Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Morphologically, fuṣḥà is the f. of the m. adj. ʔafṣaḥᵘ ‘of purer/purest language; more/most eloquent’, elat. of ↗faṣīḥ ‘pure, good Arabic (language), literary; skillful in using the correct literary language; clear, plain, distinct, intelligible (language, speech); fluent, eloquent’, which, probably, ultimately goes back to a now obsolete ^†fiṣḥ ‘milk divested of the froth’. Used as a n., al-fuṣḥà is short for al-luġaẗ al-fuṣḥà, al-ʕarabiyyaẗ al-fuṣḥà, or al-luġaẗ al-ʕarabiyyaẗ al-fuṣḥà ‘classical Arabic’, lit. *‘the purest, most eloquent Arabic language’. (↗luġaẗ, ↗ʕarab).
▪ »It is quite startling to see how pervasive and still prevalent the exaltation and professing of fuṣḥà as the sole unifying force of an otherwise politically and economically divided Arab world is, and how allegiance to ‘perfect’ fuṣḥà (fuṣḥà salīmaẗ) continues to be constructed as allegiance to the unity of the Arab world, its glorious Golden Age and magnificent heritage, when allegiance to any alliance or unity in the rest of the world is based on economic interests and political ties.« – art. »Diglossia« (N.B. Omar), in EALL.
▪ »It is now generally agreed that the fuṣḥà and the dialects represent the end points of a variation continuum (Badawī 1973; Holes 1995; Versteegh 1997), but it is worth pointing out that, in the native linguistic-cum -intellectual tradition, little recognition is accorded to the taxonomies Western Arabists use to describe the diachronic variability of the language.« – art. »ʕArabiyyat« (unspecified author), in EALL.

hist

▪ eC7 ʔafṣaḥᵘ (more/most able to express o.s., more/most eloquent) Q 28:34 wa-ʔaḫī Hārūnu huwa ʔafṣaḥu min-nī lisānan ‘and my brother Aaron is more eloquent than I in speech’

cogn

↗faṣuḥa.

disc

See above, section CONC, and ↗faṣuḥa.

west

–

deriv

–

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