Introduction to Koranic and Classical Arabic: Key to Exercises

by Wheeler M. Thackston

Key to Exercises for W.M. Thackston's Introduction to Koranic and Classical Arabic.

Genres: Language, Linguistics, Reference, Nonfiction, Islam

69 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr. (born 1944) is an Orientalist and distinguished editor and translator of numerous Chaghatai, Arabic and Persian literary and historical sources.
Thackston is a graduate of Princeton's Oriental Studies department, where he was a member of Princeton's Colonial Club, and Harvard's Near Eastern Studies department (Ph.D., 1974), where he was Professor of the Practice of Persian and other Near Eastern Languages since 1972. He studied at Princeton under Martin Dickson and at Harvard with Annemarie Schimmel. Thackston retired from teaching at Harvard in 2007.

Reviews

[Jacob Andrews]

I have only read through the book and copied the vocab and paradigms. In 2015 I will complete the exercises.

Very, very good textbook. Old-school- the way you learned Latin, not the way you learned French. No putting off grammar or taking breaks to learn how to order coffee.

[Liam Porter]

This is a very old-school grammar book.

Throughout the book, the three root consonants of "F-'-L" (the most wide-ranging three-consonant root in Koranic Arabic, meaning "do/make" as a verb and "act/verb" ) are transformed with a frightening diversity of vowel patterns into...

...the noun "cases" of Arabic: nominative, accusative and genitive (familiar for learners of German: e.g. the word "act" in the phrases "the act was done", "enact the act", and "the act of somebody")

...and, as a verb, not only into the familiar perfect, imperfect, passive, imperative and subjunctive moods, familiar to learners of European languages (e.g. the verb "act" in the phrases "he has acted", "he is acting", "it was acted upon", "act now!" and "I don't know if he acted or not"), but also the "jussive" mood, which is a special case used with the phrase "let's" i.e. "let's act now".

In summary, a vowel-template can be applied to each of these transformations of the three-consonant root, "F-'-L", in order to transform that root into a functioning word. That word might end up sounding like "tafa''ala", infa'ala, munfa'il, yafta'il, yanfaala, fa''ala, yufa'alu, fa''i, yufa''aa, and so on and so on and so on. These transformations are, however, not uniform across all three-consonant roots, and therefore the author devotes chapter upon chapter into systematizing these variations on a general theme, in order to iron creases of logical imperfection out of the strictly deductive approach, so to speak.

If the word "generated" from "F-'-L" is a noun, then it must obey rules of agreement according to number and gender. If the noun appears alongside a second word, then rules of agreement according to that noun-phrase's precise meaning (e.g. "the final act" "a final act", "that final act", "the act of finality", "that act of finality" and so on and so on) must be observed regarding the appearance or none-appearance of the word "the".

Long tables of all these variations summarize bewilderingly diverse options for self-expression for a book titled an "introductory/elementary grammar". The book seems to have, as its mission, the goal of ensuring that if you read it, and are unable to read a sentence of the Koran without a single mistaken vowel, that the author will not be to blame. It seems churlish to criticise a grammar book for being "pedantic", but I have read many grammar books in my time and this is a real classic of the "overly-pedantic book on grammar" genre.

Frankly, this book was the opposite of an "introduction", and far from "elementary" indeed. It fails to define its grammatical categories (such as "genitive" or "jussive") so that the reader is expected to memorize complicated patterns of vowels for the sake of a distinction she has not yet understood (without relying upon outside reference material).

It should be said that the teaching of Arabic grammar has always had a reputation for pedantry and highly detailed classification of these fine distinctions into "algebraic"-like formulas, and so the author, Wheeler M. Thackson, is only following what is regarded as "proper form" for a book on Arabic grammar. Still, the style of the thing is still defiantly formal and lifeless.

The structure of the book involves pages of translation exercises that, though I did not complete, I cannot imagine anyone but accomplished experts completing, for they are so dull and artificial. They are trained on subject-verb agreement and would require constantly flipping back and forth between the "glossary" appendix and the main text in order to "deduce" the correct translation of an English phrase.

It must be said that this style of translation-exercise was a standard of such grammar books back in the 40s and 50s - notably in the Teach Yourself series. I find it, personally, extremely uninviting and pedagogically questionable. This book was copyrighted in 1994.

The best advice I can give you, if you must read this book, is to skip the tables entirely and to read the sentences that are given as examples to illustrate those tables: these are given in Arabic script, a romanized transcription and, finally, an English translation-gloss. Sadly, the author does not include these English translation-glosses for the specially chosen excepts from the Koran. These would have been very useful, if they had not been merely pasted onto the end of the later chapters.

So, in the end I cannot recommend this book to anyone but those who are masters of written (AND spoken) Koranic Arabic already. It was quite useless to me, as a beginner.

[Christopher]

This is a textbook of Koranic and Classical Arabic (not Modern Standard Arabic; the grammar largely overlaps but the lexical differences are sizeable) and it works. At least, this is the book that helped me finally crack Arabic after many years of wanting to learn it, and already some three-quarters through this textbook I was able to very slowly work my way through real Classical Arabic texts like Ibn Hawqal and Ibn Khaldun. Thackston presents forty chapters, each with a couple of new grammatical concepts, followed by some new vocabulary and then Arabic–English and English–Arabic exercises. There is a complete vocabulary at the end of the book, as well as useful appendices like all the ways of forming the plural of nouns.

Those beginning the study of Arabic might be daunted by the fact that its script does not normally show short vowels, and Thackson teaches through such unpointed script from the very beginning. The successive introduction of new material is so cleverly organized, however, that this was no obstacle. In fact, when I picked up another Classical Arabic textbook to use its exercises as a supplementary workbook, I was downright annoyed by the vowel pointing that it provided as hand-holding! I’m looking forward to eventually reading Thackston’s Syriac textbook that uses the same approach.

It is difficult for any one Arabic textbook to provide the substantial drilling in verbal inflection that learning this language requires; the learner will need to find additional exercises elsewhere, and one can’t really hold that against his textbook. Also, the way that vocabulary is presented here works well enough for completing the textbook, but for a real mastery of Arabic one will need to find flashcards organized differently somewhere else (or painstakingly make them oneself).

There are only two real flaws to Thackston’s book. Firstly, he derives all his material from the Qur'an, except for some hadiths in an appendix. It may be that this book was initially intended solely as a course of Koranic Arabic, and “Classical Arabic” was appended later in the process. It would have been nice to also get some reading exercises from e.g. Kalila wa dimna or the Arab geographers. I quickly grew bored by the reading passages as they are repetitive, on the same limited themes.

Secondly, there are a great many typos in the key to exercises. For example, one word is presented among the new vocabulary in a lesson, but the answer key demands that the reader use a synonym that hasn't been taught yet. Or an exercise in the book directs you to use a singular subject on the verb, but the answer in the key was written with a plural subject. This sloppiness is never enough to impede learning, but it happens often enough to be annoying.

[Jalaluddin Abdullah]

Although I read till pg. 252, the rest was the verb structure, vocabulary, word lists, etc. I will finish this review after my examination due tonight.