A Blog by the Editor of The Middle East Journal

Putting Middle Eastern Events in Cultural and Historical Context

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Another View on Arabic

Thanks to his comment posted on my earlier post on Qifa Nabki's column on Arabic, I find that Wastafarian (a great psuedonym) at Blogging the Casbah has translated a piece by Egyptian author Fahmy Huweidi on the "slaughter of the Arabic language," worrying about the classical language being corrupted by colloquial in newspapers. We've talked about the diglossia issue among others in the past. I'm personally closer to the views of Qifa Nabki here than to Huweidi's, but thought it was a good example of the death-of-Arabic argument and worthy of calling it to your attention.

1 comment:

Jesse Aizenstat said...

Wastafarian is a great name... and it's about time we got some substance over in our dusty old Casbah.