Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics
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Subject: Language And Linguistics
Managing Editors Online Edition: Lutz Edzard and Rudolf de Jong
The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online comprehensively covers all aspects of Arabic languages and linguistics. It is interdisciplinary in scope and represents different schools and approaches in order to be as objective and versatile as possible. The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online is cross-searchable and cross-referenced, and is equipped with a browsable index. All relevant fields in Arabic linguistics, both general and language specific are covered and the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online includes topics from interdisciplinary fields, such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and computer science.
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The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online comprehensively covers all aspects of Arabic languages and linguistics. It is interdisciplinary in scope and represents different schools and approaches in order to be as objective and versatile as possible. The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online is cross-searchable and cross-referenced, and is equipped with a browsable index. All relevant fields in Arabic linguistics, both general and language specific are covered and the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online includes topics from interdisciplinary fields, such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and computer science.
Subscriptions: see brill.com
ʾIʿrāb
(3,592 words)
The verb
ʾaʿraba, from which the term
ʾiʿrāb is derived, means ‘to use good Arabic style, to express one's mind clearly, to make known’ and, in a technical sense, ‘to pronounce the final short vowels of a word’, hence the usual translation of
ʾiʿrāb as ‘declension’. The
ʾiʿrāb is the main distinctive feature of the
ʿarabiyya, the language used by the Arabs of the desert, and in particular the form of expression of the oldest poetry, transmitted by the
ruwāt ‘reciters’ of certain trustworthy Bedouin tribes. It is usually regarded as a synonym of
bayān ‘clear expression’ (e.g. Zajjājī,
ʾĪḍāḥ 91…
Date:
2018-04-01
Iran
(5,704 words)
1. Introduction New Persian, including its most recent phase, Modern Persian, the official language of Iran and the main or second language of huge surrounding territories, has absorbed a large number of foreign words. These loanwords were borrowed from various northwestern and eastern Iranian dialects or from Western languages in the modern period, but the most effective and influential source was Arabic. Arabic loanwords constitute more than 50 percent of the contemporary Persian vocabulary, and in elevated…
Date:
2018-04-01
Iraq
(5,778 words)
1. General Arabic is the majority language of Iraq, the most important minority language being Kurdish; lesser minority languages are Neo-Aramaic (in its two main varieties, Chaldean and Ashuri) and Turkoman. Geographically, Arabic is mostly found in the lower-lying regions of Iraq, while the minority languages are predominantly found in the mountainous regions of the north and northeast (i.e. Iraqi Kurdistan). As in all Arab states, a situation of diglossia obtains. Modern Standard Arabic is the official language and the language of instruction and the …
Date:
2018-04-01
Ism
(3,588 words)
Ism, pl.
ʾasmāʾ, is the technical term for ‘noun(s)’, the first of the three major parts of speech traditionally recognized in Arabic grammar (the other two being
fiʿl, pl.
ʾafʿāl ‘verb(s)’, and
ḥarf, pl.
ḥurūf ‘particle(s)’; parts of speech). Morphosyntactically, the category of
ʾasmāʾ is characterized by the following four features: i.Nouns have declension, either full (
munṣarif), partial (
ġayr munṣarif), or invariable (
mabnī); ii.Nouns may be marked for definiteness (by the prefixed
al-) or indefiniteness (by
tanwīn ‘nunation’); iii.Nouns have three numbers, singular, dua…
Date:
2018-04-01
Ism al-fāʿil
(2,500 words)
It is characteristic of medieval terminology not to be specific to one analytical level, thus, for example,
ḥarf ‘particle’ can refer to anything from phonemes to paragraphs. The word
fāʿil is no exception. It is discussed here on four levels. 1. Lexically,
fāʿil means ‘doer, person doing’. An obscene metaphor, doubtless coined by a grammarian, pairs it with another technical term,
mafʿūl bihi ‘done to’, viz. ‘direct object’, for the active and passive members of a homosexual relationship. 2. At the morphological level,
fāʿil has three applications: (a)
Fāʿil stands for any word in…
Date:
2018-04-01
Ism al-fiʿl
(1,449 words)
The term
ism al-fiʿl (pl.
ʾasmāʾ al-fiʿl) is used for interjections conveying the sense of a verb. Most of them denote an imperative, e.g.
nazāli ‘go down!’,
ʾilayka ‘go away!’,
hālumma ‘come here!’. However, some
ʾasmāʾ al-fiʿl have the sense of a declarative sentence (
xabar), e.g.
hayhātu ‘far from it!’. The plural form is mentioned for the first time in the 8th century, by Sībawayhi (
Kitāb I, 102.8). The singular
ism al-fiʿl or
ism fiʿl occurs only in later sources. Interjections known by this term are also called
ʾasmāʾ li-l-fiʿl (sg.
ism li-l-fiʿl) and
ʾasmāʾ al-ʾafʿāl (Levin 1991:24…
Date:
2018-04-01
ʾIsnād
(2,241 words)
The term
ʾisnād and words derived from it indicate in Arabic grammar the connection between a noun and its predicate, or the act of assigning a predicate to a subject (Levin 1981:157). The central point in the analysis of the sentence in Arabic grammar is the distinction between nominal (
ʾismiyya) and verbal (
fiʿliyya) sentences, each with their own constituents. The nominal sentence is built on a topic/comment structure, with the topic (
mubtadaʾ;
ibtidāʾ) and the comment (
xabar) as basic constituents, whereas the verbal sentence consists of a verb (
fiʿl; this term is synonymous wi…
Date:
2018-04-01
Israel
(2,774 words)
1. Introduction Arabic is the mother tongue and the main national language of more than one million Palestinian citizens in the state of Israel. It is also a community language of hundreds of thousands of Sephardic Jews. Arabic serves as the sole official language of Israel's neighboring countries and enjoys a special status in most Muslim countries. The case of Arabic in Israel is unique. It is a minority language and is legally recognized as a second official language. Arabic was a majority language, as well as one of three official languages, in the British mandate to Palestine, until th…
Date:
2018-04-01
Istiʿāra
(4,083 words)
Istiʿāra is used as a technical term in the Arabic linguistic and literary tradition for a figure of speech or mode of expression that is usually described as a metaphor in classical and modern rhetorical theory. The literal meaning of
istiʿāra is ‘borrowing’, which in the given context means borrowing the name or an attribute of something to stand for something else, as in
raʾaytu ʾasadan ‘I saw a lion’,
ʾasad being borrowed to stand for a brave man, to cite the simplest form. This linguistic phenomenon may be found in Western manuals also under the heading of si…
Date:
2018-04-01
Ištiqāq
(2,812 words)
1. Ištiqāq The term
ištiqāq lit. ‘splitting’ is a grammatical term that translates into English as ‘derivation’; in some respects it could be viewed as the equivalent of the notion of etymology.
Ištiqāq means that one word is derived from another, or that the two are derived from a common source, called
ʾaṣl ‘root’ (cf. ʾAstarābāḏī,
Šarḥ aš-Šāfiya II, 334). In order to understand the derivation of new words from the root, the root should be defined in relation to another concept called
wazn ‘template’. 2. Root Since there is no infinitive in Arabic, the verb in the 3rd person sing…
Date:
2018-10-27
Istiṯnāʾ
(1,903 words)
Istiṯnāʾ, a verbal noun of Form X from the radicals
ṯ-n-y, literally means ‘setting aside as excluded; exclusion, exception’ (Lane 1863–1893:I, 357; Wehr 130). The term is used in Arabic grammar to denote an exception or an exceptive sentence (
jumlat al-istiṯnāʾ), which basically consists of two parts: the general term from which the exception is made (
al-mustaṯnā minhu) and the exception itself (
al-mustaṯnā). The relationship between these two parts of the sentence is made through the use of an exceptive particle (
ḥarf al-istiṯnāʾ), mostly
ʾillā (a compound of
ʾin and
lā and traditi…
Date:
2018-04-01
Italian
(1,458 words)
The history of the Italian territory bears a certain resemblance to that of the Iberian Peninsula because both were occupied by Arabs at the time of their expansion. The Arab influence was most strongly felt in Sicily, which was conquered in 827 and remained under Arab rule until some years after the fall of Palermo to the Normans in 1071. The effect of Arab civilization in Italy was much smaller than in Spain, and, accordingly, the number of Arabic loanwords is much smaller. A number of Arabic …
Date:
2018-04-01
Italian Loanwords
(2,308 words)
This entry addresses Italian loanwords in some Arabic dialects, especially Egyptian Arabic (the dialect of Cairo, with some mention of Alexandria) and Tunisian Arabic (the dialect of Tunis). Because of its proximity, Tunisia has always been in contact with Italy; likewise, the dialect of Libya has been strongly influenced by Italian, but not much is known about it, and after Rossi (1933) the topic has hardly been studied. For Italian borrowings in some Oriental dialects, see Abou Abdallah (1981), Butros (1973), and Behnstedt (1996). In the centuries when the Arab civilization f…
Date:
2018-04-01
ʾIṭbāq
(1,176 words)
The term
ʾiṭbāq, derived from the Arabic root
ṭ-b-q, generally means ‘covering, e.g. a lid covering a pot’. As a phonetic term, it is defined by Sībawayhi as “the raising of the (back of) the tongue toward the velum” (
Kitāb IV, 436). While some modern phoneticians call
ʾiṭbāq ‘emphasis’ (Vollers 1893:147), others speak of ‘velarization’ (Gairdner 1925:20). Gairdner defines velarization as an articulation in which “the back of the tongue is raised towards the back of the velum, i.e. the extreme back of the palate. The tongue feels as if it ‘f…
Date:
2018-04-01