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Arabic belongs to the Semitic language
family. The members of this family have a recorded history going back
thousands of years--one of the most extensive continuous archives of documents
belonging to any human language group. The Semitic languages eventually took
root and flourished in the Mediterranean Basin area, especially in the
Tigris-Euphrates river basin and in the coastal areas of the Levant, but where
the home area of "proto-Semitic" was located is still the object of dispute
among scholars. Once, the Arabian Peninsula was thought to have been the
"cradle" of proto-Semitic, but nowadays many scholars advocate the view that
it originated somewhere in East Africa, probably in the area of
Somalia/Ethiopia. Interestingly, both these areas are now dominated
linguistically by the two youngest members of the Semitic language family:
Arabic and Amharic, both of which emerged in the mid-fourth century C.E.
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Since its inception in 1970 the
Journal of Arabic Literature has provided an international scholarly
forum for the discussion of Arabic literature and has secured its
position at the forefront of critical and methodological debate. The
journal publishes literary, critical and historical studies, as well as
reviews and bibliographies, on a broad range of Arabic material
s-classical and modern, written and oral, poetry and prose, literary and
colloquial. Studies that seek to integrate Arabic literature into the
broader discourses of the humanities and social sciences take their
place alongside technical work of a more specialized nature.
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The journal thus
addresses itself to a readership in comparative literature and literary theory
and method, in addition to specialists in Arabic and Middle Eastern
literatures and Middle East studies generally. Particularly due to the many
articles that include original translations of literary texts, the journal is
an invaluable resource for university instruction as, well as for scholarly
research. The continued presence of the Journal of Arabic Literature in
library holdings throughout the world testifies to its standing as a scholarly
periodical of established international repute.
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The most important thing to know about the Arabic language is that, like
other Semitic languages, it is based on what is usually called a "
consonantal root system," which means that almost every word in the
language is ultimately derived from one or another "root," usually a
verb. This root almost always consists of three letters. By making
changes to the root letters - adding a letter to the beginning of the
root, changing vowels between the consonants, or inserting extra
consonants - new words with new meanings are produced. For example, the
three consonants d, r, s, combined in that order denote the idea of
education.
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Arabic script has a genetic relationship with the Latin alphabet, since
both are historically traceable back to a script current on the Levant
coast around 1000 B.C. and used for the notation of the language which
we call Old Phoenician. The Old Phoenician script had a repertory of 22
symbols, all written individually. The values of the symbols were
exclusively consonantal, showing no means of noting a vowel at all. In
the 8th century B.C., the Old Phoenician script was employed for the
rendering of Old Aramaic, but with one seminal development, namely the
use of a few of the symbols as vowel notation.
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