This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Baalbaki, R. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Visual Influences on Arabic Linguistic Sciences

Department of Arabic, American University of Beirut. E.mail: rbaalbak{at}aub.edu.lb

Associated with reliance on vision unaided by hearing, tashif adversely affected several scholarly fields, especially grammatical study since a large part of its data originates in Qur'anic readings, prophetic tradition and poetry, all influenced by tashif. Further, because of concern with the analysis of linguistic usage, the grammarians' reliance on the written form of language was prone to errors in analysis due to the inherent deficiencies of any written system in representing spoken language. In Arabic linguistics, sarf (morphology) is the only branch in which analysis was largely made on the written form of words. However, Arabic, like most Semitic scripts, indicates consonants and long vowels as the skeleton of words to which short vowels and other markers may be added externally. Although this ‘skeletal’ writing of Arabic fairly reflects its spirit as a Semitic language, it greatly misled the grammarians. This article dwells on four types of morphological rules traceable in the tradition to visual influences. These are: hadf (elision), i‘ll (vowel mutation), naql al-haraka (vowel transfer), and ibdl (alternation).

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?