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THE LANGUAGE OF THE ANGELS
The Arabs are a proud and noble race. They are proud of their liberty and of their free open-air desert customs. They are proud of their religion and of their prophet. They are proud of their history and of their patriarchal descent. But most of all, they are proud of their language, one of the oldest and most wonderful forms of human speech. Mohammed himself in his Koran, which you know is the Moslem Bible, speaks of the Arab tongue as “the language of the angels.” He and the Arabs believed that Adam and Eve spake Arabic in Paradise, and that the language of revelation in which God spoke to His prophets, Abraham, Moses and Solomon, was none other than the language of the desert, the speech of the Arabs.
One of the most learned Arabs who lived about three hundred years after Mohammed said: “The wisdom of God hath come down upon three things:—the brain of the Franks, the hand of the Chinese and the tongue of the Arabs.” What this Arab philosopher meant was that while the people of Europe are distinguished for their power of invention and discovery, the Chinese are distinguished as artists and artisans, but the Arabs are all of them born orators and poets. The people of Europe, he meant to say, have brain power, the people of the Orient skill in handicraft, but the Arabs, eloquence. If you will read the Book of Job, which was doubtless written in Arabia and describes early Arabian life, or read the latter chapters of Mohammed’s Koran, or better still some of the Arabian poetry, you will appreciate the truth of this wonderful statement.
The first thing that is remarkable about the language of the Arabs is its wide-spread use. Like English it has spilled itself all over the map of the world, far beyond its original limits, and like English it was carried by commerce and by conquest, by merchants and by missionaries.
FIRST CHAPTER OF THE KORAN
Some time ago an American typewriter firm in advertising a machine with Arabic characters made the statement that the Arabic alphabet is used by more people than any other alphabet in the world. Some one thought that this was an exaggeration, and asked a professor of languages, “How big a lie is that?” He answered: “It is true.” The total population of all the countries whose inhabitants use the Arabic “A B C”—if they use any at all—is larger than the number of those who use the Latin alphabet or the Chinese character. The Arabic Koran is read by the Moslem boys in the day-schools not only of Arabia, but of Turkey, of Afghanistan, Persia, Java, Sumatra, the whole of North Africa and throughout Central Asia. In the Philippine Islands there are three hundred thousand Mohammedans whose only alphabet came from Arabia, and as far west as the mosques of Morocco the Arabic tongue has travelled and become the language of law and commerce and religion.
When the early Arabs in their conquests crossed the strait between Africa and Spain and conquered that country they left many words behind. And therefore many of the place names in Spain to-day are Arabic. Gibraltar, for example, is the corrupted form of Jebel Tarik, which means the mountain of Tarik, the Arab general who first crossed the straits with his soldiers. And Quadiliquiver, one of the rivers of Spain, should be spelled Wady El Kebir, or the Big River.
Even the English language has a number of words that came as Arab guests to the feast of reason and have been adopted into our family and put into our dictionary. When you speak of algebra, ciphers, zero, alchemy, alcove, minaret, alcohol, coffee, sofa, amber, artichokes, gazelles or magazine you are using good Arabic words which nearly every Arab would understand. To use these words, however, is quite a different thing from speaking “the language of the angels” correctly. It is easier to borrow a carpenter’s jack-knife than to acquire his skill in building a house. Many languages have borrowed from the Arabs and the Arabs have borrowed from them in return, but no language is richer than the Arabic in its number of words.