skipped
لکنَّ. When I showed that to him (Peace be upon him), he ordered me
to add
لکنَّ. Therefore, every time I finish a chapter
I showed it to him
(May God be
satisfied with him), until I covered what I thought to be enough. He said,
"How beautiful is the approach you have taken!" From there the
concept of grammar
النحو came to exist.
Following
Abu Al-Aswad Al-Du'ali came a group of grammarians that we know most of by
their names, not their works. The list includes:
Ibn ‘AaSim
‚نصر بن عاصم , Al-Mahry
عنبسة بن معدان المهري , Al-Aqran
ميمون الاقرن , Al-‘Adwaany
يحيی بن يعمر العدواني , Al-Akhfash
الاخفش الاکبر , Al-‘Araj
, Al-Hadhramy
عبد الله بن ابي اسحق
الحضرمي , Ibn Al-‘Alaa'
أبو عمرو بن العلاء ,
Al-Thaqafy
عيسی بن عمر الثقفي , who wrote two famous
books,
الإکمال and
الجامع Waafi
credited Al-Thaqafy
الثقفي for transferring the interest
from Basrah to Kuufa, because he began his work there, and Al-Khalil was his
student. Among the other Kuufic grammarians were Al-Tamiimy
أبو معاوية شيبان بن عبد الرحمن التميمي and Al-Harraa'
أبو مسلم معاذ الهراء and
Al-Ru'aasy
أبو جعفر الرؤاسي who wrote
الفيصل))
.If Siibawayh was considered the 'Imaam of grammar in Basrah, the Kuufic
version was Al-Kisaa'y
أبو الحسن علي بن حمزة بن فيروز الکسائي who studied under
Al-Harraa'
الهرَّاءand
Al-Ru'aasy
.
الرؤاسيUnfortunately, Al-Kisaa'y did not author any major work in Arabic
grammar. However, he became one of the best seven readers of the Quran.
The
framework of the Arab grammarians served exclusively for the analysis of Arabic
and, therefore, has a special relevance for the study of the language. From the
period between 750 and 1500 we know the names of more than 4000 grammarians who
developed a truly comprehensive body of knowledge on their own language.
Siibawayh
was the first grammarian to give an account of the entire language in what was
probably the first publication in book form in Arabic prose. In his book,
زهر الآداب وثمر الألباب , Al-Husary reported that
Siibawayh used to have his work reviewed by another grammarian of his time
named Al-Akhfash Al-Saghiir who said that, " Siibawayh showed me the
grammar rules he came up with thinking that I knew better than him. In fact, he
has better knowledge than me." Siibawayh's example set the trend for all
subsequent generations of grammarians, who believed that their main task was to
provide an explanation for every single phenomenon in
Arabic. Consequently, they distinguished between what was transmitted and what
was theoretically possible in
language. In principle, they accepted everything from
reliable resources, which included the language of the Qur'an, pre-Islamic
poetry, and testimonies from trustworthy Bedouin informants. After the period
of the Islamic conquests, the sedentary population of Mekka and Medina began to
regard the free-roaming Bedouin, whose language preserved the purity of the
pre-Islamic times, as the ideal type of Arab, and the term
کلام العرب 'Language of the
Arabs' came to denote the pure, unaffected language of the Bedouins.
Versteegh stated that the early beginnings of grammar
and lexicography began at a time when Bedouin informants were still around and
could be consulted. There can be no doubt that the grammarians and
lexicographers regarded the Bedouin as the true speakers of the Arabic FuSHa,
and continued to do so after the conquests. In the words of Ibn Khalduun, the
Bedouin spoke according to their linguistic intuitions and did not need any
grammarian to tell them how to use the declensional endings. There are reports
that it was fashionable among notable families to send their sons into the
desert, not only learn how to shoot and hunt, but also to practice speaking pure
Arabic. The Prophet Mohammed was one of those when he was a small boy. Other
reports come from professional grammarians who stayed for some time with a
Bedouin tribe and studied their speech because it was considered to be more
correct than that of the towns and cities.
The Arabic linguistic references
tell us that the need for some "linguistic authority" came to exist
long before the time of Al-Khalil and Siibawayh. There is a vast amount of
anecdotes concerning the linguistic mistakes made by the non-Arabs who
converted to Islam. It is commonly believed that these anecdotes document a
state of confusion and corruption of the Classical language. According to many
resources, the Well-guided fourth Caliph, Ali Ibn 'Abi Taalib, the cousin and
son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, was the first to insist that something to
be done. One anecdote mentioned that Ali came to perform his pre-dawn prayer at
the Mosque of A-Kuufah. As he went in, he heard a non-Arab Muslim reading the
Quran and that man was assigning the end-words voweling incorrectly. The verse
in question was from FaaTir (Chapter #35. Verse # 28):
إنما يخشی اللهَ من
عبادهِ العلماءُ
Those
truly fear Allah,
Among
His Servants
Who
have knowledge
Apparently,
that man had the nominative case assigned to what supposed to be the direct
object
اللهَ, and the accusative case was assigned to
the subject
العلماءُ. Because the end-word voweling is the
manifestation of Arabic language grammar, the meaning of that verse was
completely messed up. That same day Ali handed a note to Abu Al-'Aswad
Al-Du'ali which said that, "Speech is made of three elements; nouns,
verbs, and particles." Ali asked Al-Du'ali to expand on that definition
and write the first grammar rules for
Arabic. In other words, Ali was asking for a
"linguistic authority" whose rules should be enforced.
According
to some historians, Al-Du'ali at first hesitated but was later persuaded when
his own daughter made a terrible mistake in the use of the declensional
endings, by confusing the expressions:
ما أَحسنُ السماءِ؟ /
ما أحسنَ السماءَ!
How
beautiful is the sky!/What is the most beautiful thing in the sky?
She was reported to have said:
ما أحسنُ السماءَ؟ / ما
أحسنَ السماءِ!
The origin
of the "dot," notation of the three short vowels, and the Nunation is
ascribed to 'Abu Al-'Aswad, and the names of the vowels (FatHa, Dhamma, Kasra)
are connected to their articulations. From that we have the common expression,
ضعِ النقاط علی الحروف!, literally meaning "put the dots on
the letters!, i.e., to "be more clear/specific."Two other innovations
attributed to 'Abu Al-'Aswad concern the notation for hamza (glottal stop) and
Shadda (consonant gemination). Both signs are absent from the Nabataean script.
The
framework of the Arab grammarians served exclusively for the analysis of Arabic
and therefore has a special relevance for the study of the language. From the
period between 750 and 1500 we know the names of more than 4000 grammarians who
elaborated a comprehensive body of knowledge on their own language.
Most Arabic
grammars follow the order established by Siibawayh and start with syntax
ألنحو , followed by morphology
التصريف , with phonology added
as an appendix. Phonology did not count as an independent discipline and was
therefore relegated to a position at the end of the treatise, although a
considerable body of phonetic knowledge was transmitted in introductions to
dictionaries and in treaties on recitation of the Qur'an,
تجويد The
grammarians' main preoccupation was the explanation of the case endings of the
words in the sentence, called
إعراب , a term originally meant the correct use
of Arabic according to the language of the Bedouins but came to mean
declension.
Kees believes that the works
which appeared after Al-Khalil and Siibawayh only contributed either by
offering commentaries or further explanations. In this context, this
publication is nothing more than an account of the most common rules
non-speakers of Arabic will need to refer to in their quest for learning the
language. Yet, our additional aim is to offer some suggestions and ideas on how
to present these commonly used rules.
These suggestions and ideas are
based on recent research in language proficiency learning and pedagogy.
Many
researchers agree that formal classroom instruction of certain grammatical
structures -that is, morphological inflections, function words, and syntactic
word order- can be beneficial to students. The rationale for teaching grammar
is multifaceted. First students are expected to be already literate and
therefore have established expectation concerning language instruction. Grammar
instruction can be beneficial because of the fact that it raises learners'
consciousness concerning the differences and similarities of L1 and L2. In this
respect, grammar instruction can be used as a "linguistic map," with
reference points of "rules of thumbs" to assist students as they
explore the "topography" of the new language.
However, we need to remember that
grammatical structures by themselves are rather useless. Like road signs,
grammatical structures take on meaning only if they are situated in a context
and in connected discourse. Furthermore, Krashen (1982) reminds us that
grammatical structures will become internalized only if the learners are placed
in a situation in which they need to use the structures for communicative
purposes. Consequently, an important role of the teacher is to create
learning situations in which the
students feel a need to master the grammar in order to comprehend and
communicate in the target language. A detailed pedagogy scheme on how to teach
and learn grammar is provided in a section that follows the presentation of the
rules.
1. The Arabic Alphabet. The
Arabic sources, as long as they do not attribute the invention of the Arabic
script to Adam or Ishmael, tell us that the script had been introduced either
from South Arabia region or from Mesopotamia (Iraq). Ibn Al-Nadim, for example,
said that the people of Al-Hira, the capital of the Lakhmid dynasty in the Euphrates valley, used a form of Syriac cursive script
which had developed into the Arabic alphabet.
Versteegh claims that the theory of
Syriac origin has now been abandoned by most scholars. It seems much more
likely to him that the Arabic alphabet is derived from a type of cursive
Nabataean in Petra, Jordan. In the Aramaic script, from
which Nabataean writing ultimately derived, there are no ligatures between
letters. But in the cursive forms of the Nabataean script most of the features
that characterize the Arabic script already appear. Versteegh adds that the
elaboration of an Arabic script for texts in Arabic took place as early as the
second century CE. This would mean that the development of the Arabic script as
it is used in pre-Islamic inscriptions occurred largely independently from the
later developments in Nabataean epigraphic script. The most important internal
development in Arabic script is the systematic elaboration of connections
between letters within the word, and the system of different forms of the
letters according to their position within the word.
According to Siibawayh, the Arabic
Alphabet is made of 29 letters, including 3 long vowels. He put them in the
following order starting with the laryngeal and ending with labial,
representing the place of articulation along the vocal tract.
ء، ا، هـ ، ع ، ح ، غ ،
خ ، ك ، ق ، ض،
ج ، ش ، ي ، ل ، ر ، ن
، ط ، د ، ت ، ص ،
ز ، س ، ظ ، ذ ، ث ، ف
، ب ، م ، و
Though
Siibawayh listed 29 letters he concluded that in reality there were 35 sounds
which are represented by those 29 letters. He explained that the recitation of
the Quran and reading of poetry had necessitated the existance of those 6
additional sounds. The list included the 'light Nuun'
النون الخفيفة, the 'medial Hamza'
الهمزة التي بين بين ,
'Alif al-'Imaala
الالف التي تُمال إمالة
شديدة ,'the
J-sounded Shiin
الشين التي کالجيم , the Z-sounded emphatic S'
الصاد التي تکون کالزاي , 'the velarized 'Alif'
ألف التفخيم in the language of
Hijaaz in words like,
الحياة والصلاة والزکاة.
Siibawayh
went on to say that he could trace 42 sounds but the additional 7 sounds were
not favorable in the recitation of the Quran and reading of poetry. Therefore,
they were of less significance since their use is only limited to oral
communication.
Al-Khalil
Ibn Ahmed, who died in 791, grouped and put them in the following order:
ع ح هـ خ غ ، ق ك ، ج
ش
ض ، ص
س
ز ، ط د ت ، ظ ث ذ ، ر
د ن ، ف ب م ، و ا ي ء
The
codification of the Qur'an was a crucial moment in the development of a written
standard for the Arabic language. On a practical level, the writing-down of the
holy text involved all kinds of decisions concerning the orthography of the
Arabic script and elaboration of a number of conventions to make writing less
ambiguous and more manageable than it had been in pre-Islamic Arabia.
Writing was
not unknown in the peninsula in that period. But, for religious reasons, early
Islamic sources emphasized the illiteracy of the Prophet Mohammed. The Prophet
was
أُميّ, someone who could not read nor write, and
this was what made the revelation of the Qur'an and his recitation of the text
a miracle.
There are
clear indications that as early as the sixth century writing was fairly common
in the urban centers of the peninsula, in Mekka and to a lesser degree in Medina. In the commercial
society that was Mekka, businessmen must have had at their disposal various
means of recording their transactions. There are references to treaties being
written down and preserved in the Ka'ba in Mekka. Even the
الرواة , the
transmitters of poetry, sometimes relied on written notes, although they
recited the poems entrusted to them orally. In the
Qur'an, we find reflection of a society in which writing for commercial
purposes was well established. In the second sura we find, for instance,
detailed stipulations on the settlement of debts that include the exact
writing-down of the terms.
In the
biography of the Prophet, there are many references to his using scribes for
his correspondence with Arab tribes and of writing treaties. In the accounts
preserved by the historians, scribes and witnesses were mentioned and the
Prophet signed those documents with his fingernail. Tradition has preserved the
names of several scribes to whom Mohammed dictated messages, chief among them
being Zayd Ibn Thabit.
Just as
Christian monks of the Middle Ages spent lifetimes writing and illuminating
religious manuscripts, their Arab and Muslim forebears contemporaries devoted
their lives to producing elegantly handwritten copies of the Quran. In lieu of
pictorial representation, which was frowned upon, calligraphy became not only practical, but decorative, replacing design,
painting and sculpture over a period of centuries. Later every caliph's court
employed these artists to draw up official documents, design official
signatures and write out diplomatic correspondence.
The Arabs
and Muslims of that time used interlaced geometric lines derivations from the
Kufic style to adorn the walls of palaces and mosques, and the name of this
style, arabesque, is a reminder of its cultural origins. Arabic calligraphy
forms a primary
ornamentation of the Moorish palace of Alhambra
in Granada,
other citadels and
الرئيسية 
