The Egyptian Travelling Interpreter or Arabic without a Teacher for English Travellers visiting Egypt.

£450 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A rare introduction to the Arabic language by Gabriel Sacroug (d.1895), who served as interpreter at the British Consulates in Cairo, Jeddah and Istanbul. It contains a two-hundred page English to (transliterated) Arabic vocabulary, a short grammar of Egyptian Arabic and a wonderful selection of dialogues and proverbs. The latter is particularly valuable as a digest of proverbs common in nineteenth-century Egypt, with many curious and poetic examples: “The clarinet is in my sleeve and the breath in my mouth (ready for playing). Used to express ‘I am completely ready for business.’ ” (p.400). Given the detail and depth of the book, it is perhaps unsurprising that Sacroug plagiarised other works. It is largely a piracy of E. Nolden’s 1844 Vocabulaire Français Arabe , with some of the dialogues adapted from Assaad Yakoob Kayat’s 1844 work, The Eastern Traveller’s Interpreter . Clearly unconcerned about his appropriations Sacroug marked each copy with his seal and even included a line warning against further intellectual theft, “All Rights of Translation and Reproduction are reserved” (p.[ii]). Rare. LibraryHub locates just a single copy in the UK, at Oxford, while OCLC adds three further holdings, at Munich, Harvard and Biblionet Drenthe, Netherlands.

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