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Version 2020-1 Updates:1) chronological divisions - Pre-Historic Old Arabic2) broken plurals and agreement3) mythologies of Arabic4) sound changes, Old Higazi and Tamimi5) new texts6) some typos removed, new ones surely generated.I first compiled this manual in 2014 to teach the Historical Grammar of Arabic at the Leiden Linguistics Summer School. I have since continued to update it with new material and insights, and have used various iterations to teach my classes at Leiden University and again at the Leiden Linguistics Summer School, the second time with Dr. Marijn van Putten. The book as it stands now is incomplete; future iterations will cover subjects not treated here, such as the plurals, the morphology of the infinitives and participles, and syntax. The bibliography is not fully formatted and the appendix of texts contains mostly Old Arabic inscriptions but will soon be expanded to include texts from all periods. This text has not been copy edited so please forgive any typos and other infelicities. It is my intention to keep this book open access and free for all to use for research purposes and instruction. Please feel free to cite this text but be sure to include the version number. I will archive the versions at H-Commons so that previous versions are available even though the main text will continue to be updated.Visit my academida.edu (https://leidenuniv.academia.edu/AhmadAlJallad) page to comment a permanent “session”. Users are encouraged to send me suggestions and improvements to better the overall text; I will acknowledge these contributions in the notes. I would like to thank Marijn van Putten for his corrections on this draft while using this manual in his courses and privately.
This contribution provides a preliminary update to An Outline of the Grammar of the Safaitic Inscriptions (ssll 80; Leiden: Brill, 2015) based on new inscriptions and the re-interpretation of previously published texts. New data pertain to phonology, demonstratives, verbal morphology, and syntax. The supplement to the dictionary contains hundreds of new entries, mainly comprising rare words and hapax legomena.
Arabic Grammar in Context offers a unique and exciting approach to learning grammar. It presents grammar as a necessary and essential tool for understanding Arabic and for developing comprehension and production skills.
2004
This book represents a major contribution to the field of Arabic linguistics. It gives in depth treatments of the current issues in Arabic linguistics and makes excellent readings for graduate courses and for linguists at large.
Historiographia Linguistica 41/1, p. 109-126, 2014
Classical Arabic scholars continue to refer to A Grammar of the Arabic Language by William Wright (1830–1889) which they generally cite without any further precision. In doing so, they dissimulate the long history of this work. Basically, it is the translation, published in two volumes (1859 and 1862), of the second edition, in German, of the Grammatik der arabischen Sprache (1859) by Carl Paul Caspari (1814–1892). However, this book has itself a long history. A first edition was published, in Latin, in 1848, under the title of Grammatica arabica. The first part (Doctrina de elementis et formis) had even been printed for the first time in 1844. In the preface to the 1848 Latin edition, Caspari quotes his two main sources: the Grammaire arabe (11810, 21831) by Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) and the Grammatica critica linguae arabicae, in two volumes (1831 and 1833, respectively), by Heinrich Ewald (1803–1875). The German version of Caspari’s Arabic Grammar was reedited in 1866. A new edition appeared in 1876, prepared by August Müller (1848–1892). This fourth edition was translated into French (two printings, in 1880 and 1881) by an amazing personality, the Colombian Ezequiel Uricoechea (1834–1880). It was also republished (5th and last edition) in 1887. As for Wright’s Arabic Grammar, a second edition, “revised and greatly enlarged” appeared, in two volumes, in 1874 and 1875, and a third edition, revised by William Robertson Smith (1846–1896) and Michael Jan de Goeje (1836–1909), also in two volumes, appeared in 1896 and 1898. This third edition, with some modifications due to Anthony Ashley Bevan (1859–1933), was reprinted in 1933. The latter, constantly reprinted, is the one Arabists generally refer to. Wright’s Arabic Grammar thus appears as the collective work of the 19th and early 20th century’s European orientalism. Interestingly, it also came to remind us that it is impossible to undertake the history of the field without the knowledge of two of its great academic languages: Latin and German.
asian studies, 2017
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. The fourth/tenth century was marked by a conspicuous focus on the activities of organization and arrangement across the various fields of cultural and scientific endeavour within the Arab-Islamic empire. This holds true for the discipline of linguistics, and, in particular, grammar. A pivotal moment in this process was the publication of al-Uṣūl fī l-naḥw by Ibn al-Sarrāj (d. 316/929), a treatise that was held in high esteem by his contemporaries as well as the following generations. It also provided the standard model according to which many subsequent grammatical treatises were arranged. Following a brief presentation of the significance and impact of the Kitāb Sībawayh, the most comprehensive description of Arabic and the most authoritative text of Arabic grammar, we will introduce al-Uṣūl fī l-naḥw and its innovative approach. We will then compare the introductory sections of the Kitāb Sībawayh and al-Uṣūl fī l-naḥw of Ibn al-Sarrāj that
2011
Abū al-Qāsim az-Zama ẖ s ar ī’s (1075–1144) grammatical treatise Al-Mufaṣṣal fī ṣan‘at al-i‘rāb is one of the main and most acknowledged philological masterpieces of the classical Arabic. The aim of this article is to shed some light on its origin, cultural and philological background, main goals and assumptions of the author, its position in the history of studies on Arabic grammar, hitherto prevailing research output of European orientalist dealing with Al-Mufaṣṣal. It also comprises a short presentation of the figure of Az-Zama ẖ s ar ī himself. The article quotes references to Arabic, English, German, Russian and Polish source literature.
INTRODUCTION The Arabic language developed through the early centuries in the Arabian Peninsula in the era immediately preceding the appearance of Islam, when it acquired the form in which it is known today. Arab poets of the pre-Islamic period had developed a language of amazing richness and flexibility. For the most part, their poetry was transmitted and preserved orally. The Arabic language was then, as it is now, easily capable of creating new words and terminology in order to adapt to the demand of new scientific and artistic discoveries. As the new believers in the seventh century spread out from the Peninsula to create a vast empire, first with its capital in Damascus and later in Baghdad, Arabic became the administrative language of vast section of the Mediterranean world. It drew upon Byzantine and Persian terms and its own immense inner resources of vocabulary and grammatical flexibility.
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Historiographia Linguistica, 2007
Arabic Grammar at the Advanced Level: A Paradigm Shift, 2023
Difficulties learners face when it comes to grammar continue to be among some of the unresolved issues in the teaching and learning of Arabic language. These issues might be rooted in historical and more contemporary reasons.
The Modern Language Journal, 2011
Throughout history, a number of languages have achieved the status of learned language, i.e., a language included in the curriculum of an educational system without yielding any communicational benefi ts. In large parts of the Islamic world, Arabic was (and still is) such a learned language. Acquisition of the learned language took place through the memorization of texts, with instruction and/or translation in vernacular languages. The vernacular languages themselves were not deemed to be in need of grammatical description, which explains why grammars for them were late to be developed. The present paper focuses on Malay, the lingua franca of choice in Southeast Asia for both Muslim missionaries and British and Dutch colonial administrators, while serving as the auxiliary language in the Islamic curriculum. The fi rst grammars of Malay were published by the British and Dutch. Malay grammars written by native speakers did not make their appearance until the nineteenth century. Their main representative is Raja Ali Haji (d. probably 1873). In his Bustān al-kātibīn, he used the grammatical framework of Arabic grammar for a grammatical sketch of Malay, using in part the Malay terminology that had been developed in traditional education for the study of Arabic grammar and Qurˀānic exegesis.
Folia Orientalia, LVI, p. 479-488 , 2019
Ahmad Al-Jallad