Summary
This article discusses four 19th-century textbooks for teaching Egyptian Arabic to foreigners: Nolden’s Vocabulaire français arabe (1844), Zenker’s Vocabulaire phraséologique français-arabe (1854, published under the pseudonym Barthélémy), Sacroug’s The Egyptian Travelling Interpreter (1874) and De Vaujany & Radouan’s Vocabulaire français-arabe (1887). These books display remarkable similarities. They contain, among other subjects, a vocabulary, a grammar, useful Arabic phrases and Egyptian weights and measures. Zenker, Sacroug and De Vaujany & Radouan copied extensively from Nolden’s book without referring to the original source. However, these three textbooks are not exact copies (or, in the case of Sacroug, not an exact translation) of Nolden’s book: although the authors took Nolden’s Vocabulaire as their basis, they also considerably reworked it and added extra materials. In this paper, the contents of the four textbooks are compared in order to determine how the authors treated Nolden’s work, what they added and how they improved it.