Classical Arabic
Classical Arabic is the standardized literary form of the Arabic language 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.
The first comprehensive description of Al-ʿArabiyyah "Arabic", Sībawayhi's al-Kitāb, was upon a corpus of poetic texts, in addition to the Qurʾān and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the ʿarabiyya.
Modern Standard Arabic is its direct descendant used today throughout the Arab world in writing and in formal speaking, for example, prepared speeches, some radio broadcasts, and non-entertainment content;. While the lexis and stylistics of Modern Standard Arabic are different from Classical Arabic, the morphology and syntax have remained basically unchanged. In the Arab world, little distinction is made between CA and MSA, and both are normally called al-fuṣḥā in Arabic, meaning 'the purest' or 'the most elegant.'
History
The earliest forms of Arabic are known as Old Arabic and survive in inscriptions in Ancient North Arabian scripts as well as fragments of pre-Islamic poetry preserved in the classical literature. By the late 6th century AD, it is hypothesized that a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koiné", a synthetic language distinct from the spoken vernaculars, had developed with conservative, as well as innovative, features, including the case endings known as ʾiʿrab. It is uncertain to what degree the spoken vernaculars corresponded to the literary style, however, as many surviving inscriptions in the region seem to indicate simplification or absence of the inflectional morphology of Classical Arabic. It is often said that the Bedouin dialects of Najd were probably the most conservative, a view possibly supported by the romanticization of the "purity" of the language of the desert-dwellers expressed in many Medieval Arabic works, especially those on grammar, though some argue that all the spoken vernaculars probably deviated from the literary norm to different degrees, while others, such as Joshua Blau, believe that "the differences between the classical and spoken language were not too far-reaching".In the 7th century AD, the distinctive features of Old Hijazi, such as loss of final short vowels, loss of hamza, lenition of final /-at/ to /-ah/, and lack of nunation, influenced the consonantal text '' of the Qur'an and the later normalized orthography of Classical Arabic as a standard literary register in the 8th century.
By the 2nd century AH, the language had been standardized by Arab grammarians and knowledge of Classical Arabic became an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world, as it was the lingua franca across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa, and thus, the region eventually developed into a widespread state of diglossia. Consequently, the classical language, as well as the Arabic script, became the subject of much mythicization and was eventually associated with religious, ethnic, and racial conflicts, such as the rise of many groups traditionally categorized under the broad label of Al-Shu'ibiyya who rejected the stressed and often dogmatized belief that Arabs, as well as their language, were far superior to all other races and ethnicities. Furthermore, many Arabic grammarians strove to attribute as many words as possible to a "pure Arabic origin," especially those in the Qur'an.
Poems and sayings attributed to Arabic-speaking personages who lived before the standardization of the Classical idiom, which are preserved mainly in far later manuscripts, contain traces of elements in morphology and syntax that began to be regarded as chiefly poetic or characteristically regional or dialectal. Lexically, Classical Arabic may retain one or more of the dialectal forms of a given word as variants, albeit often with much less currency and use.
Various Arabic dialects freely borrowed words from Classical Arabic, a situation is similar to Romance languages, wherein scores of words were borrowed directly from Classical Latin. People may speak Classical Arabic as a second language if they speak colloquial Arabic dialects as their first language, but as a third language if others speak other languages native to a country as their first language and colloquial Arabic dialects as their second language. But Classical Arabic was spoken with different pronunciations influenced by vernaculars. The differentiation of the pronunciation and vocabulary of vernaculars was influenced by native languages spoken in the regions, such as Coptic in Egypt; Berber and Punic in North Africa; Himyaritic, Modern South Arabian, and Old South Arabian in Yemen; and Aramaic in the Levant.
Phonology
Consonants
Like Modern Standard Arabic, Classical Arabic had 28 consonant phonemes:Notes:
Vowels
Grammar
Nouns
Case
The A1 inscription dated to the 3rd or 4th century AD in the Greek alphabet in a dialect showing affinities to that of the Safaitic inscriptions shows that short final high vowels had been lost in at least some dialects of Old Arabic at that time, obliterating the distinction between nominative and genitive case in the singular, leaving the accusative the only marked case:أوس عوذ بناء كازم الإداميْ أتو من شحاصْ؛ أتو بناءَ الدَّورَ ويرعو بقلَ بكانون
ʾAws ʿūḏ Bannāʾ Kāzim ʾal-ʾidāmiyy ʾatawa miś-śiḥāṣ; ʾatawa Bannāʾa ʾad-dawra wa yirʿaw baqla bi-kānūn
"ʾAws son of ʿūḏ son of Bannāʾ son of Kāzim the ʾidāmite came because of scarcity; he came to Bannāʾ in this region and they pastured on fresh herbage during Kānūn".
Classical Arabic however, shows a far more archaic system, essentially identical with that of Proto-Arabic:
State
The definite article spread areally among the Central Semitic languages and it would seem that Proto-Arabic lacked any overt marking of definiteness. Besides dialects with no definite article, the Safaitic inscriptions exhibit about four different article forms, ordered by frequency: h-, ʾ-, ʾl-, and hn-. The Old Arabic of the Nabataean inscriptions exhibits almost exclusively the form ʾl-. Unlike the Classical Arabic article, the Old Arabic ʾl almost never exhibits the assimilation of the coda to the coronals; the same situation is attested in the Graeco-Arabica, but in A1 the coda assimilates to the following d, αδαυρα *ʾad-dawra الدورة 'the region'.In Classical Arabic, the definite article takes the form al-, with the coda of the article exhibiting assimilation to the following dental and denti-alveolar consonants. Note the inclusion of palatal, which alone among the palatal consonants exhibits assimilation, indicating that assimilation ceased to be productive before that consonant shifted from Old Arabic :