A scarce Arabic phrasebook with excellent provenance. This copy belonged to Hardwicke Rawnsley (1851-1920) who would’ve taken this on one of his trips to Egypt with renowned archaeologist, Finders Petrie (1853-1942).
The book’s author, Gabriel Sacroug (d.1895) served as interpreter at the British consulates in Cairo, Jeddah, and Constantinople. 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).
The work is in large part an unacknowledged piracy of E. Nolden’s Vocabulaire Français Arabe (1844). Some of the dialogues were adapted from Assaad Yakoob Kayat’s The Eastern Traveller’s Interpreter (1844) and other additions were presuably added by Sacroug himself. 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]).
We locate copies at Oxford, Munich, Harvard plus Biblionet Drenthe in the Netherlands.
Zack, L., “Three Cases of Plagiarism?” in Historiographia Linguistica Vol. 49, Nos 2/3 (2022), pp.267-301.
