The Arabic Language

PART
participle
PERF
perfect
POSS
possessive
PRED
predication
REL
relative
s
singular
SUBJ
subjunctive
TOP
topicaliser
Further reading
The general problem of transcription is discussed by Reichmuth (2009). For 
the standard adopted by the IPA, see http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa. For the 
origin of Arabic script see below Chapter 3, pp. 37f. The use of Arabic script for 
languages other than Arabic is dealt with below, Chapter 17, p. 314. For the model 
of morphosyntactic description and glossing see Payne (1997). 

---

---

Chapter 1
The Study of Arabic in the West
In 632 
ce, the Prophet of Islam, Muḥammad, died in the city of Medina. The 
century of conquests that followed brought both the Islamic religion and the 
Arabic language to the attention of a world that up until then had possessed only 
the vaguest notion of what went on in the interior of the Arabian peninsula. Ever 
since this first confrontation between the Islamic world and Europe, the Arabs 
and their language have been part of the European experience. At first, the intel-
lectual relationship between the two worlds was unilateral. Greek knowledge 
and knowledge about Greek filtered through into the Islamic world, while the 
Byzantines did not show themselves to be overly interested in things Arabic. 
Although their military prowess was feared, the Arabs’ culture and language were 
not deemed worthy of study. Their religion was regarded as little more than the 
latest in the series of Christian heresies that flourished in the East. For the Byzan-
tines, the Greek heritage did not need any contribution from the inhabitants of a 
desert, whose only claim to fame rested on their ability to harass the Byzantine 
armies and contest Byzantine hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean.
In Western Europe, for a long time information about the Arabs and their 
religion remained limited to vague notions about paganism in the desert of Arabia. 
After the conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 711, the Arabs’ presence came to be 
seen as a direct threat to Europe and Christianity. Yet there was another side to 
this confrontation, because through the Arabs Western Europe got in touch with a 
part of its heritage that it had lost in the turmoil of the fall of the Roman Empire. 
Western medicine and philosophy became dependent on the Arab culture of 
Islamic Spain for knowledge of Greek medical and philosophical writings, which 
were practically unknown in the West. From the eleventh century onwards, after 
the fall of Toledo in 1085, these writings began to circulate in Latin translations of 
the Arabic versions. The Arabic language itself was not widely studied, since most 
scholars relied upon translations that were made by a small group of translators, 
often Jews, who had familiarised themselves with the language either in Arab 
Sicily or in al-ʾAndalus.
In the twelfth century, during the period of the Crusades, Western Europeans 
became acquainted with Islamic culture and Arabic on site. This first-hand contact 
contributed to the ambivalence of the European reaction. On the one hand, Islam 

---

2
The Arabic Language
was the enemy that threatened Europe and held the keys to the Holy Land. On the 
other hand, for the time being the Muslims, or Saracens, were the keepers of the 
Greek heritage in medicine and philosophy, and provided the best available access 
to these treasures. Thus, while crusaders were busy trying to wrest Jerusalem 
from the Muslims and to preserve Europe from Islam, at the same time scholars 
from all over Europe were travelling to Islamic Spain in order to study at the 
famous universities of Cordova and Granada. The study of Arabic served a double 
purpose. For the medical scholars at the University of Paris, who humbly sat down 
at the feet of the Arab doctors and called themselves