Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume I.djvu/658

 622 ARABIC LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE by internal dissensions and bloody struggles. Walid I., one of this line, abolished the use of the Greek language and characters, which had hitherto been employed in keeping the ac- counts, and ordered his clerks and secretaries to substitute the Arabic, a change to which very probably we owe the invention or at least the familiar use of our present numerical fig- ures. To this dynasty, which ruled for nearly 90 years, succeeded that of the Abbassides, who transferred the seat of the caliphate from Cufah to Bagdad, and held sway over a large part of the Mohammedan countries from the 8th to the 13th century. The subsequent his- tory of Arabia is but a succession of quarrels among its numerous petty chiefs, except the reform movement of the Wahabees, a sect founded in the middle of the 18th century by Mohammed ibn Abd-el-Wahab. (See WAHA- BEES.) In 1870 and 1871 a rebellion broke out among the Bedouins in Hedjaz, which was with difficulty suppressed by the Turkish troops. See "History of Arabia," by A. Crichton (Ed- inburgh, 1834), and "Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia," by W. G. Palgrave (Lon- don, 1865). ARABIC LANGIAGE AND LITERATURE. The Arabic belongs to the southern branch of the Semitic family of languages, and after the He- brew is the most important member of the family. The other members of the southern branch are the Himyaritic and the Ethiopio. The particular dialect which, mainly through the influence of the Koran, became the stan- dard of the literary language, was that spoken in the central part of Arabia, in Hedjaz and Nedjed. Partly perhaps because of its sheltered position, but partly also because of an unusually strong conservative tendency, the Arabic, though the latest of the Semitic lan- guages to acquire historical importance, is in its forms the most archaic of all. Nowhere else are the inflections so fully preserved, and for the comparative study of these languages the Arabic is of the first importance. In wealth both of grammatical forms and of vo- cabulary it is equalled by few languages, and no other of the Semitic family approaches it. The characteristic features of the family, the prevailing triliteral and consonantal character of the roots, and the modification of the radi- cal meaning by a significant change of vowels within the root, appear most clearly in the Arabic. There are other features which, if not altogether peculiar to it, are found in the other dialects only in a rudimentary or fragmentary state. Such are the system of case endings and the so-called " broken pJurals," that is, col- lective nouns which have iearly supplanted the proper plurals formed byyneans of termi- nations. The number of derived forms of the verb, commonly culled conjugations, is also con- siderably larger in Arabic, each verb having, at least theoretically, 15 ; and the mode forms are likewise more numerous. As an instru- ment of thought the Arabic is characterized by great flexibility, delicacy, and precision. While the other Semitic languages have only a very simple syntactical structure, unsuited to the expression of any but the more obvious relations of thought, the Arabic has an exten- sive philosophical literature. The external his- tory of the Arabic is remarkable, furnishing in many respects a parallel to that of the Latin. It has taken possession of nearly the whole field formerly occupied by the Semitic family. It has also spread over the whole north of Africa, and in central Africa it is still aggres- sive. The present Arabic-speaking races num- ber about 85,000,000. Where it has not sup- planted, it has strongly impregnated the lan- guages with which it has come in contact. The Turkish and Persian have borrowed from it nearly one half of their vocabularies, the Hindustani but little less, the Hindi and Malay quite largely. The languages of western Eu- rope have felt its influence, tile Spanish, as was natural, most strongly. Elsewhere it is to be traced mainly in the presence of various scien- tific and technical terms, such as algebra, al- chemy, azimuth, nadir, cipher, alcohol, elixir, magazine. A glossary of words of Arabic der- ivation found in Spanish and Portuguese has been published by Dozy and Engelmann (2d ed., Leyden, 1869) ; in French, by Pihan (Paris. 1851); in Dutch, by Dozy (Leyden, 1867). The literary Arabic has during its whole his- tory remained almost without change, and the various dialects now spoken, when we consider the long period (12 centuries) and the wide territory which they cover, show remarkably little divergence either from the literary lan- guage or from each other. They differ from the written language mainly in the frequent loss of final vowels, and with them of inflec- tions of the noun and verb, which they served to distinguish. Phonetic decay has reached about the same stage of progress in the Arabic now spoken that we find in the Biblical He- brew. The Arabic alphabet is derived from the Estrangelo, or Ola Syriac, and more re- motely from the Phoenician, and was introduced not more than a century before Mohammed. It no doubt consisted originally, like the Es- trangelo, of 22 characters, which number was afterward raised by the use of diacritical marks to 28. Like all the Semitic alphabets, it is written from right to left, and is essentially consonantal. The vowel signs, written above and below the line, are a later invention, gen- erally attributed to Abul-Aswad, the earliest Arab grammarian, who died in 688. These vowel and diacritical signs were first applied to the Koran, in order to put an end to the disputes to which the previous ambiguous mode of writing had given rise. The Arabic system of vowel notation, unlike the Hebrew and Syriac, is strictly etymological. Only the fundamental vowels a, i, u, long and short, and the diphthongs an, ai, are written, although in speaking several intermediate vowels are heard. Both in manuscripts and in printed texts