ARABIC-L: PEDA: Gulf Arabic Response

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 14 Apr 1999
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: Gulf Arabic Response

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1)
Date: 14 Apr 1999
From: Mutarjm at aol.com
Subject: Gulf Arabic Response

Greetings.

Could you kindly post here, or e-mail privately to me, the publisher data,
ISBN and address for this new book < Hodder & Stoughton's new "Teach Yourself
Gulf Arabic" > so I might examine a copy?

I doubt that there are many other one-volume "teach-yourself" types of books
on Gulf Arabic (GA) available.

Bruce Ingham's jewel of a paperback, entitled "The Simple Guide to Customs
and Etiquette in Arabia and the Gulf States" has many social expressions and
amenities.

Sir Donald Hawley's (1978) paperback entitled "Customs and Courtesies of the
Gulf Region" is very good and extremely useful for most-probable social and
private occasions. While that fine book is now out of print, it is worth your
tracking down from used bookstores or libraries.

====================

A few locally-published "Gulf Arabic Made Easy"-style paperbacks I saw for
sale in some hotel bookstores in UAE in late 1995 were pretty shoddy and of
very limited usefulness (plus each work had its own tortuous transliteration
system).

Most of those works resemble the trash churned out during the 1970s OPEC-boom
era when there was a wave of books of the genre of "Learn instant Arabic for
your business success in the Gulf."

===================

Another candidate, although a multi-volume product is:

Hamdi Qafisheh's series of paperback texts on Gulf Arabic, which series
consists of:

o  Basic GA level

o  Intermediate GA level

o  Reference Grammar

Published in the 1970s-1980s by the University of  Arizona Press in Tucson,
Arizona, might be helpful, although they require considerable time to get
through reading plus getting familiar with their unique systems of
transliteration. Audiocassette tapes are available for the first volume
(Ordered separately from the U of AZ Press or Dept of NE Studies).

===================

There are several larger and more academically-rigorous (plus better
researched) books (most in English and several in Arabic) on Saudi Arabian
and Gulf Arabic dialects, but they are beyond the genre of "teach yourself."

===================

Hope this helps.

Khair, in sha' Allah.

Regards from Los Angeles,

Stephen H. Franke

E-mail: < mutarjm at aol.com >
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End of Arabic-L: 14 Apr 1999