Arabic
arabic
Latin (from Greek, from Semitic)
“Arabic is the Latin word for a language that already had its own name.”
In Arabic, the language is called al-ʿarabiyya: the article al- plus the adjective ʿarabiyya, from the Semitic root ʿ-r-b. The English word 'Arabic' did not come from this Arabic term. It arrived through Latin Arabicus, a Roman adjective for anything from the Arabian peninsula, and before that through Greek Arabikos, used by historians who had read about the Aribi, a desert people mentioned in Assyrian cuneiform as early as 853 BCE. A word describing a language thus has origins entirely outside that language.
The Assyrian king Shalmaneser III records a coalition opponent as 'Gindibu the Aribi' in inscriptions from 853 BCE, the earliest known written form of the name. The Semitic root ʿ-r-b has several proposed meanings: 'west' (Arabia lay west of Mesopotamia), 'nomad,' or simply the name of an early tribe. The same root appears in Hebrew ʿerev, meaning 'evening' or 'the west,' and in Maghreb, the Arabic name for North Africa, meaning 'the place of the sunset.' Greek geographers knew the peninsula as Arabia and its people as Arabs by the time Herodotus wrote in the 450s BCE.
Classical Arabic crystallized in the 5th and 6th centuries CE through the oral tradition of qasida poetry, recited at tribal fairs across the Hejaz. The codification of the Quran under Caliph Uthman around 650 CE fixed one variety as the prestige standard. Arabic then expanded with the Islamic conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries, carrying vocabulary into Persian, Turkish, Spanish, Swahili, and Urdu. European scholars who encountered Arabic science and philosophy in the 10th through 13th centuries translated Arabic texts into Latin, depositing hundreds of Arabic words into European languages.
The English word 'Arabic' appears in records from the 14th century, first in the phrase 'Arabic numerals,' the positional number system medieval Europeans learned from Arab mathematicians who had adapted it from Indian sources. The word then entered scientific vocabulary in compounds like Arabic gum and Arabic alchemy, before settling as the name for the language itself. Today Arabic is spoken by about 370 million people and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The name 'Arabic' is a Latin label for a language that named itself in its own way from the beginning.
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Today
Arabic today names both a classical written standard and a continuum of spoken dialects so divergent that Egyptian Arabic and Moroccan Darija are not fully mutually intelligible. Modern Standard Arabic, based on Classical Arabic, is the language of formal writing, news, and official speech across the Arab world. The word 'Arabic' in English thus covers what is really a family of related forms, from the register of the Quran to the street speech of Casablanca.
The name 'Arabic' was built by outsiders: Assyrian scribes, Greek geographers, Roman administrators, medieval Latin scholars. Each handed a slightly different label to the next, until English inherited 'Arabic' in the 14th century. The Arabs themselves called their language al-ʿarabiyya, without waiting for anyone else to name it. 'A language that named a civilization does not need a borrowed name to prove its weight.'
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