A Grammar of Classical Arabic.

• Author: Kaye, Alan S.
• Position: Book Review

By WOLFDIETRICH FISCHER. 3rd revised edition. Translated from the German by Jonathan Rodgers. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2002. Pp. xiv + 338. $50.

Arabists, Semitists, and general linguists will be grateful to Jonathan Rodgers, the head of the Near East Division of the University of Michigan Library and longtime secretary-treasurer of the American Oriental Society, for making available in English for the first time Fischer's excellent grammar of Classical Arabic (CA). In addition to approving of the translation, Fischer has also written a new preface for it (pp. vii-xiv), and has further offered numerous corrections, additions, and improvements to the earlier German editions of 1972 and 1987 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag).

Let me begin with comments on the translator's preface (pp. x-xi). I certainly agree with Rodgers that there is a crucial need for an English version of Fischer's work, since the most comprehensive grammar in English, William Wright's classic A Grammar of the Arabic Language, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1859), and vol. 2 (1862), suffers from "an inconvenient arrangement [and] an obsolete English style" (p. x). Rodgers has also considerably updated the bibliography (pp. 259-318); however, he notes that since "almost all recent books and articles ... are indexed or available in full-text in one or several electronic resources, the translator felt that an exhaustive update in print would be superfluous" (p. x).

Turning to Fischer's preface, written in English especially for this volume in 1996 (pp. xii-xiv), we read about his being approached originally by Harrassowitz Verlag in Wiesbaden to revise the old standby of Arabic grammar, Carl Brockelmann's Arabische Grammatik. Since that work had already been through fourteen editions, he fortunately decided it was time to compose a new one. He, too, is of the opinion that Wright's aforementioned grammar is larger and more comprehensive than his, which is, coincidentally, also a translation from a German original (Caspari).

To take up some specific points:

p. 1: I am not sure that everyone would agree with Fischer's pronouncement that "from its earliest times to the present, Arabic has remained superficially almost unchanged" (italics mine), and "the morphology of the old poetic language and that of modern written Arabic are identical" (italics mine). It would be better to express these thoughts more cautiously. Certainly, it is no longer fashionable...