give you an example from Italian. The Germans have a word Gegend, meaning ‘country’, ‘region’, derived from gegen, ‘opposite’, because a country is that which lies opposite, which meets the eye. When the Germans invaded Italy and settled there, they found themselves surrounded by a Latin-speaking race, so they tried to speak Latin, and, like all people who speak a foreign language, they often translated idioms which were peculiar to their mother- tongue. Thus, when they wanted to speak of a country, they said contrate (from the Latin contra)-opposite, coining the word on the analogy of their own word Gegend. To-day you have the word contrada (our word country), which is as good Italian as the most aristocratically descended word of pure Latin origin.
SHEIKH: Sir, what you say is true. Perhaps for the reasons which you have stated, there would be no harm in writing the Egyptian language. But it cannot be. We cannot give up the written language because it is the language of the Koran, and if our children do not learn to write it, the study of the Koran will suffer.
CRITIC: Come, Sheikh, you will not maintain that the Arabic you write to-day-the Arabic of newspapers and books - is Koranic Arabic? The grammar may be mainly the same, but there is an enormous difference as regards style and vocabulary. The written Arabic of to-day is as different from that of classical times as the sorry language of a modern Athenian writer is from the Attic of Xenophon.
But, even if spoken Egyptian becomes the language of writing, what is to prevent your keeping up the Arabic of the Koran? In the village schools the children can still learn it by heart. In the other schools you can continue to teach it, as we teach classics in England. It has long been considered part of the accomplishments of an English gentleman to write verse and prose in correct Latin and Greek. You have much stronger reasons for making a sound1392 Minute of Dissent
