What others said about Arabic Read in the original
On the poet’s place among the Semitic peoples:
“The story of Balaam is the most familiar example of this conception of the poet’s function; nevertheless no other Semitic language has a poetry even remotely resembling that of the pre-Islamic Arabs.”
H. A. R. Gibb
1895–1971
Scottish Arabist, professor of Arabic at Oxford and then Harvard, member of the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo.
In Arabic
وقصّةُ بلعام أشهرُ مثالٍ على هذا التصوّر لوظيفة الشاعر؛ ومع ذلك فليس لأيّ لغةٍ ساميّةٍ أخرى شعرٌ يشبه شعرَ العرب قبل الإسلام، ولو من بعيد.
Source
Arabic Literature: An Introduction, ch. 2 “The Heroic Age”, London: Oxford University Press, 1926, p. 14
Read in the 1926 first edition; the conference volume had it at two removes, via an Urdu essay.
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