British 18th-Century Orientalism and Arabic Dialectology

William Price of Worcester and his “Dialogues in the vulgar arabick of Morocco” (1797)

Bibliographic Data

ID3955411
AuthorsAraceli González Vázquez (0000-0003-4241-9347, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), Montserrat Benítez Fernández (0000-0002-8103-1428, Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Year2016
Volume43
Issue1-2
Pages61-97
Publication date2016-06-28
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistoriographia Linguistica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0302-5160 • E-ISSN: 1569-9781
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/hl.43.1-2.03gon
OpenAlexW2483325630
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited24

This article examines a relatively unknown 18th century European source on Moroccan Arabic. It is the article entitled "Dialogues on the vulgar Arabick of Morocco", published in London in 1797 by William Price (1771-1830), a self-taught linguist and orientalist from Worcester, England. Price's work is one of the few European texts predating 1800 focused on Moroccan Arabic, and providing some information about this linguistic variety. As we explain, Price obtained these "Dialogues" from "some natives of Barbary", who happened to be in London. In the first four sections of the article, we examine the life and works of William Price, we place his activities as an expert in Arabic and other of the so-called "Oriental languages" in the context of 18th century British Orientalism, and we analyse the contents of the "Dialogues" provided in his article. These "Dialogues" consist of a conversation between two interlocutors who are taking a stroll in a walled coastal town of the Moroccan Atlantic strip. The fifth section of our contribution is a linguistic dialectological analysis of both the Arabic and Latin character transcriptions of Moroccan Arabic provided by Price. We analyse different issues concerning the transcriptions given, and we focus our linguistic study on phonological, morphological and syntactical issues

Arabic · Archaeology · Art · Character (mathematics · Context (archaeology · Conversation · Dialectology · Linguistics · Literature · Modern Standard Arabic · Orientalism · Variety (cybernetics · Computer Science · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Mathematics · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub