Classical Arabic Research Articles

Tagging Classical Arabic Text using Available Morphological Analysers and Part of Speech Taggers

Focusing on Classical Arabic, this paper in its first part evaluates morphological analysers and POS taggers that are available freely for research purposes, are designed for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Classical Arabic (CA), are able to analyse all forms of words, and have academic credibility. We list and compare supported features of each tool, and how they differ in the format of the output, segmentation, Part-of-Speech (POS) tags and morphological features. We demonstrate a sample output of each analyser against one CA fully-vowelized sentence. This evaluation serves as a guide in choosing the best tool that suits research needs. In the second part, we report the accuracy and coverage of tagging a set of classical Arabic vocabulary extracted from classical texts. The results show a drop in the accuracy and coverage and suggest an ensemble method might increase accuracy and coverage for classical Arabic.

Grammatical construction of function words between old and modern written Arabic: A corpus-based analysis

AbstractThis paper argues that Arabic function words (FWs) vary in usage between old and modern Arabic, thus prompting an experimental investigation into their changeability. This investigation is carried out by testing classical Arabic (CA) in Arabic heritage language (AHL) texts – those labeled as archistratum – and the modern standard Arabic (MSA) of Arabic newspaper texts (ANT), each group of which contains randomly collected 5 million (M) word texts. The linguistic theory of the grammar of Arabic FWs is explained through the differences between CA and MSA, despite Arabic FW changes and the unlearnability and/or unusability of some FW constructions between in these two eras of Arabic usage. The dispersion/distribution of the construction grammar (CxG) of FWs and the number (n) of word attractions/repulsions between the two distinct eras is explored using the very latest and most sophisticated Arabic corpus processing tools, and Sketch Engine’sSkeEn gramrelsoperators. The analysis of a 5 M word corpus from each era of Arabic serves to prove the non-existence of rigorous Arabic CxG. The approach in this study adopts a technique which, by contrasting AHL with ANT, relies on analyzing the frequency distributions of FWs, the co-occurrences of FWs in a span of 2n-grams collocational patterning, and some cases of FW usage changes in terms of lexical cognition (FW grammatical relationships). The results show that the frequencies of FWs, in addition to the case studies, are not the same, and this implies that FWs and their associations with the main part of speech class in a fusion language like Arabic have grammatically changed in MSA. Their constructional changes are neglected in Arabic grammar.

Classifying and Segmenting Classical and Modern Standard Arabic using Minimum Cross-Entropy

Text classification is the process of assigning a text or a document to various predefined classes or categories to reflect their contents. With the rapid growth of Arabic text on the Web, studies that address the problems of classification and segmentation of the Arabic language are limited compared to other languages, most of which implement word-based and feature extraction algorithms. This paper adopts a PPM character-based compression scheme to classify and segment Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) texts. An initial experiment using the PPM classification method on samples of text resulted in an accuracy of 95.5%, an average precision of 0.958, an average recall of 0.955 and an average F-measure of 0.954, using the concept of minimum cross-entropy. PPM-based classification experiments on standard Arabic corpora showed that they contained different types of text (CA or MSA), or a mixture of the both (CA and MSA). Further experiments with the same corpora showed that a more accurate picture of the contents of the corpora was possible using the PPM-based segmentation method. Tag-based compression experiments (using tags produced by parts-of-speech Arabic taggers) also showed that the quality of the tagging (as measured by compression quality) is significantly affected when tagging either CA and MSA text. The conclusion is that NLP applications (such as taggers) should treat these texts separately and use different training data for each or process them differently.

RELATIVISATION IN ARABIC: NOUN PHRASE ACCESSIBILITY HIERARCHY

This article has three folded interrelated goals: first, to present a brief outline of relative clause typology, second, to introduce the assumingly universal Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) to relativisation, and third to show which functional positions specified on the hierarchy are accessible to relativisation in Arabic. It is concluded here that Classical Arabic (CLA) relativisation go deep on the scale because of resumptive pronoun strategy.

The Phonetic Inventory of Classical Arabic

The main concern of this paper is to examine the phonetic inventory of classical Arabic language. The consonants and vowels subsumed under this classical inventory are considered separately. Each segment is decomposed into its phonetic components, and classified in terms of the three phonetic criteria posited in the International Phonetic Alphabet chart, i.e. voicing, place of articulation and manner of articulation. Each consonant is further described in terms of other four additional formatives, viz. centrality, nasality, active articulator and passive articulator. Hence, consonants are analyzed on articulatory criteria.The set of the eight vowels in the language is examined in terms of the direct relation between the different tongue-lip positions and the various configurations of the vocal tract as resonance cavities. The indirect relation holding between the various tongue-lip positions and the eight different vowel qualities is established via the different shapes of the vocal tract. Hence, vowels are analyzed on auditory criteria. Two diphthongs, /ei/, /әu/ and six mono-phthongs (/i(i)/, /a(a)/, /u(u)/), are recognized in the language. The phonological value of the six simple vowels is triggered by vowel length as a distinctive feature, i.e. three short vowels and three long correlates. The phonemic significance of each C-segment is attested and proved via contrastive minimal pairs. Certain Arabic phonetic processes are considered. These processes include letter-based Arabic phonetics, emphasis, primary articulation secondary articulations, double articulation, distinctiveness, assimilated Sun-l, non-assimilated Moon-l and geminated consonants. This study paves the way to investigate the assumption that the phonemic system of classical Arabic comprises phonological consonants and phonetic vowels, as it is claimed by Rakas, M. (1981).

Resultative Predicate and Argument Structure: A Minimalist Approach

This paper investigates the semantic and the syntactic behavior of resultative predicates (RPs) in Classical Arabic (CA) and English. It highlights the differences between the universal properties of RPs (principles) and the language particular properties (parameters). The universal properties of RPs (principles) include Affectedness Condition and Direct Object Restriction. The parameters focus on the surface differences between English and CA with respect to the syntactic behavior and realization of RPs. The theoretical framework used here is Chomsky`s Principles and Parameters and the Minimalist Approach.

Suffering and Techniques of Poetic Resistance: Mohammed Mahdi al-Jawahiri's "In Jail" and W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts"

Suffering and Techniques of Poetic ResistanceMohammed Mahdi al-Jawahiri's "In Jail" and W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" Ahmed F. Khaleel (bio) Many critics and writers agree that the modern political, social, and cultural history of Iraq cannot be studied without referring to Mohammed Mahdi al-Jawahiri, Shaʿir al-ʿArab al-Akbar (the great poet of Arabs), a poet whose career offers insight into the major events of the twentieth century in Iraq. Al-Jawahiri (Najaf, 1899–Damascus, 1997) belongs to a family of renowned religious scholars. His father insisted on teaching him to become a Shiite clergyman. His childhood was a difficult one: while his friends were playing outdoors he was obliged to study classical literature, Shiite doctrine, and classical Arabic language. This exceptional education made him worthy of becoming a scholar at the age of ten, but when his father died shortly after, he found his chance to become what he desired: a poet. Al-Jawahiri is regarded as the last of fohūl ul-shiʿr (the masters of traditional Arabic poetry). This title has been attached to him mainly because he was the last neoclassical poet living in the modern age of Arabic poetry. It is significant to mention in this respect that al-Jawahiri was nominated more than once for the Nobel Prize for peace, not for literature, for dedicating most of his poetry to defending rights, supporting peace, and opposing tyranny and oppression. Al-Jawahiri wrote the poem "Fī al-Sijn" in 1937, while in jail. The study of this poem on the one hand is inspired by the necessity to provide an [End Page 95] analysis of prison writing as a genre that is central to the idea of the poetry of human rights. Prison is one of the pillars of suffering in the Arab world, especially the suffering of the individual. On the other hand, the poem stands as an example of individual suffering, the circumstances that pave the way for its happening, and the kind of outcomes that individual suffering and social apathy could bring forth. The metrical construction of this poem is al-kāmil al-tām (the perfect), which consists of eight syllables in each half line (iambic tetrameter). This verse form is usually very strict, but al-Jawahiri in this poem meant to break the rhythm of the lines, although he did not move from al-kāmil al-tām into another metrical verse form. This metrical construction provides a more flexible space for the employment of sounds and makes the poem suitable for tarnīm (chanting). The choice of this meter is perfect for reflecting the unchanging atmosphere of prison, whose monotony is often broken by the clinking of chains or the sounds of pain made by prisoners. The slight change in the rhythm also provides an irregular but familiar tone, such as: 1. [Mādhā turī] [du min al-zamānī] / [wa min al-raghā]['ibi wa al-amānī] [mustafʿilun] [mutafāʿilātun] / [mutafāʿilun] [mutafāʿilātun]1 (What further desires and wishes / Do you seek from life) 2. [Awa kullamā] [shārafta min] / [āmālika al]-[ghurri al-hisānī] [mutafāʿilun] [mustafʿilun] / [mustafʿilun] [mustafʿilātun] (Haven't you been offered / To see your dreams come true) ("Fī al-Sijn," 1,2) The change, as we notice from these two lines, can hardly be recognized, but by toning them one becomes better able to notice it and like it as well, because it breaks the rigidity of al-kāmil al-tām metrical form. Choosing to tone a sad poem might reflect how al-Jawahiri felt in prison and how this "toning" can offer to help him in this difficult situation. As a public poet whose country was controlled by colonization and its government too vulnerable to suppress corruption, Al-Jawahiri believed that legal action in this polluted environment would not lead to political, social, and economic reform. He expressed in a short poem he titled "Al-Adl" [End Page 96] (Justice, 1937) how big the gap was between law and justice: Laʿamruk inn al-ʿAdl lafzun adā'uh...

الكتابة الأدبية والتعدد اللغوي

Literary Writing and Multilingualism
 Plurilingualism constitutes fundamental characteristics of literary writing, and also constitutes important paradigms for the description of the language effects that found literary texts. We wish to study within the framework of this article the modalities of inscription and the meaning of multilingualism in the novel: the guardian of the shadows of Wasiny Laredj. We propose that despite the fact that the Guardian of the Shadows is written mainly in the Classical Arabic language, several clues signal to the reader that the text employs languages and levels of language other than the Classical Arabic of the text. This study proposes to identify these plurilinguistic elements in order to arrive at a formula that is representative of this fact in the literary text. The analysis will also examine how the paradigms of plurilingualism contribute to elucidating the question of the quest for identity in the literary text.

Arabic Dialects and Classical Arabic Language

Classical Arabic (CA) is known as the language of the Qur’an. This form of Arabic language has been used among the people of different tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. Relations between these tribes were based on trade, marriage, war and poetry competition. The speakers of the tribes in Arabia have used different Arabic dialects. However, the dialect of the tribe of Quraish must have been like Classical Arabic. The study aims to prove that these old dialects of these tribes have not become remote and archaic but they have ensured their existence and continued to be used in many parts across the Arab world. Moreover, the article will identify the old different dialects of Arabic language and their characteristics and how they are related to the modern dialects in various Arab regions, with the exception of the arabized and borrowed words. In other words, modern Arabic dialects are rooted in the old dialects of Classical Arabic.

Arabic Dialects and Classical Arabic Language

Arabic Dialects and Classical Arabic Language

Parallelisms in Arabic

Parallelism in Arabic is investigated through data from three Arabic varieties: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), Classical Arabic (CA), and (Yemeni) Adeni Arabic (AA). Parallelism in Arabic is examined at different linguistic levels: morphological and lexical, syntactic, and textual. Parallelism seems to be inherent and is more likely in writings that aim to convince or restate theses and topics. However, the occurrence of parallelisms is genre-specific, purpose-oriented, and situation/context-dependent. It is predictable in sermons, public speeches/addresses, and opinion writing. Apparently, parallelism, particularly beyond reduplication and lexical level, triggers resonance in the mind of the listener/reader, retaining the respective information in short term memory and thus marking it for emphasis.

Journalistic transgression against Classical Arabic via translation

Journalistic Arabic appears to be encroaching upon Classical Arabic language in many respects. The former seems to have been influenced by European languages via translation. New construct phrases and idiomatic expressions have come into existence and other classical syntactic structures ceased to exist in journalistic Arabic. The new syntactic modes of expression are not as strict as Classical ones. They seem conformed to the English thought habits and thus retain much less of the rigid Classical Arabic structural particularities. Thus journalistic Arabic is deemed more flexible than Classical Arabic, which enjoys a restricted formal scope of Arabic literary genres that bring about the poetic use of the language. Such use is unwelcome by the media, merely because the focus of the media writing is on communicating the message rather than presenting the aesthetic value of the expression. It is not the intention of the author here to promote Classical language to the detriment of the language of the media, but to show how deviant the modern journalistic language is in relation to the classical Arabic, the most revered and highly respected. This paper is thus an inquiry into the journalistic transgression against Classical Arabic via translation from European languages, especially English. This transgression is obvious in deviant passive structures, negative constructions, and literal translation of foreign idiomatic expressions. Each of these themes will be discussed, alongside representative examples to elucidate each point in question. The paper ends by discussing the repercussions of this study for journalists and their affinity with Classical Arabic.

Hybrid Part-Of-Speech Tagger for Non-Vocalized Arabic Text

Part of speech tagging (POS tagging) has a crucial role in different fields of natural language processing (NLP) including Speech Recognition, Natural Language Parsing, Information Retrieval and Multi Words Term Extraction. This paper proposes an efficient and accurate POS Tagging technique for Arabic language using hybrid approach. Due to the ambiguity issue, Arabic Rule-Based method suffers from misclassified and unanalyzed words. To overcome these two problems, we propose a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) integrated with Arabic Rule-Based method. Our POS tagger generates a set of three POS tags: Noun, Verb, and Particle. The proposed technique uses the different contextual information of the words with a variety of the features which are helpful to predict the various POS classes. To evaluate its accuracy, the proposed method has been trained and tested with two corpora: the Holy Quran Corpus and Kalimat Corpus for undiacritized Classical Arabic language. The experiment results demonstrate the efficiency of our method for Arabic POS Tagging. In fact, the obtained accuracies rates are 97.6%, 96.8% and 94.4% for respectively our Hybrid Tagger, HMM Tagger and for the Rule-Based Tagger with Holy Quran Corpus. And for Kalimat Corpus we obtained 94.60%, 97.40% and 98% for respectively Rule-Based Tagger, HMM Tagger and our Hybrid Tagger.

Testing the Limits of Anaphoric Distance in Classical Arabic: A Corpus-Based Study

One of the central aims in research on anaphora is to discover the factors that determine the choice of referential expressions in discourse. Ariel (1988; 2001) offers an Accessibility Scale where referential expressions, including demonstratives, are categorized according to the values of anaphoric (i.e. textual) distance that each of these has in relation to its antecedent. The aim of this paper is to test Ariel’s (1988; 1990; 2001) claim that the choice to use proximal or distal anaphors is mainly determined by anaphoric distance. This claim is investigated in relation to singular demonstratives in a corpus of Classical Arabic (CA) prose texts by using word count to measure anaphoric distance. Results indicate that anaphoric distance cannot be taken as a consistent or reliable determinant of how anaphors are used in CA, and so Ariel’s claim is not supported by the results of this study. This also indicates that the universality of anaphoric distance, as a criterion of accessibility, is defied.

Translation of Classical Arabic Language to English

Translation of Classical Arabic Language to English

Medial deictic demonstratives in Arabic

This paper investigates two different views concerning the number of deictic degrees of demonstratives in Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The first view claims that CA has a medial category of demonstratives in addition to proximals and distals; the second view postulates that there are only proximals and distals in CA. The study examines the dialectal origin of singular and dual CA demonstratives based on writings of ancient grammarians in addition to investigating the Semitic origin of these demonstratives. It is argued that the demonstrative system in CA is the result of a combination of two dialectal demonstrative systems: one of these had been used in Old ?ijaazi, while the other had been used in Old Tamiimi Arabic. Each of these dialects had only proximals and distals but no medials. Demonstratives in these dialects had dissimilar forms for distals. ?ijaazi distals had two suffixes attached to the proximal base, while Tamiimi ones had one suffix only. The presence of these different forms led grammarians representing the first view to the fallacy that demonstratives with one suffix are medials, while those with two suffixes are distals. However, the supposed medials are in fact the distals that were used in Old Tamiimi; their distance value is the same as that of Old Hijaazi distals.

The Extensive Construction in Contemporary Classical Arabic Language.

قاعدة التوسع إحدى القواعد التحويلية التي يبدو التركيب اللغوي من خلالها في صورتين: - الصورة الأولى: تسمى التركيب الأساسي أو الأصلي أو العميق. - الصورة الثانية: تسمى التركيب الموسع. والتركيب الموسع هو ما أضيف أو زيد على مكوناته الأساسية وحدات لغوية تعمل على توسعته واستطالته مهما كان موقعها منها. ويوسع التركيب المستقل في الفصحى المعاصرة بوسيلتين: - الأولى من داخله: وتكون عن طريق توسعة مكوناته وهي الكلمة أو العبارة. - الثانية من خارجه: حيث تتم إضافة عناصر موسعة إلى مكونات التركيب الأساسي، وهي المسند والمسند إليه، ومن هذه العناصر الظرف والجار والمجرور والمكملات والتركيب التعليلي، التي قد ترد متقدمة أو متأخرة عنهما أو متوسطة بينهما. ويتم توسعة الكلمة في الفصحى المعاصرة بالاعتماد على المصاحبة التي تؤدي دوراً أساسياً في تكوين الكلمات المركبة التي ترد للدلالة على أسماء الأماكن والهيئات والمؤسسات والدول والمصطلحات العلمية وغيرها. ومن أسباب توسعة العبارة في الفصحى المعاصرة: أ- تعدد الإضافات. ب- تنوع الصفات. ج- كثرة المعطوفات. د- كثرة المتعلقات الخاصة بمكونات العبارة. وقد وقع هذا البحث في مقدمة وتمهيد ومبحثين وخاتمة، ثم الهوامش والمراجع: وفي التمهيد عرضت لمفهوم المصطلحات الخاصة بالبحث. مثل الكلمة، العبارة، التركيب، البنية العميقة، البنية السطحية، التركيب الأساسي، القواعد التحويلية، التركيب الموسع. المبحث الأول جاء بعنوان "توسعة الوحدات البنائية للتركيب" كالكلمة والعبارة. المبحث الثاني جاء بعنوان: "توسعة التركيب". وفي الخاتمة عرضت لأهم نتائج البحث.

The Dual Distal Demonstrative in Modern Standard Arabic: Between Norms and Non-Canonicity

The system of the demonstrative pronouns in Classical Arabic (CA), on which that of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is based, is distance-oriented and has been described as a two-term (proximal-distal) or three-term (proximal-medial-distal) system. A characteristic feature of the subsystem of the distal demonstratives in CA was that it had a suffix indicating the gender and number of the addressee(s). Within the subsystem of distal demonstratives, the dual form has not been described in a unanimous way: authors do not agree as to its form, some give more than one, others do not mention the issue, while according to some descriptions this form does not exist at all. In MSA texts, the function of the dual distal demonstrative is, however, sometimes carried out by a form which according to CA rules should be used when a singular object is pointed to and two persons are being addressed. This means that some users of MSA have reinterpreted the CA indicator of a dual addressee, -kumā, as the indicator of the duality of the object pointed to.

‫أحمد باشا كمال فقيه الهيروغليفية العربي المصري‬ (Ahmed Kamal Pasha The Philologist of Egyption Hieroglyphs)

Ahmed Kamal Pasha is the clerk who wrote a lexicon which has not seen light because of the tendentious (unfair) orientalists. Ahmed Kamal Pasha is the first Arabic philologist who ascribed the Egyptian dialects to the Arabs throughout [Mystification (Slang)] and [philology]. This research displays the efforts of Ahmed Kamal Pasha and his ideology as philologist, and not as a linguist. This research explains the effect of [Orientale] on the Arab history; some were fair, others were tendentious and another group collected the important information for us. However, the destiny of the clerk, the Egyptian people and Arabs is that Dictionary fell in the unfair hands of Virth (British), Laco (French), and Reisner (American). Some rejected to publish and to print this Dictionary over the past 90 years. This Dictionary has recently returned to meet phenomenal attention by Arabs who know the classical Arabic language to reveal [Hieroglyphic] writings. (please note that this article is in Arabic)

Sensibility and Synaesthesia: Ibn Al-Rūmī's Singing Slave-Girl

This chapter explores the function of waṣf by dealing with the relation between verbal art and the musical art of gesture and singing in a medieval Arabic qaṣidah or ode from the ninth century A.D., which describes a singing slave-girl. It focuses on George Sawa's study of the theory and practice of musical performance in the classical Middle East. The chapter focuses on singing slave-girls by al-Jaḥiẓ, one of the most prominent classical Arab litterateurs. On the stage, the slave-girl sings before the audience, and the poet is not only one of them but also an observer of the whole drama. The poet combines the ṭarab effect of the song and the performance context for the purpose of con-. veying to us the audience's affective response. Kitab al-qiyan, of Abu ʿUthman ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Jaḥiẓ, one of the great masters of classical Arabic prose, offers us some brilliant insights concerning certain circumstances of singing slave-girls in the ?Abbasid era.