is much more transparent than that between the 
Indo-European languages. They called these collectively ‘Oriental languages’, a 
name that at various times included not only Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic, but 
also Ethiopic, and even unrelated languages such as Armenian and Persian. But 
this vague awareness of a linguistic connection did not lead to any scientific 
comparison, and the only practical effect was that the study of Arabic was recom-
mended as an ancillary to the study of the Hebrew Bible. It was generally assumed 
that Hebrew had been the language of paradise and as such the original language 
of mankind. The other languages were therefore regarded as its offspring, which 
presented the original language in a degenerated form.

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The Study of Arabic in the West 
5
The idea of a relationship between the languages that are now known as 
Semitic found its Biblical support in the story about the sons of Noah, namely, 
Shem, Cham and Japheth, a division also used by Hebrew and Arab scholars. 
The sons of Shem had spread all over the Middle East and North Africa; the sons 
of Cham were the original speakers of the African languages; and the sons of 
Japheth were the ancestors of the speakers of a variety of languages in Europe 
and Asia (see p. 17). In its original form, this classification hardly evoked any 
diachronic connotation: the languages were seen as distant relatives and the 
genealogical distance between them was represented in the form of a family tree. 
Western linguistics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was more inter-
ested in the universal structure of human speech, and the ideas of the