 He is most famous for his advocacy on behalf of codifying the spoken Lebanese language, as a competency distinct from Standard Arabic, to be written in a modern modified Roman script consisting of 36 symbols that he deemed an evolution of the Phoenician Alphabet.Although he was a gifted Arabist, producing some of the masterpieces of modern Arabic belle lettres in Standard Classical Arabic, his most exquisite works remained in his "native language," in what he referred to as the "Lebanese language.