3

JOURNAL

OF THE

AMERICAN ORIENTAL SOCIETY.

Syrian Songs, Proverbs, and Stories; collected, translated, and annotated.-By HENRY MINOR HUXLEY, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

INTRODUCTION.

DURING the summer of 1900, while living in Bhamdûn, a small village of the Lebanon, to the east of Beirût, I collected a number of songs and proverbs typical of the locality. My Arabic teacher, Sitt Rahil Jörjis Tâbit, first obtained these from the Christian natives, and then, at her dictation, I wrote them in the dialect of the region; in this vernacular they appear in the following pages. The stories are written in the dialect of

the Christians of Beirût.

ضهر

In writing the vernacular in Arabic characters it is impossible to avoid certain inconsistencies. In every case I have written the consonants as they are pronounced: and not loo and not. I have thought best, however, not to write the Arabic phonetically when this would introduce confusion and prevent the recognition of a word by students of the classical language. Thus we write JJ, and not the phonetic form, which might be written. The transliteration, on the other hand, has been written strictly in accordance with the actual pronunciation. By so doing, I have, of course, been obliged to depart from the principle which should govern the transliteration of the classical language: namely, that in reading the trans

literation, an Arabist should immediately be able to see how the word is spelled in the original. To quote the above example again, while writing & J in the Arabic, in transliteration I

have written kollu.

In some of the funeral songs, it will be noticed that at times the metre is decidedly defective. I have, however, left these songs, with all their imperfections, exactly in their original form, for only so will they show the actual compositions of the fellaḥîn. In the same way, the stories are in the exact form in which they were first told. In the translations my primary object has been literalness and clearness, rather than literary. excellence.

The Arabic text has been used as the basis in numbering the lines. The last word of a numbered line of Arabic text has the same number opposite the line in which this word occurs in the transliteration and the translation. For convenience of reference I have arranged the lines of the translations of the songs in the same relative positions occupied by the lines of the Arabic

text.

An attempt has been made in the Bibliography to give the titles of all books and articles which are of importance to the student of modern Arabic. I have tried to make the list of vernacular texts as complete as possible. Several of the dictionaries, grammars, and books of proverbs, deal with the classical language.

I desire to express my thanks to Sitt Rahil Jörjis Tâbit for her painstaking and conscientious help, without which my own work would have been impossible. To Professor Toy of Harvard University, and Professor Torrey of Yale University, I am under obligation for many valuable suggestions. I am indebted to Dr. Enno Littmann of Princeton University for his careful reading of the manuscript of the wedding songs, and to Sitt Rahil Halil Şalîbi of Montclair and formerly of Bḥamdûn, for a final reading of the Arabic manuscript. Finally, my thanks are due to Messrs. B. T. Babbitt Hyde, Clarence M. Hyde, V. Everit Macy, and I. Newton Phelps Stokes, by whose generosity I was enabled to carry on the work in Syria.

=b.

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TRANSLITERATION.

is used only when hemza occurs in the middle or at the end of a word.

t.

j. The soft French pronunciation of the letterj. Not the sound of dj found in many parts of Syria.

This symbol, used by Socin and others, seems superior to', which is used as the sign of the rough breathing in Greek. being a consonant, should, like the other consonants, have a symbol written on the line, and not merely a sign for breathing, written above the line.

When is not pronounced, its position is indicated in transliteration by '.