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1. The sources for pre-Islamic Arabic Pre-Islamic Arabic is the cover term for all varieties of Arabic spoken in the Arabian Peninsula until immediately after the Arab conquests in the 7th century C.E. Scholars disagree about the status of these varieties (Rabin 1955). Three different points of view stand out. Some scholars (Nöldeke 1904, 1910; Fück 1950; Blau 1965; Chejne 1969; Versteegh 1984) assume that the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān was similar, if not identical, to the varieties spoken in the Arabian Peninsula before the emergence of Islam. I…

1. Introduction of Braille in the Arab world Physically, Braille is a “universally accepted system of writing used by and for blind persons and consisting of a code of 63 characters, each made up of one to six raised dots arranged in a six-position matrix or cell” ( Encyclopedia Britannica II, 465). Content-wise, Arabic is a six-dot tactile copy of its schwarzschrift (normal ink print). The system is divided into the alphabet and its subsystems, the non-alphabetical code systems of contractions, and the mathematical signs and musical notation. One interes…

Foreigner Talk is a continuum of formal and discourse modifications used by native speakers in communicating with nonnative speakers/learners (Ellis 1994:247). It is an automatic process triggered by the native speaker's realization that the nonnative speaker's proficiency level is low (Gass and Varonis 1985:149–162). The degree of modification is determined by the level of proficiency of the particular nonnative interlocutor in a certain interactive context (Gass 1997:66). Native speakers' modi…