Erpenius used Turkish dictionaries to improve Arabic scholarship, though Europeans scorned Turkish itself
Evidence
Erpenius claimed that Arabic was not a difficult language to learn. (I have to confess that this has not been my experience.) He also debunked the notion that Arabic was useful for studying Hebrew, even though that was why he had himself started to study Arabic and indeed his chief intellectual interest was in the vowelling of Hebrew. He recommended studying Turkish in order to understand Arabic better, in large part because of the usefulness of Turkish–Arabic dictionaries, which enabled him to make many emendations to Raphelengius’s dictionary. (It should be noted that in the seventeenth century almost no one thought that Turkish was worth studying in its own right. Whereas the Arabs were respected for their culture and science, Europeans tended to regard the Turks as the barbarous descendants of the Scythians.) — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 178
Categorization
- SHARE: A friend into Arabic lexicography would enjoy that early Arabists leaned on Turkish–Arabic dictionaries and that Europeans despised Turkish as barbaric.
Related
- Early European Arabic dictionaries were built on medieval Arab lexicons plus Turkish aids (similarity 0.86)
- Learning Arabic so quickly got scholars accused of practicing magic (similarity 0.80)
- The first European Arabic grammar shaped the standard work still used today (similarity 0.80)
- ‘Arabist’ once meant someone reading Greek only through Arabic (similarity 0.79)
- Turkish studies barely existed in Europe before the twentieth century (similarity 0.79)
- Eighteenth-century scholars studied Arabic to illuminate the Bible (similarity 0.78)