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The word medina (root: d-y-n/d-w-n) has the meaning of "metropolis" in Amharic, "city" in Arabic and Ancient Hebrew, and "State" in Modern Hebrew. There is sometimes no relation between the roots. For example, "knowledge" is represented in Hebrew by the root y-d-ʿ , but in Arabic by the roots ʿ-r-f and ʿ-l-m and in Ethiosemitic by the roots ...
Old Arabic and its descendants are classified as Central Semitic languages, which is an intermediate language group containing the Northwest Semitic languages (e.g., Aramaic and Hebrew), the languages of the Dadanitic, Taymanitic inscriptions, the poorly understood languages labeled Thamudic, and the ancient languages of Yemen written in the Ancient South Arabian script.
The first known recorded text in the Arabic alphabet is known as the Zabad inscription, composed in 512. It is a trilingual dedication in Greek, Syriac and Arabic found at the village of Zabad in northwestern Syria. The version of the Arabic alphabet used includes only 21 letters, of which only 15 are different, being used to note 28 phonemes:
Sabaic is the best attested language in South Arabian inscriptions, named after the Kingdom of Saba, and is documented over a millennium. [4] In the linguistic history of this region, there are three main phases of the evolution of the language: Late Sabaic (10th–2nd centuries BC), Middle Sabaic (2nd century BC–mid-4th century AD), and Late Sabaic (mid-4th century AD–eve of Islam). [16]
The oldest surviving papyrus in Arabic dates to 643 CE, and it uses dots to produce the modern 28-letter Arabic alphabet. The language of that papyrus and of the Qur'an is referred to by linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into " Classical Arabic ".
The West Semitic languages consist of the clearly defined sub-groups: Modern South Arabian, Old South Arabian, Ethiopic, Arabic (including Maltese), and Northwest Semitic (this including Hebrew, Aramaic, and the extinct Amorite and Ugaritic languages). [5] The East Semitic languages, meanwhile, consist of the extinct Eblaite and Akkadian ...
Classical Arabic or Quranic Arabic (Arabic: العربية الفصحى, romanized: al-ʻArabīyah al-Fuṣḥā, lit. 'the most eloquent classic Arabic') is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notably in Umayyad and Abbasid literary texts such as poetry, elevated prose and oratory, and is also the liturgical language of Islam.
Paleo-Arabic (or Palaeo-Arabic, previously called pre-Islamic Arabic or Old Arabic [1] [2]) is a pre-Islamic Arabian script used to write Arabic. It began to be used in the fifth century, when it succeeded the earlier Nabataeo-Arabic script, and it was used until the early seventh century, when the Arabic script was standardized in the Islamic era.