Understanding Arabic: Essays in Contemporary Linguistics in Honor of El-Said Badawi.

• Author: Kaye, Alan
• Position: Review

Edited by ALAA ELGIBALL Cairo: AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO PRESS, 1996. Pp. 274.

El-Said Muhammad Badawi, Professor of Arabic Linguistics at the American University in Cairo, is that rare linguist who has exerted enormous influence in two distinct areas: on his students as a fine instructor, and on his chosen field of Arabic linguistics. With respect to his research endeavors, Badawi's international reputation is well deserved. All Egyptian Colloquial Arabic specialists are intimately familiar with his (1973) Mustawayat al- arabiyya al-mu asira fi misr (Cairo: Dar alma arif) and (1986) A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic: Arabic-English, co-authored with the late Martin Hinds (Beirut: Librairie du Liban). This dictionary has been universally acclaimed as the finest available for any colloquial Arabic dialect. Both of the aforementioned works are referred to numerous times by many of the authors in this collection.

Alaa Elgibali, Badawi's Egyptian colleague at A.U.C., has done a fine job in editing the fourteen essays which appear for the first time in this volume in Badawi's honor; the fifteenth, Charles A. Ferguson's "Epilogue: Diglossia Revisited" is reprinted from the Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10 (1991): 214-34. The editor's introductory remarks in his "Beginning to Understand Arabic" (pp. 1-14) are a state-of-the-art survey of Arabic linguistics, as well as a summary of the tome's fifteen articles. I agree with Elgibali's stern warning against the monopolizing effect of the "seemingly powerful magnet" of (Chomskyan) government-binding (GB) theory (p. 11): "Why then are the energies of our better Arabic linguists dedicated solely to and consumed by GB?" (ibid.). Surely, there are many roads, all leading to Tipperary.

Kees Versteegh's "Linguistic Attitudes and the Origin of Speech in the Arab World" (pp. 15-31) quotes many medieval Arab grammarians as well as orientalist research on Arabic grammatical thought. One of the topics treated has to do with the role of the Bedouin as a native-speaker informant for kalam al- arab (still, incidentally, the proper designation for the Arabic language among Nigerian Arabs). Another topic discussed is the idea of fasad al-kalam 'corruption of speech' among non-native learners of Arabic, as Islam penetrated lands in which other languages were spoken. Parallels to Greek grammatical concepts are offered (pp. 22 ff.); however, the author rejects as improbable any historical connection between the Greek and Arabic theories, despite the similarities of Greek thesis and Arabic wad al-lugha 'creation of language'.

Dionisius A. Agius' "Features of Siculo-Arabic" (pp. 3348) describes Siculo-Middle Arabic (part of the Siculo-Arabic continuum) as used in the jara id (tax registers), which date from 1091 to 1266. Among its more interesting features are the b-imperfect; the...