Yusuf al-Maghribi was an Egyptian writer (d. 1616), who wrote a volume on the spoken Arabic of early 17th century Egyptians entitled Dafʿ al-iṣr ʿan kalām ahl Miṣr, “Removing the burden from the speech of the Egyptians.” (Writing in a idiolectical form of Classical Arabic infused with Egyptian words, he nonetheless viewed spoken Egyptian as inferior). His was one of the first studies of spoken Arabic, and one of the only sources that exists describing spoken Arabic before the 1800s and Edward Lane’s Manners and Customs. Most excellent that al-Maghribi was interested in recording spoken language, for it lets us see how the spoken language has changed over several centuries. It would have been nice to have a few lengthy, transcribed, voweled passages of an Egyptian’s speech, but collected words will have to suffice. As an example, al-Maghribi records that the Egyptians were saying izzayak to mean “how are you” at least 4 centuries ago.

He collected some local poetry and wrote some of his own, mostly punning off of Arabic verb forms and double entendres. I found this gem, a mawwal in which the first word of each line is the reverse of the last word. al-Maghribi was apparently especially proud of this, because he had never seen anyone do such a thing with four-letter roots (which themselves aren’t too common). He called it maḥbūk al-ṭarafayn or “tightly woven from both sides:

مَن منّ بالوصل لو عارض كما نمنم

مَلْمَلَ فؤادى و مالي الكل قد لمْلَم

مَسْمَسَ حسودي بوصله لي و له سَمْسَم

مَزْمَزَ بشربه مِن القهوة و لي زَمْزَم

“The one who granted the union resisted it like he embellished
He made my heart restless, and did not gather everything for me
My envier confused me with his union with me and ran to him
He sipped his drink from the coffee and murmured to me”

A badass concept in Arabic wordplay, and somewhat unique to Arabic (well, Semitic languages) because of the way consonantal roots work. The poem seems a bit nonsensical, if only because al-Maghribi was compelled to use only those four-letter roots whose inverses exist. He ends up having to cheat a little bit anyway: man manna in the first line is really a pronoun plus a geminated verb, and not a quadriliteral, re-duplicated verb.

I found this through the doctoral dissertation (which includes a pdf of the Arabic text) of Liesbeth Zack (available online) entitled Egyptian Arabic in the seventeenth century: a study and edition of Yusuf al-Magribi’s Daf’ al-isr ‘an kalam ahl Misr.