The first European Arabic grammar shaped the standard work still used today
Evidence
Erpenius’s magnum opus was his Grammatica Arabica, published in Leiden in 1613. In this, the first proper grammar of Arabic in a European language, he struggled to impose an unsuitable Latinate grammatical structure on the usages of classical Arabic. Erpenius’s grammar was reworked by Silvestre de Sacy in the early nineteenth century, then revised by the Norwegian Karl Caspari in 1848, and Caspari was revised in 1859 by William Wright as A Grammar of the Arabic Language, which remains a standard work to this day. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 179
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes how colonial/European frames persist in academic infrastructures, similar to Chomsky-adjacent critiques of linguistics’ Latinate bias.