---
title: "Teaching an Arabic Dialect to Non-Native — Al-Hamad 2024"
description: "The paper examines Tercüme-i Hediyye-i Hassân (\"The Interpretation of Ḥassān's Gift\"), a manuscript by the Ottoman author Ḥassān ibn Naṣūḥ ar-Rūmī…"
authors: ["Muntasir Fayez Al-Hamad", "Ali Benli"]
year: 2024
venue: "Folia Orientalia 61"
source: "https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/734"
doi: "10.24425/for.2024.152387"
licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Folia Orientalia)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/al-2024-hamad-teaching-arabic-dialect-non-native/"
---
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# Teaching an Arabic Dialect to Non-Native Learner in the Mid-Fifteenth Century Case Study: Al-Balāṭī Manuscript

**Authors:** Muntasir Fayez Al-Hamad, Ali Benli · **Year:** 2024 · **Venue:** Folia Orientalia 61 · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Folia Orientalia)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.24425/for.2024.152387) · [PDF](https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/download/734/554) · [DOI 10.24425/for.2024.152387](https://doi.org/10.24425/for.2024.152387) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4408620402)

**Citations:** 0 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper examines *Tercüme-i Hediyye-i Hassân* ("The Interpretation of Ḥassān's Gift"), a manuscript by the Ottoman author Ḥassān ibn Naṣūḥ ar-Rūmī al-Balāṭī from around 1445. It was written to teach spoken Arabic, mainly a northern Syrian dialect, to Turkish speakers planning to travel in Arab lands. The authors analyse the Ottoman Turkish copy held in Ankara (Text#1) and set it against a Persian-medium version (Text#2). They look at the author's stated motives and at how the book handles grammar, cultural content, topic choice and dialect mixing.

Al-Balāṭī deliberately sets aside the rule-based grammatical teaching common in his time. He teaches phrases inside everyday dialogues, translates them into Turkish, and finishes with a glossary grouped by topic. The paper presents this as an early, rough form of communicative teaching that responds to learners' practical needs. The manuscript also blends Syrian (Aleppo/Euphrates), Iraqi and Egyptian features with Fuṣḥā and shows some transfer from Turkish. This makes it a historical record of both Arabic dialects and fifteenth-century Anatolian Turkish.

## Key points
- **Three known copies:**
  - Ankara National Library A4870 (Text#1, Ottoman Turkish, the main source).
  - An incomplete Ottoman copy at Ankara University Library, Mustafa Cön Section, A349.
  - A Persian-medium copy at Istanbul University, FY 01153 (Text#2), dated 850/1445–1446.
- **Copying record:** the approved copy notes it was copied in Aleppo in 956/1549–1550.
- **Physical form of Text#1:**
  - 43 leaves in careful Naskh script.
  - Arabic is written in red and Turkish in black.
  - A catchword at the foot of each page links it to the next.
- **Version comparison:** comparing Text#1 and Text#2 produced over 2000 observations. The versions adapt localized content, for example replacing "Turkish" with "Persian" and "a Bedouin Turk" with "a man".
- **Teaching content:**
  - The introduction discusses language immersion, the role of translators, social differences in speech (farmer, Bedouin, judge), and why dialect is taught rather than Fuṣḥā.
  - The body lists verb conjugations form by form, each with a Turkish gloss.

## Interesting ideas
- Teach language through phrases placed in concrete everyday situations rather than through abstract rules, because the situation itself carries the meaning. — For Mova (answer): Group test items for the readers by situation (market, travel, prayer, greeting) so that comprehension failures can be traced to specific scene types.
- Present each paradigm one form at a time, with person and number made explicit by a gloss next to it (e.g. ʕaraftu / ʕarafnā / ʕarafta …). — For Mova (tokens): Build full paradigm tables with per-cell glosses as regression tests for the English morphology and lemmatizer, checking every inflected cell rather than sampled tokens.
- Tie speech varieties to social roles such as farmer, Bedouin and judge, so the learner sees that the same content is expressed differently depending on who speaks. — For Mova (frames): Add a speaker-register attribute to speech-act frames, so that the choice of politeness or formality can be explained by the role of the speaker.
- Two versions of one text differ mainly where culture-specific references were swapped for the target audience, so diffing parallel versions isolates the localized parts. — For Mova (back): When translating through the meta-world, mark culture-bound entities in the graph so that generation can deliberately substitute or neutralize them, as the Persian version did.
- End with a vocabulary list grouped by topic, which works as a small domain ontology supporting what the dialogues taught. — For Mova (world): Organize compiled lexical knowledge into situation-based topical clusters that can be matched to the scene a text describes, helping entity typing in the world model.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{alhamad2024teaching,
  title = {{Teaching an Arabic Dialect to Non-Native Learner in the Mid-Fifteenth Century Case Study: Al-Balāṭī Manuscript}},
  author = {Al-Hamad, Muntasir Fayez and Benli, Ali},
  booktitle = {Folia Orientalia 61},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.24425/for.2024.152387},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.24425/for.2024.152387}
}
```

- [← previous TAO at StanceEval2024 Shared Task: Arabic Stance Detection using AraBERT](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/melhem-2024-tao-stanceeval2024-shared-task-arabic/)
- [next → Team_Zero at StanceEval2024: Frozen PLMs for Arabic Stance Detection](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/galal-2024-team-zero-stanceeval2024-frozen-plms/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2024](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2024/page/5/)

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