Some of the linguists argue that Arabic world will never achieve scientific progress and progressive thinking due to the logical structure of their mother tongue.
Language has played a significant role in the rise and fall of civilizations. Since language is the portrait of human thoughts, it reflects the quality of thought generated in a society. The selection of language tools used to express thought reflects the priorities of a person or for that matter a nation. The way language is acquired can make a significant difference in the development of nation. The quality and quantity of language is a barometer of the intellectual health of the people.
Executive Director of the New Century Education, Rayed Afzal wrote once that that the growth of a society depends on two types of language skills. The BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills) concern with human feelings, social and religious arguments and entertainment. The CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency) is the language of science, the ability to present a problem, building a hypothesis, analyzing data and then presenting solutions. Since CALP mostly deals with data, facts and figures, it lacks the beauty of Shakespeare or the imagery of Mirza Ghalib.
Apparently, logical structure of Arabic language itself lacks of CALP which leads to lack of scientific knowledge and discoveries, creating a severe handicap for a society.
The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, and is written from right to the left. It has a vast abundance of words, which enables the language to reach a level of precision. The words in Arabic are built on “roots”. For example, the combination of the letters `k-t-b` conveys the idea of the verb `to write`. By adding vowels, or affixes to the root, it is possible to derive many other words which have a closely associated meaning. We may derive words such as kutub (`books`), katib (`writer`), maktub (`letter`), maktab (`office`), miktaab (`typewriter`), maktaba (`library`) and iktitaab (`registration`). All these words have within them the consonants k, t and b (and always in that order), this represents the semantic root of the words and the idea of `writing`.
This means it is often much easier to figure out the meaning of a word in Arabic by looking at its basic root , rather than having to memorize words that do not have any obvious structural identification with the idea they represent.
Therefore, the logical structure of Arabic much differs from the Latin originated languages. The Latin based languages do foster precision in the use of words. When reading English or French or German closely and carefully, word by word, it focuses our mind on individual words and their usage. There may be a certain amount of stylistic imitation involved, but more important is the habit of reading closely and following important texts with accuracy.
While the West did away with BICS and successfully developed CALP of its people, leading to hundreds of scientific discoveries and inventions in the last three hundred years, the Arabic society full of color, warmth and beauty of speech, is still unable to move towards technical and scientific progress.
Comments
And it does not stop Jewish people to evolve and stuff.
In fact Rambam was writing mainly in Arabic for some time, and he is one of the world recognized philosophers.
Plus Chomskiy proved that all languages a evolve in similar way since language skills are one of the basic functions of our brain and they are coded in DNA.
Plus Arabs were very evolved civilization, and they contributed greatly to the science and culture.
I believe Arabic lack of progress in modern time is a result of this Al Gazali guy work .He diverted Islam from classical Greek philosophy towards Islamic philosophy.He was clearly ahead of his time.Had he come today in the time of quantum physics ,his work could be ground breaking and stuff.But in 1000 it just alienated Arab culture from rest of the world, forbidding it to benefit from Renaissance fully.