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29 January - 4 February 2009 Issue No. 932 Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 The language of politics Extract: 'The varieties of Arabic languages' The thesis that the varieties of Arabic languages spoken currently in many different countries represent languages different both from each other and from the Qureish Arabic, the language of the Prophet's tribe and in which the Koran was thus revealed, is no novelty. It was already affirmed in the fourteenth century by no less an authority than the great Arabic thinker Ibn Khaldoun in his well known Introduction [ Muqaddimah ]. Nobody has ever explained better than him the difference between knowing a language by birth and oral transmission, and knowing it by study and learning. Study may enable someone to know the structure of a language, but the structure itself is not the language. The learner may thus be compared to someone who can say something about the art of sewing without having the ability to sew. In Ibn Khaldoun's terms, they have the knowledge of the faculty but not the faculty itself. I can only agree with him in affirming that the differences between the spoken Arabic -- and I am mainly thinking of the idiom spoken in Egypt -- and Qureish or Koranic Arabic are as significant as those between Italian and Latin. Whatever the semantic and syntactic affinities between Italian and Latin, an Italian speaker has to study Latin in order to understand it. If we compare spoken Egyptian and classical Arabic we can note that in classical Arabic the predicate usually precedes the subject, whereas in Egyptian the subject precedes the predicate. Moreover, the negative and interrogative particles are not the same and they obey different word-order rules. This is also true for demonstratives. Nouns in classical Arabic decline, but they don't in spoken Egyptian. Phonological differences are no less important... As for vocabulary, it is true that an enormous quantity of words are common between the two languages. However, most of these have changed through the centuries, some changing the order of letters and some dropping or adding letters. And that's before we start talking about meaning change and neologisms. To all this we must add a substantial number of words that go back to ancient Egyptian. For example, Egyptian peasants still use Coptic names to indicate the months of the year. Before the Arab conquest there were three languages current in Egypt: Greek, which continued to be the administrative language after the Roman conquest, Latin and Coptic -- the native language. As for the Arab conquerors, they were not all from the Qureish ; many if not most belonged to other tribes which spoke different idioms, so that the Egyptians had to make, you might say, their own cocktail of Arabic, which was not necessarily the same as the Qureishi tongue. More of them came to talk their Arabic as more of them converted to Islam for a variety of reasons, amongst which one has to note the exemption from the tax each adult Christian male had to pay, the jizya. When in AD 705, Abdelmalek Ibn Marawan issued a decree imposing Arabic as the official administrative language, many Copts had to learn it in order to keep their offices. The distinction between the written and the spoken languages, which had existed in Egypt from the beginning of its history, was thus revived in a new form. My understanding of the political significance of this divorce between political and demotic Arabic and the key place of writing in the perptuation of despotism crystallised when I read the work of our great poet Adonis, entitled The Book. It is one of the most revolutionary books I've read in Arabic literature. Apart from its provocative title, it lays bare the truth of our political history as having been a series of assassinations in a struggle for power. But it's written in such a high style that it's a difficult text even for the educated, without taking into account the vast majority of illiterate folk. So, it's no wonder that The Book has remained a 'dead letter'. I may say that I once heard Adonis declare that he won't ever write except in 'grammatical' Arabic because he prefers writing in a 'dead language'. One may wonder if his choice doesn't also represent his method for dealing with the condition [the German-born American political philosopher] Leo Strauss describes in his Persecution and the Art of Writing. The authorities are happy to ignore such books because in the unlikely event that they themselves have understood them, they know that their message will only reach a very limited number of people. It was thus the greatest modern example of classical Arabic which made me determined henceforward to abandon the classical language and to write in demotic Egyptian. Adonis's poem is merciless about the misplaced pride taken in this language and its terrible political traditions. It makes clear why the educated chatter of intellectuals seemed so vacuous and vapid. The reason why I opted to translate Othello into vernacular is thus clear: to enable ordinary people to read great writers in the language they learn at the breast and in which they spend their lives from birth to death. >From Why are the Arabs not Free? The Politics of Writing by Moustapha Safouan [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
