le-children, brought up from early years among the grown-up men of the
house or tent, learn more from their own parents and at home than is
common in other countries; reading and writing are in most instances
thus acquired, or rather transmitted; besides such general principles
of grammar and eloquence, often of poetry and history, as the elders
themselves may be able to impart. To this family schooling too are due
the good manners, politeness, and self-restraint that early distinguish
Arab children. In the very few instances where a public school of a
higher class exists, writing, grammar and rhetoric sum up its teachings.
Law and theology, in the narrow sense that both these words have in the
Islamitic system, are explained in afternoon lectures given in most
mosques; and some verses of the Koran, with one of the accepted
commentaries, that of Baidawi for example, form the basis of the
instruction. Great attention is paid to accuracy of grammar and purity
of diction throughout Arabia; yet something of a dialectic difference
may be observed in the various districts. The purest Arabic, that which
is as nearly as possible identical in the choice of words and in its
inflections with the language of the Koran, is spoken in Nejd, and the
best again of that in the province of Suder. Next in purity comes the
Arabic of Shammar. Throughout the Hejaz in general, the language, though
extremely elegant, is not equally correct; in el-Hasa, Bahrein and Oman
it is decidedly influenced by the foreign element called Nabataean. In
Yemen, as in other southern districts of the peninsula, Arabic merges
insensibly into the Himyaritic or African dialect of Hadramut and Mahra.
(See SEMITIC LANGUAGES.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--Lieutenant Wellsted, _Travels in Arabia_ (Lond., 1838);
"Narrative of a Journey to the Ruins of Nakeb el Hajar" (_Jour. R.
Geog. Soc._ vii. 20); Carsten Niebuhr. _Travels through Arabia_
(transl. into English by Robert Heron, 2 vols., Edin., 1792); John
Lewis Burckhardt, _Travels in Arabia_ (2 vols., Lond., 1829); _Notes
on the Bedouins and Wahabis_, (2 vols., Lond., 1830; in German,
Weimar, 1831); C.J. Cruttenden, _Journal of an Excursion to Sana'a,
the Capital of Yemen_ (Bombay, 1838); A. Sprenger, _Die alte
Geographie Arabiens als Grundlage der Entwicklungsgeschichte des
Semitismus_ (Berne, 1875); Sir Richard F. Burton, _Personal Narrative
of a Pilgrimage to El Medinah and Meccah_ (Lond., 1855); W. Roberts