Affiliation

Scholar of early Arabic dialects; Ancient West-Arabian

Biography

Born in Giessen, Germany, he studied the Semitic languages and taught at Oxford and later at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His Ancient West-Arabian (London, 1951) reconstructs the pre-Islamic dialects of western Arabia from what the grammarians and the Qur'anic readings preserved. He also wrote on the foundations of Classical Arabic (1954), an essay on Arabic in the Gibb Festschrift (1965), and on word structure in the Semitic languages.