What others said about Arabic Via a reliable witness
On early Arabic poetry:
“The perfection of the prosody astonishes us no less than the perfection of the language. Arabic is the only Semitic language that has given birth to an independent prosody.”
Ignaty Krachkovsky
1883–1951
Dean of Russian Arabists, member of the Academy of Sciences and corresponding member of the Arab Academy of Damascus.
In Arabic
كما أنّ إتقانَ العروض يثير فينا دهشةً لا تقلّ عن تلك التي يثيرها إتقانُ اللغة. فاللغةُ العربيّة هي اللغةُ الساميّةُ الوحيدة التي أنجبت عروضاً مستقلّاً.
Source
Studies in the History of Arabic Literature, Arabic tr. from the Russian supervised by Kulthum ʿAwda, Moscow: Nauka, 1965, p. 8, from his essay “Arabic Poetry” (1924)
The English is ours, from the reported Arabic.
Krachkovsky wrote in Russian; the text is from the Arabic translation supervised by Kulthum ʿAwda, checked letter by letter. The English is our translation of the Arabic.
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