Premium
NOTES TOWARD A DEFINITION OF MODERN STANDARD ARABIC
Author(s) -
Cowan William
Publication year - 1968
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-1770.1987.tb00387.x
Subject(s) - linguistics , modern standard arabic , grammar , psychology , mood , arabic , feature (linguistics) , psycholinguistics , spoken language , cognition , philosophy , social psychology , neuroscience
Modern Standard Arabic has two manifestations: a written manifestation and a spoken manifestation. These two manifestations differ significantly in the amounts and type of information they convey about the language. For example, the spoken manifestation ideally indicates case and mood inflections; the written manifestation does not, yet is intelligible to readers of the language. In this feature the written manifestation mirrors the facts of colloquial Arabic, which also does not have case and mood inflections. A suggested method of teaching this type of Arabic is one which omits the case and mood inflections at the elementary stage, and does not introduce them until after the basic core of the grammar has been learned.