Proceedings of the Colloquium on Arabic Grammar, Budapest, 1-7 September 1991.

• Author: Sawaie, Mohammed

This volume is the result of a conference held in Budapest in 1991. Its title carries the conference title; it is dedicated, appropriately in my view, to the memory of the well-known Hungarian Islamicist and University of Budapest student and professor Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), whose contributions to the field of Islamic and Arabic studies warrant this befitting dedication.

The book consists of 27 articles on various aspects of Arabic and Arabic grammar, classical Arab grammarians, Quranic, and Semitic studies. Inasmuch as there is diversity in the topics of this volume, its contributors also exhibit a wide range of diversity, not only in the countries they come from (Europe, North America, the Middle East) and their academic institutions, but also in their orientation and approaches to the discussions that ensued. This diversity manifests itself also in the languages employed in these essays: there is one article in Arabic, six in French, and twenty in English.

Besides the languages in which these essays were written, the following categories could be employed to characterize the topics of the essays in this book: classical Arabic and classical grammarians (articles by Agius, Anghelescu, Ayoub, Baalbaki, Beeston, Bohas, Carter, Devenyi, Ivanyi, Jones, N. Kinberg, and Levin); Semitic topics, specifically Hebrew and Arabic (articles by Chahbar, Grunfest, and Zaborski); Quranic studies (articles by Burton and L. Kinberg); dialectal studies (articles by Grand'Henry and Marugan); synchronic studies (articles by Al-Ani, Cuvalay, Moutaouakil, Roman, Shivtiel, and Suleiman); and, finally, two articles that do not fit in this schema: one a bibliography on Moroccan contributions to Arabic grammar (by Soulami) and the other on Arabic grammar and past and modern efforts to reform it (by Omran). I should hasten to add here that these divisions are for classificatory purposes only; the intention is not to create artificial boundaries between disciplines that are intimately intertwined. As is well attested, Arabic linguistic studies flourished originally from study of the Quran. This diversity of articles, authors and their varying schools of thought and methodologies, complicates the task of the reviewer. Space limitations will, inevitably, oblige me to confine my comments to a select number of articles in this valuable book. Many excellent articles will be left out of this review.

Marugan, in "Negative Markers in the Spanish Arabic Dialect,"...