This book presents a comprehensive portrait of the Kitāb Sībawayhi. It offers new insights into its historical and linguistic arguments and underlines their strong correlation. The decisive historical argument highlights al-Ḥīra's role, not only as the centre of pre-Islamic Arabic culture, but also as the matrix within which early Arab linguistics grew and developed. The Kitāb's value as a communicative grammar forms the crux of the linguistic argument. The complementarity of syntax and pragmatics is established as a condition sine qua non for...

Morphemes combined with the Arabic noun are clearly described in the literature, but their interpretation can be somewhat nebulous, and a unified scholarly analysis does not as yet exist. This book proposes a new and unified perspective regarding these morphemes, analyzing them as copulae, and the constructions in which they occur as instances of predication. Analyzing morphemes combined with the Arabic noun as copulae explains many of their puzzling properties (rise and loss of declension, proteiform nature of nunation, etc.). Emphasis is placed on data previously marginalized in the...

The collection of articles in this volume is dedicated to Ramzi Baalbaki of the American University of Beirut on the occasion of his 60th birthday. The volume reflects the central themes of Ramzi Baalbaki's scholarly work: history of Arabic grammar, Arabic lexicography, Arabic linguistics, comparative Semitics, Arabic epigraphy, and textual editing of classical texts. It provides intellectual, literary, and social historians, as well as Arabists, philologists, and linguists with an interesting glimpse into the early medieval and modern traditions related to the Arabic language, its grammar,...

This is the first monograph-length volume entirely devoted to the theoretical and empirical issues raised by the definition of 'word' and related concepts in Arabic, both at the historical and synchronic level. Some of the best-known scholars in the field of Arabic linguistics debate such issues as the technical definition of words and morphemes in the Arabic grammatical and rhetorical traditions, the theoretical status of the root and its interactions with morphology, the analysis of word in the computer treatment of Arabic texts, some relevant phenomena in the contact of Arabic with other...

This work is a linguistic description of an obsolescent dialect of Neo-Aramaic. The dialect was originally spoken by Jews residing in the village of Amәdya (a.k.a Amadiya) in modern-day northern Iraq. No native speakers of this dialect remain in situ. They, along with the other Jewish communities of the Kurdish region, had all left by 1951. The majority went to Israel, where their numbers have dwindled. The dialect has not been passed on to the next generation, whose native tongue is Modern Israeli Hebrew. There remain but a handful of competent native speakers, whose speech has often...

This book offers a comprehensive account of Arabicization in the Middle East and Egypt in the early period of the Arab conquests. Drawing on material from ancient Arabic grammarians as well as modern studies in second language acquisition, it analyzes the linguistic and non-linguistic ecological factors that contributed to the development of Arabic during the early period after the Arab conquests. It describes the pre-Islamic linguistic and sociolinguistic situation and traces the development in this period. The sociological, cultural, and sociolinguistic context is sketched to determine the...

In recent scholarship, the connection between Middle Arabic and Mixed Arabic is studied in a more systematic way. The idea of studying these two varieties in one theoretical frame is quite new, and was initiated at the conferences of the International Association for the Study of Middle and Mixed Arabic (AIMA). At these conferences, the members of AIMA discuss the latest insights into the definition, terminology, and research methods of Middle and Mixed Arabic. Results of various discussions in this field are to be found in the present book, which contains articles describing and analysing...

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 the context of his intellectual and social environment. The papers make significant contributions to and offer in-depth introductions into major aspects of the foundations of Arab Linguistics, early Syriac and medieval Hebrew linguistic traditions. This is a unique reference on the three...

In The Subjunctive Mood in Arabic Grammatical Thought Arik Sadan outlines the grammatical theories on the naṣb (subjunctive mood) in Classical Arabic. Examining over 160 treatises written by 85 grammarians, lexicographers and Qurʾān commentators, the author defines and characterizes the opinions of medieval Arab grammarians concerning this mood in the verbal system of Classical Arabic. Special attention is given to the prominent early grammarians Sībawayhi (d. ca. 180/796) and al-Farrāʾ (d. 207/822), who represent the Schools of al-Baṣra and...

The Arabic Influence on Northern Berber provides an overview of the effects of language contact on a wide array of Berber languages spoken in the Maghrib. These languages have undergone important changes in their lexicon, phonology, morphology, and syntax as a result of over a thousand years of Arabic influence. The social situation of Berber-Arabic language contact is similar all over the region: Berber speakers introducing Arabic features into their language, with only little language shift going on. Moreover, the typological profile of the different Berber varieties is relatively...