ON THE ARABIC LANGUAGE. &jfl with in the course of that route, but that the Arabic is spoken by the intelhgent part of the people, and the Muhamedan religion is known and followed by many ; their writings are uniformly in Arabic.

It may not be improper in this place, seeing the many errors and mutilated translations which appear from time to time, of Arabic, Turkish and Persian papers, to give a list of the Muhamedan moons or lunar months, used by all those nations, wiiich begin with the first appearance of the nev moon, that is, the day following, or sometimes two days after the change, and continue till they see the next new moon ; these have been mutilated to such a degree in all our English translations, that I shall give them, in the original Arabic character, and as they ought to be spelt and pronounced in the English character, as a clue whereby to calculate the correspondence between our year and theirs. They divide the year into 12 months, which contain 29 or 30 days, according as they see the new moon ; the first day of the month Muharam is termed Ajei\ (j\j Ras Elame, i. e. the beginning of the year. As we are more used to the Asiatic mode of punctuation, that will be observed in these words.

Muharam l-svt Asaffer \ B B