LINGUIST List 6.534

Sun 09 Apr 1995

Disc: Language and Religion

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Message 1: lg & religion

Date: Fri, 07 Apr 95 22:41 PDT
From: benji wald <IBENAWJMVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU>
Subject: lg & religion

I read Dr. Abdussalam's summary of language and religion with interest. I miss ed his original inquiry. Otherwise, I would have responded to him in person an d let him summarise. However, what the question brings to my mind about BORROWING I think of sufficient interest to post to the list in general.

First, with regard to the notion of classifying languages according to religion , at least for languages of Islamic populations, there are some interesting observations to be made. Among them is that Arabic has influenced a great many languages of various types and genetic families specifically by the loan of conjunctions and adverbs. Words like amma "but" (sometimes "or"), (wa)lakin "but, however" etc., and one of my favorites a discourse marker bass "enough, that's it, so, then (in a logical sense)" Bass is actually a loan from Persian (I t hink) but then spread widely through Arabic. Middle Eastern Arabic sometimes uses xalaas "enough, finished!" in some contexts where bass is used in other dia lects and more generally in the languages of other Muslims. (in Somali it sound s more like biss). There is no equivalent in European (Christian?) languages, so I can't translate exactly how it works in discourse with a single word, but from its use in Swahili (form is basi), I recognise quite well how it is used i n other languages where it has been borrowed.

The original question reminded me of the following personal experience, related to the above point. Once, fresh from East Africa, I arrived on a particular store-front street in Brussels, Belgium which has both Turkish and Arabic (North African) shops. As I moved from one shop to another and listened to conversations in them, the SAME Arabic loans, regardless of language, came to my ears. In fact, they were so salient that I felt I could understand the general topics of conversation through the Arabic cues and the situational context, not too difficult for me for Arabic, since I have heard it a lot in various places, but also for Turkish (although despite some familiarity with Turkish vocabulary and grammatical structure I may be deluding myself about how much I understood). Of course, greetings were Arabic "salaam aleykum", " marahaba" etc., and the words mentioned above, among various loans among nouns and verbs.

Muslim greetings are general to Muslims regardless of language used. Nothing comparable exists in the Christian world -- which suggests the latter is not as cohesive (in some sense that I cannot fully specify -- something to do with acknowlegment of a cultural link/"brotherhood" on the basis of religion across what may be otherwise very distinct peoples.) Although there have been deep schisms into sects in the history of Islam, I wonder if its relative symbolic linguistic cohesion compared to Christianity may not be a consequence of the initial split among Christians between the Eastern/Byzantine and Western/Roman empires, where there was also the initial administrative linguistic division between Greek in the East and Latin in the West.)

Similarly, I was once trying to remember the Wolof greetings I had heard in Dakar, Senegal but couldn't. Then I went to a Senegalese store in New York and realised why. They use the same Arabic greetings, not distinct Wolof greetings (that is, as the most general and common greeting). Swahili, as a lingua franca and standardised language, is perhaps even more widely spoken by non-Muslims than Muslims, so that when you are taught the standard language you will learn standard Swahili greetings like "habari (gani)?", literally "what's the news?", and even habari is one of those pan-Islamic Arabic l oans, xabar (news/something worth reporting, cf. Turkish-influenced Greek "ti khabari-o") But among the Swahilis of the coast it is usual for Muslims to greet each other with "salaam aleykum" and respond "w-aleykum salaam". Not only that, but the greetings are so much a part of the culture that there are specific intonation patterns and other aspects of delivery that are expected in giving the greetings. That also applies to other languages. For example, once at a bus-stop in Mombasa I was joking with a Somali girl and her mother. They had been talking about me, wondering who/what I was. I was chewing qat, a favorite Somali recreation. I laughed and they realised I understood. We started talking, in Swahili, and then some Somali men passed by and we all exchanged Arabic greetings. The men moved on. Later at some point, the girl asked me what my religion was. I didn't want to tell her, so I joked with her about why she didn't assume I was Muslim. She said I hadn't done the Arabic greeting like a Muslim -- I realised that, it was half-hearted because I didn't know the people and was reserved, but I didn't know she would interpret it as follows. She said, a Muslim gives the greeting from the stomach, I had only given it fr om the throat. I understood what she meant in terms of delivery.

Islamic symbolism through Arabic is a well-known feature of many languages. The supposed difference between "Hindi" and "Urdu" are well-known examples. In the 1960s, when I studied Hindi with a Hindu teacher I was told that kitaab is the Urdu word for "book" (an Arabic loan) but the " correct" Hindi word is pustak (from Sanskrit). This reflected an attempt in the aftermath of Hindu-Muslim antagonism in Northern India to polarise the difference between the various forms of Hind(ustan)i. I have noticed since that kitaab has remained the usual Hindi word for "book" among Hindus, so that the purification/polarisation attempts of an earlier period have not succeeded, and I don't think the attempt is still being pressed to the same degree. I don't know, but would be interested in hearing if Arabic loans play any role in differentiating Serbian as spoken by Serbs and Bosnian Muslims -- possibly not in terms o f distinct "dialects" but as stylistic devices allowing Muslims to symbolise their common religion, as in the case of Arabic greetings. I haven't seen any references on that, but I haven't looked. If so, as in Greek, the Arabic words would have come through Turkish, although in Greece religious conversion to Islam was negligible compared to Bosnia.

The interesting but not surprising feature of Arabic loans is that among the various Muslim languages, speakers remain conscious of many if not most of the Arabic loans, so that they can transfer from one langua ge to another as a distinct component of the vocabulary of the donor language, even though it is often not Arabic directly. Very often this is because of their cultural content, and, of course, recognition is aided by the religious stud y of Quranic Arabic among Muslims of all language backgrounds. However, examples like the durable Hindi kitaab "book" show that innovative concepts is not the only reason. After all, literacy and books were well established in India before Islam. Thus, an issue remains of the religious symbolic status of loans expressing ordinary concepts. I can imagine, for example, that among Muslim Hindi/Urdu speakers kitaab is A book, and pustak is a fancy Sanskrit word for the same and/or for some Hindu religious writings, but that only kitaab could also be THE book, meaning the Qur'an. It could not be legitimately called a pustak for cultural reasons; I'm only guessi ng about this.

Meanwhile, on the other side of cultural loans, it is interesting that Swahili uses a Bantu word chuo specifically for Arabic/Quranic school. In most languag es darasa, from Arabic, would be the word. In Swahili darasa means "class (whe re lessons are taught)" or even "classroom" in general. Actually, when kids go to Quranic class they usually refer to it as "darasa", but out of context dara sa has no religious connotations, while chuo always has the religious connotati on of Islam -- skuli (from English in Kenya) and shule (from German in Tanzania) refer to secular primary school. chuo probably originally meant the pre-Islamic educational system associated with acculturation of a set of youngsters, maybe associated with instruction prior to initiation into an official age-set (rika), and then was transferred to Isla mic education when the Swahili people became Muslims.

Apart from the above, I can guess that Dr. Abdussalaam's original inquiry might also have been motivated by religious divisions in particular Arabic communiti es with regard to the dialects of its speakers. Thus, Chaim Blanc (1948?) described the division of Arabic in Baghdad at the time into a Muslim, Christian and Jewish dialect. The Christian and Jewish dialects were similar but very distinct from the Muslim dialect in terms of phonology, some morphology and lexicon. His explanation was that the Jewish-Christian varieties were the pre-Islamic varieties of Arabic spoken there, and that the Muslim variety had been imp orted from elsewhere after Islam became politically dominant in the area. Presumably, locals who became Muslims adopted the dialect which originally came from another (more southern?) area and was associated with the change in political power. The historical differences were maintained due to the communal cultural differences among the different religious populations. As I recall, Baghdad was earlier an Akkadian and eventually Aramaic (Mandaic/Chaldean etc) area, and I don't know how the original "Jewish-Christian" dialect of Arabic was established there. Benji