Arabic-L:LING:Studies on MSA Development

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Mon 25 Oct 2010
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dil at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: Studies on MSA Development

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1)
Date: 25 Oct 2010
From: David Wilmsen <david.wilmsen at gmail.com>
Subject: Studies on MSA Development

The question is usually turned on its ear and posed "how did the dialects develop"?

Neither that question nor yours is by any means settled.

By MSA do you mean the current manifestations of the writing system? Or do you simply mean written Arabic as it has persisted over the centuries?

For that, you might look at this piece that I have just assigned to my seminar students:

C. Rabin The Beginnings of Classical Arabic. Studia Islamica, No. 4 (1955), pp. 19-37

For a detailed look at many of the issues, you might consider chapter 3 (The Classical Arabiya as the Language of an Oral Poetry) in  

M. Zwettler 1978. The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry:  Its character and implications.  Columbus:  Ohio State University Press

Then you can read the German and French writers that those two authors cite!

There are also chapters about the origins and development of Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic in Versteegh, C. H. M. 1997.The Arabic language. New York: Columbia University Press

David Wilmsen
Associate Professor of Arabic
Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages
American University of Beirut

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