After giving the foregoing translation, it behoves me to inform the
intelligent reader, that I wrote a letter to Mr. Bowdich,
communicating to him my observations on several notes, transmitted
to him by Sir William Ouseley, on the manuscript of which the
foregoing is a translation, in which I informed him, that in
decyphering the Arabic manuscript, I had observed the Oriental or
Asiatic punctuation; knowing that Mr. Bulmer had not letters with
the occidental punctuation. Several observations I made, respecting
the Arabic manuscripts which could not be elucidated here without
the Arabic type. I shall, therefore, omit them, and conclude by
observing, that in translating this manuscript, two gentlemen
(Arabic scholars) had translated _akkadan Fie Asfeena_, "two maids
in the ship;" which words I have translated, "were tied or bound in
the vessel:" the word _akkadan_ being the preterite of the verb
_akkad_, to bind. I was not surprised to hear that _one_ translator
had made such an interpretation; knowing that incredible errors
have been frequently committed by professed Professors in the
Hebrew language as well as in the Arabic. But when I heard, as I
did, that another Arabic scholar had given a similar
interpretation, I must confess that I was not a little surprised.
However, a circumstance soon after unravelled the mystery; for I
discovered that these two gentlemen, at a loss no doubt to
412 ascertain the meaning of _akkadan_, had referred to Richardson's
Arabic Dictionary, wherein the word is quoted to signify, in a
figurative sense, a virgin. _In a figurative sense!_ In translating
an ill-written, illiterate, and ungrammatical manuscript, these two
translators had had recourse to _rhetorical figures_, and actually
substituted a trope for what was a verb, generally used in the
West, signifying "to bind!"
As it has been asserted in the following extract, that my
translation of the foregoing manuscript differs _only in a trifling
degree_ from that of Mr. Abraham Salamé, I here insert my answer to
that assertion, leaving the intelligent reader to determine,
whether they are alike or materially different.
_Extract from The Times, 3d May, 1819_.