An Introduction to Koranic and Classical Arabic: An Elementary Grammar of the Language.

• Author: Bellamy, James A.

Of all books probably the most difficult to review fairly is an elementary foreign language textbook. Such books contain no new information, so criticism must center on presentation, method, appearance, legibility, and so forth. Actually most elementary grammars are pretty good. Unless they contain gross errors or make egregious omissions - and most do not - they are helpful to students and facilitate the work of the instructor in running the course. However, every instructor in the course of time builds up his own set of crotchets and pet peeves which he cannot readily forego when looking at someone else's work. Before I unburden myself in this regard, I should state that Thackston's Introduction is quite good. The reading materials are well chosen, the explanations are for the most part clear, and the typography is excellent. The only serious omission from this work is the particle in mukhaffafah rain al-thaqil. Although not common, it does occur in the Koran and other early texts, mostly in conversational passages, and because it is uncommon, students are likely to stumble over it unless forewarned, and mistake it for conditional in. In kana ghaniyan means "if he is rich," but in kana la-ghaniyan means "indeed he was rich"; in the latter construction the predicate, if a verb, is always introduced by la-, never in the conditional. Even famous scholars can come a cropper over this one. H. Reckendorf, Arabische Syntax, p. 128, note, mistranslates two such sentences as conditionals, which is curious, since on the following page he deals with in mukhaffafah and gives correct examples.

Now for some quibbles. P. x. The example of Kufic writing is lopped off at both ends and as it stands makes no sense (Surah 4:121). The same is true of the Arabic on the front cover. These could have been made complete by reducing the size a bit, and might have been an interesting challenge to the students.

P. xiii. The texts of this book are all unvocalized, but romanized in the vocabularies and the Arabic-English glossary at the end. I have to disagree with this procedure, and with the author's statement that "when the final inflectional vowels are removed, most students panic at the sight of a 'naked' Arabic word." They really don't. The difficulty is not caused by the omission of the endings but of the vocalization of the body of the words themselves. For example, the combination ktb ??lrjl can be read either kataba l-rajulu or kutubu l-rajuli. If the...