Table Of ContentThe Foundations of Arabic Linguistics
Studies in
Semitic Languages and
Linguistics
Editorial board
T. Muraoka, A.D. Rubin and C.H.M. Versteegh
VOLUME 65
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/ssl
The Foundations of
Arabic Linguistics
Sībawayhi and Early Arabic Grammatical Theory
Edited by
Amal Elesha Marogy
With a foreword by M.G. Carter
LEiDEn • bOSTOn
2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The foundations of Arabic linguistics : Sibawayhi and early Arabic grammatical theory / edited by Amal
Elesha Marogy ; with a foreword by M.G. Carter.
p. cm. — (Studies in Semitic languages and linguistics; v. 65)
iSbn 978-90-04-22359-2 (alk. paper)
1. Sibawayh, ‘Amr ibn ‘Uthman, 8th cent. 2. Arabic language—Grammar—History. i. Marogy, Amal.
PJ6101.S53F68 2012
492.7’5—dc23
2012007523
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters
covering Latin, iPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities.
For more information, please see www.brill.nl/brill-typeface.
iSSn 0081-8461
iSbn 978 90 04 22359 2 (hardback)
iSbn 978 90 04 22965 5 (e-book)
Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke brill nV, Leiden, The netherlands.
Koninklijke brill nV incorporates the imprints brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing,
iDC Publishers and Martinus nijhoff Publishers.
All rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke brill nV
provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center,
222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
COnTEnTS
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................ vii
Foreword ........................................................................................................... ix
List of Contributors ........................................................................................ xi
PART i
SĪbAWAYHi in THE KITĀB
The Term Mafʿūl in Sībawayhi’s Kitāb ..................................................... 3
Almog Kasher
Don’t be Absurd: The Term Muḥāl in Sībawayhi’s Kitāb ................... 27
Avigail S. Noy
Spatial Language in the Kitāb of Sībawayhi—The Case of the
Preposition fī/in .......................................................................................... 59
Mohamed Hnid
The Relation between Frequency of Usage and Deletion in
Sībawayhi’s Kitāb ....................................................................................... 75
Hanadi Dayyeh
PART ii
SĪbAWAYHi in HiS HiSTORiCAL AnD LinGUiSTiC COnTEXT
The Parsing of Sībawayhi’s Kitāb, Title of Chapter 1, or Fifty
Ways to Lose Your Reader ...................................................................... 101
M.G. Carter
Zayd, ʿAmr and ʿAbdullāhi: Theory of Proper names and
Reference in Early Arabic Grammatical Tradition .......................... 119
Amal E. Marogy
vi contents
yaqum vs qāma in the Conditional Context: A Relativistic
interpretation of the Frontier between the Prefixed and the
Suffixed Conjugations of the Arabic Language ................................ 135
Manuela E.B. Giolfo
A Comparison between the Usage of laysa in the Qurʾān and
laysa in Sībawayhi’s Kitāb ....................................................................... 161
Haruko Sakaedani
The Mood of the Verb Following Ḥattā, according to Medieval
Arab Grammarians .................................................................................... 173
Arik Sadan
PART iii
THE GRAMMAR OF OTHERS
Elements of the Syriac Grammatical Tradition as these Relate to
the Origins of Arabic Grammar ............................................................. 189
Daniel King
The Medieval Karaite Tradition of Hebrew Grammar ........................ 211
Geoffrey Khan
Subject index .................................................................................................... 231
index of names ................................................................................................ 234
ACKnOWLEDGEMEnTS
The papers in this volume are a selection of the papers presented at the
first Foundations of Arabic Linguistics Conference (FAL1), which was held
in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of
Cambridge between 3rd and 4th September 2010. it had as its main focus
Sībawayhi and early Arabic linguistic theory. i am extremely grateful to
each of the authors for their contribution to this volume and for their hard
work and dedication. i am privileged to be able to count them not only as
colleagues but as friends.
As Chair of Faculty and a colleague, Professor Geoffrey Khan never
failed to show his encouragement and support and i am deeply grateful
to him.
i am greatly indebted to Professor M.G. Carter for his unfailing
encouragement and his willingness to write the foreword for this volume.
in fact he was the one who suggested the title of the conference.
Very warm thanks are due to Professor Harry norris whose fatherly
care and scholarship were of the greatest value. i am also indebted to
Marie-Claire Daaboul for her generous financial support in organising
the FAL1 Conference, and to Gerard Hill for making this manuscript a
much better text. Special thanks are due to my students Charles Walker-
Arnott and Thomas Crooke for their editorial suggestions and to Jasmin
Lange, who oversaw the production of this book. i should like to end these
acknowledgements by expressing my deepest gratitude to my family and
especially to Jan, Elise and Joseph.
Cambridge
December 2011
FOREWORD
All the papers in these Proceedings are concerned with Sībawayhi to a
greater or lesser extent, and it is appropriate to arrange them here not
in the order of presentation but according to the degree of their focus on
the Kitāb. We shall therefore divide them into groups, using the famil-
iar binary scheme of qisma ‘aqliyya or taqsīm, the exhaustive dichotomy
borrowed from the Greeks and enthusiastically applied in all the islamic
sciences, though conspicuously absent from the Kitāb. by the first taqsīm
the papers are divided into those devoted exclusively to Sībawayhi and
the Kitāb and those which are not, the former group comprising (in order
of publication) the papers of Kasher, noy, Hnid and Dayyeh.
The residue is subdivided into those which deal with Sībawayhi in the
wider context of the development of grammar within the Arab-islamic
tradition, and those which do not, the former group containing the papers
of Carter, Marogy, Giolfo, Sakaedani, and Sadan, leaving two papers in
which Sībawayhi is only marginal, those of King and Khan.
There is little to be gained from summarising the contents of individual
papers, but some general qualitative remarks may help to put this confer-
ence into perspective. Group One examines Sībawayhi alone, sometimes
in very great detail, exploring hitherto unremarked aspects of his theory,
his terminology, categories and linguistic evidence. it is always risky to
make claims of completeness, but it can be safely asserted that some of
the papers in this group are so data-rich that they may well have captured
every item of relevant information in the corpus.
The humanities do not deal in certainties, and it will be apparent from
some contributions that the lifetime of a scholarly opinion on Sībawayhi
is not much more than a generation. indeed perfect unanimity is either an
impossible dream or a sign of intellectual stagnation. The mediaeval gram-
marians knew this well, and spent much of their energies in disagreeing
with their rivals, often by relabelling or reanalysing the same old facts.
in Group Two the horizons are broader, placing Sībawayhi in the con-
text of his grammatical legacy and reviewing his system in the light of
modern theories (the boundary is too vague to support another taqsīm). it
will become obvious how much the later grammarians owed to Sībawayhi,
who remains to this day the acknowledged fountainhead of authentic data
and methodological adequacy. When his ideas are measured against those
x foreword
of modern Western linguistics the profundity and coherence of his analy-
sis become clear, and his observations and conclusions compare well with
our own most recent perceptions, a scientific convergence which proves
no historical link, merely the truth of the old saying that great minds think
alike. Another way of putting it is that the study of the Kitāb in the West
over the last one hundred and eighty years or so (from de Sacy’s Antholo-
gie grammaticale arabe of 1829) has been a continuous application of the
prevailing Western linguistic theories as they successively emerge, with
no end in sight.
in this regard the pedagogical by-products of the Kitāb have their own
special importance, as they illustrate the gradual simplification of theory
and reduction of the range of possible patterns symptomatic of a situation
where the language had not only ceased to be a mother tongue and could
only be acquired artificially, but which also for religious reasons could not
be allowed to evolve like a natural language.
Group Three takes us out of the Kitāb and into the intellectual environ-
ment in which Sībawayhi’s ideas were formed. The two papers give a vivid
impression of the immense vitality of the period, the watershed of the
transition from informal oral contact to documented literary dependence
on Greek sources.
The result is, however, three different grammars within three differ-
ent cultural frameworks: in contrast to the Arabic, both the Syriac and
Karaite Hebrew grammars were self-consciously non-universal, reflecting
the position of those communities inside an islamic political structure
which did explicitly claim to be universal. Sībawayhi takes all this for
granted: simply by describing Arabic in all its domains, religious, poetic,
commercial, legal, administrative, proverbial, conversational, his gram-
mar acquires a universality unattainable by the grammars of Hebrew and
Syriac, languages which (to over-simplify) functioned largely as the reli-
gious and liturgical vehicles of a minority.
it is astonishing how sophisticated the speculations were in each of
the three cultures, and there is no doubt of their common methodologi-
cal ground, but their individuality and autonomy are even more striking.
if the three systems were expressed as Venn diagrams, the overlap would
be exceedingly small by comparison with the large areas in which they go
their separate ways.
Description:This volume is intended as the first in a series of studies on traditional Arab linguistic theories concentrating on Sībawayhi and his grammatical legacy. Here, the reader is introduced to the major issues and themes that have determined the development of Arabic grammar and presents Sībawayhi in
