Short answers, pulled from the story.
The earliest known continuous text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script was created in the year 125 CE. A man named Garm(')allāhe carved three lines of poetry into a stone in En Avdat, Israel, establishing a tangible bridge between ancient Semitic languages and the global phenomenon that Arabic would become.
Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali initiated the standardization of Arabic grammar known as naħw and died in 689. He pioneered a system of diacritics using red dots to differentiate consonants and indicate vocalization to ensure the sacred text of the Quran could be recited with absolute precision across the expanding Islamic empire.
The sociolinguistic phenomenon where educated Arabs speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic and their native dialects is called diglossia. While Modern Standard Arabic is used in formal print media, newscasts, and speeches, the spoken dialects have lost the case distinctions and mood distinctions of Classical Arabic and evolved into distinct varieties.
Classical Arabic maintains 28 out of 29 consonantal phonemes and preserves the complete Proto-Semitic three grammatical cases and declension. This conservative nature allows Classical Arabic to serve as a linguistic time capsule, preserving ancient features that linguists use to reconstruct Proto-Semitic, the hypothetical ancestor of all Semitic languages.
The city of Baghdad became the intellectual epicenter of the world during the early Abbasid period, anchored by the House of Wisdom. Classical Greek terms were translated into Arabic there, creating a new scientific vocabulary and transforming Arabic into a major vehicle of culture and learning in science, mathematics, and philosophy.
Maltese is a Semitic language written in the Latin script that evolved from an extinct Siculo-Arabic dialect. It demonstrates the language's ability to adapt and transform over centuries of contact with Italo-Romance varieties while maintaining a global footprint that extends to African languages such as Hausa, Amharic, and Swahili.