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Pedantriology Intellectuals

Dr..

Parvin Habib

December 06, 2022

In order not to tire the dear reader by searching in the dictionary for this strange word, I will spare him his effort and whisper to him that it does not exist, but I derived it from the English word “pedantry”, which means “pedantry”, so the meaning is “the intellectuals of pedantry” and the title is intended to shed light on a class of intellectuals that has narrowed Their language is incapacitated, inferiority complex, or learned, so they enriched our ears with terms that, if the ancients knew them, they would have used them as a spell to conjure the jinn.

I do not deny that the flow of terminology at the time of the information revolution, and the fragmentation and branching of sciences makes it difficult or even impossible to follow up and Arabize all of this, and this is not exclusive to the Arabic language alone. Months ago, the French Academy, the highest linguistic authority in France, issued a 30-page statement warning against The invasion of English jargon into Molière's language, and she was deeply concerned about it.

But for us, what is not fully comprehended is not left behind, and does our knowledge decrease if we say sociology instead of sociology or psychology instead of psychology, and the hundreds of terms that the Arab has settled against and has been palatable by pens for decades?

Isn't it enough that the language of our youth has become a heterogeneous mixture of English and Arabic, like a crow that lost its gait when it wanted to imitate the gait of a dove, or as described by Hafez Ibrahim in his famous poem about the Arabic language when he said: Then came a garment that included seventy patches of different colors

Isn't the lack of readability enough and the readers' distraction from the book to modern means of communication, for the pedantic intellectuals to alienate those who remained loyal to the letter and the smell of paper?

I remember that during my university studies I was fond of structural criticism, and I used to collide with terms such as synchronism and diachronism, and I wonder why the academic researcher avoided beautiful words such as synchronicity and succession.

I understand that the Arab writer resorts to transferring the Western term loaded with philosophical connotations as it is to escape from the “chaos of the term” or for fear of trying to Arabize it, or even laziness about that. As for reading a text as if it was written in a foreign language but in Arabic letters, I cannot respect its author because he is not respected. His language is the most important component of his national identity.

The Arabic language academies have collectively translated tens of thousands of foreign terms in various fields and issued dictionaries in this regard.

So why do we leave this effort locked up in the drawers and not benefit from it as we benefited from the Arabicization of the same academies for words such as telephone, computer, television and hundreds of others?

And why does a writer show off his linguistic muscles by grafting his text with words that sometimes overwhelm even specialists?

Does this exaggeration and sometimes the allegation serve his idea, or is it “the vanquished’s fondness for following the example of the majority,” as Ibn Khaldun says?

Our Arabic language is malleable, accepts the stranger and inserts him into its fabric, so that he becomes one of the people of its household, and the derivation feature in it facilitates translation and Arabization. It is better for those who write in it among the intellectuals not to play a discordant tone in its text that disturbs the reader’s eye and ear, and before that it sticks a knife into the body of “our poetic language.”

Why does a writer display his linguistic muscles by grafting his text with words that sometimes overwhelm even specialists?

Does this exaggeration and sometimes the allegation serve his idea, or is it “the vanquished’s fondness for following the example of the majority,” as Ibn Khaldun says?

@DrParweenHabib1 

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