KHASHCHAB, Antonii Fedulovich.

£1,950 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Obraztsy sovremennoy arabskoy pis'mennosti First and only edition of this well-illustrated study of modern Arabic palaeography and vocabulary, based on facsimile reproductions of nearly a hundred Arabic manuscript documents from private Syrian collections. Born in Syria within an Orthodox family, Anton Khashchab (b. 1874) moved to Russia where he studied, and later taught, Oriental languages at the University of St Petersburg. With this work, Khashchab aimed at improving learning resources for the study of what is now known as Modern Standard Arabic, which had been developing as a koinè across the Arab world since circa 1800. His introduction explains how this shift had been affecting language learning in that the meaning of many classical words had changed, while many new words were being added for new concepts. Khashchab thus designed a lexicon based on the vocabulary found in three kinds of contemporary Arabic manuscripts, produced in Syria: official letters, as examples of the administrative language (e.g., death certificates, marriage proposals, divorce papers), with numerous Turkish and European words; juridical documents, greatly influenced by French; and personal and business correspondence. The facsimile reproductions illustrate documents which include official paper stamps, carved seals, and dates. Based on these documents, the Arabic-Russian dictionary that follows focuses on the general style and vocabulary of the Arabic language circa 1900, and on the more recent

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