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Image: Arabic translation of Greek, from Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Source: https://brill.com
Linguistics

Linguistics is the study of the origins, construction and development of languages.

Medieval Central Asia was not only multiethnic and multireligious, but multilingual as well. This posed both challenges and opportunities for rulers and for the writers and translators under their patronage. The rise of Islam elevated Arabic to a lingua franca for immense swaths of the medieval world, and the need for translations in turn prompted the study and comparison of languages. Central Asian scholars also pioneered cryptography, developing the first systems for code-breaking by frequency analysis. Methodological examinations of grammar and phonetics were undertaken, as accurate translations were essential to interpreting the meaning of the Koran and hadiths of Muhammed. Later scholars applied the same rigor to the examination of their own native Persian or Turkic languages to demonstrate that they were of equal sophistication to Arabic, a task which carried political as well as cultural significance and provided motivation for dedicated analysis and comparison.


Scholars Who Studied Linguistics

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