Today's Wisdom - Arabic, Zelensky and Goya

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Arabic belongs to one of the oldest continuously documented language families. Linguists regard it as the closest surviving relative of Proto-Semitic (the ancient mother tongue from which Hebrew, Aramaic, and Amharic all descend). The language developed among the nomadic tribes of the northwestern Arabian Peninsula spreading through trade, storytelling, and above all poetry. The oldest confirmed inscription, found in southern Syria, dates to 328 CE.

Everything changed in the 7th century with the revelation of the Quran. Because Muslims hold that the text must be recited in its original Arabic, the language was standardized and then frozen with extraordinary care. This is why a modern speaker can still read a 1,400-year-old manuscript with relative ease while English speakers struggle with Shakespeare after just four centuries. The armies and scholars of Islam then carried Arabic across half the world. Within a century of Muhammad's death the caliphates stretched from Spain and North Africa to the borders of India and China. During the Islamic Golden Age it was the Latin of its day, the tongue in which the finest minds wrote on medicine, astronomy, and philosophy.

Words such as algebra, algorithm, alchemy, alkali, and cipher all entered European languages from Arabic. The deepest mark of all was left on Spanish. For nearly 800 years, from 711 to 1492, much of the Iberian Peninsula was ruled by Arabic-speaking Muslims. Roughly 4,000 Spanish words carry Arabic roots as a result. Any Spanish word beginning with "al" is a good bet to be one of them, since it preserves the Arabic definite article, as in almohada for pillow and alcalde for mayor, while ojalá, meaning "hopefully," descends from an Arabic phrase invoking God. English quietly absorbed a haul of everyday words too, including sugar, coffee, cotton, magazine, sofa, lemon, giraffe, and admiral. Even the phrase many English speakers utter without thinking, saying "so be it" as amen, travels back through this same Semitic family. A language born among desert poets who rarely wrote anything down ended up shaping how a good part of humanity counts, reasons, and speaks to this day.

Volodymyr Zelensky was born in 1978 in the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih, into a Jewish family in what was then Soviet Ukraine. His father was a computer scientist and his mother an engineer. He studied law at university and earned a degree, yet he never practiced it for a day as comedy had already taken hold of him. In his twenties he cofounded a production company called Kvartal 95, named after the neighborhood where he grew up, and spent the next fifteen years becoming one of the most famous entertainers in the country. He wrote, produced, and starred in films and television shows. By 2018 he was beloved and about as far from frontline politics as a public figure could be.

In 2015 Zelensky starred in a satirical sitcom called Servant of the People, portraying an ordinary history teacher whose furious rant about corruption is secretly filmed by a student, goes viral, and rockets him unexpectedly into the presidency. The show was a colossal hit, and life began imitating art with uncanny precision. In March 2018 his colleagues registered a real political party using the show's name, and on New Year's Eve of that year, in the slot where Ukrainian channels traditionally broadcast the president's address, Zelensky instead appeared to announce his own candidacy. His campaign broke every rule, avoiding rallies and press conferences in favor of comedy sets and short videos posted to YouTube and Instagram. Voters exhausted by entrenched corruption embraced the outsider, and in April 2019 he crushed the incumbent Petro Poroshenko by taking 73 percent of the vote.

His first years in office were rocky, dogged by the difficulty of governing without political experience and by an American scandal in 2019, when a phone call in which President Trump pressed him for damaging information on a rival helped trigger a US impeachment. All of that was eclipsed on 24 February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. The United States offered to evacuate him, expecting the capital to fall within days. Zelensky refused, reportedly replying that he needed ammunition, not a ride, and posted a phone video of himself standing on a Kyiv street with his senior team to prove he had stayed. The man who once played a president for laughs found himself cast, for real, in the most serious role his country has ever asked of anyone.

Francisco Goya spent the first half of his career following the traditional path of an ambitious artist. Born in 1746 in a small Aragonese village, he trained in Zaragoza and Madrid, married into a well-connected artistic family, and by 1786 had reached the summit of his profession as a painter to the Spanish royal court. He produced glittering portraits of kings, nobles, and courtiers, and grew rich and celebrated doing so. He named his three great teachers as Velázquez, Rembrandt, and nature. It was that last master and his unflinching fidelity to what he actually saw that would eventually pull him away from the comfortable world of the court.

At the age of 46 Goya was struck by a mysterious sickness that nearly killed him and left him permanently deaf for the rest of his life. Cut off from conversation and sealed into his own head, his art began to darken. He produced Los Caprichos, a series of etchings mocking the superstition and folly he saw around him. When Napoleon's armies invaded Spain he witnessed atrocities that marked him forever. Out of that war came his masterpiece, The Third of May 1808, which shows a French firing squad executing helpless Spanish civilians in the dead of night. It stripped away every trace of heroism and glory that war paintings traditionally wore, showing only terror and slaughter.

In 1819 he bought a country house outside Madrid, already nicknamed the House of the Deaf Man after its previous owner, and there the aging, disillusioned painter covered the plaster walls of his own home with fourteen nightmarish murals now called the Black Paintings. The images were of witches, despair, and violence that he never named, never exhibited, and likely never intended anyone to see. These were the private demons of a man who had lost his hearing and much of his hope. Goya finally left Spain for France to escape a tyrannical king, and died in Bordeaux in 1828 at the age of 82. He had begun his artistic life as a servant of kings and ended it as a man who painted the inside of his own troubled mind, and in doing so quietly became one of the first modern artists.

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