‘Arabist’ once meant someone reading Greek only through Arabic

Evidence

For a while, ‘Arabist’ came to mean someone who was not familiar with the original Greek, but who relied on a Latin translation of Arabic. Renaissance humanists, no longer content to rely on clumsily written and inaccurately translated Arabic versions of Greek texts, instead hunted for manuscripts of the Greek originals in monastic libraries and elsewhere. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 110

Categorization

• DEFINE: A striking fact about the original, now-forgotten meaning of ‘Arabist’ — the opposite of today’s meaning.

Related

• Eighteenth-century scholars studied Arabic to illuminate the Bible (similarity 0.81)
• Arabic translation of ancient texts peaked between 750 and 900 AD (similarity 0.80)
• Arabist and Islamic studies resisted the revision that reformed other area studies (similarity 0.80)
• Erpenius used Turkish dictionaries to improve Arabic scholarship, though Europeans scorned Turkish itself (similarity 0.79)
• The same Arabic authors were retranslated repeatedly across centuries because few manuscripts were available (similarity 0.79)
• Western scholars of Arabic long studied the classical language over living dialects (similarity 0.79)