Egyptian Arabic for foreigners

Sacroug, Gabriel. The Egyptian Travelling Interpreter or Arabic Without a Teacher for English Travellers Visiting Egypt.

$1,675.00

First edition. A practical textbook teaching Egyptian Arabic to foreigners, published at the height of the popularity of 19th-century oriental travel that entailed a need for such guidebooks. The present work comprises a vocabulary, a grammar, basic phrases, titles of dignity and proper names, some proverbs, as well as Egyptian weights and measures. This is essentially an English translation of Nolden's "Vocabulaire français-arabe" (1844), enriched with more than 60 pages of "Dialogues" that proved particularly useful to travellers to Egypt, as they could be simply read aloud. These dialogues are divided into 21 categories, including "landing at the custom-house", "travelling by rail", "discourse with a donkey-boy and a guide", "polite conversation" and "on researches of antiquities". Part of the dialogues are copied from Kayat's "Turguman inkilizi wa-'arabi / The Eastern Traveller's Interpreter" (1844), for instance the dialogue "with an Eastern lady", in which Sacroug replaced Kayat's references to Syria with those to Egypt. The book concludes with a number of proverbs, taken verbatim from Burckhardt's "Arabic Proverbs" (1830).

Some pencil annotations in English and Arabic to endpapers give a brief travel itinerary and boat schedules.