8vo. viii, 298 pp., Latin text with some Arabic, +31 pp., of Arabic text, contemporary marbled boards, rubbed, red edges, contemporary note on front endpaper, previous owner’s inscription on title page, light soiling to top margin of pages 18-20 of the Arabic section, otherwise copy in good condition, Lugduni Batavorum, J. Luchtmans, Leyden, rare first edition, 1835.

Synopsis

First edition of an Arabic grammar by the Dutch professor of oriental languages Taco Roorda (1801-1874), followed by a lexicon based on the writer Al-Tha’alibi (961-1038) and an Arabic chrestomathy by P. Cool. A second edition appeared in 1858. Roorda’s grammar was published to replace Erpenius’s. Added at the end is an extensive review of the work by H.E. Weijers, originally published in De gids I (1837), but here apparently published as an offprint with new page numbers.
Taca Roorda ( 1801-1874), a Dutch Orientalist showed during his career as a Professor at the Institution for the Teaching of Linguistics, Geography and Ethnography of the Dutch East Indies at Delft, a college for the training of Dutch colonial civil servants, can be regarded as one of the most prominent
nineteenth-century representatives of the tradition of general grammar in the Netherlands. A theologian by education, he showed a keen interest in philosophy, and in the field of linguistics he had developed into an expert on several non-Indo-European languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Javanese).