04-25-2004, 06:13 PM
Shlama Akhi bar-Khela,
Imagine you had two sons who both move off to different places and become isolated from you....losing contact with you and each other as well. Imagine one son goes to an unpopulated place in the desert to the east of L.A. and the other son goes to a desert in Mexico that is populated.
After a few generations, their descendents (your great-great-great-great grandchildren) will speak differently from each other, but they will still retain a similiarity to how you used to speak.
Both Hebrew and Arabic are highly specialized Aramaic dialects - Abraham left his family in Mesopotamia and in Aram and his children settled in foreign lands. Some of them (the Isaacites) settled in areas among foreign people and adopted their ways of speech. Others (the Ishmaelites) settled in unpopulated areas of the desert and became so isolated that they developed their own way of speaking.
The Nabateans were close enough (in northern Arabia) to the rest of their original Aramaic-speaking Semitic stock that they retained the Aramaic of their father Ishmael.
When Islam swept through, the southern Arabian tribes who were more isolated came along and most of the Arab tribes were united with their speech and their religion.
Imagine you had two sons who both move off to different places and become isolated from you....losing contact with you and each other as well. Imagine one son goes to an unpopulated place in the desert to the east of L.A. and the other son goes to a desert in Mexico that is populated.
After a few generations, their descendents (your great-great-great-great grandchildren) will speak differently from each other, but they will still retain a similiarity to how you used to speak.
Both Hebrew and Arabic are highly specialized Aramaic dialects - Abraham left his family in Mesopotamia and in Aram and his children settled in foreign lands. Some of them (the Isaacites) settled in areas among foreign people and adopted their ways of speech. Others (the Ishmaelites) settled in unpopulated areas of the desert and became so isolated that they developed their own way of speaking.
The Nabateans were close enough (in northern Arabia) to the rest of their original Aramaic-speaking Semitic stock that they retained the Aramaic of their father Ishmael.
When Islam swept through, the southern Arabian tribes who were more isolated came along and most of the Arab tribes were united with their speech and their religion.
+Shamasha Paul bar-Shimun de'Beth-Younan
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