Page 101 - University English for non-speacalist

of the lexicon of Western languages due to Arabic
influence on Europe during the medieval period. Thus,
the vocabulary is not so alien as one might think. And
because modern Arabic is closely based on the classic
form, any native speaker of modern Arabic or many
closely related languages do not find it difficult to
learn classic Arabic. Virtually all citizens of the
Middle East and much of northern Africa speak
modern Arabic already, and a great many other central
European and Asian languages have been heavily
influenced by Arabic. Thus, a good portion of the
world's population is readily able to learn classic
Arabic.
The situation is a bit harder for native speakers of the
Indo-European languages, which accounts for 46
percent of the world's population. While the language
rules themselves—the way of conjugating verbs, for

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