The Arabic Koran is a text-book in the day-schools of Turkey, Afghanistan, Java, Sumatra, New Guinea, and Southern Russia. Arabic is the spoken language not only of Arabia proper but forces the linguistic boundary of that peninsula 300 miles north of Bagdad to Diarbekr and Mardin, and is used all over Syria and Palestine and the whole of northern Africa. Even at Cape Colony there are daily readers of the language of Mohammed. As early as 1315 Arabic began to be taught at the universities of Europe through the missionary influence of Raymund Lull and to-day the language is more accurately known and its literature more critically investigated at Leiden than at Cairo and at Cambridge than in Damascus.
A missionary in Syria who is a master of the Arab tongue thus characterizes it, “A pure and original speech of the greatest flexibility, with an enormous vocabulary, with great grammatical possibility, fitted to convey theological and philosophical and scientific thought in a manner not to be excelled by any language except the English, and the little group of languages which have been cultivated so happily by Christianity in Central Europe.” Ernest Renan, the French Semitic scholar, after expressing his surprise that such a language as Arabic should spring from the desert-regions of Arabia and reach perfection in nomadic camps, says that the Arabic surpasses all its sister Semitic languages in its rich vocabulary, delicacy of expression, and the logic of its grammatical construction.[83]
The Semitic family of languages is large and ancient, although not as extensive geographically nor so diverse as those of Indo-European family. Some maintain[84] that the Semites were ancient immigrants from the region northeast of Arabia. They hold that before the formation of the different Semitic dialects the Semites everywhere used a name for the camel (_jemel_) which still appears in all of the dialects. They have however no names in common for the date-palm, the fruit of the the palm nor for the ostrich, therefore, in their first home, the Semites knew the camel but did not know the palm. Now the region where there is neither date-palm nor ostrich and yet where the camel has lived from the remotest antiquity is the central table-land of Asia near the Oxus. Von Kremer holds that from this region the Semites migrated to Babylon even before the Aryan emigration; the Mesopotamian valley is the oldest seat of Semitic culture.