my friend pierre akl, editor-inchief of transparent, wrote in a comment on my article about the death of the arabic language, that we are not the only party that linked the language to religion. the greeks, for example, linked the bible to greek because it was originally written in it. in 1910, massive riots occurred in athens, in which 8 people were killed, in protest against the publication by the acropolis newspaper of a translation of texts from the gospel of matthew into modern greek!
he added: i do not know if there is an organic reason that prevents arabic from developing to accept the vocabulary of modern life, by borrowing words from other languages, such as television and radio, and most likely this will enrich it and bridge the gap with colloquial language.
but the problem lies in what the scientist ferguson called diglossia, that is, the disconnect between a higher, written, language and a lower, spoken language. the student must learn upper-class arabic to use it to study, while a turkish or frenchman, for example, does not face this problem, and he and others like him who are children of arab immigrants speak arabic, but they are unable to read its texts or understand a news bulletin, for example, in a proper way.
there is almost agreement among the majority of specialists in matters of the arabic language that it needs treatment and has even become a factor hindering progress, especially in scientific fields, and what hinders its development, among other things:
first: the fear that linguistic, spelling, grammatical, or writing modifications to the language may make it difficult for some to easily return to religious texts. this is not true, and many examples contradict this. for more than 1,400 years, more than 90% of the nation was “completely illiterate,” yet the religion continued to expand, and the language of the qur’an remained the same.
second: the absence of any concept or ceiling on what development or change means, and this prevents us from moving on this path.
third: the most important ... there is no specific body that can be agreed upon to carry out the task of modification and development, and it is also not possible to guarantee that all arab countries will say so, and therefore the linguistic situation, and the rest of our situations, will remain backward, as long as disagreements plague most arab countries, east and west. the harshest of these differences are among the countries closest to each other, geographically, religiously, and culturally.
some believe that arabic causes a headache for anyone who wants to learn it, let alone master it. there is a problem with the issue of differentiating between some letters and a bigger problem related to the position of the cursed “hamza” in the word!
likewise, diacritics and the use of stress cause and cause headaches for almost everyone, not to mention that arabic suffers from a deficiency in some colloquial letters in other living languages, such as english and french, and introducing them into arabic will enrich it and improve the pronunciation of the names of individuals, places, machines, equipment, etc., in a more accurate manner.
for your information, i learned to read more than 70 years ago, wrote ten thousand articles, and only today i discovered that there is something in grammar called “relative prepositional pronouns”! my ignorance of this rule and dozens of others did not prevent me from reading all religious texts, such as the qur’an, with great ease. nor did my ignorance of grammar and my lack of knowledge of the difference between them, prevent me from writing, in an understandable manner, on almost any topic!