Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: Is Hebrew similar to Arabic?
Many Jewish immigrants to Israel spoke a variety of Arabic in their countries of origin and pronounced the Hebrew rhotic as an alveolar tap , similar to Arabic '. Gradually, many of them began pronouncing their Hebrew rhotic as a voiced uvular fricative , a sound similar or (depending on the Arabic dialect) identical to Arabic '. However, in modern Sephardic and Mizrahi poetry and folk music an alveolar rhotic continues to be used.
Like other European languages, English contains many words derived from Arabic, often through other European languages, especially Spanish. Among them is every-day vocabulary like "sugar" ("sukkar"), "cotton" ("quṭn") or "magazine" (""). More recognizable are words like "algebra" ("al-jabr"), "alcohol" ("al-kuhūl"), "alchemy" ("al-kimiya"), "alkali", "cypher" and "zenith" (see list of English words of Arabic origin).
The official language of Egypt is Modern Standard Arabic.
On the other hand, Arabic is divided into over 27 dialects. Almost every Arab state has at least one local dialect of its own. they can be divided into 5 major branches, the Peninsula Arabic, which is the Arabic used in the Arabian peninsula, with around 9 main dialects, Arabic of the Nile Valley, which includes the Masri, Saedi, Sudanese and Chadic Arabic, the Arabic of the Fertile Crescent, which includes the Bedawi, Levant Arabic, Iraqi Arabic and North Mesopotamian Arabic, the Magharbi Arabic, which includes the Dialects used in Mauritania, Morocco, Libya, Algeria and Tunisia, also another category of Arabic is the other isolated dialects of Arabic, like the Judeo-Arabic, Mediterranean Arabic, Nubi Arabic, and the juba Arabic, which have greatly been affected by these communities' own pronunciation, culture and native tongue.
An important factor in the mixing or changing of Arabic is the concept of a prestige dialect. This refers to the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect within a speech community. The formal Arabic language carries a considerable prestige in most Arabic-speaking communities, depending on the context. This is not the only source of prestige, though. Many studies have shown that for most speakers, there is a prestige variety of vernacular Arabic. In Egypt, for non-Cairenes, the prestige dialect is Cairo Arabic. For Jordanian women from Bedouin or rural background, it may be the urban dialects of the big cities, especially including the capital Amman. Moreover, in certain contexts, a dialect relatively different from formal Arabic may carry more prestige than a dialect closer to the formal language—this is the case in Bahrain, for example.
Yemeni Arabic is a cluster of varieties of Arabic spoken in Yemen, southwestern Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Djibouti. It is generally considered a very conservative dialect cluster, having many classical features not found across most of the Arabic-speaking world.
Hejazi Arabic or Hijazi Arabic ( '), also known as West Arabian Arabic, is a variety of Arabic spoken in the Hejaz region in Saudi Arabia. Strictly speaking, there are two main groups of dialects spoken in the Hejaz region, one by the urban population, originally spoken in the major cities of Jeddah, Mecca and Medina, and another by the Bedouin or rural populations. However, the term most often applies to the urban variety which is discussed in this article.
Arabic came to Egypt in the 7th century, and Egyptian Arabic has become the modern spoken language of the Egyptians, is understood by almost all Egyptians and is based on Egyptian Coptic grammar. In southern Egypt, Saidi Arabic is the main spoken language for most non-urbanized people. Of the many varieties of Arabic, Egyptian Arabic is the most widely understood first dialect in the Middle East-North Africa, probably due to the influence of Egyptian cinema throughout the Arabic-speaking world.
There are a number of languages spoken in Egypt, but Egyptian Arabic or "Masry" which literally means "Egyptian", is by far the most widely spoken in the country.
It is claimed by some Arab authors that the dialect of Belad Ghamid and Zahran (Now known as Al Baha province in Saudi Arabia) is nearest to classical Arabic. Ahmed Abdul Ghafur Attar (Arabic : احمد عبدالغفور عطار ) has said in an article* that the language of the Hejaz (Arabic لهجات الحجاز), especially that which is spoken in Belad Ghamdi and Zahran is close to the Classical Language.
According to Charles A. Ferguson, the following are some of the characteristic features of the koiné that underlies all of the modern dialects outside the Arabian peninsula. Although many other features are common to most or all of these varieties, Ferguson believes that these features in particular are unlikely to have evolved independently more than once or twice and together suggest the existence of the koine:Of the 29 Proto-Semitic consonants, only one has been lost: , which merged with . But the consonant is still found in many colloquial Arabic dialects. Various other consonants have changed their sound too, but have remained distinct. An original lenited to , and – consistently attested in pre-Islamic Greek transcription of Arabic languages – became palatalized to or by the time of the Quran and , , or after early Muslim conquests and in MSA (see Arabic phonology#Local variations for more detail). An original voiceless alveolar lateral fricative became . Its emphatic counterpart was considered by Arabs to be the most unusual sound in Arabic (Hence the Classical Arabic's appellation ' or "language of the '"); for most modern dialects, it has become an emphatic stop with loss of the laterality or with complete loss of any pharyngealization or velarization, . (The classical "" pronunciation of pharyngealization still occurs in the Mehri language and the similar sound without velarization, , exists in other Modern South Arabian languages.)
The dominance of Latin and Greek among the literate elite may obscure the continuity of spoken languages, since all cultures within the Roman Empire were predominantly oral. In areas where Syriac, Coptic, Hebrew and Aramaic were spoken, they coexisted with Greek.
The phoneme represented by the Arabic letter "" () has many standard pronunciations: in most of the Arabian Peninsula and as the predominant pronunciation of Literary Arabic outside the Arab world, in most of Egypt and some regions in southern Yemen and southwestern Oman. This is also a characteristic of colloquial Egyptian and southern Yemeni dialects. In Morocco and western Algeria, it is pronounced as in some words, especially colloquially. In most north Africa and most of the Levant, the standard is pronounced , and in certain regions of the Persian Gulf colloquially with . In some Sudanese and Yemeni dialects, it may be either or as it used to be in Classical Arabic.
In this book "Minan-ur-Rahman" Ahmad claimed that Arabic was the very First Language, taught to man by God. Ahmad describes the system of "Mufradaat" [the Simples or the Roots of words] in the Arabic Language had a unique scientific organization and a system, unknown in any other language. He described the five peculiarities of Arabic and claimed, all other languages of man, were derived from Arabic,
One of the earliest linguistic sketches of Egyptian Arabic is a 16th-century document entitled "" (, "The Removal of the Burden from the Language of the People of Egypt") by Yusuf al-Maghribi (). It contains key information on early Egyptian Arabic and the language situation in Egypt in the Middle Ages. The main purpose of the document was to show that while the Egyptians' vernacular contained many critical "errors" vis-à-vis Classical Arabic, according to al-Maghribi, it was also related to Arabic in other respects. With the ongoing Islamization and Arabization of the country, Egyptian Arabic slowly supplanted spoken Coptic. Local chroniclers mention the continued use of Coptic as a spoken language until the 17th century by peasant women in Upper Egypt. Coptic is still the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria.
So, while having unique "tadbhav" sets, modern IA languages have a common, higher "tatsam" pool. Also, "tatsam"s and their derived "tadbhav"s can also co-exist in a language; sometimes of no consequence and at other times with differences in meaning:
What remains are words of foreign origin ("videśī"), as well as words of local origin that cannot be pegged as belonging to any of the three prior categories ("deśaj"). The former consists mainly of Persian, Arabic, and English, with trace elements of Portuguese and Turkish. While the phenomenon of English loanwords is relatively new, Perso-Arabic has a longer history behind it. Both English and Perso-Arabic influences are quite nationwide phenomena, in a way paralleling "tatsam" as a common vocabulary set or bank. What's more is how, beyond a transposition into general Indo-Aryan, the Perso-Arabic set has also been assimilated in a manner characteristic and relevant to the specific Indo-Aryan language it is being used in, bringing to mind "tadbhav".
Peninsular Arabic, or Southern Arabic, are the varieties of Arabic spoken throughout the Arabian Peninsula. This includes the countries of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Southern Iraq and the tribal people of Jordan (the native Jordanians).
The official language of the Republic is Arabic. The spoken languages are: Egyptian Arabic (68%), Sa'idi Arabic (29%), Eastern Egyptian Bedawi Arabic (1.6%), Sudanese Arabic (0.6%), Domari (0.3%), Nobiin (0.3%), Beja (0.1%), Siwi and others. Additionally, Greek, Armenian and Italian, and more recently, African languages like Amharic and Tigrigna are the main languages of immigrants.
During 1909 and 1910 there were movements by Young Turks supporters to adopt an Arabic alphabet, as they considered the Latin script to be un-Islamic. In Elbasan, Muslim clerics led a demonstration for the Arabic script, telling their congregations that using the Latin script would make them infidels. In 1911, the Young Turks dropped their opposition to the Latin script, and the Latin alphabet was invented. In order to eliminate ambiguity in the pronunciation of the Arabic script, Rexhep Voka developed a customized Arabic alphabet consisting of 44 consonants and vowels, which he published in 1911. However, it was hardly used anymore due to the Congress of Monastir. Tiranli Fazli then used this script to publish a thirty-two page grammar. Only one Albanian newspaper at the time ever appeared in Arabic script, and it lasted a brief period. Regardless of what script appeared, such material raised Albanian national consciousness.
The Bible was translated into various languages in late antiquity; the most important of these translations are those in the Syriac dialect of Aramaic (including the Peshitta and the Diatessaron gospel harmony), the Ge'ez language of Ethiopia, and, in Western Europe, Latin. The earliest Latin translations are collectively known as the Vetus Latina, but in the late fourth century, Jerome re-translated the Hebrew and Greek texts into the normal vernacular Latin of his day, in a version known as the Vulgate ("Biblia vulgata") (meaning "common version", in the sense of "popular"). Jerome's translation gradually replaced most of the older Latin texts, and also gradually ceased to be a vernacular version as the Latin language developed and divided. The earliest surviving complete manuscript of the entire Latin Bible is the Codex Amiatinus, produced in eighth century England at the double monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow. By the end of late antiquity the Bible was therefore available and used in all the major written languages then spoken by Christians.
Christian Arabs comprise about 9% of the Arab population in Israel. Approximately 70% reside in the north, in Jish, Eilabun, Kafr Yasif, Kafr Kanna, I'billin, Shefa-'Amr. Some Druze villages, such as Hurfeish and Maghar, have small Christian Arab populations. Nazareth has the largest Christian Arab population. The near entirety of Haifa's Arab minority is Christian as well. There are 117,000 or more Christian Arabs in Israel (and more than 35,000 non-Arab Christians). As of 2014 the Melkite Greek Catholic Church was the largest Christian community in Israel, where about 60% of Israeli Christians belonged to the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, while around 30% of Israeli Christians belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem.
As in the rest of the Arabic world at the time, Arabic was the typical language for Jewish writing, except for belles lettres. Practically all Jewish works about philosophy, theology, mathematics, were written in Arabic, typically in Hebrew characters. This type of writing has been called Judeo-Arabic, although there was little difference in the language used by Jews and non-Jews at this time. The choice of Hebrew as the poetic language can be seen as an expression of Jewish self-assertion. Contemporary Arabic poets considered their language, the language of the Qur'an, the most beautiful language, and Arabic verse as the highest form of poetry; Jewish poets thought similarly of their sacred writings and composed poetry in Biblical Hebrew Apart from Dunash's metrical innovations, the Hebrew of these poems tried to emulate the diction and style of Classical Hebrew, abolishing elements that had introduced into the language after the canonization of the Bible. This classical approach was facilitated by advances in the study of Hebrew grammar and biblical interpretation.
Classical Arabic still preserves forms similar to the reconstructed Ancient Hebrew forms, e.g. "ʼarḍ" "earth", "kalb" "dog", "ʻayn" "eye", "ṣidq" "sincerity". (Some modern dialects insert an epenthetic vowel between the final two consonants, similar to what happened in Hebrew.
The country's laws are published in Hebrew, and eventually English and Arabic translations are published. Publishing the law in Hebrew in the official gazette ("Reshumot") is enough to make it valid. Unavailability of an Arabic translation can be regarded as a legal defense only if the defendant proves he could not understand the meaning of the law in any conceivable way. Following appeals to the Israeli Supreme Court, the use of Arabic on street signs and labels increased dramatically. In response to one of the appeals presented by Arab Israeli organizations, the Supreme Court ruled that although second to Hebrew, Arabic is an official language of the State of Israel, and should be used extensively. Today most highway signage is trilingual (Hebrew, Arabic, and English).
In addition, when Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the pioneer of the Hebrew language's modern revival, began creating new Hebrew words to adapt to the modern world, he preffered borrowing words from Arabic and Aramaic (both Semitic languages, like Hebrew) than languages that were more linguistically removed from Hebrew. This modern revival, in addition to centuries of osmosis between the two neighbor-languages, have resulted in striking similarities in the two language's grammar and vocabulary.