In order to explain in a few words, and without recourse to specialized linguistic knowledge, the specific nature of the Arabic language, let us first of all recall that every language has at its beginnings two poles, as it were, one of which comes to predominate without excluding the other. These two poles can be described by the terms "auditive intuition" and "imaginative intuition". Auditive intuition essentially identifies the meaning of a word with its quality as sound; this presents itself as the development of a simple phonetic formula which expresses a fundamental action such as "to unite", "to separate", "to penetrate", "to emerge", and so on, with all the physical, psychological, and intellectual polyvalence of which a type-action of this kind is capable. This has, moreover, nothing to do with semantic convention or onomatopoeia; the identification of sound and act is immediate and spontaneous, and in this regard, speech conceives everything it names as being basically an act or as the object of an act. Imaginative intuition, on the contrary, manifests itself in speech by the semantic associations of analogous images; every word pronounced evokes inwardly a corresponding image, which calls up other images, with the type-images dominating the more particular ones, according to a hierarchy that stamps itself, in its turn, on the structure of speech. The Latin languages are examples of this latter type, whereas Arabic discloses an almost untrammeled auditive intuition or phonetic logic, in which the identity of sound and act, as well as the primacy of action, are affirmed across the entire rich tissue of this language. In principle, every Arabic word is derived from a verb consisting of three invariable consonants, something like an aural ideogram, from which are derived as many as twelve different verbal modes—simple, causative, intensive, reciprocal, and so on—and each of these modes produces in its turn a plethora of nouns and adjectives whose first meaning is always linked, in a more or less direct way, to that of the fundamental action depicted by the trilateral root of the entire verbal "tree".
Titus Burckhardt, Art of Islam: Language and Meaning
