English | 2007 | ISBN: 0748627952 | 100 Pages | PDF | 38 MB
An 8th-century scholar and linguist born in Persia, Sibawayh is to Arabic linguistics what Panini is to Indian linguistics. He departed from the traditional methods of doing analysis to launch a more objective, descriptive and formal paradigm of linguistic analysis. Sibawayh wrote only one book called Al-Kitab 'the book' , considered to be the most thorough grammar of Classical Arabic ever written. His grammar established the foundations of Arabic linguistics as it became a statement of the new paradigm, and the book has become the model for all subsequent grammarians of Arabic. The treatise on ?imalah 'inclination' is part of this grammar. It brings together the disparate mechanisms of 'inclination' by stating the conditions for its occurrence. This is not a purely an abstract treatise, but a study that looks over the various dialects of Arabic and formulates the conditions under which 'inclination' takes place.
