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321 321 Notes 1 Buṭrus Yūsuf Ḥawwā: one of a group of Lebanese merchants living in London, on whom al-Shidyāq depended for financial and moral support during his third sojourn there, between June 1853 and the summer of 1857, during which period he was also visiting Paris to oversee the printing of Al-Sāq; Ḥawwā provided al-Shidyāq with employment as a commercial agent in his offices. 2 “that house” (hādhā l-bayt): i.e., either the Ḥawwā family or the trading house it owned. 3 “the oddities of the language, including its rare words” (gharāʾibi l-lughah wa-nawādirihā): works on oddities and rarities of the “classical” or literary Arabic language form a well-established genre of Arabic letters, originally intended to clarify the use of unusual words in the Qurʾān and hadith. 4 “morphologically parallel expressions” (ʿibārāt muraṣṣaʿah, from tarṣīʿ, literally, “studding with gems”): a device used in rhymed prose (sajʿ), e.g., ḥattā ʿāda taʿrīḍuka taṣrīḥan wa-ṣāra tamrīḍuka taṣḥīḥan (“until your obscurity reverted to plain statement and your deficient rendering became sound”). 5 “substitution and swapping” (al-qalb wa-l-ibdāl): on the evidence of his work devoted to the topic, Sirr al-layāl fī l-qalb wa-l-ibdāl, the author includes, under qalb, not only palindromes (the conventional definition of the term; see Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey, Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, 2 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 2:660) but also the substitution of one letter in a word by another without change of meaning (see, e.g., Sirr 46, bāḥah and sāḥah (“open space, plaza”)); by “swapping” the author means variation of the dots used to distinguish certain consonants over an identical or nearly identical ductus to produce different, related, words. 6 Unless otherwise noted, definitions added by the translator have been taken, here and throughout the translation, from Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Fīrūzābādhī (= Fīrūzābādī), al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿah al-Ḥusayniyyah, 1344/1925–26) (see Glossary), from which only one of what are frequently several possibilities has been chosen. 7 Muntahā l-ʿajab fī khaṣāʾiṣ lughat al-ʿArab: this work is also mentioned by the author in his Sirr al-layāl fī l-qalb wa-l-ibdāl (Mattityahu Peled, “Enumerative Style in Al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq,” Journal of Arabic Literature, vol. 22, no. 2 (1991), 132); it was multi-volumed and 322 322 Notes may have been lost in a fire (Mohammed Bakir Alwan, Aḥmad Fāris ash-Shidyāq and the West (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1970), app. B). 8 i.e. “space for the avoidance of falsity.” 9 The author’s implicit claim appears to be that the uncommon “second” or “augmented” form of the quadriliteral verb is associated with intensity. 10 Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505): a prolific polymath, much of whose 500-work oeuvre compiles material taken from earlier scholars. 11 Al-Muzhir fī l-lughah: the full title of the work is Al-Muzhir fī ʿulūm al-lughah wa-anwāʿihā (The Luminous [Work] on the Linguistic Sciences and Their Branches). 12 Aḥmad ibn Fāris (d. 395/1004), known as al-Lughawī (“The Linguist”), wrote on most areas of lexicography and grammar. It may be that the author’s choice of the name “Aḥmad” on his conversion to Islam was an act of homage to this scholar. 13 i.e., the author does not regard such a straightforward figurative usage as a distinguishing characteristic of Arabic. 14 By “the Fāriyāqiyyah” the author has been generally assumed to mean the Fāriyāq’s wife, but Rastegar makes the point that, “while the noun is feminine, it is not simply a feminization of his name (which would be Fāriyāqah). Fāriyāqiyyah should more correctly be translated as ‘Fāriyāq-ness,’ although as a grammatical formulation, it is feminine. Within the text, it is not always clear that it refers to his wife (although at times it clearly does)” (Kamran Rastegar, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-century Arabic, English, and Persian Literatures, 105– 6). The Fāriyāqiyyah does...

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