What others said about Arabic From the author's own Arabic
In his lectures at the Egyptian University:
“Many languages never acquired enough means of making one clause govern another; only the languages of civilised peoples, of high intellectual culture, managed it – among them Chinese, Old Indian (Sanskrit), Greek and Latin, the Western languages, and Arabic. Yet Arabic, for all its distinction in rising to varied interlocking sentence structures able to express every kind of relation between ideas, has also kept some simple, primitive forms of construction.”
Gotthelf Bergsträsser
1886–1933
German Semitist, professor at Munich, who gave his lectures on the grammatical development of Arabic in Arabic at the Egyptian University in 1929.
The Arabic original
وكثيرٌ من اللغات لم يتحصّلْ على غنًى كافٍ من وسائط إعمال الجمل في الجمل، ولم يوفَّق إلى ذلك غيرُ لغات الأقوام المتمدّنين، أصحابِ الحضارة العالية من جهة الفكر، منها اللغة الصينيّة، والهنديّة القديمة، أي: Sanskrit، واليونانيّة واللاتينيّة، واللغات الغربيّة، ومنها اللغة العربيّة، غير أنّها- حسبَ مزيّتها مع الترقّي إلى تركيبات الجمل المشتبكة المتنوّعة، الكافية في إفادة جميع أنواع العلاقات بين الأفكار على اختلافها- قد حافظت على بعض أشكال التركيب البسيطة الأوّليّة أيضاً.
Source
Bergsträsser, al-Taṭawwur al-naḥwī li-l-lugha al-ʿarabiyya (lectures given in Arabic at the Egyptian University, 1929), ed. Ramadan ʿAbd al-Tawwab, Cairo: al-Khanji, 2nd ed., 1994, p. 177
The English translation is Voice of Arabic's, made from the original.
Bergsträsser lectured in Arabic, so this is his own wording as edited by Ramadan ʿAbd al-Tawwab, checked against the print. No link, as the edition is in copyright. The English is ours.
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