Footnote 206:[ (return) ] The African Jews find it very difficult in speaking, to distinguish between shim and sim, for they cannot pronounce the sh, ش but sound it like s س ; the very few who have studied the art of reading the language, have, however, conquered this difficulty.
It is difficult for any one who has not accurately studied the Arabic language, to imagine the many errors which an European commits in speaking it, when self taught, or when taught in Europe. This deficiency originates in the inaccuracy of the application of the guttural and synonymous letters.
The ain ع and the غ grain cannot be accurately pronounced by Europeans, who have not studied the language grammatically when young. The aspirated h, and the hard s, in the word for morning (sebah), are so much like their synonymes, that few Europeans can discern the difference; the one is consequently often mistaken for the other; and I have known a beautiful sentence absolutely perverted through an inaccuracy of this kind. In the words rendered Hatred and Harvest, the two synonymes of س and ص or s hard and s soft, are indiscriminately used by Europeans in their Arabic conversations, a circumstance sufficient to do away the force and meaning of many a sentence.
The poetry as well as prose of the Arabians is well known, and has been so often discussed by learned men, that it would be irrelevant here to expatiate on the subject; but as the following description of the noblest passion of the human breast cannot but be interesting to the generality of readers, and, without any exception, to the fair sex, I will transcribe it.
"Love
beginneth in contemplation, passeth to meditation; hence proceeds desire; then the spark bursts forth into a flame, the head swims, the body wastes, and the soul turns giddy. If we look on the bright side of love, we must acknowledge that it has at least one advantage; it annihilates pride and immoderate self-love; true love, whose aim is the happiness and equality of the beloved object, being incompatible with those feelings.
"Lust is so different from true love
, and so far from a perfection, that it is always a species of punishment sent by God, because man has abandoned the path of his pure love."