Standard Arabic Essay

Arabic has been called the language of Adam and Eve, making it one of the oldest written languages in human history. In its modern form, Arabic is spoken by 422 million individuals worldwide, making it the fifth most commonly utilized language. Central Semitic in classification, it developed from a Proto-Semitic predecessor and has evolved significantly with time. Today, based purely on linguistic grounds, one could argue that Arabic is in fact not one distinct language, but is several because some dialects are mutually unintelligible. Jordanian Arabic is a mutually understandable branch of the South Levantine Spoken dialect of Standard Arabic spoken by 6,798,00 individuals worldwide. Among these individuals, approximately 3,590,000, including the subject of my interviews, live in Jordan. The remaining speakers reside mainly in Israel and Palestine. The Jordanian dialect differs from Standard Arabic in only special cases such as grammatical alterations in the use of pronouns and articles, drawing the majority of its lexical influences from French and Turkish. So far as its transcription into text, Jordanian Arabic utilizes the Standard …show more content…
The reason why the word “ate” moves to the beginning of the sentence in Arabic is that there is an empty complementizer position that accepts it. In contrast, the word ate does not move in the subordinate clause (in the right picture) because the complementizer position is filled by the auxillary “that.” To test the validity of this explanation, I presented the native speaker with additional sentences containing both occupied and unoccupied complementizer positions. His translations of these sentences were the same as those predicted by the movement pattern, confirming that this trend is more than just a random occurrence. It will be interesting to see in future interviews how this movement is affected when the sentences are restructured into