CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY WiLLARD FiSKE Endowment ""'""•"y PJ 6779.W7I" Library ..SROken Arabic of Egypt 3 19P4 026 887 152 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026887152 THE SPOKEN ARABIC OF EGYPT THE SPOKEN ARABIC OE EGYPT JiY- J. SELDEN WILLMOEE, M.A. ONE Of THE JUDGES OP THE NATIVE COURT OF APPEAL AT CAIRO LONDON DAVID NUTT, 57-59 LONG ACRE ?3 W13 ^ Printed by Ballantynb, Hanson &> Co. At the Ballantyne Press CX/vW^ INTRODUCTION Professor Sheldon Amos once remarked to me that Egyptian Arabic had been a hopeless puzzle to him, which he despaired of ever being able to master, until he fell across Spitta Bey's grammar of the language. Then all became clear at once. Spitta's work was indeed a model of the way in which a spoken living language should be scientifically studied. But it was necessarily the work of a pioneer. It opened the way which others should follow and complete. The work that was begun by Spitta seems to me to have been finished by Mr. Willmore. The present volume contains an exhaustive account of the Cairene dialect of Egyptian Arabic as it is spoken to-day. On the practical side it will be welcomed by those who live in Egypt and wish to understand and be understood by the natives. But it will be qiiite as much welcomed by the student of scientific philology. It tells him what he wants to know—how a living Semitic language pronounces its words and forms its grammar. For language consists of sounds, not of written symbols, and its grammar is that of ordinary conversation. What has been termed anti- quarian, philology is doubtless important to the historian or the literary scholar ; for linguistic science it is of little use. The living organism alone can yield scientific results ; the spellings of a past age or the grammatical forms which exist only in books are a hindrance rather than a help to scientific research. It is, of course, essential that the living organism should be represented as accurately and exactly as possible. In other words, we must have a notation which shall reproduce the pronunciation of a language with approximate accuracy. The defective Arabic alphabet, with its diacritical marks and poverty vi INTKODUCTION belongs to a pre- of vocalic symbols, is out of the question. It to represent scientific age and people, and is wholly unfitted For this we the living sounds of a modern Arabic language. alphabet. must have recourse to some modification of the Latin immediate What this modification shall be will depend on the object in view. If the object is purely scientific, we may make our choice between the alphabets of Lepsius, Alexander J. Elli.s, it is practical, there is or Sweet ; if, on the other hand, mainly nothing better than the alphabet adopted in the " Sacred Books of the East,'' or that adaptation of Spitta Bey's alphabet which is to be found in the present work. This latter reproduces the pronunciation of the Cairene dialect with all the accuracy needed by the practical student. It sets before us a Semitic language as it really exists, not an artificial jargon such as has been imagined by grammarians of the old school or the compilers of newspaper articles. A. H. SAYCE. PREFACE A TBEATISE on tbe Arabic language as spoken in Egypt, and particularly at the capital, was published by Wilhelm Spitta in the year 1880 under the title of Grammatik cles Arabischen Vulgdrdialectes von ^Egypten. To the scholarship and careful researches of this writer orientalists are indebted for the first and, perhaps, only serious attempt to sketch the distinguishing features of the literary and vernacular dialects. In the grammars of " vulgar " Arabic which already existed, as in others which have since appeared, we find a confusion between two spoken dialects, such as Egyptian 'and Syrian, or a hopeless mixture of forms and expressions used only in conversation with those which are peculiar to the written language. In some of these grammars the Arabic words are written in Roman characters without any method ; in others the Arabic letters are employed. In the latter case the short vowels are omitted altogether ; a single character (iv) is used for u, 6, and au, another (y) for t, e, and ay, and a double consonant is printed single ; so that it is impossible in almost every case to pronounce correctly a word with which we are not already orally acquainted.^ Signs for such short vowels as occur in the literary language, in the form of accents above and below the consonants, are employed in copies of the Koran and occasionally in other books, as a guide to pronunciation ; but new ones would have to be invented to express sounds peculiar to the spoken language if, in adopting the Arabic character, we "pointed" the words. To do so with any approach to completeness, we should have to employ a system in for of vowel-points and accents akin to that use Hebrew ; 1 Thus both katab he wrote, and kutib it loan written, are re- presented by the letters Idb ; malak he possessed, malik Mng, and milk property, by 7nUc, and the letters miot will be read according to the context mawt or m6t death, mauwit he killed, or mauwitt / killed. viii PKEFACE would, no but no Arabic type would admit of this. Natives without vowel doubt, learn to read in the Arabic character tamiiiar points the language which they speak, as they are already of the books is naturally in with the words ; but the language jealousy the keeping of the learned, who still regard with much even of the introduction of "vulgar" grammatical forms or words which do not figure in the Qamus. Hence the proportion of people who are able to read and write in Axabic-speaking having countries is exceedingly small ; for the working-man, no time to study a strange idiom, and nothing to gain by learning the letters, remains, and will ever remain under the present system, illiterate. No doubt there is a certain benefit in having a common written language for the whole of the Arab world, so that a man of education brought up in Algeria can read a book published in Egypt or Syria ; but it is a benefit enjoyed at the expense of the lower classes. The foreigner who seeks a practical knowledge of the language is at another disadvantage. Whether he engage a professor or study from the books, he generally acquires a vocabulary of words only understood by the educated, and in the latter case he is confronted with the difiiculties resulting from the absence of the vowels. The dialect of Cairo presents many forms of very high antiquity. Its precise place in the Semitic family could be more easily determined if the influence which the Koreish dialect has had upon it could be removed. There can be .no doubt that it is more closely allied, in structure at least, to the Hebraic and Aramaic branches of the family than is the language of the Koran and subsequent Arabic literature. Hebrew and Syriao, for instance, have, like Oairene and other spoken dialects, no final vowel in the 3rd person singular of the verb, making katab and ktab respectively (lit. Arab, kataba^) in the past tense, nor in any person of the aorist except in the plural. 3rd person The vowel of the preformative syllable is in Hebrew i, in Syriac e, but a in the primitive form of the literary Arabic verb. The dual is wanting in the verb and pronoun,2 and the nouns have no case-endings. In Hebrew we may note the following further points of resemblance : h has no consonantal power at the end of words, though it may take 1 Literary Arabic drops the final short vowels in the iussive only. 2 It is wholly absent in Syriac, and appears only in a few nouns in Hebrew. PKEFACE ix the place of an accent, thus malka queen, z6 this ; ^ ay becomes e and au o in certain cases, as beth house (lit. Arab, bayt), 16 if ; a full vowel disappears under circumstances similar to those described in § 33 of the grammar, as melek, malka, gevM ^ boundary, ligvM ; y in the early stages of the language stands for qat'a in such words as 'arbhiyim (later, but rarely, 'arbhi'im) Arabs, or the qat'a falls out, as r§m for re'm (cf. r&s, &c.) ; the vowel of the first syllable in certain cases is thrown out and prefixed to the first radical, as in ezro' (for zer6') arm, ezba' finger (cf. grammar, § 15) ; the e and ^-sounds frequently replace the a, as in the verbs (above), or as in melek, chad ^ (lit. Arab, malik, ahad), ve (but also va) and; there are traces of both itfa'al and itfa"al ; the letter dh of the literary Arabic is * unknown, being replaced by 2; ; ve and is softened to -d before a labial and before a consonant moved only by a sheva ; the pronoun of the 1st person is hemma (lit. Arab, huma, Oair. humma), the interrogative mi (lit. Arab, man, Oair. min) ; ani is sometimes used for the 1st person, as in Oairene ; the 3rd person hu often accompanies the noun pleonastically (cf. § 375 of grammar), as ha ish hu the man hefi In Syriac the verb system offers some very striking points of resemblance to Egyptian in addition to those already men- tioned.