Simplified Grammar of Arabic, Persian and Hindustani Review

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Simplified Grammar of Arabic, Persian and Hindustani ReviewThis 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 and letters), which I found easier to read). And if you actually need the Persian and Hindustani grammars, you really can't beat it. As they say, you can beat the author, but you can't beat his price. :-)Simplified Grammar of Arabic, Persian and Hindustani OverviewWith just a few hours of diligent study, this concise and practical book will enable students to analyze sentences in all 3 languages. Alphabets, numerals, verb parts, and tenses are given for each language, along with English equivalents, pronunciations, and explanations for forming compound words. Technical terms, arbitrary rules, and old classifications into declensions and conjugations are excluded.

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