The legitimate fathers of speech errors

Abstract

Summary The history of speech errors is reviewed in the West and traced back to its origin in Medieval Arabic linguistics. It is claimed that Rudolf Meringer (1859–1931), the Austrian linguist was not the first scholar to start speech error studies. Some western as well as many Arab linguists were interested in speech errors long before him. It is claimed that Meringer may have been under the influence of Arabic books on speech errors since he thaught at the Orientalische Akademie in Vienna and was in touch with Orientalists interested in speech-error studies. The paper also points out how the interest of Arab linguists in this area emanated from their fear that such errors may lead to the corruption of Arabic and misunderstandings of the Qu’ān. Arab linguists collected speech errors made by educated and uneducated people from different parts of the Arabic-speaking world. Such errors were related to language use, social setting, and cultural factors. Linguistic explanations were also provided such as assimilation, substitution, nearness of point of articulation, anticipation, deletion, addition, and analogy as well as hypercorrection. This helped greatly in the development of empirical studies of phonetics, grammar, lexicography, dialects, the Arabic writing system, and scholarship concerning the Qur’ān.