Arabic in the broad sense revolves around two main registers: classical (or literary) Arabic and dialectal Arabic. The former refers to the written language stemming from the speech of the Arabian Peninsula at the time of the advent of Islam. As for dialectal Arabic, it actually designates not a single language but as many languages as there are spoken derivatives of Arabic.

Arabic, as everyone knows, is a Semitic language. Its morphology is built around roots, generally made up of three consonants — so-called triliteral roots. Words are formed by adding vowels, prefixes, suffixes, or by doubling the consonants themselves. The specific word-forms obtained by adding these elements constitute what are called “patterns”. One pattern, for example, is proper to occupational nouns, another to nouns of place, another to active participles, and so on.

This capacity to modulate the language greatly facilitates the creation of neologisms. For example, the word for computer, ḥāsūb, is drawn from the root Ḥ-S-B, which evokes calculation.

Another practical consequence of this characteristic of Arabic is that dictionaries traditionally arrange words by their root. It is therefore under those entries that one must look for words derived from a given root.

Arabic grammar distinguishes two types of sentence: nominal sentences (sentences without a verb) and verbal sentences (sentences with a verb). To say, for example, “the child is big,” Arabic says “Al-walad kabīr,” literally “the child big.”

To be continued…

The origins of Arabic grammatical theory

While the first reflections on Arabic grammar took place in the immediate aftermath of the Arab conquests — that is, at the beginning of the 8th century — by reciters of the Qur’an anxious to standardize the reading of the Sacred Text, it was only at the end of that same century that the first Arabic grammar was established. We owe it to Khalīl (died 786) and his illustrious student Sībawayh (died 791). It was the latter who produced a treatise of an already highly elaborate theoretical level, from which the Arabic grammatical tradition would never entirely free itself. This work probably borrowed certain elements from the Greek heritage, yet is no less original, set within a strictly Arabic framework.

Arabic grammar developed amid a controversy pitting the thinkers of Basra against those of Kufa, until the end of the 9th century, with the notable participation of Māzinī (died 828) and Mubarrid (died 898) in the first camp, and Kisā’ī in the second.

To be continued…