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 be called a language and degrade it to the rank of a mere patois. All these arguments are usually based on a complete ignorance of the laws of philology and the history of other languages.

The retention of the written idiom is advocated on a variety of grounds - literary, political, religious. This elusive nature of the arguments brought forward will, perhaps, be best represented in an imaginary dialogue between a Sheikh and an English critic. The writer has had many such.

SHEIKH: Do you propose, sir, that we should write the common language, the Arabi darig? But that is impossible. It is not Arabic, it is not a language; it is a corruption of a language. It has no grammar, it is not fit to be used by educated people.

CRITIC: I will take your points one by one. You say the spoken language is not Arabic? Let us be quite clear, about terms. If by Arabic you mean the classical idiom, then of course modern Egyptian is not Arabic. It is no more Arabic than Italian is Latin. But all the same it is an Arabic language, just as French or Italian are Latin languages. However, in order to avoid confusion, I will refer to it in the future as ‘Egyptian.’

Your next point is that it is a mere corruption of a language. I prefer the word ‘development’. Of course, it is all the same really, but corruption contains a suggestion of censure. Everything in the world is in a state of constant decomposition and renewal - if you have studied philosophy at the Azhar, you have probably heard of the old Greek theory of flux. Language is no exception to this rule. Take any word in any language to-day, and from the point of view of the same language a few centuries before, it is a barbarism which would have made the delicate in such matters shudder. Call Egyptian corrupt, if you like, but do not imagine that the epithet implies anything discreditable or exceptional among languages. 1389 Minute of Dissent