Abstract

Arab linguists have exerted efforts to study language through carefihl investigation and analysis. Therefore the historical contrastive approach has become a methodological requirement that focuses on studying the linguistic phenomenon that descend from the same origin. These approaches aim at examining the aspects of development that influence the Linguistic subject matter both formally (of Fomt) and semantically. Despite the fact that Arab scholars attempted to study the relationship between Arabic and other languages, Western linguists established this method in the Nineteenth century, The historical contrastive approach was adopted by several Orientalists among whom was Yacoub Bakr who concentrated on tarring Arabic utterances and both the syntactic and morphological systems of Arabic as hypothesis for his studies, Bakr also tried to locate Arabic among Semitic and other languages. He shed some light on some matters using the historical contrastive approach which enabled him to clarify some controversial syntactic issues. Bakr explained some linguistic Points in a way that contradicts the old syntacticians. Meanwhile. he tried to reconcile the viewpoints of the old syntacticians with the modem ones. He used to heed many of the orientalists opinions but he sometimes disagreed with them. Baker made tremendous linguistic efforts through introducing the material compiled in Arabic and Semitic dictionaries in order to compare and contrast the different studies conducted.