Arabic Grammatical Tradition Research Articles

Anachronistic bias in the study of Arabic grammatical tradition

Abstract One of the most obscure and most frequently commented on texts in Arabic grammatical tradition is the opening formulation in its earliest extant book, Sībawayhi’s al-Kitāb, concerning the tripartite division of parts of speech. For the third part of speech, the particle, around which the present article revolves, Sībawayhi uses a complex term, whose head is ḥarf, a term which is commonly used by itself by later grammarians for this part of speech. This article revisits the question of whether the term ḥarf by itself denotes “particle” in al-Kitāb, alongside the denotation “word”. Following Weiss’ article, published more than a hundred years ago, it will be argued that ḥarf does not denote “particle” in al-Kitāb, though occurrences thereof may refer to particles, and that scholars who ascribe the later denotation “particle” to ḥarf in al-Kitāb do so due to an anachronistic bias.

Ahmed Sudi Bosneviʼs Commentaries on Ibn Ḥāğibʼs Grammatical Works al-Kāfiya and al-Šāfiya

Before the famous commentaries on the classical works of Persian literature, Ahmed Sudi Bosnevi wrote in Ottoman Turkish language commentaries on al-Kāfiya and al-Šāfiya, the works on Arabic syntax and morphology written by the famous Arab grammarian, Ibn Ḥāğib. The main purpose of this research is to explore and analyse different aspects of Sudiʼs commentaries on al-Kāfiya and al-Šāfiya, to give an insight into these hitherto unstudied manuscripts and to present Sudiʼs specific way of commenting by translation and description of passages from the original texts of the commentaries. In addition to this, the paper presents the educational and scientific path of Ahmed Sudi Bosnevi and his role as a muderis who tried to improve the teaching process by writing commentaries on the textbooks that were part of the Curriculum in Ottoman madrasas. Likewise, this paper investigates the significance of the original texts of al-Kāfiya and al-Šāfiya in the Arabic grammatical tradition.

Arab linguistics, Arabic linguistics, and language ideology

Taking as its point of departure Michael Carter’s discussion of the problematic relationship between the Arabic grammatical tradition and modern linguistics (1987), this paper seeks to outline a set of pathways for dealing with this relationship from the perspective of language ideology in so far as it relates to the notion of social identity. The paper investigates this ideologically mediated link of language to society in the Arab(ic) context by problematizing the notions of language myths, the native speaker, mother tongue and native language, speech-community and native-language community, as well as the notion of universal and middle-range theory in ways that challenge some of the received “dogmas” in modern linguistics and privilege the native linguistic tradition. The paper does not deny that similarities do exist between these two approaches, but it eschews the debate that took place about the nature of these similarities in the 1990s in favor of a perspective that recognizes the embedding of knowledge about language in society and the importance of double hermeneutics in understanding this embedding.

The Greek death of Sībawayhi and the origins of Arabic grammar

AbstractSībawayhi, the founder of the Arabic grammatical tradition, was said to have died in Persia of sorrow after losing to Kufan rivals in a competition in Baghdad. The first part of this article demonstrates the artifice of Sībawayhi's biography, his death tradition in particular, and the stakes involved in its elaboration in early Islamic culture. The second part argues that the tradition of his death was based on the model of Homer's death, which can be shown to have circulated and been creatively adapted in contemporary Syriac historiography. The third part considers the consequences of Sībawayhi's Greek death for the old question of the influence of Greek on early Arabic grammar.

Unnecessary Necessity

A survey of the Arabic grammatical tradition is not about Arabic alone. It is about scholarly inquiry and debate, diglossic languages, and their contribution to the evolution of language and linguistics.

Grammars of Classical Arabic in Judaeo-Arabic

Abstract This article presents an overview of medieval Classical Arabic grammars written in Judaeo-Arabic that are preserved in the Cairo Genizah and the Firkovich Collections. Unlike Jewish grammarians’ application of the Arabic theoretical model to describing Biblical Hebrew, Arabic grammars transliterated into Hebrew characters bear clear evidence of Jewish engagement with the Arabic grammatical tradition for its own sake. In addition, such manuscripts furnish new material on the history of the Arabic grammatical tradition by preserving otherwise unknown texts. The article discusses individual grammars of Classical Arabic in Judaeo-Arabic and tries to answer more general questions on this little known area of Jewish intellectual activity. An analysis of the corpus suggests that Jews who copied and used these texts were less interested in the intricacies of abstract theory than in attaining a solid knowledge of Classical Arabic. Court scribes appear to have been among those interested in the study of Classical Arabic grammar.

Semantic and Formal Underlying Levels in Arabic Grammatical Tradition: The Case of Exceptive Sentences

It is customary in modern scholarship to classify exceptive sentences such as mā qāma 'illā zaydun 'no one stood except Zayd' (the so-called al-istiṭnā' al-mufarraġ) as containing a restored general term (mustaṭnā minhu), that is, to posit for the abovementioned sentence an underlying structure such as mā qāma 'aḫadun 'illā zaydun. Moreover, it has occasionally been claimed that this view was also held by Arab grammarians. However, the writings of Arab grammarians present a much more complicated picture. In this article three different analyses of al-istiṭnā' al-mufarraġ will be discussed: whereas the first is completely distinct from the foregoing analysis, and the third shows remarkable similarity with it, it is on the second analysis, which posits an underlying general term, but only at the semantic level, that our discussion will concentrate.

"Five" as a typological number in the medieval Arabic grammatical tradition

In the Arabic grammatical tradition several categories comprising exactly five members can be found, e.g., the types of “meaningful things”, of definite nouns, of tanwīn, of definite article, of tawābiʿ etc. Given the importance of the number ‘five’ in Islam, it is natural to ask whether these categorizations are affected by the symbolical meaning of that number. This article examines some of these categorizations in order to check the extent to which they are linguistically or theoretically justified, and whether they use ‘five’ as a typological number. In order to answer these questions, the fivefold divisions are tested for consistency and the surrounding discourse is investigated.

A historical overview and annotated bibliography of the studies on the Arabic grammatical tradition in al-Andalus

Arabic grammatical studies in al-Andalus have never drawn much attention in the two fields of Arabic grammatical thought and al-Andalus. However, a tradition of studies goes back to the beginning of the 20thcentury and, after some notable contributions between the 1980s and the 2000s, it is now witnessing a renewal in interest and approaches.The present historical overview and annotated bibliography of relevant research up until mid-2018 aims at providing a comprehensive, chronologically organised state of the art, which will help to identify new trends and possibilities for further research, thus facilitating future contributions to this field.

Systematizing the Description of Arabic: The Case of Ibn al-Sarrāj

Abstract This paper will focus on the Arabic grammatical tradition and, in particular, on the new arrangement, in the 4th/10th c., of grammatical matters already elaborated in the first centuries of Islam. With this aim in mind we will take into consideration two representative grammatical treatises of the 8th c. and the 10th c.: Sībawayh’s Kitāb and Ibn al-Sarrāj’s al-Uṣūl fī l-naḥw, which both represent watershed moments in the history of the Arabic grammatical tradition. Abū Bakr ibn al-Sarrāj’s philosophical training is obvious in the way he approaches the subject through the precise description of single items and in the laboured logic of the subdivision of his treatises. He follows the principle of “comprehensive subdivisions” (taqāsīm) borrowed from the logic he had studied under the direction of al-Fārābī. Ibn al-Sarrāj’s method of organizing and introducing linguistic matters will be contrasted with the approach of the father of Arabic grammar, Sībawayh, who wrote – two centuries earlier – the most comprehensive description of Arabic.

Origine et finalité du langage dans le moyen âge islamique

This research, issued from a doctoral seminar at the French Institute of Damascus (IFPO - Institut Francais du Proche Orient) organized by the authors and Professor Pierre Lory (IFPO / EPHE - Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes), aims at inquiring upon the issues related to language during the Islamic Middle-Ages. The two articles explore two dimensions of language, i.e. two different perspectives of the nature and scope of the language: the first, theological and, the second, mystical. Theology and Sufism, although they appear distant and separated from each other, share the same degree of attention to the phenomenon of human language. The first part of the article is devoted to the Mutakallimūn’s discussion on the origin of language and the theological issues related to it. The discussion about the origin of language in the kalām milieux is analyzed on one side in its diachronic perspective, and via the primary sources comparative analysis, on the other. This approach will show how the two main key concepts of tawqīf and muwāḍa‘a are embedded in a strict theological context. The second part of the article will be devoted to the mystical approach on language. The analysis takes into account the mystical and ṣūfī interpretation of grammar of the Ṣūfī master, ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Qusayrī (d. 465/1072) throughout his grammatical works: an accurate reading of which allows to grasp the mystical interpretation of grammar (naḥw) that goes beyond the mere linguistic dimension of the Arabic language. Moreover, from the analysis of al-Qusayrī’s grammatical works a new interpretation of language inscribed into the relation between man and God will arise. Finally, the two articles undertake a sources’ analysis aiming at reconsidering the role of language (the Arabic language) aside from the Arabic grammatical tradition’s boundaries. Reconsidering the role of language as a core issue in its theological and mystic contexts shows how the phenomenon of language intervenes within man’s relationship vis-a-vis the other and God.

Eighth-century Iraqi grammar: A critical exploration of pre-Halilian Arabic linguistics

This learned work is the accumulated harvest of more than twenty years of profound research, as shown by the inclusion in the book's bibliography of numerous publications on the subject by the author, Rafael Talmon. The subject at hand is the reconstruction of the Arabic grammatical tradition in its earliest phase up to the time of the most famous grammarian of Arabic, Sibawayh (d. ca. A.D. 796), author of al-Kitab, “the Book,” and his teacher al-Khalil ibn Ahmad (d. between 777 and 791), author of the lexicographical Kitab al-Ayn. The discussion was triggered by Michael G. Carter in a few thought-provoking publications dating from the 1970s in which he identified Sibawayh and his immediate teachers (besides al-Khalil, Yunus ibn Habib [d. 798]) as the first real systematic grammarians of Arabic. In Carter's view, Sibawayh had a group of enthusiastic but still amateurish grammarians in mind when reference was made, twenty-two times, to naḥwiyyūn in his Kitab. Talmon could not and would not accept the idea of a sudden creation of Arabic grammar in free space and became engrossed in approaching this subject matter from various angles, analyzing both grammatical and historiographical aspects of the early history of the Arabic grammatical tradition. In his previous monograph, the voluminous Arabic Grammar in its Formative Age (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), originally intended to be a mere chapter of the book under review here, Talmon deals exclusively with al-Khalil's role in the genesis and early development of the Arabic linguistic tradition. This was basically done to determine which parts of Kitab al-Ayn can be positively attributed to al-Khalil in order to compare al-Khalil's views with Sibawayh's and with those of other early grammarians from both the Basran and the Kufan schools to support the “Old Iraqi School” hypothesis, which is central in the present work.

Grammar and Logic in Syriac (and Arabic)

In order to advance the debate surrounding the origins and background of the Arabic grammatical tradition, we offer an exploration of the Syriac grammatical tradition with a focus on the interdiscipli-narity it shared with the study of logic. The essay demonstrates that the essentialist view of grammar adopted by many Greek thinkers led to the working assumption that logic and grammar were virtually the same discipline, and that the Syrians shared this view of things and transmitted it to Arab scholasticism. A number of philosophers and grammarians are explored with a view to demonstrating this point. Scholasticism in the Late Antique Near East was a cross-linguistic phenomenon which never respected the boundaries we like to draw between Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, and Arabic worlds. Arabic grammar grew out of this background, while being driven by its own internal genius.

Discovering Arabic structures from texts: what a formal analysis can tell us

We present a new approach to discover Arabic language structures from electronic texts. The method is based on a distributional analysis inspired from Arabic Grammatical Tradition (AGT) and Harris, and uses a minimum knowledge about the Arabic language. The idea underlying this research is that in the absence of a formal model of Arabic language and freely usable Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for this language, what we can learn about the structures of this language only by a formal analysis of raw corpora written in it. By the word 'formal' we mean, here, that the analysis is based only on the form of the written texts and uses only a minimum knowledge about the language. This knowledge consists in some minimal hypothesis inspired from AGT and that never refers to the meaning of words, utterances and texts. On the contrary, we do not yet know these structures, but we want to discover them formally by automatic algorithms.

Des usages variables de la doxographie dans la tradition grammaticale arabe

Although the Arabic grammatical tradition never acknowledged its historicity, it nevertheless gathered a vast amount of informations about its past. These informations appear in two different textual genres : bio-bibliographic collection on the one hand, doxographical works on the other. After a brief survey of the former, this paper adresses the latter, through three particular cases, Ibn al-Anbārī’s Inṣāf, Ibn Mālik’s Tashīl and Astarābāḏī’s Šarḥ al-Kāfiya.

The Term Ism in Medieval Arabic Grammatical Tradition: A Hyponym of Itself

The term ism in the Arabic grammatical tradition is a hyponym of itself. In other words, it can refer to the entire class of words belonging to the part of speech ism, or to just a subclass of this part of speech. In the latter sense it always stands in opposition to one of three other subclasses of this part of speech, viz. ṣifa, maṣdar and ẓarf; the subclass defined by the former is more focal than the one referred to by each of the latter. This interpretation resolves a difficulty stemming from cases where ism and one of the three other terms refer to two mutually exclusive classes, although the latter always refers, in the contexts in question, to a subclass of the part of speech ism.

Un homme nommé ’Af‛al : Sībawayhi et les incertitudes du métalangage

The ‘ pattern-words’ (mitāl, plural amtila), i. e. fictive words designed to represent the morphological patterns of real words, are among the first tools created by the Arabic grammatical tradition, and form an important element of its metalanguage. Sībawayhi (d. 797) devotes a chapter of the Kitāb to their status and their use, in the form of a discussion between himself and his master al-Xalīl ; this discussion, however, if far from being conclusive, as it constantly mixes between three different – and to a point mutually exclusive – lines of argumentation. These uncertainties are due, all things considered, to the tension which pervades all Arabic grammatical texts, between a strictly integrationist attitude (pattern-words are words like the others, and should be treated as such), and the preoccupation with preserving their function as metalinguistic tools.

Two Types of Taqdīr? A Study in Ibn Hišām's Concept of 'Speaker's Intention'

AbstractThe term taqdīr is mostly used in Arabic grammatical tradition to refer to underlying structures, i.e. to sentences, forms etc. intended by the speakers but which differ from the sentences, forms etc. which they actually utter. This is also the sense modern scholars have in mind when discussing taqdīr. Yet the term proves to have a significantly wider extension, embracing also cases where it pertains not to underlying structures, but to properties possessed by constituents at surface structure, such as the syntactic functions they assume and the parts of speech to which they belong. Both usages of the term taqdīr, however, are derived from the single basic sense it conveys, viz. speakers' intention. This argument is illustrated in the present article through Ibn Hišām's writings.

RAFAEL TALMON, Eighth-Century Iraqi Grammar: A Critical Exploration of Pre-Halilian Arabic Linguistics, Harvard Semitic Studies, 53 (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2003). Pp. 361. $44.95 cloth

This learned work is the accumulated harvest of more than twenty years of profound research, as shown by the inclusion in the book's bibliography of numerous publications on the subject by the author, Rafael Talmon. The subject at hand is the reconstruction of the Arabic grammatical tradition in its earliest phase up to the time of the most famous grammarian of Arabic, Sibawayh (d. ca. A.D. 796), author of al-Kitab, “the Book,” and his teacher al-Khalil ibn Ahmad (d. between 777 and 791), author of the lexicographical Kitab al-Ayn. The discussion was triggered by Michael G. Carter in a few thought-provoking publications dating from the 1970s in which he identified Sibawayh and his immediate teachers (besides al-Khalil, Yunus ibn Habib [d. 798]) as the first real systematic grammarians of Arabic. In Carter's view, Sibawayh had a group of enthusiastic but still amateurish grammarians in mind when reference was made, twenty-two times, to naḥwiyyūn in his Kitab. Talmon could not and would not accept the idea of a sudden creation of Arabic grammar in free space and became engrossed in approaching this subject matter from various angles, analyzing both grammatical and historiographical aspects of the early history of the Arabic grammatical tradition. In his previous monograph, the voluminous Arabic Grammar in its Formative Age (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), originally intended to be a mere chapter of the book under review here, Talmon deals exclusively with al-Khalil's role in the genesis and early development of the Arabic linguistic tradition. This was basically done to determine which parts of Kitab al-Ayn can be positively attributed to al-Khalil in order to compare al-Khalil's views with Sibawayh's and with those of other early grammarians from both the Basran and the Kufan schools to support the “Old Iraqi School” hypothesis, which is central in the present work.

Studies in the Linguistic Structure of Classical Arabic

In 1997 Naphtali Kinberg died, one of the best specialists in Classical Arabic and the Arabic grammatical tradition. His main work, the index on Farra''s Ma'ani l-Qur'an, which appeared in the Brill series Handbook of Oriental Studies (1996) will remain one of the most important reference tools for future research in this field. In this volume the editors have collected a number of articles in which Kinberg demonstrates his ability to combine modern linguistic insights with the theories of the Arab grammarians. The result is a series of detailed studies on such aspects of the structure of Arabic as conditional sentences, adverbial clauses, and the particles lakin and qad. These articles have been published before, sometimes in relatively inaccessible journals. They are now made available in a collective volume, and made accessible by an index that will facilitate using them in research on Arabic linguistics. This volume also contains an important study that was part of Kinberg's legacy, the edition and translation of a treatise on the pronunciation of the d ad by the grammarian 'Ali al-Mansuri (12th/18th century). This treatise is an important document on a hitherto neglected aspect of Arabic phonetic studies. It discusses the phonetic status of the sound that was regarded by the Arabs themselves as the most characteristic sound of their language.