Posted by Christoph Heger on November 04, 1997 at 09:38:27:
Greetings to all,
Mohamed Ghounem made much ado about the question which language Jesus and His apostles spoke -- as to my experience Muslims in general do. This matter is discussed in the thread "Mish'al Abdullah Al-Kadhi's book". I think that item is of less importance since nobody doubts that Jesus (usually) spoke Aramaic and the New Testament is written in Greek.
But what's about the primordial language of the Qur'an? Muslims usually argue that without any doubt it is written in Classical Arabic, the language of the Meccan people in Muhammad's time. That however seems to be a later myth.
To my knowledge the Swedish arabist Count Carlo de Landberg (1848-1927) was the first to state that the language of normal communication in the time of Muhammad and before - at least amongst the urban population of Mecca and Medina, but probably amongst the bedouins, too - was an Arabic vernacular and not the Classical Arabic, which we know from the old Arabic poetry and which according to this thesis was restricted to a small, especially educated elite. Carlo de Landberg was a private scholar who had traveled the length and the breadth of Arabia in the course of his linguistic research. A recension of de Landberg's thesis by Theodor Noeldeke one may find in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlaendischen Gesellschaft (ZDMG) 59 (1905), p. 412-419.
This thesis in the meantime apparently has become nearly kind of communis opinio. I refer, for instance, to Bernhard Lewin, Oriens 7 (1954), p. 131-134; Anton Spitaler, Bibliotheca Orientalia 10 (1953), p. 144-150; Hans Wehr, ZDMG 102 (1952), p. 179-186.
Actually, we have examples of popular poetry in this vernacular from the earliest times; cf. Wiebke Walther: "Altarabische Kindertanzreime", Studia Orientalia in memoriam Caroli Brockelmann, Halle 1968, p. 217-233, and the literature quoted there.
The German arabist Karl Vollers (1857-1909) then was the first to state that the Qur'an, too, was originally written in the vernacular and only afterwards "emended" to become a text in Classical Arabic (Karl Vollers: Volkssprache und Schriftsprache im alten Arabien. - Strassburg 1906). Regarding the related problem of reading the Qur'an with or without case endings (`I'rab) I point to Paul Kahle "The Qur'an and the 'Arabiya" in: Ignace Goldziher Memorial Volume, I, p. 163-182.
How this Arabic vernacular looked like cannot be said in few words. Of course, it used the words without case endings (`I'rab). And it differed from Classical Arabic in the lexical meaning of many words.
For instance, - as al-Farra' reported (s. Theodor Noeldeke, Geschichte des Qorans, vol. 1, Leipzig 1909, p. 81) - the renowned early philologist Abu `Ubaida asserted that the verb "qara'a" in Surah 96:1 and 96:3 has the same meaning as the verb "dhakara", viz. "to invoke", "to praise". One may guess that that reflects its meaning in the vernacular.
To get an idea of this vernacular one may use Joshua Blau's "Grammar of Christian Arabic", Louvain 1966, for Christian Arabic is a sort of early Arabic vernacular.
Kind regards,
Christoph Heger