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What They Said About the Arabs and Arabic

What Arab and Muslim scholars have said about their language, and what scholars from outside the Arab world have said about it, and about the Arabs and their civilisation. Nothing is published until it was read in its author's own book or in a named, reliable witness; the Western sayings appear in their original languages beside a translation, each with a link to the page of the book.

105 sayings — 52 by Arab and Muslim scholars, 53 by others; 48 read in the original language of their author.

How these sayings were documented

Most sayings of Western scholars about Arabic circulate in Arabic translations taken from secondary sources, and many turned out to add to or cut from the original. We went back to the authors' own books, in scans of their pages, and publish the original text with a faithful translation, noting under each saying where the circulated version departs from it. Sayings whose original we have not yet found are not published.

Read in the original Read in its author's own language (French, German, Latin…) in a scan of the book; the original is printed beside any translation. From the author's own Arabic The author's own Arabic words, read in his book by edition, volume and page; the English is our translation. Narrated with its chain The speaker wrote no book of his own; this is read in a work that narrates it from him with its chain of transmission, by edition, volume and page. Via a reliable witness Reported by a named scholar without a chain, or not found in the author's own work.

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Read in the original
On studying a language by reasoning rather than memory alone:
“The Arabic language above all seems to lend itself more readily than many others to this operation, whose instruments are analysis and synthesis; and I have sometimes been surprised to see how exactly the forms of this language answer to what clarity and precision of discourse require.”
La langue Arabe sur-tout semble se prêter plus aisément que beaucoup d'autres à cette opération, dont les instrumens sont l'analyse et la synthèse ; et j'ai quelquefois été surpris en voyant combien les formes de cette langue sont dans un juste rapport avec ce qu'exigent la clarté et la précision du discours.
Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy
1758–1838
 Read in the original
“My work was more or less influenced by the style of medieval Hebrew and Arabic grammar. It was historical analysis. But you can translate the basic ideas into a kind of a synchronic interpretation, a description of the system as it actually exists, and out of that came the early stages of generative grammar. […] When I got to college I started studying Arabic. I wanted to learn Arabic, and I got pretty far.”
كان عملي متأثّراً إلى حدٍّ ما بطريقة النحو العبريّ والعربيّ في العصور الوسطى؛ كان تحليلاً تاريخيّاً، ولكن يمكنك أن تنقل أفكارَه الأساسيّة إلى تفسيرٍ وصفيٍّ للنظام كما هو قائمٌ فعلاً، ومن ذلك خرجت المراحلُ الأُولى للنحو التوليديّ… ولمّا دخلتُ الجامعة بدأتُ أدرس العربيّة؛ أردتُ أن أتعلّمها، وقطعتُ فيها شوطاً بعيداً.
Noam Chomsky
b. 1928
 Read in the original
On the pre-Islamic odes:
“It is probable, however, that the poets greatly enriched the language by absorption of dialect forms, and that they helped to fix its usages. The syntactical construction of the poems especially attains a degree of refinement unknown to any other Semitic language […].”
وَقَدْ بَلَغَ التَّرْكِيبُ النَّحْوِيُّ فِي هَذِهِ القَصَائِدِ خَاصَّةً دَرَجَةً مِنَ التَّهْذِيبِ لَمْ تَعْرِفْهَا لُغَةٌ سَامِيَّةٌ أُخْرَى.
Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb
1895–1971

Some well-known sayings attributed to Western scholars have not been traced to an original and are not published: one credited to Krachkovsky (we searched the whole of his history of Arabic geographical literature), one credited to Germanus (not in any of his articles in al-Risāla), others credited to Marçais and Berque, and one credited to Brockelmann ("through the Qur’an Arabic reached an extent…"). The saying credited to al-Asma‘i is one he transmits from al-Khalil from Ayyub al-Sakhtiyani, whose saying is in this section. The saying credited to "William Work" has no such author: the name is a corruption of William H. Worrell, director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, and its source has not been found. The claim that Chomsky was influenced by Sībawayh was denied by Chomsky himself in two published e-mails.