The Arabic Language

Grammaire 
générale et raisonnée
of Port Royal (1660) about the connections between logic 
and grammar greatly affected the orientation of Arabic and Semitic linguistics 
too, for instance, in Silvestre de Sacy’s 
Grammaire arabe
(1806). The universalist 
orientation strengthened the ahistorical character of the study of Arabic and 
Hebrew, and did not advance the comparative study of what had become known 
as the Semitic languages, a term used for the first time in 1781 by August Ludwig 
Schlözer.
The two factors that promoted the study of Arabic, the use of Arabic for polem
-
ical purposes, and its use for the study of the Hebrew Bible, combined to ensure 
the continuation of the study of the language, even after the decline of the influ-
ence of Arab medical science. It may be added that commercial interests, too, 
may have played a role in the search for knowledge about Oriental languages. 
Especially in the Dutch Republic, but also in Germany and France, the study of 
Arabic and, to a lesser degree, of Turkish and Persian became increasingly impor
-
tant for the growing trade with these countries. Some of the most famous Orien
-
talists started their careers in the diplomatic service of their country. Golius 
(1596–1667), for instance, who was Erpenius’ successor in the Chair of Arabic at 
the University of Leiden and the author of the first real dictionary of Arabic in 
the West (
Lexicon Arabico–Latinum
), which for two centuries remained the only 
available and reliable lexical source, visited Morocco, Syria and Ottoman Turkey 
before accepting his appointment at Leiden.
Theology and the 
philologia sacra
remained an important factor in the study 
of Arabic throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, as we have 
seen above, most scholars of Arabic were simultaneously experts in Hebrew. The 
emphasis on the dangers of Islam for Christian Europe continued to make itself 
felt until the eighteenth century, when the philosophers of the Enlightenment 
inaugurated a new attitude towards the Orient. Basing themselves on travellers’ 
reports, they concluded that much could be learnt from the ‘Oriental’ cultures. 
The Persian Empire, for instance, was admired by them for its orderly organisa
-
tion and its tolerance towards all religions. This change in attitude made itself felt 
in the study of the ‘Oriental’ languages (and literatures!) as well, and although the 

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6
The Arabic Language
old prejudices crop up occasionally in the works of the scholars of this time, most 
of the interest was genuine and without ulterior motives.
In the linguistic study of the Semitic languages, a major innovation took place 
in the nineteenth century, when European linguistics was revolutionised by the 
comparative–historical paradigm, which started in the field of the Indo-European 
languages with Franz Bopp’s comparison of the conjugational system of Sanskrit, 
Greek, Latin, Persian, Balto-Slavic and Germanic (1816), but soon spread to other 
language groups as well. This paradigm enabled scholars for the first time to 
set up a classificatory scheme of an entire language group, which still used the 
simile of the language tree, only this time based on systematic comparison and a 
search for regular relationships. In the field of Semitic linguistics, the discovery 
and decipherment of Assyrian material in cuneiform script in the mid-nineteenth 
century and the availability of epigraphic material from Old Aramaic and 
Epigraphic South Arabian greatly enlarged the time-depth of the comparisons 
and made it possible to attempt a reconstruction of a proto-Semitic language at 
the root of the tree of all Semitic languages, analogous to the reconstruction of 
proto-Indo-European. The results of the new paradigm in Semitic comparative 
linguistics were collected and summarised by Carl Brockelmann in his