Orientalist scholars often spoke Arabic too classically for ordinary Arabs
Evidence
The travel writer and influential political figure Gertrude Bell, who was in Baghdad in 1918, wrote home to England about Margoliouth’s appearance there and how he lectured for fifty minutes by the clock on the ancient splendours of Baghdad in classical Arabic and without a note. ‘It is the talk of the town. It’s generally admitted that he knows more of Arabic language and history than any Arab here.’ But in another letter she noted that at a later lecture given by Margoliouth, a brave member of the audience asked, ‘How do you say in Arabic – Do you drive a motor car?’, which angered the classically erudite professor. According to The Times’s obituary of Margoliouth, he ‘spoke the vernacular with scholarly precision; but the accent and intonation were not very much like any Arab’, and the general consensus seems to have been that he spoke an Arabic that was so pure that ordinary Arabs could not understand it. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 373
Categorization
- CANDY: The ‘How do you say “Do you drive a motor car”?’ anecdote is a memorable, tweetable oddity.
- DEFINE: Illustrates what treating Arabic as a ‘dead classical language’ meant in practice.
Related
- Western scholars of Arabic long studied the classical language over living dialects (similarity 0.81)
- British Arabic teaching before 1960 ignored spoken language entirely (similarity 0.80)
- Oxford’s Arabic chair defaulted on teaching and discouraged classes (similarity 0.80)
- Classical Arabic alone is nearly useless for everyday conversation in the Arab world. (similarity 0.79)