Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [62]
* Matthew xxvii.74. Sawyer (1999: 84) quotes a lot of evidence for attitudes to Galilean.
† The name Urfa is probably derived from Hurri (cf. the Greek name of its surrounding province, Orrhoēnē), with a history going back to the Mitannian period.
† The Muslims in themselves were never a physical threat to the Aramaic speakers, since they saw them everywhere as millet, or distinct nationalities, separate but respected. But there was a tendency for Aramaic speakers everywhere to give up everyday use of the language in favour of Arabic.
* Christians were not the only people to go on speaking Aramaic, though they have lasted longest. The Gnostic sect of southern Mesopotamia also spoke another dialect of Aramaic, known as Mandate or Mandaean, at least until the eighth century. And for a few centuries AD, the Jews of Babylonia and Persia also continued, producing most notably the vast Babylonian Talmud. Both these communities were prolific in writing literature.
† There is a considerable modern diaspora too, to the major cities of Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey. Many are said to have emigrated to Armenia and Georgia after the Russo-Persian war of 1827; and a sizeable number have gathered in the USA. The use of the Internet in binding them together is examined in McClure (2001). She quotes estimates of worldwide numbers around 1-3 million.
§ Its name is derived from Arabic qibt, ‘Egyptian’, a shortening of the Greek Aigyptios.
* This caused some philological problems, since Muhammad’s dialect of Arabic was slightly nonstandard: it lacked the glottal stop ’, known as hamza (the stop heard in place of the tt of the London pronunciation of ‘bitter’), had lost the -n ending of the nominative, and had turned the -t ending of feminine nouns into -h. The scholars wanted to retain the text exactly as written, but recite it according to the rules of standard Arabic. As a result, all these consonants of Arabic had to be inserted in the written text with special accent marks, as if they were vowels. These marks are all now standard in Arabic spelling.
* Arabic script turned out to be much more universally attractive than its language, and has been taken up wherever Islam was accepted. This has happened despite its functional weaknesses, with no marking of vowels or tones, and a need for elaborate accents even to distinguish all the consonants. Nevertheless, compromises have been found, and it has been applied to languages as various and as unrelated as Persian, Turkish, Kashmiri, Berber, Uighur, Somali, Hausa, Swahili and Malay, as well as Spanish and Serbo-Croat. It must owe this success to the fact that literacy in Muslim countries finds its alpha and its omega in the sacred text of the Qur’ān in Arabic script; so any other writing system can only be an extra complication.
* It may be worth noting that the j in this word is pronounced as in judge.
† But one is left wondering why the linguistic approach of the Germans, notably the Visigoths, had been so different, when in 410 they likewise took over control of the neighbouring higher civilisation, the Roman empire, only to cast themselves, almost immediately, as its protectors. But in the European case, there was no third language playing the role of Persian: Latin was still the only language of temporal power, as well as the language of the Roman Church.
* Hausa, centred on Kano in northern Nigeria, is more of a problem for the constraint. It has certain features that are reminiscent of Arabic, e.g. two genders, masculine and feminine, the latter marked with -a (cf. Arabic -ah); and the absence of p—as in Arabic, it usually replaces p in loan-words with f. Moreover, its predominantly Muslim speakers have filled it with loan words from Arabic, including most of the numerals above ten, and the days of the week, and even some productive prefixes, such as ma-. (’School’ is makaranta, formed from karanta, ‘read’, itself related to