History
Classical Arabic has its origins in the central and northern parts of the Arabian Peninsula, and is distinct from Old South Arabian languages that were spoken in the southern parts of the peninsula, modern day Yemen. Classical Arabic is the only surviving descendant of the Old North Arabian languages. The oldest inscription so far discovered in Classical Arabic goes back to 328 AD and is known as the NamÄrah inscription, written in the Nabataean alphabet and named after the place where it was found in southern Syria in April 1901.
With the spread of Islam, Classical Arabic became a prominent language of scholarship and religious devotion as the language of the Qur'an (at times even spreading faster than the religion). Its relation to modern dialects is somewhat analogous to the relationship of Latin to the Romance languages or of Middle Chinese to modern Chinese languages.
Read more about this topic: Classical Arabic
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)