É. Apor , I. Ormos (ed.): Goldziher Memorial Conference, June 21–22, 2000, Budapest.

HOPKINS, Simon: The Language Studies of Ignaz Goldziher

SIMON HOPKINS Parier arabe des juifs dAlger) and a few corrections in ZDPV 24 (1901), 178 to an article on Galilean dialects by W. Christie in the same journal.

1'

4 Among Goldziher's reviews of books on colloquial Arabic, there is one which is quite unlike the others: his review in ZDMG 35 (1881), 514-529 of W. Spitta, Grammatik des arabischen Vulgärdialectes von Aegypten (Leipzig 1880). This review is without a doubt the highlight of Goldziher's dialectological studies; it is quite simply a brilliant review of a brilliant book.

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5 Spitta's book and Goldziher's review together form a noble tribute to the Leipzig school of Fleischer from which both proceeded; Spitta studied with Fleischer a few years after Goldziher. Arabicdialectology had not seen anything like Spitta's Grammatik before; Spitta, who was still in his twenties,

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6 had produced a masterpiece which is a landmark in the description of living Semitic languages and may to this day be read with enormous benefit. Goldziher not only knew the language described, viz. Cairene Arabic, at first hand from his Egyptian visit of 1874, but recognized at once the status of Spitta's work as inaugurating a new period in the investigation of spoken Arabic. Such a book required a review to match and Goldziher rose to the occasion with sixteen of the most luminous pages he ever wrote. In addition to the spoken Cairene material itself, Spitta's book gave Goldziher the opportunity to comment on the literary use of Arabic with a colloquial Egyptian hue. Most of his review is devoted to amplifying Spitta's work by showing how Egyptian Arabic is reflected in printed popular literature, a genre which had not been used for this purpose before and which even today is not very well known. Goldziher's review may in fact be regarded as a study in Egyptian Middle Arabic, i.e. the prc-modcrn representatives of that stylistic range which lies between the classical standard and the spoken dialect, comprising elements of both. He was the first to document a number of characteristic NeoArabic usages, some of which have very deep historical roots. One of these is the conjunctional use of Uli in sentences such as ^yii lí^

1 2a.

3 "er fand, dass drei von ihnen verwundet wurden" (Romance of cAntar), a construction identified, correctly described and amply exemplified by Goldziher here (pp. 523-524) for the first time.

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7 19

4 This item seems to have been overlooked in the bibliographies of Goldziher's writings. 19

5 Again, it is to be regretted that this superb piece has not been included in GS. It is worth mentioning here that Spitta's book was honoured with a likewise magisterial review by Nöldeke, GGA 1881,303-317. 19

6 Wilhelm Spitta died at the age of thirty in 1883. 19

7 On these constructions see A. Spitaler, Oriens 15 (1962), 97-114, where p.

106 [= Id., Philologica. Beiträge zur Arabistik und Semitistik

, Wiesbaden 1998, 239] Goldziher's contribution is acknowledged. Goldziher added further examples in his review of Derenbourg's edition of Usäma b. Munqiö, ÖmfO 12 (1886), 78b. 124