La grammaire française à l'usage des Arabes (1854) de Gustave Dugat et Fārès Echchidiāk

Abstract

abstract : he first Arabie grammars of French appeared in the mid- 19th C. In 1854, in Paris, Dugat and Chidyàq published their Grammaire française à l'usage des Arabes de l'Algérie, de Tunis, du Maroc, de l'Egypte et de la Syrie. They wanted to provide the first grammar of the kind. However, they did not know that in Egypt, Khalïfa Mahmûd Effendi had already published his own grammar in Instructions aux drogmans. Generally speaking, Dugat and ChidyAq's work appears as a translation based on material taken from the grammatical literature produced at that time, with, in addition, a few Arabic-related contrastive creations embedded in the text, and also a list of familiar phrases and a model of grammatical analysis — not included in the text. Considering the richness of the local tradition, the grammatization effort was almost limited to adaptation and translation. There was no question whatsoever of any transfer from the Arabic grammatical tradition. It became therefore naturally necessary to try and contrive appropriate Arabic equivalents for the French terminology, examples and paradigms. The task was all the more arduous as the authors had used up all the classical Arabic paradigmatic resources as well as the Arabic traditional terminological potential. The use of dialectal paradigms and the neologisms in the area of terminology show how the need for a bilingual grammar, even if it only means a simple practical grammar, cannot be reduced to the information provided by the target language grammars. Transcription is another hot issue which these grammars cannot adequately address and unfortunately, the authors have indeed done very little in this respect.