To all,
Does the possibility exist that perhaps the Arabic letters were taken
from the written Hebrew language, only mirror-imaged? But since I have
no dates for written Hebrew, I cannot substantiate.
Gerry
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks, Dennis. Very illuminating. If Kamal Salibi is right, Arabic
could almost be called a daughter language of Hebrew?
Marc Verhaegen
I too find it highly unlikely that Hebrew and Arabic split about
600BCE. As Mark says, Hebrew was virtually a dead language by this date,
and Arabic had yet to be born.
What I mean by that, is that prior to the Quran, one cannot speak of
an Arabic language, just a collection of Arabian dialects spoken by the
various tribes.
Arabic is said to be very conservative, so the resemblances probably
go way back to common proto-Semitic. In addition, Jews were very active
in western Arabia before Islam. In fact, three of the five tribes
settled in Medina at the time of the Prophet's migration were Jewish.
Muhammad went there to mediate in a feud between the two non-Jewish
tribes. Much of the Quran must come from Jewish sources. And of course,
Abraham's child by Hagar, Ismail is the legendary father of the Arabs.
There were also various ephemeral client states that arose on the
borders of the Fertile Crescent and the great Syrian desert, and many
trading links. So all in all, there are many possible reasons for the
resemblances in the languages and parallels in names.
I always understood Hebrew to be virtually identical to Phoenician.
So, whatever one's view of pre-exile Israelite history, it seems pretty
certain that Hebrew was one of the languages spoken in the Levant in the
first half of the 1st millennium.
Cheers
Dennis
----- Original Message -----
From: Marc Verhaegen
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Sunday, 14 May, 2000 4:40 AM
Subject: Re: [TIED] Hebrew and Arabic
Nothing of the Old Testament has to be dismissed, only
re-interpreted. You have to read Salibi I think. Rather convincing
IMO. --Marc
There is a theory, not unlikely IMO, based on remarkable
resemblances between biblical names & W.Arabian geographical names, that
the Jews originally lived in western Arabia, were deported to Assyria &
Babylonia (8th-6th cent.BC), not from Israel but from W.Arabia, and
later "came back", not to W.Arabia but to Israel. If that is true,
Hebrew & Arabic split ca.2600 years ago. Kamal Salibi 1985 "Het ware
land van Abraham" Elsevier Netherlands (I don't know the origin German
title, Rowohlt Verlag, 1985).
No, no, no. Highly unlikely, absurd. You have to dismiss
much of the Old Testament as a forgery on grounds that would require you
toss Homer and Hesiod onto the bonfire too.
Mark.
Hebrew, as a living language, was essentially extinct by the
end of the Exile, and had been supplanted by Aramaic (the chancery
language of the Persians). Before the Exile, it was probably little more
than the official court dialect. Aramaic displaced just about everything
until the advent of Greek, and finally, Arabic.