Arabic

One of the three main branches of the Semitic family, spoken in the peninsula of Arabia. Unknown till the century before Mahomet, it suddenly then reached its highest perfection in the poems of the Moallakât. It is the richest, the most flexible, and most exact of all the Semitic tongues, and its grammar the most subtle and perfect, probably, of all known languages. The dialect of the tribe of Koreisch, adopted by Mahomet in the Koran, has been, since the seventh century, the cla ical language of large parts of Asia and Africa, and has greatly influenced the Turkish, Maltese, Persian, Hindi, and other tongues, owing to the wide range of Arabian conquest. Cla ical Arabic must be distinguished from Arabic as actually spoken. The “vulgar” Arabic makes scarcely any distinction of vowel-sounds, has a grammar simple to rudene , and is destitute of the richne and versatility of the tongue as employed by its most famous scholars.     R. P. S.