Howell’s A Grammar of the Classical Arabic Language

Author

Mortimer Sloper Howell

About this project

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

Mortimer Sloper Howell (Wikipedia entry) published his A Grammar of the Classical Arabic Language from 1880–1911.

It has more than 4000 pages printed across 7 books. The scanned PDFs are hosted at: https://archive.org/details/howellarabicgrammar2013.

This Quarto book aims to make his work more navigable.

Here is a summary breakdown of the parts and sections into the individually bound books:

  • Volume 1 (Part 1, pp. 1–1813)
    • Book 1 (Part 1, Fasciculus 1):
      • Frontmatter
      • Introduction (§ 1, pp. i–xliii)
      • Part 1: The noun (Chapters 1–4, §§ 2–158, pp. 1–498)
      • Notes (pp. 1A–88A)
    • Book 2 (Part 1, Fasciculus 2):
      • Part 1: The noun (Chapters 5–6, §§ 159–233, pp. 499–861)
      • Notes (pp. 87A–134A)
    • Book 3 (Part 1, Fasciculus 3):
      • Part 1: The noun (Chapters 7–11, §§ 234–312, pp. 862–1422)
      • Notes (pp. 131A–189A)
    • Book 4 (Part 1, Fasciculus 4):
      • Part 1: The noun (Chapters 8–17, §§ 313–401, pp. 1423–1813)
      • Notes (pp. 189A–223A)
  • Volume 2 (Parts 2–4, pp. 1–1850)
    • Book 5 (Part 2 and Part 3):
      • Part 2: The verb (§§ 402–496A, pp. 1–282)
      • Part 3: The particle (§§ 497–624, pp. 283–735)
      • Notes (pp. 1A–30A)
    • Book 6 (Part 4, Fasciculus 1):
      • Part 4: The common processes (Chapters 1–10, §§ 625–730A, pp. 736–1622)
    • Book 7 (Part 4, Fasciculus 2):
      • Part 4: The common processes (Chapter 11, §§ 731–759, pp. 1633–1850)
      • Appendix (pp. i–xxvii)
      • Notes (pp. 29A–181A
      • Index to references to the Quran (pp. i–xxvii)
      • Index of proper names (pp. i–cxxxvi)
      • Index of subjects (pp. i–liii)
      • Final additions and corrections (pp. 1–9)

For links to the individual sections, I build upon the work done by Aasim Iqbal (جزاه الله خيرًا) published on his site and hosted at https://archive.org/details/AI2_reuploads2.

For an interesting read on Howell’s methodology vis-a-vis contemporary trends in the Western study of Arabic grammar, see:

  • Jean-Patrick Guillaume, “Deux grammaires de l’arabe à contre-courant: A Grammar of the Classical Arabic Language de M. S. Howell et la Grammaire arabe composée d’après les sources primitives de D. Vernier,” in Documenter et décrire les langues d’Asie: Histoire et épistémologie. https://books.openedition.org/shesl/10369?lang=en

Another interesting general read:

  • Carolyn G. Killean, “The development of western grammars of Arabic,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, vol. 43, no. 3, 1984. https://doi.org/10.1086/373081

How to use this web-book

Linking to a specific page

In order to link to a specific page within a chapter, append ?page= followed by the page number to the URL. The page number is the one listed on the horizontal progress bar on archive.org.

For example: https://adamiturabi.github.io/howell-navigator/content/1-03-0.html?page=179

This opens page 179 of Book 1 according to the numbering of archive.org (which more-or-less corresponds to the page number of the PDF). This happens to be printed page 6.

There is no bounds checking, so you’ll have to make sure you’re linking within the right chapter/book.

Notes regarding the text

  • Numbers in square brackets in running text, for example “[402]”, are a cross-reference to that section number.
  • Howell’s own opinions are within brackets.

Other high quality scans and OCR

Maybe try running Tesseract OCR (with eng+ara language tags), or a cloud OCR to digitize.