CARDAHI (Qardāhi), GABRIELE. - B. in Fajtrūn (Lebanon) on 20 Feb. 1845, d. in Rome on 7 Nov. 1931. He entered the Aleppine Maronite Order in 1861 and completed his higher studies in the schools of Propaganda Pide, where he subsequently taught Arabic and Syriac from 1875 to 1920. He was procurator abbot in Rome for the patriarch and the Order (1878).
He wrote: a Treatise on Arabic-Italian Grammar (Rome 1872). After more than 30 years of labor, he also compiled Lobāb al-lobāb (“the best part of the quintessence”), a Syriac, Arabic, and Latin dictionary. While revising and lithographing it, he died at the fifteenth letter. The remainder was revised by P. Sfair. He published two Syriac works: Paradisus Eden del Sobense (Beirut 1889) and Liber columbae del Barebreo (Rome 1898). In addition, al-Kans at-tamīn, seu Liber thesaurī de arte poetica Syrorum (ibid. 1875), with an anthology and biographical notes; al-Iḥkām (“the well-made work,” ibid. 1880), Syriac morphology, which later appeared in an improved edition under the title Iḥkām al-Iḥkām (“clarification of the well-made work”); al-Lobāb (“the quintessence”), a Syriac-Arabic dictionary in 2 vols. (Beirut 1887–91), at a time when no work of this kind existed at all; al-Manāhīg (“the luminous ways,” Rome 1903), Syriac syntax.