Some Egyptian Words in Mīḫā’īl Ṣabbāġ’s Treatise on the Dialects of Syria and Egypt

As is known, Mīḫā’īl Ṣabbāġ’s Risāla on the spoken Arabic of Syria and Egypt written in Paris in 1812 is one of the earliest sources on colloquial Arabic in general. Though Ṣabbāġ was a Palestinian born in ʿAkka, he spent a rather long time in Egypt and certainly knew Egyptian Arabic. The last chapter of the Risāla is about loan-words, words ‘distorted’ in the colloquial either phonetically or/and semantically. Although his lexical list gives only a limited idea of the Egyptian Arabic vocabulary of the end of the 18th century, Ṣabbāġ’s list is an important source for the historical study of the spoken Arabic lexicon.