The Tongue of Arabs

This same richness, fascinating as it indeed is, is at the root of grave problems in the Arab world, problems that are in intimate relation with the linguistic question.

I am guilty of loving books as "objects." I am, rightfully, accused of more buying books than reading them. I like to "have" books, available, within arm's reach. I like them to be beautiful editions, well-made, luxurious if possible...

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For all these reasons, I have a great desire to have on my shelf a treasure called "Lissan al-Arab" (freely translated as The Tongue of the Arabs...). It is the most complete dictionary of the Arabic language, created by Ibn Manzur around the end of the 13th century!

(Are you curious to know why I put an exclamation mark at the end of that last sentence? You'll soon know the answer)

It's 20 volumes that compile Arabic vocabulary and its uses and, I promise, the collection looks beautiful lined up on a shelf! That's why, despite being entirely available online, the desire remains... But that's beside the point...

I remembered the dictionary and its name when thinking of a title for this chapter of my endless book about the Middle East (as you should remember, in recent texts, I spoke of the Arabs and their multiplicity, including their perhaps fatal divisions, and promised to soon reach the central place that language plays in their history... we've arrived).

Soon we'll see that I perhaps have in mind above all the linguistic diversity (in terms of varieties of Arabic) among Arabs; for this reason, I felt the temptation to speak of "tongues of the Arabs" and thus title the text. But I soon realized, or intuited, or realized that I intuited, that the very name of the book already carried something of the symbols I see so present in the Arabic language.

My intuition started here: the word "lissan" means more properly tongue as a physical organ than as a synonym for language. In this sense, Arabic would distance itself somewhat from Portuguese, in which we refer more easily to "língua" as idiom or language, and would approach English, in which "tongue" refers more to the organ than to idiom or language, although in both cases the reference by metaphorical extension is possible.

For the author, there were alternatives to the word "lissan" for a book that would collect Arabic vocabulary, concepts and uses: "lugha" would be the best equivalent for language as a system and "kalam" would express the idea of speech and/or discourse. The fact that he preferred the term "lissan" makes the title carry something more of poetry, through the capacity that metaphor has to reach other dimensions.

The choice also allows us to perceive, or imagine, perhaps when one already knows something about Arabs, that there would be a connection between the physical, corporal universe, necessary for expression, and the cultural dimension in which Arabs saw themselves (and still see themselves) inserted, their cultural identity.

Photo by Yulian As on Unsplash

"Lissan" also reminds us of a historical characteristic of the Arabic language, which is not exclusive to it, but which serves as an essential marker: the prevalence of orality during a great period of its evolution. Before inscriptions in Arabic appeared and soon spread (first using the Nabataean writing system and then in what would be the Arabic script we know today), Arabs valued immensely eloquence, poetry, the sophistication of discourse.