The Arabic Language
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(plural vyuo ) schools, and hardly anybody has any active knowledge of the language. With the disappearance of the old-fashioned religious and cultural aristocracy, the influx of Arabic words more or less ceased. In recent times, however, there has been a renewed tendency in Tanzania and Kenya, where Swahili has become 320 The Arabic Language the national language, to replace English loans with words of Arabic origin. In most cases, these words already existed as alternatives and were regarded by the speakers as Swahili, for example, ripoti is replaced with taarifu ‘report’, korti with mahakama ‘court’, jaji with hakimu ‘judge’, especially in scientific terminology (e.g., elimunafsi has become more current than the English loanword saikolojia , elimujamii more current than the English loanword sosholojia ). The use of the Arabic script for Swahili has been abandoned, however, and only elderly people use it infrequently in private correspondence and religious instruction. The only country where Arabic has remained a national language is the tiny Islamic Federal Republic of Comoro, which recognises both Arabic and the local language Shingazija (written in a script derived from Arabic script) as national languages. According to the dictionaries, approximately 50 per cent of the vocabulary of Swahili derives etymologically from Arabic. In modern journalistic Swahili, this drops to 30 per cent, and in the colloquial language it is even less. The influence of Arabic has spread to many domains of the lexicon, foremost among them, of course, religion, but also law, politics, economy and trade, education and sciences. One example may suffice to show the dependence of the language on Arabic in the choice of abstract words: to express the notion of ‘estimating, calculating, thinking’, Swahili uses no fewer than four Arabic words, kisi ‘to estimate, calcu - late’ (Arabic qāsa ), fikiri ‘to think, reflect’ (Arabic fikra ‘thought’), kadiri ‘reckon, judge’ (Arabic qaddara ) and hesabu ‘count, calculate’ (Arabic ḥisāb ‘account [noun]’ or ḥasiba ‘to account’), alongside a word derived from Persian, bahatisha ‘to guess, speculate’, and a Bantu word pima ‘to measure’. The degree of integration of Arabic loans in the structure of Swahili is high. Thus, we find, for instance, from the Arabic words ʿilm ‘science, knowledge’ and muʿallim ‘teacher’ the following Swahili derivatives: elimu ‘science, education’ mwalimu /plural walimu ‘professor’ mtaalamu /plural wataalamu ‘scholar’ utaalamu ‘culture, erudition’ -taalamu ‘learned’ kutaalamu ‘to be specialised in’ kuelimisha ‘to teach, instruct’ These derivatives show that the derivation cuts across categories, and one Arabic noun may be used as point of departure for other nouns, adjectives and derived verbs. The example of mwalimu / walimu shows that Arabic words are integrated in the morphological pattern of Swahili plurals. In this case, the Arabic mu- in muʿallim is treated as the Swahili prefix of the nominal classes 1/2 (cf. m-tu/wa-ntu ‘person’), hence, the plural with wa- ; similarly kitabu /plural vitabu , on the pattern of the Swahili nominal classes 7/8 (cf. kitu /plural vitu ‘thing’). Arabic is also the source for many of the conjunctions and prepositions of Swahili, for example, Arabic as a World Language 321 kama ‘as’, kabla ‘before’, baada ‘after’, baina ‘between’, lakini ‘but’, wala ‘nor’, au ‘or’, zaidi ‘plus’, karibu ‘almost’ and so on. It is also present in such colloquial expressions as asante ‘thank you!’ (< Arabic ʾaḥsanta ‘you have done well’). As in most African languages that came into contact with Arab traders, some of the numerals in Swahili were borrowed from Arabic: situ ‘six’ (< sitta ), saba ‘seven’ (< sabʿa ), tisa ‘nine’ (< tisʿa ), and all decimals (e.g., ishirini ‘twenty’ < ʿišrīna , arobaini ‘forty’ < ʾarbaʿīna ). But note that for ‘eight’ a Bantu word is used, nane , as for the numerals one to five ( moja , mbili , tatu , nne , tano ) and the word for ‘ten’ ( kumi ). Even when contact with the Arabs was less intensive, linguistic borrowing took place on a large scale, as, for instance, in the Ful languages, spoken in a large area from Guinea to Chad. The approximately 550 vocabulary items derived from Arabic are almost all connected with Islam and trade and have been integrated to a large degree. One finds, for instance, for ‘onion’ albasal (< Arabic baṣal with the article). The final syllable of the word -al was interpreted as a nominal classifier, as in the Fulfulde word lisal ‘branch’, on whose plural licce the plural of albasal is built, albacce . Other loanwords were provided with a Ful classifier, for example, ḥarf ‘letter’ > harfeere /plural karfeeje , or dunyā ‘world’ > dunyaaru /plural duuni - yaaru . In some cases this led to virtual unrecognisability, for instance, in ḫinzīr ‘swine’ > hinjiiru /plural kinjiiji . As in other African cultures, the contact with Islam led to the emergence of an intellectual and religious elite of scholars, who became well versed in Classical Arabic and wrote commentaries in Fulfulde on Arabic religious texts. Their familiarity with Arabic manifests itself in a tendency to Arabicise the pronunciation of Arabic loans, for example, ḏikru ‘mention of God’s name’ instead of the popular jikru , or zamaan ‘time’ instead of the usual jamanu , jamaanu , jamanuuru . A special case is that of Arabic influence in the Austronesian language Malagasy, the official language of Madagascar. Trading contacts with Arab traders go back several centuries, but it seems that the loanwords from Arabic in general use are restricted to the domain of astrology (called alikilili < Arabic al-ʾiklīl ‘the Head of Scorpio’). Still, there must have existed a literate tradition connected with Arabic, which produced an extensive literature in Malagasy written with a modified Arabic script. Several hundred manuscripts of these so-called sorabe texts have been preserved. In the south-west of Madagascar, one of the Antemoro clans still uses a secret jargon based on Arabic lexical items and called kalamon’Antesitesy ‘language of the people of the sand’ (e.g., maratsi ‘woman’, Arabic marʾa , instead of usual Malagasy vehivàvi , or dzoma ‘day’, Arabic yawm , instead of usual andru ). Yüklə 2,37 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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