The Development of Western Grammars of ArabicAuthor(s): Carolyn G. KilleanSource: Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Jul., 1984), pp. 223-230Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/544462 .Accessed: 24/08/2011 04:45

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN GRAMMARS OF ARABIC

CAROLYN G. KILLEA N, University of Chicago

WHEN the West, specifically Western Europe, became more aware of the non- Christian world after the Renaissance, the study of Arabic naturally followed the rise in Hebrew studies as the interest in other scripture-dominated religions increased. As the desire to learn and understand literary Arabic developed in the scholarly capitals of Europe, attempts were initially made simply to translate the concise but superficial treatises on Arabic inflectional patterns which were then popular teaching manuals in the Islamic world.

These early European translations and commentaries upon Arabic grammar works will be the topic of this paper, and I shall specifically examine the nature of Western grammars of Arabic dating from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, when knowledge of the native Arab grammatical tradition heavily influenced the non-Arab writers of such works.

The first grammars of Arabic in Western languages appeared in the sixteenth cen- tury. The first known try at writing an Arabic grammar in Europe was the work of Pedro de Alcali, printed in 1505 in Spanish.' Since this short grammar reflects, how- ever, many of the features we know today as common to the North African or West- ern dialects of Arabic, it can hardly be called the first Western grammar of Classical Arabic. (Most of what is cited below concerning the works of this century is found in more detail in the work of J. Flick.) Alcala's work was followed shortly by a grammar printed in Paris in 1538 by William Postel, but Fiick feels that the latter work shows a pitiful lack of a solid knowledge of Arabic.2

The growth of Arabic studies in the West really began in the seventeenth century. In 1613, Thomas Erpenius published a work in Latin entitled "Five Books on Arabic Grammar." A second work appeared in 1620 entitled "Rudiments of Arabic," and in 1636 he published his most definitive work entitled simply Grammatica arabica.3 This latter work represents an important transition since Erpenius changed his original technique of simply translating the system used by the native masters into Latin equivalents to a more radical reworking of the discussion of Arabic structure in order to fit the classical models imposed in Greek and Latin grammars. This change made Arabic grammar more understandable to Euopean readers already familar with the system used in teaching the classical languages.

I Pedro de Alcala, Arte para ligeramente saber la lengua arauiga (Granada, 1505; facsimile reprint New York, 1928). This work is also available in the collec-

tion Petri hispani de lingua arabica libri duo (Gittin- gen, 1883) with an introduction by William Wright. For more information, see J. Fjick, Die arabischen Studien in Europa: Bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahr- hunderts (Leipzig, 1955), pp. 29-34.

2 Fick, Die arabischen Studien, pp. 36-43. 3 T. Erpenius, Grammatica arabica, quinque libris

methodice explicata a Thoma Erpenio (Leiden, 1613); Rudimenta linguae arabicae (Leiden, 1620); Gram- matica arabica (Leiden, 1636). See FRick, Die ara- bischen Studien, pp. 59-73.

[Carolyn G. Killean is Associate Professor of Arabic.]

[JNES 43 no. 3 (1984)] @ 1984 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-2968 / 84/4303-0004$1.00.

223

224 JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES

Erpenius's work was a milestone in Arabic studies in the West. It was accorded the highest of literary compliments by being reprinted, translated, and copied as a model for other grammars (written in Latin) over the next two centuries. It was only in 1810 that its position as the Arabic grammar of Europe was superseded by the French grammar of A. I. Silvestre de Sacy.4 Duncan Stewart, writing in 1844, rates Erpenius's work as excellent but points out that all the syntax of Arabic the author considered important was covered in only nine short pages and printed in very large type.5

Whereas the seventeenth century witnessed mainly copies and republications of the 1636 grammar of Erpenius with a few exceptions,6 toward the end of the eighteenth century a new trend emerged. Erpenius's grammar was either revised extensively or translated into the living languages of Europe. For example, in 1770, Johann Hirt pro- duced yet another grammar in Latin, but it was not a direct copy of Erpenius's Grammatica arabica. In 1776, John Richardson translated the latter into English; it was the first Arabic grammar to appear in that language.8 In 1781, J. D. Michaelis produced a simplified version of the same grammar in German.9 In 1796, Johann Jahn produced another grammar of Arabic in German which de Sacy, in 1810, considered the best of all those which had preceded his own work.'0

With the beginning of the nineteenth century and Napoleon's expeditions to the Middle East, the French school of orientalism was born. It was immediately domi- nated by the personality and work of de Sacy. Gaudefroy-Demombynes and Blachbre, writing in 1942, speak of this great scholar as the dominating force in Arabic gram- matical studies during the entire nineteenth century."

De Sacy's Grammaire arabe was the first major Arabic grammar written in French. Unlike his famous predecessor, Erpenius, de Sacy made a great effort to have his grammar conform both in its terminology and description with those of the Arab grammarians known to him. He found this goal more and more difficult to achieve as he moved from morphology into syntax, and thus in the second volume of his work he divided the presentation into two parts: part 3, Arabic syntax according to de Sacy

4 A. I. Silvestre de Sacy, Grammaire arabe (Paris, 1810).

5 Duncan Stewart, Practical Arabic Grammar (London, 1844), p. v.

6 See, for example, Agapitus a Valle Flemmarum, Flores grammaticales arahici idiomatis, exoptimis grammaticis, nec non pluribus arahum monumentis collecti (1684; reprint Rome, 1845); See Flick, Die arahischen Studien, pp. 76-79.

7 J. F. Hirt, Institutiones arabicae linguae (Jena, 1770).

8 John Richardson, A Grammar of the Arabic Language (1776; facsimile reprint Menston, England, 1969). In the preface of his work, John Richardson writes a long, one-sentence expression of his con- tempt for gramrr.rians which certainly included those who followed the Islamic grammarians too closely in their manner of presentation and terminology.

Among many reasons which may be assigned for our limited knowledge of this language, the first, and perhaps not the least, arises apparently from the perplex-

ing obscurity and unengaging manner of grammarians, who, without sufficiently attending to that simplicity and perspe- cuity which ought ever to be the necessary guides to the uninformed minds of youth, bend their chief efforts to investigation of unuseful trifles, uninteresting definitions, and polemical subtleties; involving the whole in such obscure terms, as to demand often as much time, patience, and penetra- tion to decypher the meaning of the teacher, as to acquire the language itself through a less complicated medium.

9 J. D. Michaelis, Arabische Grammatik (Gittin- gen, 1781). See RFick, Die arabischen Studien, p. 119.

10 Silvestre de Sacy, Grammaire arabe, p. vi. J. Jahn, Arabische Sprachlehre (Vienna, 1796).

11 M. Gaudefroy-Demombynes and R. Blachbre, Grammaire de /'arabe classique (Paris, 1942), p. 3: "During more than a century, all the grammars of Classical Arabic published in Europe were only abridgements or recastings of the de Sacy grammar."

THE DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN GRAMMARS OF ARABIC 225

and part 4, Arabic syntax according to the Arab grammarians. In the preface to his grammar, de Sacy credits his knowledge of the Arabic grammatical tradition to the work of Martellotto (Institiones linguae arabicae, 1620) and the commentaries of Thomas Obicin on his edition and translation of the Djaromiyya of Ibn Ajurrum published in 1631.12 Clearly, de Sacy did not deal with primary sources for his material on the native grammatical tradition. He partially explains his reluctance to do so in a footnote in which he complains that the native grammarians differed in their analysis of points of grammar and sometimes even changed their minds about the analysis of a certain sentence from one work to another.'3 This became a major problem for West- ern grammarians as there was no single system of presenting grammar coming out of the Arab world.

The effect of de Sacy's grammar on the field of oriental studies in Europe is de- scribed in glowing terms in Hartwig Derenbourg's biography of de Sacy published in 1905.14 In comparing de Sacy's work to the grammar of Matthew Lumsden produced at approximately the same time (1813), Derenbourg complains that despite the fact that Lumsden, in writing his grammar, followed the native Arab tradition even more closely, his erudition and composition was decidedly inferior to that of de Sacy.'5

De Sacy, however, was not working alone in the field of Arabic grammar. In 1831, as he was preparing a second edition of his Grammaire arabe, Heinrich Ewald, in Germany, published a counter-grammar, in Latin, based on a comparative Semitics style of presentation in which he claimed that de Sacy's work was too dominated by the native Arab grammatical tradition and therefore was inferior to his own descrip- tion. As he explains his own goals in his preface, Ewald complains that his European predecessors had all too timidly followed in the footsteps of the Arab masters and had never really sought to do any independent linguistic investigation.16

After publishing the first volume of his work, Ewald had the opportunity to read de Sacy's second edition (also published in 1831), and in the preface of his second volume Ewald continued to have nothing but scorn for de Sacy's methodology." In contrast to de Sacy, Ewald set as his goal a complete reworking of Arabic grammar along the lines of other work in Semitic studies. His goals were commendable, but his grammar would have had a greater impact if he had not felt compelled to compose it

12 Very little is known of the Martellotto work and what Arabic sources were used in its composition. From the presentation of de Sacy, it appears his sources were fairly late compilations of native tradi- tions, but no one work is clearly in evidence. The Martellotto work was not available to me for direct perusal; see Rick, Die arabischen Studien, p. 76.

13 "La meme proposition est souvent analys6e de diverses manitres, par diff6rents grammairiens, quel- quefois par le meme grammairien"; Silvestre de Sacy, Grammaire arabe, vol. 2 (1810 edition), p. 378.

14 Hartwig Derenbourg, "Silvestre de Sacy, Es- quisse de biographie," Bibliotheque des arabisants franCais, vol. 1, ser. 1 (Cairo, 1905).

15 Ibid., p. xxxviii. Matthew Lumsden, A Gram- mar of the Arabic Language, Selected from the Works of the Most Eminent Grammarians (Calcutta, 1813). Only vol. 1 appeared. This grammar, though

very rare, was mentioned by Ewald in 1831 and consulted by W. Wright for the revision of his trans- lation of Caspari's grammar for his second edition in 1874. I have not had access to a copy of this work.

16 G. H. A. Ewald, Grammatica critica linguae arabicae (Leipzig, 1831), vol. 1, p. iv.

17 Ibid., vol. 2, p. iii. Derenbourg's translation ("Sylvestre de Sacy," p. xlii) is as follows:

Comme l'on pouvait le conjecturer, la nature de l'oeuvre n'a pas 6t6 modifi6e. Ce qui en est encore aujourd'hui l'essence, c'est que cet homme, qui a rendu des services signal6s aux lettres orientales, continue A suivre la methode des maitres arabes pour ne s'en separer que rarement et sur des points sans importance.

226 JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES

in Latin. (Grammars of Arabic in Latin continued to appear in Europe as late as

1869.)'" By the mid-nineteenth century there was a conflict of opinion on what consti- tuted a good grammar of Arabic. Should it rely on the prescriptive formulas of the Arab masters or should it describe the grammar forms and usage which were actually drawn from Arabic prose and poetry.

The wide divergence in the views of de Sacy and Ewald as to what constituted a

"proper" grammar of Arabic in a Western language was bridged by the works of C. P.

Caspari. In 1844, he published the first of his important grammars-once again in Latin.'9 Although Gaudefroy-Demombynes and Blachbre rather chauvinistically de- scribe the book as a mere resume of de Sacy's work,20 H. L. Fleischer describes

Caspari's grammar more accurately as a blend of the good points from both his illus- trious predecessors.21

By the mid-nineteenth century, as the de Sacy-Ewald rivalry clearly indicates, the Arabists of Western Europe were divided in their opinions of the relative merits of the native Arab grammatical system for the writing of teaching and reference grammars for non-Arabs. The thorny problems encountered in trying to combine the terminol-

ogy of these two different grammatical traditions-the Greco-Latin and the Arab-is mentioned in the preface Duncan Steward wrote in his Practical Arabic Grammar published in 1844.

It will be observed that in the Paradigmata of the verbs, I have given, conformably [sic] with the plan of Erpenius, the verbal adjective as a participle and the noun of action in the accusative as an infinitive. There has, I presume to think, been much needless discussion upon this subject; Erpenius though exhibiting them as participles and infinitives in consequence of their verbal origin, confesses they must be regarded, strictly speaking as the verbal adjective and noun of action; and M. Ewald, very properly, I think, considers that M. de Sacy has gone too far in separating them entirely from the verb, and although they do not wholly answer to the ideas attached to the words participle and infinitive in Latin grammar.22

The growing disaffection in general for writing European grammars of Arabic using the divisions and classifications of presentation found in native grammars is also illus- trated well by a quote from Stewart who comments on why he deliberately avoided Arab classifications and explanations for language phenomena.23

I have not thought it necessary... to enter into long details upon the divisions and subdivi- sions ad infinitum, of the Arabian grammarians. However ingenious the writings of those authors, it is much to be regretted that their attention was so extensively directed to such learned trifles: there can, I think, be no doubt that their waste of time and talent upon the metaphysical subtleties of Grammar, had a most unhappy effect in diverting them from the

18 H. Zschokke, Institutiones fundamentales lin- guae arabicae (Vienna, 1869).

19 C. P. Caspari, Grammatica arabica (Leipzig, 1844-48).

20 Gaudefroy-Demombynes and Blachbre, Gram- maire, p. 3.

21 H. L. Fleischer, "Beitrige zur arabischen Sprach- kunde," Verhandlungen der Konigl. Siichs. Gesell- schqft der Wissenschaften (1863): 93-176; reprinted in Kleinere Schriften (Leipzig, 1885), vol. 1, pp. 1-2:

Die kUirzere Grammatica Arabica von Caspari... sttitzt sich auf de Sacy und Ewald und sucht nur, mit einigen Berichti- gungen und Zugaben von mir, das Gute beider zu vereinigen.

22 Stewart, Practical Arabic Grammar, pp. xi-xii. 23 Ibid., p. xi. This statement is a more sophisti-

cated version of the complaints voiced by John Richardson in 1776 (see n. 8, above).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN GRAMMARS OF ARABIC 227

more important and useful pursuits of science, in the cultivation of which, although they did much, we should have owed still more to them, had they not forgotten that Grammar is to be considered as a means and not as an end.

In 1861, J. B. Glaire wrote an abridgement of de Sacy's long grammar which he considered more suitable for the use of students. However, in following the master's model, he once again included a supplement to his grammar entitled "La Langue arabe consider6e selon le systeme des grammairiens arabes."24 From the order of the material in this supplement compared to de Sacy's earlier essay on Arabic syntax, it is clear that Glaire did not merely copy the presentation of Martellotto that de Sacy had incorporated but instead had recourse to some other synopsis of Arab grammatical thought. Glaire does not choose to inform his reader of his source, but it appears to be an eclectic analysis. Glaire, as did his predecessor, labored under the delusion that there was a single system of Arab grammatical thought and terminology. This naive assumption is not too surprising considering how very few works written by Arab grammarians were actually known in Europe at the time. Not until the very last decades of the nineteenth century would a reasonable number of Arab grammatical works be read and translated for purposes other than the production of pedagogical grammars.

H. L. Fleischer in 1863 published a long list of examples actually culled from Arabic writings, many of which refuted the grammatical statements made by de Sacy. In his introduction, Fleischer shows that he clearly understood the difference between seek- ing knowledge about the Arab grammarians and their work and seeking knowledge from them. He pointed out that progress in grammatical studies in Arabic in the West would only take place if the analysis of the Arab grammatical tradition as a history of different schools of linguistic method was combined with the discussion and analysis of real Arabic examples drawn from existing texts. Fabricated examples helped sup- port a logical but unrealistic description. What writers really did when writing Arabic seldom corresponded to what they were told by the grammarians that they should do.25

The earliest example of this more sophisticated approach to grammar production is found in the work of William Wright. Caspari's grammar in Latin was republished in German in 1859 and was translated into English by Wright from 1859 to 1862 and revised and reissued in 1874.26 In this second edition, Wright produced a new format for presenting Arabic grammar, drawing heavily on his knowledge of Fleischer's "Bei- triige" (see above) and also on his reading of some of the Arab grammarians. In his preface he mentioned, in particular, Zamakhshari's Al-mufassal, Ibn Malik's AI- Dalfiyya and La-mmTyat -Pafcal and the respective commentaries written by Ibn cAqil

24 J. B. Glaire, Principes de grammaire arabe (Paris, 1861), pp. 163-240.

25 Fleischer, "Beitrige," p. 2.

Der nachste gr6ssere Fortschritt der Grammatik des Altarabischen wird einer- seits von einer genau abwagenden Ver- gleichung und Wuirdigung der morgenlan- dischen Sprachlehrer selbst nach ihren verschiedenen Schulen, anderseits von

einer m6glichst umfassenden und auf- merksamen, im Geiste unserer Sprachwis- senschaft ausgefiihrten Durchforschung des in den massgebenden Sprachdenk- malern verliegenden grammatischen Ma- terials ausgehen.

26 W. Wright, A Grammar of the Arabic Lan- guage (London, 1859, 1862, 18742).

228 JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES

and Badr al-din. In addition, he cites several of the more commonly used pedagogical grammars in use in the Arab world during the nineteenth century.

Thus we see that the Arabic grammars produced in the West during the last years of the nineteenth century reflect a growing separation of two types of analysis. One is an historical appreciation of the native grammatical tradition; the other is an analysis of real Arabic writings as the basis for Western grammars of the language. As knowledge about the Arab grammarians and their different linguistic viewpoints grew, their sys- tem of grammar was progressively abandoned by Western writers of Arabic grammar in favor of independent philological research on data drawn from non-philological works in Arabic. These later writers deliberately ignored previous analyses of Arabic and organized their work as if no native tradition of classification and description existed. (A few of the best known examples of this trend will be mentioned here, but a full discussion of this type of work lies outside the scope of this article.)

Albert Socin published a remarkably good pedagogical grammar in German in 1885, which was republished in 1895. This same work was revised and improved by Carl Brockelmann in 1909, with a new edition in 1925.27 This last revision contains an excellent short bibliography of Arabic grammars written by both native and non- native authors.

T. Naldeke published a grammar of Arabic in 1897 which contained many examples drawn from Arabic sources following the line of research begun by Fleischer.28 In his foreword, Ndldeke politely gave due respect to the work of the Arab grammarians but made it quite clear that his own collection of grammar examples differed from theirs. He pointed out that the Arab grammarians were not above falsifying examples to fit their hypotheses unlike modern Western scholars of the nineteenth century, who up- held scientific principles of objectivity.

H. Reckendorf, in 1898, wrote on Classical Arabic syntax with only the barest reference to the system used by Arab grammarians.29 His second book on the subject, which appeared in 1921, is much more concise and includes native Arabic terminology, despite the fact that it appears to be an independent piece of research.30 Both of these works are examples of excellent philological analyses of a corpus of examples drawn from existing materials. In fact, the material Reckendorf, Ndldeke, Fleischer, and others sought to describe for Western orientalists was far wider in its scope and inclusiveness than that accepted by the Arab grammarians as worthy of analysis.

Whereas Reckendorf's work is a definitive study of Classical Arabic syntax suitable for a linguist, the best modern textbook applying similar techniques to Classical Arabic data is that of Gaudefroy-Demombynes and Blachbre already mentioned (see n. 11, above). In their introduction, the authors of this work explain their reasons for avoiding examples of written Arabic from either poetry or grammatical works as a basis for their description. They feel that poetic examples do not allow for broad enough definitions and that the examples included in philological works are all too

27 Albert Socin, Arabische Grammatik (Karlsruhe, 1885; Berlin, 1895; Berlin, 1909 and 1925).

28 T. N6ldeke, Zur Grammatik des classischen Arabisch (Vienna, 1897) (republished in 1963 with additions and appendixes added by Anton Spitaler

[Darmstadt, 1963]). 29 H. Reckendorf, Die syntaktischen Verhiiltnisse

des Arabischen (Leiden, 1898). 30 Idem, Arabische Syntax (Heidelberg, 1921).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN GRAMMARS OF ARABIC 229

often artificially contrived and do not represent real usage in Classical Arabic.31 Directly opposed to this modern style of analysis stand the two late nineteenth cen-

tury works on Arabic grammar which deliberately attempted to follow the system used by Arab grammarians. In 1883, Mortimer S. Howell in India began publishing a work in English that was to run to seven volumes, encompassing an introduction and four parts. Purporting to present Arabic grammar according to the most approved native authors, Howell informed his readers in his preface that his work was intended to be a pedagogical grammar.32

In 1883, his view that only native authors could instruct the learner was out of fashion in Europe. Howell's work was not completed until 1911, and the whole effort seems to have been virtually wasted. In trying to combine all the statements by the Arab grammarians known to him on every topic, Howell produced incomprehensible and ludricous statements which are also rendered quite unreadable by the extensive use of space-saving abbreviations and acronyms. One sentence will suffice to illustrate how turgid the work became. In discussing the initial noun of a non-verbal sentence, he writes the following:

#26 The enuc. is (1) a single term [24], either [prim., and then, according to the KK (and Z) and IM, absolutely (IA)] void of the pron. [relating to the inch.].33

In contrast to Howell's work, the two volumes based on native Arabic grammars published in 1891-92 by Father Vernier are quite readable.34 He subdivided his treat- ment of Arabic grammar, following the native grammarians, and included many of their examples and terms, frequently, but not always, identifying his sources. Apart from Sibawayh of the eighth century, Vernier relied exclusively on the later works of Arabic grammar. He had some of the same difficulty that plagued Howell. Since there was no single system of Arabic grammatical terminology and technical locutions, he had to choose the one to follow in any particular description. This work certainly could have been more valuable to Western orientalists; the criticism leveled against it by Gaudefroy-Demombynes and Blachbre in 1942, however, seems overly harsh.35

31 Gaudefroy-Demombynes and Blachbre, Gram- maire, p. 5.

... et qu'on en a fait trbs peu aux tour- nures des grammairiens arabes si avides d'inhabituel et si prompts A forger des examples pour 6tayer leurs abstractions. 11 ne convenait pas en effet, de perdre de vue de c6te vivant de cette langue "classique" et d'accorder une valeur generale

' des trouvailles d'artistes ou a des subtilites de philologues.

32 M. S. Howell, A Grammar of the Classical Arabic Language, Translated and Compiled from the Works of the Most Approved Native or Natu- ralized Authorities (Allahabad, 1883-1911), vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 1.

This grammar is designed in conformity with the Prophet's injunction, istacTni fT- Isina cdti bi-'ahliha 'Seek help in arts from

their masters' which, as applied to the study of Arabic grammar, may be inter- preted to mean that the learner should have recourse to the teaching of the native Grammarians, and eschew the unauthor- ized conjectures of foreign scholars.

33 Ibid., vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 97. The abbreviations and acronyms are to read as follows: enuc., enunciative; [24], section 24 above; prim., primitive; KK, Kufan grammarians; Z, Zamakhshari; IM, Ibn Malik; IA, Ibn cAqTI; pron., pronoun; inch., inchoative.

34 Donat Vernier, S.J., Grammaire arabe, compo- sdee d'aprds les sources primitives (Beirut, 1891-92).

35 Gaudefroy-Demombynes and Blachbre, Gram- maire, p. 3.

Le copieux ouvrage du P. Donat Ver- dier [sic] (1891-1892) a accumul les faits, extraits des grammairiens arabes de telle sorte qu'il semble plus ais6 de les retrouver dans leurs ouvrages que dans le sien.

230 JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES

In summary, the attention Western orientalists focused on Arabic grammar expressed itself first in attempts to force Latin terminology and classifications onto the systems set out by the later native grammarians. Only partially successful, this expression of concern gradually evolved into a recognition of a clear-cut distinction between the need for works on Arabic analyzed in Western linguistic terms and the need for dis- cussions of the native grammatical tradition of Arabic translated into semi-equivalent Western terms. By the mid-nineteenth century, the two goals were recognized as separate when it became clearer to orientalists that to teach someone Arabic or pro- vide a truly helpful reference grammar of Arabic, one did not need to follow the "laws" of Arabic as prescribed in absolute form by the grammarians. Instead, the writer of an Arabic grammar had to search the actual writings of native authors for examples with which to present the system of Classical Arabic as it was actually written, rather than a system of Arabic as it ought to have been written.36 To appre- ciate why this was not the goal of Arab writers, one must investigate what internal Islamic forces kept the grammarians from straying from their very narrow interpreta- tion of what grammar meant in reference to a description of the language of Allah.

36 After 1900, most Arabic grammatical works in Western languages tended either to emphasize the emerging syntax and vocabulary of modern literary

Arabic or to concentrate on descriptions of the living dialects of Arabic.