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97-431: The Tabqa Dam ( Arabic : سَدُّ الطَّبْقَةِ , romanized :  Sadd aṭ-Ṭabqah , Kurdish : Bendava Tebqa ; Classical Syriac : ܣܟܪܐ ܕܛܒܩܗ , romanized:  Sekro d'Tabqa ), or al-Thawra Dam as it is also named ( Arabic : سَدُّ الثَّوْرَةِ , romanized :  Sadd aṯ-Ṯawrah , Kurdish : Bendava Tewra ; Classical Syriac : ܣܟܪܐ ܕܬܘܪܗ , romanized:  Sekro d'Ṯawra , literally "Dam of

194-600: A bunker buster , failed to detonate. An emergency ceasefire between the Islamic State, US forces, and the Syrian government, otherwise sworn enemies, enabled engineers to make emergency repairs to the dam to prevent it from failing while the Turkish authorities coordinated to close the gates of dams upstream in order to prevent overtopping. A US drone strike killed three of the civilian emergency dam workers shortly thereafter. On March 29

291-562: A collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic, first emerged during the Iron Age . Previously, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic script at Qaryat al-Faw , in southern present-day Saudi Arabia. However, this inscription does not participate in several of the key innovations of the Arabic language group, such as

388-435: A corpus of poetic texts, in addition to Qur'an usage and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the ʿarabiyya . Arabic spread with the spread of Islam . Following the early Muslim conquests , Arabic gained vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish . In the early Abbasid period , many Classical Greek terms entered Arabic through translations carried out at Baghdad's House of Wisdom . By

485-1077: A dialect of Arabic and written in the Latin alphabet . The Balkan languages, including Albanian, Greek , Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian , have also acquired many words of Arabic origin, mainly through direct contact with Ottoman Turkish . Arabic has influenced languages across the globe throughout its history, especially languages where Islam is the predominant religion and in countries that were conquered by Muslims. The most markedly influenced languages are Persian , Turkish , Hindustani ( Hindi and Urdu ), Kashmiri , Kurdish , Bosnian , Kazakh , Bengali , Malay ( Indonesian and Malaysian ), Maldivian , Pashto , Punjabi , Albanian , Armenian , Azerbaijani , Sicilian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian, Tagalog , Sindhi , Odia , Hebrew and African languages such as Hausa , Amharic , Tigrinya , Somali , Tamazight , and Swahili . Conversely, Arabic has borrowed some words (mostly nouns) from other languages, including its sister-language Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin and to

582-427: A floodgate was opened by emergency workers, causing flooding downstream which displaced approximately 3,000 people. A second floodgate was opened on April 5, mitigating risk of collapse. If the dam had failed major flooding would have extended past Deir ez-Zor, more than 100 miles downstream. SDF forces announced they captured the dam on 10 May 2017. The Tabqa dam is located on a spot where rocky outcrops on each side of

679-483: A lesser extent and more recently from Turkish, English, French, and Italian. Arabic is spoken by as many as 380 million speakers, both native and non-native, in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world, and the fourth most used language on the internet in terms of users. It also serves as the liturgical language of more than 2 billion Muslims . In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Arabic

776-677: A millennium before the modern period . Early lexicographers ( لُغَوِيُّون lughawiyyūn ) sought to explain words in the Quran that were unfamiliar or had a particular contextual meaning, and to identify words of non-Arabic origin that appear in the Quran. They gathered shawāhid ( شَوَاهِد 'instances of attested usage') from poetry and the speech of the Arabs—particularly the Bedouin ʾaʿrāb  [ ar ] ( أَعْراب ) who were perceived to speak

873-400: A protective glacis was built around the castle Qal'at Ja'bar . The castle was located on a hilltop that would not be flooded, but the lake would turn it in an island. The castle is now connected to the shore by a causeway. In 1971, with support from UNESCO, Syria appealed to the international community to participate in the efforts to salvage as many archaeological remains as possible before

970-576: A result, many European languages have borrowed words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages (mainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese , Catalan , and Sicilian ) owing to the proximity of Europe and the long-lasting Arabic cultural and linguistic presence, mainly in Southern Iberia, during the Al-Andalus era. Maltese is a Semitic language developed from

1067-408: A result, only 60,000 hectares (230 sq mi) were irrigated from Lake Assad in 1984. In 2000, the irrigated surface had risen to 124,000 hectares (480 sq mi), which is 19 percent of the projected 640,000 hectares (2,500 sq mi). Due to lower than expected water flow from Turkey, as well as lack of maintenance, the dam generates only 150 MW instead of 800 MW. Lake Assad

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1164-658: A result, tensions rose; both governments sent troops to the Syria-Iraq border , and the Iraqi government threatened to bomb the Tabqa Dam. Before the dispute could escalate any further, an agreement was reached in 1975 after mediation by Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union, whereby Syria immediately increased the flow from the dam and agreed to let 60 percent of the Euphrates water that came over

1261-639: A river of importance, and Ammianus states that Julian the Apostate crossed it "per navalem Aborae pontem". Strabo describes it as near the town of Anthemusias . The river is fed by several smaller streams, the names of which are mentioned by the later classical writers. These are, the Scirtus (Procop. de Aedif. 2.7), the Cordes (Procop. de Aedif. 2.2), and the Mygdonius ( Julian . Or. i.). Ptolemy (5.18.6) mentions

1358-462: A script derived from ASA attest to a language known as Hasaitic . On the northwestern frontier of Arabia, various languages known to scholars as Thamudic B , Thamudic D, Safaitic , and Hismaic are attested. The last two share important isoglosses with later forms of Arabic, leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and Hismaic are early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic . Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic",

1455-465: A single language, despite mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions. From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages . This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for

1552-455: A town called Chabora (Χαβώρα), on the Euphrates, which he places near Nicephorion , and which probably derives its name from the river, and Theophylact Simocatta mentions Ἀβορέων φρούριον, which is, as certainly, the same place. Since the 1930s, numerous archaeological excavations and surveys have been carried out in the Khabur Valley, indicating that the region has been occupied since

1649-503: A type of Arabic. Cypriot Arabic is recognized as a minority language in Cyprus. The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia , which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. Tawleed is the process of giving a new shade of meaning to an old classical word. For example, al-hatif lexicographically means

1746-499: A variety of regional vernacular Arabic dialects , which are not necessarily mutually intelligible. Classical Arabic is the language found in the Quran , used from the period of Pre-Islamic Arabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate . Classical Arabic is prescriptive, according to the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians (such as Sibawayh ) and the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries (such as

1843-470: A wider audience." In the wake of the industrial revolution and European hegemony and colonialism , pioneering Arabic presses, such as the Amiri Press established by Muhammad Ali (1819), dramatically changed the diffusion and consumption of Arabic literature and publications. Rifa'a al-Tahtawi proposed the establishment of Madrasat al-Alsun in 1836 and led a translation campaign that highlighted

1940-413: Is 125  RPM , and they can potentially generate 103 MW each. Lake Assad is 80 kilometres (50 mi) long and on average 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) wide. The reservoir can potentially hold 11.7 cubic kilometres (2.8 cu mi) of water, at which size its surface area would be 610 square kilometres (240 sq mi). Annual evaporation is 1.3 cubic kilometres (0.31 cu mi) due to

2037-419: Is 9.6 cubic kilometres (2.3 cu mi), with a surface area of 447 square kilometres (173 sq mi). The proposed irrigation scheme suffered from a number of problems, including the high gypsum content in the reclaimed soils around Lake Assad, soil salinization , the collapse of canals that distributed the water from Lake Assad, and the unwillingness of farmers to resettle in the reclaimed areas. As

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2134-727: Is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world . The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic , including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic , which is derived from Classical Arabic . This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā ( اَلعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ "the eloquent Arabic") or simply al-fuṣḥā ( اَلْفُصْحَىٰ ). Arabic

2231-585: Is a minimum level of comprehension between all Arabic dialects, this level can increase or decrease based on geographic proximity: for example, Levantine and Gulf speakers understand each other much better than they do speakers from the Maghreb. The issue of diglossia between spoken and written language is a complicating factor: A single written form, differing sharply from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites several sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all speak

2328-542: Is a sister language rather than their direct ancestor. Arabia had a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. The term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula , as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece . In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside the Ancient South Arabian family (e.g. Southern Thamudic) were spoken. It

2425-469: Is believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages (non-Central Semitic languages) were spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hejaz , Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages. In Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested. In eastern Arabia, inscriptions in

2522-408: Is credited with establishing the rules of Arabic prosody . Al-Jahiz (776–868) proposed to Al-Akhfash al-Akbar an overhaul of the grammar of Arabic, but it would not come to pass for two centuries. The standardization of Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehensive description of the ʿarabiyya "Arabic", Sībawayhi's al - Kitāb , is based first of all upon

2619-468: Is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar , or an-naḥw ( النَّحو "the way" ), and pioneering a system of diacritics to differentiate consonants ( نقط الإعجام nuqaṭu‿l-i'jām "pointing for non-Arabs") and indicate vocalization ( التشكيل at-tashkīl ). Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (718–786) compiled the first Arabic dictionary, Kitāb al-'Ayn ( كتاب العين "The Book of the Letter ع "), and

2716-543: Is located immediately south of the dam. The dam is 60 metres (200 ft) high and 4.5 kilometres (2.8 mi) long and is the largest dam in Syria. Its construction led to the creation of Lake Assad , Syria's largest water reservoir. The dam was constructed between 1968 and 1973 with help from the Soviet Union . At the same time, an international effort was made to excavate and document as many archaeological remains as possible in

2813-566: Is not present in the spoken varieties, but deletes Classical words that sound obsolete in MSA. In addition, MSA has borrowed or coined many terms for concepts that did not exist in Quranic times, and MSA continues to evolve. Some words have been borrowed from other languages—notice that transliteration mainly indicates spelling and not real pronunciation (e.g., فِلْم film 'film' or ديمقراطية dīmuqrāṭiyyah 'democracy'). The current preference

2910-836: Is official in Mali and recognized as a minority language in Morocco, while the Senegalese government adopted the Latin script to write it. Maltese is official in (predominantly Catholic ) Malta and written with the Latin script . Linguists agree that it is a variety of spoken Arabic, descended from Siculo-Arabic , though it has experienced extensive changes as a result of sustained and intensive contact with Italo-Romance varieties, and more recently also with English. Due to "a mix of social, cultural, historical, political, and indeed linguistic factors", many Maltese people today consider their language Semitic but not

3007-559: Is the third most widespread official language after English and French, one of six official languages of the United Nations , and the liturgical language of Islam . Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities around the world and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, governments and the media. During the Middle Ages , Arabic was a major vehicle of culture and learning, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As

Tabqa Dam - Misplaced Pages Continue

3104-615: Is the most important source of drinking water to Aleppo, providing the city through a pipeline with 0.08 cubic kilometres (0.019 cu mi) of drinking water per year. The lake also supports a fishing industry. Research indicates that the salinity of the Euphrates water in Iraq has increased considerably since the nearly simultaneous construction of the Keban Dam in Turkey and the Tabqa Dam in Syria. This increase can, among other things, be related to

3201-584: Is the variety used in most current, printed Arabic publications, spoken by some of the Arabic media across North Africa and the Middle East, and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. "Literary Arabic" and "Standard Arabic" ( فُصْحَى fuṣḥá ) are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic. Some of the differences between Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are as follows: MSA uses much Classical vocabulary (e.g., dhahaba 'to go') that

3298-413: Is to avoid direct borrowings, preferring to either use loan translations (e.g., فرع farʻ 'branch', also used for the branch of a company or organization; جناح janāḥ 'wing', is also used for the wing of an airplane, building, air force, etc.), or to coin new words using forms within existing roots ( استماتة istimātah ' apoptosis ', using the root موت m/w/t 'death' put into

3395-516: Is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the industrial and post-industrial era , especially in modern times. Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, which is construed as a multitude of dialects of this language. These dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are usually acquired in families, while

3492-445: The Lisān al-ʻArab ). Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties and has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary

3589-693: The Aleppo pine and the Euphrates poplar . Lake Assad is an important wintering location for migratory birds and the government has undertaken measures to protect small areas along the shores of Lake Assad from hunters by downgrading access roads. The island of Jazirat al-Thawra has been designated a nature reserve. Arabic language Arabic (endonym: اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ , romanized :  al-ʿarabiyyah , pronounced [al ʕaraˈbijːa] , or عَرَبِيّ , ʿarabīy , pronounced [ˈʕarabiː] or [ʕaraˈbij] )

3686-544: The Late Natufian period (10,800–9500 BC). Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European travellers had already noted the presence of numerous archaeological sites in the area that would be flooded by the new reservoir. In order to preserve or at least document as many of these remains as possible, an extensive archaeological rescue programme was initiated during which more than 25 sites were excavated. Between 1963 and 1965, archaeological sites and remains were located with

3783-576: The Lower Palaeolithic period. Important sites that have been excavated include Tell Halaf , Tell Brak , Tell Leilan , Tell Mashnaqa , Tell Mozan and Tell Barri . The region has given its name to a distinctive painted ware found in northern Mesopotamia and Syria in the early 2nd millennium BCE, called Khabur ware . The region of the Khabur River is also associated with the rise of the Kingdom of

3880-769: The Mitanni that flourished c. 1500–1300 BC. The Khabur River is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible: " Tiglath-Pileser ... took the Reubenites, the Gadites and the half tribe of Manasseh into exile. He took them to Halah, Habor (Khabur), Hara and the River Gozan, where they are to this day". The identification of the Khabur with the Habor is not contested. The ancient city of Corsote , visited by Cyrus

3977-518: The Syria-Turkey border flow into Iraq. In 1987, Turkey, Syria and Iraq signed an agreement by which Turkey was committed to maintain an average Euphrates flow of 500 cubic metres (18,000 cu ft) per second into Syria, which translates into 16 cubic kilometres (3.8 cu mi) of water per year. The upper part of the Syrian Euphrates valley has been intensively occupied at least since

Tabqa Dam - Misplaced Pages Continue

4074-561: The Xth form , or جامعة jāmiʻah 'university', based on جمع jamaʻa 'to gather, unite'; جمهورية jumhūriyyah 'republic', based on جمهور jumhūr 'multitude'). An earlier tendency was to redefine an older word although this has fallen into disuse (e.g., هاتف hātif 'telephone' < 'invisible caller (in Sufism)'; جريدة jarīdah 'newspaper' < 'palm-leaf stalk'). Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to

4171-494: The northern Hejaz . These features are evidence of common descent from a hypothetical ancestor , Proto-Arabic . The following features of Proto-Arabic can be reconstructed with confidence: On the other hand, several Arabic varieties are closer to other Semitic languages and maintain features not found in Classical Arabic, indicating that these varieties cannot have developed from Classical Arabic. Thus, Arabic vernaculars do not descend from Classical Arabic: Classical Arabic

4268-419: The "learned" tradition (Classical Arabic). This variety and both its classicizing and "lay" iterations have been termed Middle Arabic in the past, but they are thought to continue an Old Higazi register. It is clear that the orthography of the Quran was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic; rather, it shows the attempt on the part of writers to record an archaic form of Old Higazi. In

4365-724: The "purest," most eloquent form of Arabic—initiating a process of jamʿu‿l-luɣah ( جمع اللغة 'compiling the language') which took place over the 8th and early 9th centuries. Kitāb al-'Ayn ( c.  8th century ), attributed to Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi , is considered the first lexicon to include all Arabic roots ; it sought to exhaust all possible root permutations —later called taqālīb ( تقاليب ) — calling those that are actually used mustaʿmal ( مستعمَل ) and those that are not used muhmal ( مُهمَل ). Lisān al-ʿArab (1290) by Ibn Manzur gives 9,273 roots, while Tāj al-ʿArūs (1774) by Murtada az-Zabidi gives 11,978 roots. Khabur (Euphrates) The course of

4462-454: The 11th and 12th centuries in al-Andalus , the zajal and muwashah poetry forms developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb. The Nahda was a cultural and especially literary renaissance of the 19th century in which writers sought "to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression." According to James L. Gelvin , " Nahda writers attempted to simplify the Arabic language and script so that it might be accessible to

4559-514: The 4th to the 6th centuries, the Nabataean script evolved into the Arabic script recognizable from the early Islamic era. There are inscriptions in an undotted, 17-letter Arabic script dating to the 6th century CE, found at four locations in Syria ( Zabad , Jebel Usays , Harran , Umm el-Jimal ). The oldest surviving papyrus in Arabic dates to 643 CE, and it uses dots to produce the modern 28-letter Arabic alphabet. The language of that papyrus and of

4656-812: The 8th century, knowledge of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world, both for Muslims and non-Muslims. For example, Maimonides , the Andalusi Jewish philosopher, authored works in Judeo-Arabic —Arabic written in Hebrew script . Ibn Jinni of Mosul , a pioneer in phonology , wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as Kitāb Al-Munṣif , Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab , and Kitāb Al-Khaṣāʾiṣ    [ ar ] . Ibn Mada' of Cordoba (1116–1196) realized

4753-573: The Al-Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor Governorates , including the area immediately surrounding the dam, began in November 2016. Interruptions in power output from the dam due to combat are estimated to have affected up to 40,000 people. In January 2017 the Euphrates rose 10 meters due to heavy precipitation and flow mismanagement, disrupting transportation and flooding farmland downstream. A nearby raid against ISIL by combined SDF and US special forces also impacted

4850-543: The Chebar or Kebar, the location of Tel Abib and setting of several important scenes of the Book of Ezekiel . However, recent scholarship identifies the Chebar as the ka-ba-ru waterway mentioned among the 5th century BCE Murushu archives from Nippur , close to Nippur and the Shatt el-Nil, a silted up canal toward the east of Babylon. The Khabur River Project, begun in the 1960s, involved

4947-754: The Elder called it the Chaboras ( Ancient Greek : Χαβώρας ), Procopius called it the Chabura , Strabo , Zosimus , and Ammianus Marcellinus called it the Aborrhas (Ἀβόρρας), and Isidore of Charax called it the Aburas (Ἀβούρας). It was described as a large river of Mesopotamia which rose in Mons Masius , about 40 miles (64 km) from Nisibis , and flowed into the Euphrates at Circesium (Kerkesiah). Procopius speaks of it as

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5044-516: The Euphrates Valley are less than 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) apart. The dam is an earth-fill dam that is 4.5 kilometres (2.8 mi) long, 60 metres (200 ft) high from the riverbed (307 metres (1,007 ft) above sea-level), 512 metres (1,680 ft) wide at its base and 19 metres (62 ft) at the top. The hydroelectric power station is located on the southern end of the dam and contains eight Kaplan turbines . The turbines' rotation speed

5141-538: The Euphrates. Construction of the dam lasted between 1968 and 1973, while the accompanying power station was finished on 8 March 1978. The dam was constructed during the agricultural reform policies of Hafez al-Assad , who had re-routed the Euphrates river for the dam in 1974. The total cost of the dam was US$ 340 million of which US$ 100 million was in the form of a loan by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union also provided technical expertise. During construction, up to 12,000 Syrians and 900 Russian technicians worked on

5238-527: The Euphrates. In 1960, as part of the United Arab Republic , Syria signed an agreement with West Germany for a financing loan. In 1965, after Syria left the UAR, a new agreement was reached with the Soviet Union . A special government department was created to oversee the construction. In the early 1960s Swedish geomorphologist Åke Sundborg worked as an advisor on the dam project with the task of estimating

5335-456: The Euphrates. The dam has not reached its full potential in either of these objectives. In 1927, when Syria was a French mandate , it was proposed to build a dam in the Euphrates near the Syria–Turkey border . After Syria became independent in 1946, the feasibility of the project was studied and shelved. In 1957, the Syrian government reached an agreement with the Soviet Union to build a dam in

5432-516: The Khabur can be divided into two distinct zones: the Upper Khabur area or Khabur Triangle north of Al-Hasakah, and the Middle and Lower Khabur between Al-Hasakah and Busayrah. The tributaries to the Khabur are listed from east to west. Most of these wadis only carry water for part of the year. The river was well noted by ancient writers, with various names used by various writers: Ptolemy and Pliny

5529-412: The Middle East and North Africa have become a badge of sophistication and modernity and ... feigning, or asserting, weakness or lack of facility in Arabic is sometimes paraded as a sign of status, class, and perversely, even education through a mélange of code-switching practises." Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementary and secondary schools, especially Muslim schools. Universities around

5626-672: The Qur'an is referred to by linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into " Classical Arabic ". In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in the Hejaz , which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra , most strongly in Judeo-Christian texts, keeping alive ancient features eliminated from

5723-511: The Revolution"), most commonly known as Euphrates Dam ( Arabic : سَدُّ الْفُرَاتِ , romanized :  Sadd al-Furāt ; Kurdish : Bendava Firatê ; Classical Syriac : ܣܟܪܐ ܕܦܪܬ , romanized:  Sekro d'Frot ), is an earthen dam on the Euphrates , located 40 kilometres (25 mi) upstream from the city of Raqqa in Raqqa Governorate , Syria . The city of Al-Thawrah

5820-561: The Romance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb , a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq , much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers but relatively easily learned by them. This suggests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be considered separate languages. With

5917-422: The Tabqa Dam. The Baath Dam , located 18 kilometres (11 mi) downstream from the Tabqa Dam, was completed in 1986 and functions as a floodwater control to manage the irregular output of the Tabqa Dam and as a hydroelectric power station. The Tishrin Dam , which functions primarily as a hydroelectric power station, has been constructed 80 kilometres (50 mi) south from the Syria–Turkey border and filling of

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6014-410: The Younger on his ill-fated expedition against the Persians as told by Xenophon , was located at the confluence of the Khabur River, known by them as the 'Mascas', and the Euphrates according to Robin Waterfield . Other authors have been circumspect upon the precise location of Corsote due to the changing names and courses of the rivers since that time. The Khabur river was sometimes identified with

6111-412: The amount and fate of sediment entering the dam. Sundborg developed a mathematical model on the projected growth of a river delta in the dam. Originally, the Tabqa Dam was conceived as a dual-purpose dam. The dam would include a hydroelectric power station with eight turbines capable of producing 880 MW in total, and would irrigate an area of 640,000 hectares (2,500 sq mi) on both sides of

6208-412: The area of the future lake before they would be flooded by the rising water. When the flow of the Euphrates was reduced in 1974 to fill the lake behind the dam, a dispute broke out between Syria and Iraq (which is downstream) that was settled by intervention from Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union. The dam was originally built to generate hydroelectric power , as well as irrigate lands on both sides of

6305-413: The area would disappear under the rising water of Lake Assad. To stimulate foreign participation, the Syrian antiquities law was modified so that foreign missions had the right to claim a part of the artefacts that were found during excavation. As a result, between 1971 and 1977, numerous excavations were carried out in the Lake Assad area by Syrian as well as foreign missions. Syrian archaeologists worked at

6402-440: The construction of a series of dams and canals . Three dams were built in the Khabur Basin as part of a large irrigation scheme that also includes the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates. The section of the Khabur River within Tell Tamer Subdistrict are home to a self-governing Assyrian enclave. Two dams, Hasakah West and Hasakah East, have been constructed on tributaries to the Khabur between Ra's al-'Ayn and Al-Hasakah. The capacity of

6499-509: The conversion of Semitic mimation to nunation in the singular. It is best reassessed as a separate language on the Central Semitic dialect continuum. It was also thought that Old Arabic coexisted alongside—and then gradually displaced— epigraphic Ancient North Arabian (ANA), which was theorized to have been the regional tongue for many centuries. ANA, despite its name, was considered a very distinct language, and mutually unintelligible, from "Arabic". Scholars named its variant dialects after

6596-400: The dam's entrance. In March 2017, ISIL warned of the dam's imminent collapse after the towers attached to the dam were bombed by an American B-52 bomber during a joint US/SDF operation to capture it on March 26, 2017. The dam had been on a U.S. no-strike list but was struck by three bombs anyway. The bombing caused critical equipment to fail and the dam to stop functioning. One of the bombs,

6693-420: The dam. They were housed in the greatly expanded town near the construction site, which was subsequently renamed Al-Thawrah . To facilitate the project, as well as the construction of irrigation works on the Khabur River , the national railway system ( Chemins de Fer Syriens ) was extended from Aleppo to the dam, Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor , and eventually Qamishli . Around 4,000 Arab families who had been living in

6790-412: The emergence of Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include: There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern Arabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of

6887-728: The eve of the conquests: Northern and Central (Al-Jallad 2009). The modern dialects emerged from a new contact situation produced following the conquests. Instead of the emergence of a single or multiple koines, the dialects contain several sedimentary layers of borrowed and areal features, which they absorbed at different points in their linguistic histories. According to Veersteegh and Bickerton, colloquial Arabic dialects arose from pidginized Arabic formed from contact between Arabs and conquered peoples. Pidginization and subsequent creolization among Arabs and arabized peoples could explain relative morphological and phonological simplicity of vernacular Arabic compared to Classical and MSA. In around

6984-593: The fact that they participate in the innovations common to all forms of Arabic. The earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script are three lines of poetry by a man named Garm(')allāhe found in En Avdat, Israel , and dated to around 125 CE. This is followed by the Namara inscription , an epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From

7081-440: The flooded part of the Euphrates Valley were resettled in other parts of northern Syria, part of a partially implemented plan to establish an " Arab belt " along the borders with Turkey and Iraq in order to separate Kurds in Syria from Turkish and Iraqi Kurdistan . In 1974, the authorities started to fill the lake behind the dam by reducing the flow of the Euphrates. Slightly earlier, the Turkish government had started filling

7178-501: The fourth most useful language for business, after English, Mandarin Chinese , and French. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet , an abjad script that is written from right to left . Arabic is usually classified as a Central Semitic language . Linguists still differ as to the best classification of Semitic language sub-groups. The Semitic languages changed between Proto-Semitic and

7275-580: The government, according to The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights . In 2013, four of the dam's eight turbines were operational and the original staff continued to manage it. Dam workers still received pay from the Syrian Government, and fighting in the area temporarily ceased if repairs were needed. The dam was then captured by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in 2014. SDF efforts to retake parts of

7372-485: The help of aerial photographs , and a ground survey was carried out as well to determine the periods that were present at each site. Between 1965 and 1970, foreign archaeological missions carried out systematic excavations at the sites of Mureybet (United States), Tell Qannas ( Habuba Kabira ) (Belgium), Mumbaqa (Germany), Selenkahiye (Netherlands), and Emar (France). With help from UNESCO , two minarets at Mureybet and Meskene were photogrammetrically measured, and

7469-445: The high average summer temperature in northern Syria. This is high compared to reservoirs upstream from Lake Assad. For example, the evaporation at Keban Dam Lake is 0.48 cubic kilometres (0.12 cu mi) per year at roughly the same surface area. Neither the Tabqa Dam nor Lake Assad is currently used to its full economic potential. Although the lake can potentially hold 11.7 cubic kilometres (2.8 cu mi), actual capacity

7566-579: The inclusion of new words into their published standard dictionaries. They also publish old and historical Arabic manuscripts. In 1997, a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League . These academies and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences, creating terms in Arabic to describe new concepts, toward

7663-608: The language. Software and books with tapes are an important part of Arabic learning, as many of Arabic learners may live in places where there are no academic or Arabic language school classes available. Radio series of Arabic language classes are also provided from some radio stations. A number of websites on the Internet provide online classes for all levels as a means of distance education; most teach Modern Standard Arabic, but some teach regional varieties from numerous countries. The tradition of Arabic lexicography extended for about

7760-599: The late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koine" distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd , probably in connection with the court of al-Ḥīra . During the first Islamic century, the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing persons spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far later manuscripts, contain traces of non-standardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology and syntax. Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali ( c.  603 –689)

7857-420: The latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschool-aged children. The relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin vernaculars (which became Romance languages ) in medieval and early modern Europe. MSA

7954-513: The lower discharge of the Euphrates as a result of the construction of the Keban Dam and the dams of the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) in Turkey, and to a lesser degree of the Tabqa Dam in Syria. High-salinity water is less useful for domestic and irrigation purposes. The shore of the lake has developed into an important marshland area. On the southeastern shore, some areas have been reforested with evergreen trees including

8051-883: The many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language. Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants; geographically distant varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible , and some linguists consider them distinct languages. However, research indicates a high degree of mutual intelligibility between closely related Arabic variants for native speakers listening to words, sentences, and texts; and between more distantly related dialects in interactional situations. The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and talk shows , as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media such as poetry and printed advertising. Hassaniya Arabic , Maltese , and Cypriot Arabic are only varieties of modern Arabic to have acquired official recognition. Hassaniya

8148-537: The minarets of Mureybet and Meskene were moved to higher locations, and Qal'at Ja'bar was further reinforced and restored. Many finds from the excavations are now on display in the National Museum of Aleppo , where a special permanent exhibition is devoted to the finds from the Lake Assad region. After the completion of the Tabqa Dam, Syria built two more dams in the Euphrates, both of which were functionally related to

8245-768: The need for a lexical injection in Arabic, to suit concepts of the industrial and post-industrial age (such as sayyārah سَيَّارَة 'automobile' or bākhirah باخِرة 'steamship'). In response, a number of Arabic academies modeled after the Académie française were established with the aim of developing standardized additions to the Arabic lexicon to suit these transformations, first in Damascus (1919), then in Cairo (1932), Baghdad (1948), Rabat (1960), Amman (1977), Khartum  [ ar ] (1993), and Tunis (1993). They review language development, monitor new words and approve

8342-424: The one whose sound is heard but whose person remains unseen. Now the term al-hatif is used for a telephone. Therefore, the process of tawleed can express the needs of modern civilization in a manner that would appear to be originally Arabic. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic as well as their native dialects, which depending on

8439-549: The overhaul of Arabic grammar first proposed by Al-Jahiz 200 years prior. The Maghrebi lexicographer Ibn Manzur compiled Lisān al-ʿArab ( لسان العرب , "Tongue of Arabs"), a major reference dictionary of Arabic, in 1290. Charles Ferguson 's koine theory claims that the modern Arabic dialects collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests; this view has been challenged in recent times. Ahmad al-Jallad proposes that there were at least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on

8536-410: The region may be mutually unintelligible. Some of these dialects can be considered to constitute separate languages which may have "sub-dialects" of their own. When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within

8633-505: The reservoir of Hasakah West is 0.09 km , and is also the southeastern end of the Assyrian enclave. The capacity of Hasakah East is 0.2 km . A third dam, Hassakeh South, was constructed on the Khabur 25 km south of Al-Hasakah. The reservoir of this dam has a capacity of 0.7 km . The Khabur Valley, which now has about four million acres (16,000 km ) of farmland, is Syria's main wheat -cultivation area. The northeastern part

8730-474: The reservoir of the newly constructed Keban Dam , and at the same time the area was hit by significant drought. As a result, Iraq received significantly less water from the Euphrates than normal, and complained that annual Euphrates flow had dropped from 15.3 cubic kilometres (3.7 cu mi) in 1973 to 9.4 cubic kilometres (2.3 cu mi) in 1975. Iraq asked the Arab League to intervene but Syria argued that it received less water from Turkey as well. As

8827-530: The reservoir started in 1999. Its construction was partly motivated by the disappointing performance of the Tabqa Dam. The implementation of a fourth dam between Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor – the Halabiye Dam – was planned in 2009 and an appeal to archaeologists was released to excavate sites that will be flooded by the new reservoir. On 11 February 2013 the dam was captured by the Syrian opposition in their fight against

8924-458: The same sentence. The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, in the same way it is for the varieties of Chinese , Hindi and Urdu , Serbian and Croatian , Scots and English, etc. In contrast to speakers of Hindi and Urdu who claim they cannot understand each other even when they can, speakers of the varieties of Arabic will claim they can all understand each other even when they cannot. While there

9021-603: The sites of Tell al-'Abd, 'Anab al-Safinah, Tell Sheikh Hassan , Qal'at Ja'bar, Dibsi Faraj and Tell Fray . There were missions from the United States on Tell Hadidi (Azu), Dibsi Faraj, Tell Fray and Shams ed-Din-Tannira; from France on Mureybet and Emar; from Italy on Tell Fray; from the Netherlands on Tell Ta'as, Jebel Aruda and Selenkahiye; from Switzerland on Tell al-Hajj; from Great Britain on Abu Hureyra and Tell es-Sweyhat ; and from Japan on Tell Roumeila. In addition,

9118-458: The sole example of Medieval linguist Abu Hayyan al-Gharnati – who, while a scholar of the Arabic language, was not ethnically Arab – Medieval scholars of the Arabic language made no efforts at studying comparative linguistics, considering all other languages inferior. In modern times, the educated upper classes in the Arab world have taken a nearly opposite view. Yasir Suleiman wrote in 2011 that "studying and knowing English or French in most of

9215-556: The standardization of these new terms throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and toward the development of Arabic as a world language . This gave rise to what Western scholars call Modern Standard Arabic. From the 1950s, Arabization became a postcolonial nationalist policy in countries such as Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Sudan. Arabic usually refers to Standard Arabic, which Western linguists divide into Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. It could also refer to any of

9312-501: The towns where the inscriptions were discovered (Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Hismaic, Safaitic). However, most arguments for a single ANA language or language family were based on the shape of the definite article, a prefixed h-. It has been argued that the h- is an archaism and not a shared innovation, and thus unsuitable for language classification, rendering the hypothesis of an ANA language family untenable. Safaitic and Hismaic, previously considered ANA, should be considered Old Arabic due to

9409-451: The world have classes that teach Arabic as part of their foreign languages , Middle Eastern studies , and religious studies courses. Arabic language schools exist to assist students to learn Arabic outside the academic world. There are many Arabic language schools in the Arab world and other Muslim countries. Because the Quran is written in Arabic and all Islamic terms are in Arabic, millions of Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab) study

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