Visual Influences on Arabic Linguistic Sciences

Abstract

Associated with reliance on vision unaided by hearing, tashif adversely affected several scholarly fields, especially grammatical study since a large part of its data originates in Qur'anic readings, prophetic tradition and poetry, all influenced by tashif. Further, because of concern with the analysis of linguistic usage, the grammarians' reliance on the written form of language was prone to errors in analysis due to the inherent deficiencies of any written system in representing spoken language. In Arabic linguistics, sarf (morphology) is the only branch in which analysis was largely made on the written form of words. However, Arabic, like most Semitic scripts, indicates consonants and long vowels as the skeleton of words to which short vowels and other markers may be added externally. Although this ‘skeletal’ writing of Arabic fairly reflects its spirit as a Semitic language, it greatly misled the grammarians. This article dwells on four types of morphological rules traceable in the tradition to visual influences. These are: hadf (elision), i‘lāl (vowel mutation), naql al-haraka (vowel transfer), and ibdāl (alternation).