This contribution aims at presenting the arguments produced by Arabic grammarians in the discussion on the ẓarf. By providing different viewpoints, the paper addresses various aspects of the issue, focusing in particular on its definition(s) and features, as well as its collocation within the overall Arabic grammatical system.

The objective of this paper is the Arabic edition and the English translation of the Dissertation on thirst (الكلام في العطش), an anonymous text included in the miscellaneous manuscript nº 888 of the Royal Library of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial in Madrid (Spain). This small treatise describes what thirst is, the types of thirst that exist, the causes why hydroponics are averse to water, the reason why diabetic people are continuously thirsty, the causes why people with fever are thirsty, the reason why some foods produce thirst and others do not, and so on. The whole manuscript is composed of fourteen works, written by the same copyist along 170 folios under the general title The book of medical and philosophical curiosities and utilities (كتاب النكت والثمار الطبية والفلسفية) and their subject are curious matters that are generally out of the span of most works on these two branches of knowledge.

It is difficult to give an unambiguous answer for the question presented in the title. J.B. Glubb considered himself to be a friend of Arabs and the Arab issue. At the same time he was a loyal officer of the British Army. He did not see any contradiction in this. J.B. Glubb began his work in the Transjordan Emirate in 1931. In the beginning he commanded the border guard made of Bedouins and since 1939 the whole army of Transjordan, namely the Arab Legion. During World War II he considerably developed these armed forces. In 1946 Transjordan gained independence. Despite this J.B. Glubb maintained his command over the Arab Army until 1956. In 1948 he commanded the army during the conflict with Israel that was coming into being. During his military service he attempted to care about the interests of the House of Hashimites. Basically, he associated the Arab issue with the interests of this house. He believed that it was possible to permanently combine Arab interests viewed in that perspective with the influence of the British in the Middle East. Such reasoning turned out to be an absolute misconception. The officer was becoming more and more hated by a large part of Arabs. For many he was a symbol of being enslaved by the British. His reasoning of the Arab issue was becoming an anachronism. Eventually, he became a nuisance also for the Hashimites. Therefore, in march 1956 young king Husayn took the command from him and removed him from Jordan. Despite such ending of his military and political career one must admit that he was one of more interesting figures of the late British Empire.

This study analyzes the conditional structures in the Spoken Arabic of Siirt, focusing on a series of aspects such as the topic of the sentences in such syntactical structures, the conditional markers, the verbal patterns and preverbal particles employed for introducing the conditionals and a compositional analysis of the conditional clause, with focus on the distinction between the real, open, generic, habitual and hypothetical conditionals, among other known types of the structure under study.

Manuscript number 888 of the Collection of Arabic manuscripts of the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo of El Escorial (Spain) contains a small treatise composed by physician and pharmacologist ʿĪsā b. Māssah al-Baṣrī (9th century). This work offers a detailed description of different causal agents that originate the sexual impulse and its culmination, the coitus. The treatise enumerates and interprets the physical factors that conform man’s sexual response, which is viewed as a purely physiological process, as well as the cultural and psychological factors that shape and modulate the sexual preferences of each individual.

The aim of this article is to present and review the research methods employed in Laura Gago Gómez’s recent study, Aproximación a la situación sociolingüística de Tánger-Arcila: variación léxica y grafemática (2018). Moreover, this article intends to evaluate the possibility of applying the methods of Hispanic research on lexical availability to Middle Arabic texts, after considering what kind of Middle Arabic texts should be taken into account for this purpose.

This article is a presentation of the EtymArab© project, a start-up (“zero”) version of an etymological dictionary of Modern Standard Arabic. Taking the etymology of some generosity-related lexical items as examples, the study introduces the reader to the guiding ideas behind the project and the online dictionary’s basic features.

The purpose of the paper is the attempt to point one of the most important aspects of the cultural contact of the Poland and Arabic countries with the consideration of the historical perspective. The author assumes that the language is the basic carrier of such contacts and also the main area of the mutual influences. Therefore, she discusses the Arabic and Polish relations mostly on the level of the translation of the literary and scientific output of both sides, as well as the linguistic interference mainly in the aspect of the lexical borrowings. The author quotes many examples of such linguistic contacts and underlines their great meaning in the existence and development of other types of relations: political, commercial, and cultural.

This article is a presentation of the EtymArab© project, a start-up (“zero”) version of an etymological dictionary of Modern Standard Arabic. Taking the etymology of some generosity-related lexical items as examples, the study introduces the reader to the guiding ideas behind the project and the online dictionary’s basic features.

This article shows that Classical Arabic expresses verbal number. Arabic, of all the Semitic language family, meets the typological tests of the languages expressing verbal number. In addition, I will show that Classical Arabic provides a morphological verb form to express number. I will, however, show that for the form to express verbal number it requires a combination of morphological and semantic conditions. Without which the designated form does not express number, but expresses transitivity or the transfer of agency. These conditions are: form II must come from a root that has a form I, form I must be the transitive meaning of the root and the root must express an instant action. Form II, therefore, does not exclusively express number. Verbal number in Arabic is conditional. However, I will also propose that when form II verb expresses number, it does not express the transfer of agency.

This article is a description and comparison of Polish and Arabic taboo-based intensifiers in terms of both the semantic domains from which they are derived and their level of desemanticization. For this objective, four domains were selected: (1) death, (2) religion, God, and demons, (3) sexuality, and (4) family. Within those domains an array of linguistic forms were analysed with the aim of examining to what extent they retained traces of the original meaning. Another question to elucidate is whether the transition from one category to another in the process of semantically-driven grammaticalization is accompanied by the loss of the taboo element of these lexemes.

This paper intends to present an semantic and cultural analysis of Rabī‛ Jābir’s novel Druzes of Belgrade. Published in 2011, the story deals with a period in Slavic history of the 19th century that parallels the reality of Middle East in the same time. The aim of the contribution is to examine the narrative context of historical events in the hero’s life which are narrated primarily through the juxtaposition of historical facts. Distinctions that are made between the real and the imaginary in the novel are bound to mystify – perhaps even mask – the historical and cultural relationship between Arab and Slavs. The writer is not only involved in producing the story of the mutual Arab – Slavic (co)existence within the Ottoman empire in Lebanon and Balkan as well, but is equally intent on providing the story behind the (hi)story. As a mode of representing reality the analysed literary work isn’ t neutral; it presupposes system of moral values which underlies the Arab Christian hero’s factual statements connected with the powerstructure and power-relations of the Ottoman society the protagonist lives in. Between history and narrative literature exists a relationship of complementarity that can only enrich and deepen reader’s understanding of a given culture and society. The narrative representations of historical facts in the novel Druzes of Belgrade are semantic and philosophical operations and as such can be misrepresentations according to Rabī‛ Jābir’s literary tendency in a specific historical and intellectual setting.