Simplified Grammar of Arabic, Persian and Hindustani

I agree wholeheartedly with the positive reviews of the grammatical merits of the book. Its dry nature gives no hint of the many events that E. H. Palmer packed into a short life of 42 years, cut short by a tragic ending in the Arabian desert. To quote Wikipedia: In the close of the year 1871 he became Lord Almoner's Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University, married, and settled down to teaching. His salary was small, and his affairs were further complicated by the long illness of his wife, who died in 1878. He was called to the English bar in 1874, and early in 1882 he was asked by the government to go to the East and assist the Egyptian expedition by his influence over the Arabs of the desert El-Tih. He went to Gaza without an escort; made his way safely through the desert to Suez, an exploit of singular boldness; and was highly successful in his negotiations with the Bedouin. He was appointed interpreter-in-chief to the force in Egypt, and from Suez he was again sent into the desert with Captain William John Gill and Flag-Lieutenant Harold Charrington to procure camels and gain the allegiance of the sheikhs by considerable presents of money. On this journey he and his companions were led into an ambush and murdered (August 1882). Their remains, recovered after the war by the efforts of Sir Charles (then Colonel) Warren, now lie in St Paul's Cathedral. Palmer's highest qualities appeared in his travels, especially in the heroic adventures of his last journeys. His brilliant scholarship is displayed rather in the works he wrote in Persian and other Eastern languages than in his English books, which were generally written under pressure. His scholarship was wholly Eastern in character, and lacked the critical qualities of the modern school of Oriental learning in Europe. All his works show a great linguistic range and very versatile talent; but he left no permanent literary monument worthy of his powers. His chief writings are The Desert of the Exodus (1871), Poems of Beha-ed-Din (Ar. and Eng., 1876-1877), Arabic Grammar (1874), Jerusalem, the city of Herod and Saladin (1871), by Walter Besant and Palmer (the latter wrote the part taken from Arabic sources), Persian Dictionary (1876) and English and Persian Dictionary (posthumous, 1883); translation of the Qur'an (1880) for the Sacred Books of the East series, a spirited but not very accurate rendering. He also did good service in editing the Name Lists of the Palestine Exploration.

I'm sorry, but I havn't got up till now this and other English -Albanian dictionary, as a result I cannot write the necessary for you review. I order this to books for the second time and I'm not sure, that I'll receive it some day

A very valuable concise reference for someone interested in Arabic, Persian and Urdu grammars. Packed with useful knowledge.

this book is outstanding but a little complicated at time. unless you are a linguist or a language major of somesort, you might find this book a little confusing. The book is excellent and goes in great detail in each respectrive langaue and the differences in the other languages, but there is no basic phrases or vocabulary listings, etc. Overall good book for studying languages comparatively, but not recommended for a student or traveller or someone who is studying the language in depth.

This is the Dover, 2002 edition of this 1890 classic by E. H. Palmer. Despite being published almost 115 years ago by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Co., this is still one of the best concise grammars of Arabic I've seen. I only know the basics about Persian and Hindustani, and was most interested in the Arabic part. Except for being written in the same Arabic script (with some minor modifications), those two languages don't have much in common with Arabic, except for many lean words, since Arabic is a Semitic family language, and Persian and Hindustani are Indo-European languages. I did learn, though, that the alphabet for Hindustani is almost the same as for Arabic, except that Hindustani has Arabic letters with up to four dots over them, the maximum in Persian and Arabic being three.The book is only 100 pages long, but half of it is devoted to the Arabic grammar. It emphasizes the "algebraic" approach to the word root, which I found very helpful, and which the modern introductory grammars of Arabic by Ingle and Awde that I have don't seem to use. For example, using the letters X, Y, and Z to denote the tri-syllabic word pattern, the author gives the basic pattern for a root and then discusses how the variations on the root change the meaning. For example, the simplest verb form in Arabic is the pattern, XaYaZa. An example of a verb that meets that pattern would be the verb for "does," or fa:ala (the ":" denotes one of the glottal-type Arabic sounds). Katala (he killed) and dharaba (he struck) are other examples. One often reads that the triliteral root patterns are helpful in inferring and gleaning other knowledge about the words, but from my experience, still being a comparative beginner, this is something that doesn't become that helpful until one has reached the intermediate stage of study, although there are exceptions, such as in the pattern for adjectives that I mentioned above. But as the author's approach emphasizes the root patterns and their derivations more than the other books I have, that aspect of the language has become more apparent to me. In general, the author avoids technical grammatical and linguistic terms. The author includes some nice tables of the verb conjugations, such as the "Table of Derived Forms, " "Table of Forms of the Simple Verb," and a "Table of Broken Plurals." (There is no consistent way to form the plural of nouns in Arabic, so the best way is to just learn it with the word, as with the gender for nouns in French, German, and Spanish). There are also tables for numerals and ordinals.I only have one complaint about the book, which is that the print is a little faint or spotty occasionally, probably because it was reproduced from camera-ready copy from the original book, but considering the price is only nine dollars, it's a lot of value for the price. I also like the Arabic font better than the ones in several other modern Arabic books, which is somewhat more compact (less distance between consonants an