Contrary to the dead languages of the Bible, whether they are ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek or Aramaic, millions of people have a very strong grasp of the Arabic of the Quran. Not only that, but very effective and strong and vast tools to help them understand it whether the vocabulary, usage, grammar and also secondary explanation through Hadeeth.
The other particularity of Arabic is it became the centralizing force of the whole empire. People started to learn Arabic to communicate, both on the level of the common man, as well as the scholars. Kufa and Basra were part of the Persian Empire, but they became centers of learning as far as the nuances of Arabic were concerned. Many of the contributors to the development of Arabic grammar were Persians, meaning the Arabic language was the defining feature of this new civilization, irrespective of the cultural shift. Egyptians speak Arabic, the Syrians speak Arabic, the Jordanians, the Iraqis, besides the whole Gulf Region for a reason. Somalians and Sudanese and other cultures speak Arabic as a common language. There was no vaccum between now and then, as far as Arabic is concerned. Even the intricacies of the language that were common to the poets have been preserved through the scholarship. All books of lexicons and linguistics on Arabic were produced while the language was alive and spread throughout, contrary to other ancient languages whose lexicons were produced in a vacuum, when they essentially became dead, by an elite and only for that elite.
The Catholic Church kept the language of the Bible locked for a 1000 year in a Latin language which was far beyond the comprehension fo the vast majority of the people, prohibiting its translation. As said earlier, this Latin is itself translated from a dead Greek language that wasnt even the language of Jesus and his followers, and that was the vehicle of sophisticated pagan thought.
In the case of the Quran, the blueprint of its ancient language, expressions and words used in pre-islamic and early post-islamic literature is available for anyone learning classical Arabic today. And this, despite the evolution of Arabic through the centuries and countries it spread to, or the changing conditions that burdened many words with new, sometimes introducing completely opposite meanings than originally intended.
All these linguistic tools however have been understood as secondary when approaching the Quran. The primary approach by the great commentators in understanding the language of the Quran was to compare it by the way the Quran itself makes use of it.
That is why it is humorous when people speak of grammatical errors of the Quran. Especially when such critics have no grasp of the Quranic language and much less the grammar of later classical Arabic which itself relies on the Quran. There isnt even a contemporaneous written text to the Quran that we know of from which the Quran could possibly deviate. The Quran in fact is the first ever Arabic book, the first writing that marked the transition of the Arabs from an oral to written culture. Therefore, from the onset, to assert grammatical errors in the Quran is untenable. The Quran simply spoke in the dialect of the Quraish tribe with all their peculiarities and standards of language
"And We did not send any messenger but with the language of his people, so that he might explain to them clearly" "Indeed, we have revealed this as an Arabic Quran so that you may understand".
The only real standard of comparison would be another writing, form of literature, grammar rules from the Quraish tribe contemporaneous with the Quran. Also, many languages today provide exceptions to their standard grammatical usages. Today's classical grammar 'rules' can be at variance with the Quran on which it has heavily relied on as a source, but to suggest the Quran is at variance with the grammar known to us today is illogical. Finally for anyone to come up and claim a "grammatical mistake in the Quran" would need to establish that this Book was not accepted by the classical and modern Arabs to be a piece of unmatched eloquence, that the linguists did not hold it to be a source material for their work, that they did not substantiate their liguistic findings based on its verses.
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