Why Allah is the Unique Name of Islam's entity of worship?

[dzheremi]

You have not been reading. I said there exists a dialect, of which nobody knows of except the quarish people.

What does this mean? Only Quraish people can know about the Quraish dialect? Um…no?

I Quote - “Only in the mid-seventh century do we begin to have more than isolated bits and pieces of epigraphic evidence for its (arabic) existence, and by this time the language had become the preferred medium of communication for a growing empire, as well as a dynamic and new religion.”

Re-read the section of the article that you took this from in context, please. This is talking about a particular dialect of Arabic, “Mudari”, not Arabic as a language itself. The date of the earliest Arabic inscription is given elsewhere in the article as 328 A.D., though I have no idea where this person is getting that figure from, as they do not provide any source for this. I have provided my source earlier in the thread. If I had to guess, I would hypothesize that Matthews’ figure from the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics probably figures Old North Arabian as an analogue for Arabic, as this is what preceded the Classical Arabic in which the Qur’an was written (though it was written in a different script, and had some different grammatical rules). It is safe to say that the Qur’an established a particular form of Arabic (it’s right there in the name, of course), but this is not the same as what you have been claiming, that the Qur’an invented Arabic itself. This is like claiming that the BBC invented English because it established “received pronunciation” as a standard form of English used by broadcasters. In the same way, the Qur’an established a standard of Arabic to be used in reading the Qur’an. It codified the standard, so to speak, but there were other dialects of the same language in use at the time, hence the need to codify one particular reading which was fulfilled when Uthman burnt all variant versions in existence in order to canonize the Qur’an into what we have today. Allah forbid if some poor Arab (or worse, maybe a Berber or Copt!) should read the Qur’an in anything other than the Quraish dialect!

“This has important implications for the study of Arabic literature–at least once it becomes a written tradition, with the revelation of the Qur’an”

Okay. This is talking about the establishment of Arabic as literary language, not the beginning of Arabic as a language itself, so I don’t see what you’re getting at.

I don’t need to explain to you what is written above. It says very clearly that the written form was ONLY revealed with the emergence of the Quran.

It wasn’t, though. And even if it was, the written form of a language does not matter at all. Most of the world’s languages are not written, but they still exist. The script in which a language is written is essentially immaterial, as there are plenty of instances in history where a language switches its script (e.g., Turkish switched from Arabic script to Latin only in 1928), but the language itself is not any different.

The Arabic script dates back to the roughly the 4th century A.D., approximately two centuries prior to Muhammad and Islam. Its immediate ancestor was the Nabataean script, which you can view here if you are curious about it.

 

[Mosacked]

What does this mean? Only Quraish people can know about the Quraish dialect? Um…no?

Re-read the section of the article that you took this from in context, please. This is talking about a particular dialect of Arabic, “Mudari”, not Arabic as a language itself. The date of the earliest Arabic inscription is given elsewhere in the article as 328 A.D., though I have no idea where this person is getting that figure from, as they do not provide any source for this. I have provided my source earlier in the thread. If I had to guess, I would hypothesize that Matthews’ figure from the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics probably figures Old North Arabian as an analogue for Arabic, as this is what preceded the Classical Arabic in which the Qur’an was written (though it was written in a different script, and had some different grammatical rules). It is safe to say that the Qur’an established a particular form of Arabic (it’s right there in the name, of course), but this is not the same as what you have been claiming, that the Qur’an invented Arabic itself. This is like claiming that the BBC invented English because it established “received pronunciation” as a standard form of English used by broadcasters. In the same way, the Qur’an established a standard of Arabic to be used in reading the Qur’an. It codified the standard, so to speak, but there were other dialects of the same language in use at the time, hence the need to codify one particular reading which was fulfilled when Uthman burnt all variant versions in existence in order to canonize the Qur’an into what we have today. Allah forbid if some poor Arab (or worse, maybe a Berber or Copt!) should read the Qur’an in anything other than the Quraish dialect!

Okay. This is talking about the establishment of Arabic as literary language, not the beginning of Arabic as a language itself, so I don’t see what you’re getting at.

It wasn’t, though. And even if it was, the written form of a language does not matter at all. Most of the world’s languages are not written, but they still exist. The script in which a language is written is essentially immaterial, as there are plenty of instances in history where a language switches its script (e.g., Turkish switched from Arabic script to Latin only in 1928), but the language itself is not any different.

The Arabic script dates back to the roughly the 4th century A.D., approximately two centuries prior to Muhammad and Islam. Its immediate ancestor was the Nabataean script, which you can view here if you are curious about it.

If the written form does not matter why do you even keep the quran??? You’re obviously prejudiced in your point of view.

The written form is evidence of the ONSET, without it, I too can claim that English was spoken back in the stone ages.

That’s the problem with islam & muslims. ALOT of empty claims, alot of empty ACCUSATIONS, but NO PROOF, just more claims to rebut the lack of evidence.

 

[dzheremi]

If the written form does not matter why do you even keep the quran??? You’re obviously prejudiced in your point of view.

I don’t know why you’re asking me about the Qur’an. I’m not ‘keeping’ it (I don’t own one to begin with). You misunderstand what I am saying. When I said that the written form does not matter, I meant two things:

1. The vast majority of linguistic work concerns spoken language, because many of the world’s languages (including the most endangered, which are the ones linguists generally like to work on) are not written, and essentially a language’s orthography is only a representation of (at best) a particular dialect, in the same way that a language’s writing system is only a representation of the sounds of the language (in English the letter that looks like this: “H” makes a “huh” sound; in Russian, “H” makes an “en” sound). Even in more phonemic orthographies (Spanish, Italian), there is rarely if ever a perfect one-to-one correspondence between all graphemes and phonemes of a particular dialect. See Wikipedia’s article on Orthography for basic descriptions of how orthographies relate to the languages they represent.
2. Many of the earliest pieces of written evidence for a particular language would NOT be recognizable in any way to speakers of the modern language or languages concerned. This is what I was getting at when I mentioned the discrepancy between the written record for Arabic according to your link (328 AD, which I’ll assume is correct), and the date given in the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics (c.6th century BC). Which one is "right’? I know you’re not going to like the answer, but honestly it depends on how you define “Arabic”. Is it only recognizable as definitely Arabic when it is in the Arabic script that we know today? In that case, inscriptions before roughly the 4th-5th century AD are out. If it is not a matter of writing system (and it definitely shouldn’t be), then when do we know when we’ve arrived at something that is definitely “Arabic” and not one of the other North Arabian dialects that we know existed at the time? It is a much more complex question than this post allows, and cannot be solved by looking for the earliest inscription of something that we can know is Arabic by sight alone. Before the Arabic script, pre-Qur’anic/pre-Classical Arabic would have been written in any number of epigraphic South Arabian scripts (these “South Arabian” languages were spoken in modern day Yemen and are the ancestors of the modern Ethiopian Semitic languages), Many were written in the Nabataean script, yet are still recognizably North Arabian/Arabic due to their underlying morphology (e.g., the words are recognizably North Arabian/Arabic, even if the script is not). This link might be of interest to you.

The written form is evidence of the ONSET, without it, I too can claim that English was spoken back in the stone ages.

Well, yes and no. For reasons that are hopefully a little more clear to you now, it is not as simple as pointing to something and saying “Aha! THAT is English to the exclusion of everything else it could be!” By way of illustration, here is the Runic alphabet. If you saw that written somewhere, would you know you were looking at Anglo-Saxon/Old English? Probably not, unless you especially adept at recognizing scripts, and also knew the history of English. But that’s how all written English would’ve looked prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet, courtesy of Irish missionaries who helped to Christianize Europe. So remember: Next time you meet an Irish person, thank them for your being able to type and read as we do around here.

Seriously, though, for all these reasons and more, you could not just make a claim like “English was spoken back in the stone ages”, because there’s a lot more to the history English (and language in general) than when it adopted a particular script. Eventually, you stop being able to see the “English-ness” of whatever it is you are looking at, and instead have to start dealing with larger categories like “Proto-Germanic”, and “Indo-European”, and eventually “Proto-Indo European”…things just get crazy… :hypno: