TIMELY TOPICS

Northern Advocate, 3 May 1934, Page 4

TIMELY TOPICS

' THE ARABIC LANGUAGE. The conflict between Classicists and Modernists, between the defenders of an ancient literary language entrenched fn the fortresses of tradition and the champions of the literary use of the current speech of the day, still agitates the Levant. Greeks, Turks, Egyptians, and Syrians have in turn engaged in the struggle. In Turkey the triumph of Glmi Mnstapha Kemal has given the Modernists the victory. In Greece, where a generation ago most: literates wrote in a language differing little from the speech of St. Paul’s days, the years since 1910 have brought about the almost complete conquest of the field of letters by the spoken “Romaic.” In Egypt, the intellectual centre of the Arabicspeaking nations, and in Syria modernism has not gone so far, but nu active Press and theatre have evolved a new and more flexible literary stylo; and even poetry, most traditional of forms, has modernised its subjects and content, though its language and conventions remain classical. But the classical Arabic, though still the medium of divines ami scholars, is In fact becoming a dead language to a groat majority of the people. Modern technical and scientific instruction has brought into use a multitude oi foreign words for some of which the old Arabic, rich though -it is, has no equivalents. The colloquial speech is becoming a separate language, bearing much the ’same relation to the statcl' idiom of the Koran that Italian bears towards Latin. <S> WORDS OF WISDOM. ” To .have faith is to create; to have hope is to call down blessing; to have ■love is to work miracles. —Michael Fairless in “The Rondmonder.” " VjT '•> TALE OF THE DAY. “What is a molecule?” asked the teacher. “A molecule,’’ said John, “is something so small that it can’t be seen, even through a microbe.”