English Sword with Arabic Inscription

[tom hyle]

Yeah, extremely vestigial (looks essentiall unusable in "true" wrapped finger fashion, though a finger might be rested upon it; there are, contrary to what many fencing masters teach, a variety of ways of holding smallswords); the clad ricassoe within the shell guard is tiny; 1800-1830 or so? The blade looks markedly similar to that on one of the final (so far...) evolutions of rapier; the lodge sword; a thin, narrow blade of lenticular or flattened-diamond section; very similar in the tip to older smallswords, but perhaps lacking the fortitude at the base to make one entirely comfortable in parrying other, heavier swords (such as sabres/broadswords). Your example is getting toward the vestigial stages of the weapon, though it's still probablywell suited for dueling against a similar sword, and is certainly capable of a very deadly thrust if sharp, though it looks to lack the stiffness of its ancestors.
Is that the foreign writing on the sheild? I wonder about the crescent on the shell; such Muslim symbolism is associated (I don't really know why) with some of the lodges and "societies"; this may actually be an early, transitional lodge sword.