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A Handbook of Early Middle Arabic is a concise yet comprehensive survey of the field by Joshua Blau of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a leading authority on Middle Arabic and winner of the Israel Prize for linguistics in 1985. It was published in Jerusalem in 2002 in the Max Schloessinger Memorial Series.
The book brings together three things: a grammatical outline of the structure of Middle Arabic, annotated examples of its main varieties, and a glossary of every word that appears in the book. The texts cover Muslim, Christian and Jewish Middle Arabic, each shown through typical or noteworthy examples, some published here for the first time. Jewish texts receive special attention in their different spelling traditions, including samples from the Cairo Geniza and passages from Saadya Gaon's translation of the Pentateuch.
At 262 pages, it is a working reference for students and scholars of Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and Semitic languages.