« Antioch and Higher Education Institutional Failure | Main | Prayer for the Motu Proprio »
June 25, 2007
What is "Arabic" and how do you go about teaching it?
Mark Liberman at Language Log has a great post with lots of updates about the state of Arabic mastery among State Department personnel in Baghdad and then expanding out to the question of what kind of Arabic to learn and what is Arabic anyway. I apologize that the link seems to take you into the middle of the post - click and scoll up to start reading, because the whol thing is very interesting! Among other things, he links to a fascinating article (link is to a pdf) about the problems of diglossia for Arabs and Arabic literacy; it's a long paper, and Liberman chooses several anecdotes and excerpts (tempting enough that I read the whole thing - I keep asking people who know Arabic how far apart the dialects really are; the simple answer, "pretty far").
So why is this of more than casual interest for medievalists? Read Liberman's next to last paragraph:
This situation makes the task of foreign learners more difficult, since they need to learn to deal appropriately with a very broad range of mixtures of "high" and "low" languages. This is true to some extent in any language, but the range of diglossia in "Arabic" appears to be significantly greater than in most other modern situations. You need to imagine a situation in which "Latin" is used to refer not only to classical and patristic Latin, but also to the spoken versions French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese (with none of them having any standard written form).I don't need to imagine a situation like that - I read about it all the time. It's called "the 8th and 9th centuries in Western Europe." Roger Wright, a student of early Spanish, pushed a lot of medievalists to start thinking about what Latin was before and after Alcuin and De litteris colendis, the Carolingian edict on how Latin was to be taught and pronounced when read aloud. To simplify, Wright says (and the field has come around a long way to him) that before Alcuin, written Latin was an elaborate spelling convention for proto-Romance. The whole question of when proto-Romance ceased to be one thing and became proto-Spanish, proto-French, proto-Italian and such and the degree to which these things were separable from Late Latin is wildly controversial, but it's exactly what Liberman is asking us to think about while thinking about diglossia and dialect problems in Arabic.
The situation of Latin/Romance diglossia in the West in the 8th and 9th centuries is important to me because early on in the dissertation my historian advisor asked something along the lines of his famous "but did the hand that guided the plow understand Augustine's sermon?" Did anyone other than clergymen understand the monumental inscriptions I was looking at? Did I need to posit a tour guide to translate them for lay visitors to buildings? How seriously could we take the idea of programmatic intention if no one could read them? Funny - I blogged about this in late June last year, too.
So, back to Arabic. What do we Americans think we're doing when we teach Modern Standard Arabic on the college level? After reading the Maamouri piece I'm beginning to wonder if we're teaching Latin and then sending our students out to deal with a lot of speakers of Spanish, Italian, and French.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at June 25, 2007 7:19 AM