Eighteenth-century French Arabic instruction read classics but ignored spoken language

Evidence

As Abbé Barthélémy put it, ‘One does not learn these languages to speak them…’ So Volney decided to make a fresh start at learning Arabic as it was spoken in Egypt. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 240

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to similar complaints about classical-language pedagogy recurring in later chapters of this book (Sacy, British universities into the 1960s).
• SEED: Angle: the long-running tension in language pedagogy between canonical text and living speech — how institutions lose the ability to speak the languages they teach.

Related

• British Arabic teaching before 1960 ignored spoken language entirely (similarity 0.82)
• Western scholars of Arabic long studied the classical language over living dialects (similarity 0.81)
• Classical Arabic alone is nearly useless for everyday conversation in the Arab world. (similarity 0.80)
• Classical Arabic is deliberately frozen by religious education while spoken dialects diverge freely. (similarity 0.79)