Arabic Grammar

There is another problem with individuals who don’t acknowledge that the Quran text was part of the divine revelation, which concerns Arabic grammar.

The Arabic language is a Semitic language. Semitic languages are a group of related languages spoken in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. The term “Semitic” comes from the word Shem, which is a figure in the Hebrew Bible and is traditionally considered the father of the Semitic peoples. A hallmark of Semitic languages is distinguished by their use of triconsonantal roots and a system of vowel changes to indicate grammatical features and changes in the word’s meaning.

Arabic, like other Semitic languages, utilizes roots to form the vast majority of words in its language. For example, the root k-t-b (ك-ت-ب) is the basis of many words in Arabic, including “book” (كِتاب), “write” (كَتَبَ), and “writer” (كاتِب).

The root system in Arabic allows speakers to create new words by adding different patterns of vowels and consonants to the root and infer the meaning of words they are not familiar with by analyzing the root and the patterns it follows. This system helps to make the Arabic language, like other Semitic languages, highly expressive and flexible.

As mentioned above, Arabic has letters that have similarities in sounds. If the majority of people were illiterate, this would severely impact their ability to deconstruct the meaning of words, as it would not be apparent which root one was to apply to an unfamiliar word. The fact that the Arabic root system has been preserved and continued to propagate even before the revelation of the Quran shows that this was a system that most people ascribed to. If the Arab people were illiterate, we would expect that the Arabic language would have drifted away from the Semitic root system it originated from. We would expect to see a lot more fluidity in the meanings of words by decoupling from the root system the language originated from.

Additionally, the Quran’s strict grammatical guidelines cause the text to appear almost more like computer code rather than what we would expect to have found if the text was of secondary importance to oral transmission. This strict structure and consistency show that even the scribes of the earliest manuscripts put extra emphasis on maintaining the accuracy of the text of the Quran, just like they did for the oral transmission, if not more so. Again, if we are to accept that the Quran was only an oral transmission and that the written Quran was taken upon individuals after the prophet’s death, then it does not make sense why there was such strict adherence to the spelling and grammar of the Quran from the earliest manuscripts to today.