The Orientalists’ Diachronic Studies of Phonological Features of Arabic

Al-Dhalimi, Hamed

	The Orientalists’ Diachronic Studies of Phonological Features of Arabic
مجلة آداب البصرة
Article 5, Volume 12, Issue 78, 2016, Pages 87-125 PDF (0 K)
Author
Hamed Al-Dhalimi
Abstract
Science of sounds is regarded as one of those sciences that the study of which is significantly developed after is witnessed a long period of stagnation. This science has become to represent the developed manifestation of Modern Linguistics more than any other branch thereof. This development is reflected through it various methodologies of research, different devices and advanced equipments used in this field. Orientalist endeavors have been directed to study Arabic language at all phonetic, morphological, grammatical and denotative levels. Using Arabic language by orientalists as a means to understand the Hebrew of Torah in the 16th century and the beginning of 17th century helped to elevate Arabic language to move ahead. In the 17th and 18th centuries, European Linguists were concerned with the international hierarchical structure of languages; and this in fact influenced their orientations to study Arabic and some other Semitic languages such as Hebrew. They focused on the study of those two languages which belong to the ancient centuries. There was a drastic development in the field of linguistic studies in Europe in the 17th century, specifically in the field of Indo-European languages when Franz Bob made a comparison among the morphological systems of verbs in Sanskrit, Persian, Germanic and Greek languages. Accordingly, this has made its own influence in the context of Semitic languages study by Orientalists especially after the discovery of many Assyrian, Aramaic and old Southern Arabic transcripts .This discovery widened the historical depth of comparison. Researchers are concerned with the study of standard language by itself and they considered accents branching from the standard language as erroneous types but in the 19th century, after scientists discovered that rural accents contain the forms of structure in the standard language. Orientalists spent massive efforts to record the various accents of Arabic language.

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