1. General

Arabic is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages; it is the official language of the 22 nations of the Arab world, the area bounded by the Atlantic on the west, the Mediterranean on the north, the Sahara on the south, and the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq on the east; it is spoken by more than two hundred million people. Modern Standard Arabic is the High literary form of Arabic that goes back to the literary language of pre-Islamic Arabia (poetic koine; Classical Arabic; see…