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Forgive me, honestly, I think I have not made myself sufficiently understood so far. We are not talking about magical properties. All languages have the capacity to be used as language of science and culture. The grammar of almost all languages is sufficient for this purpose. But, no language with limited vocabulary is able to qualify as such.
Ok, so? Once the need arises to produce works of increasing complexity, due to economic, political, societal, technological and other changes that lead to greater prominence of that language and its greater use in high-culture spheres, it will tend to develop vocabulary that it needs. Take a look at language standardizations done as a result of European nationalism.
When that happens, there is no particular need for direct borrowing, there are other methods of enrichment, calques, creating brand new words etc. Take a look at German.
Old English was no exception. English rose to the status of a world lingua franca, only after large scale borrowing from Latin.
Was it the borrowing from French and Latin that made English prominent or was it historical/political,economic and other factors?
You can under no circumstances prove that something in old English was worth translating into Greek to satisfy some scientific curiosity.
Why should I try to prove such a thing? It's your hypothesis, you're the one who is supposed to prove stuff. I can certainly prove that in modern times Old English works have been translated into other languages in order to satisfy scientific curiosity.
Not Old English, but to illustrate further - I spent a good part of a semester reading analyses of Old Icelandic sagas. It turned out I wasn't learning only about Nordic history, but also about the structure of their society, some of which turns out is applicable to earlier stages of development of other societies, part of which I found very useful applied to modern Balkans, such as the analysis of gender roles. Actually, I've already recommended reading this article below to several people:
Carol J. Clover, "Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,"
So I'm very grateful for the translations of Icelandic sagas that led to them being analyzed and the above article, and books, produced from there.
Persian began to act gradually as a language of culture, only after being intensively enriched by Arabic vocabulary.
My understanding is that Persian was a language of culture and a large empire much before Arabic came onto the world scene as a language of a great civilization.
Concerning Arabic, this is the topic we have been busy with in this thread. Its capacity to communicate scientific/philosophical concepts without relying on a known past history of intensive cultural activity is curious, isn't it?
I'd be more interested in the actual history of Classical Arabic. I haven't had the time to go through this entire discussion in detail, but it seems to me that centuries are skipped or ignored as if we were talking about days. I've noticed this habit some Muslims have of conflating the 7th, 8th and even the 9th century into some vague whole and disregarding that it's actually 3 centuries we're talking about.
Therefore my question about earliest works in Classical Arabic and their oldest surviving copies. I'd like to get an idea of the chronology not relying solely on later histories but on what we can actually prove from material evidence. This has to exist, I'd just like to know the names of books / articles that have dealt with this.
Or to simplify, why should I trust a work written in the 12th century dealing with the history of Islam and Arabic in the 7th century? Why should I even trust a work written in the 9th century when it's dealing with the 7th century? Because of super-human memories of early Muslims?
