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
Sabab
(1,218 words)
The word
sabab literally means ‘a cord or ligature’, often ‘a tent rope’, signifying the tight structural bond between the fabric of the tent and the peg. In the Arab sciences, this concept has been exploited metaphorically in a number of ways, in prosody as the name for part of a metrical unit (another element being the
watid lit. ‘tent peg’), in philosophy to denote a logical ‘cause’ or ‘reason’, and more generally (e.g. in law) for anything connected with or providing access to something else, such as relatives, dependents, or assets. In grammar it…
Date:
2018-04-01
Sajʿ
(2,429 words)
1. Introduction
Sajʿ is commonly known as rhymed prose. It is said to have rhyme but no meter, distinguishing it from poetry (
qarīḍ), which features both rhyme and meter.
Sajʿ is often associated with the text of the Qurʾān, because large parts of the
Qurʾān were composed in this type of rhymed prose. (In her study of the early Qurʾānic suras, Neuwirth (1981) expresses her doubt whether this rhyme can be considered
sajʿ.) The Arabic lexicographers usually derive the term
sajʿ from the root
s-j-ʿ in its sense of the ‘cooing of doves’, although a different etymology cannot be exc…
Date:
2018-04-01
Salt, Dialect of
(7,609 words)
1. Introduction The city of Salt is located 25 kilometers northwest of Amman, the capital of Jordan, and has around 71,100 inhabitants. Until recently, it was the biggest town on the eastern bank of the Jordan River; things started to change when Amman became the capital of Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Since Amman had no indigenous population, the dialect spoken in Salt can be rightly considered a typical example of sedentary Jordanian. The dialect described here is endangered and is probably sti…
Date:
2018-04-01
Ṣanʿānī Arabic
(5,338 words)
1. General Ṣanʿānī Arabic is the dialect of the original inhabitants of the Old City of ṣanʿāʾ and its traditional suburbs, al-Bawniyah and al-Qāʿ (Qāʿ al-Yahūd). ṣanʿānī belongs to the Eastern Muslim dialect type, and it is also spoken by Jews who emigrated from ṣanʿāʾ to Israel after 1948. There are approximately one hundred thousand speakers in and around the Old City today, a figure which includes Ṣanʿānīs who left the Old City following the post–1991 Gulf War expansion of Ṣanʿāʾ. The number o…
Date:
2018-04-01
Sandhi
(2,696 words)
The term
sandhi (from Sanskrit
saṃdhi ‘putting together’) refers to phonological processes that apply when two morphemes (roots, stems, or affixes) are juxtaposed. This very general term has been used in a variety of senses. In its broadest sense, sandhi includes the selection of alternative forms (allomorphs) at the joining of two morphemes within a word (internal sandhi) as well as processes that apply between adjacent words in a phrase (external sandhi), and in this broad sense it encompasses a la…
Date:
2018-04-01
Ṣarf
(3,028 words)
1. Definition
Ṣarf, originally meaning ‘shifting a thing from one state or condition to another’ (Lane 1863–1893:II, 1680; Ibn Manẓūr,
Lisān IV, 2434), is used in Arabic grammar as the technical term for morphology. It is linked with
taṣrīf, which also has to do with change, and originally meant ‘the turning of the winds from one state or condition, to another’ (Lane 1863–1893:II, 1681; Ibn Manẓūr,
Lisān IV, 2435). In relation to language, the science of
taṣrīf is usually called
ʿilm aṣ-ṣarf. Both indicate a change in the form of words, and both are used indiscriminately to …
Date:
2018-04-01
Saudi Arabia
(4,992 words)
1. Introduction Saudi Arabia is an area of considerable linguistic uniformity. With regard to languages that are native to the country, on the basis of the most recent data, only one language, Arabic, is spoken, although dialect diversity is considerable. In fact, in the southwest on the border of Yemen, unconfirmed reports have the dialect of Fayfa to be mutually unintelligible with local Arabic dialects and showing a substratum of the Ḥimyaritic languages of Ancient South Arabia. Although modern…
Date:
2018-04-01
Šāwi Arabic
(6,519 words)
1. Introduction The term
Šāwi may refer to various unrelated groups, such as one of the Berber varieties spoken in Algeria, the sheep-breeder Bedouins of inner Oman, as well as the sheep-breeder Bedouins of the Syro-Mesopotamian area. The root
š-w-y also appears in the ethnonym
Šuwa, which refers to some Arabic-speaking populations around the Lake Chad. The present entry only deals with the sheep-breeder Bedouins of Syro-Mesopotamia. Mostly sedentarized, the
Šiwāya (plural of
Šāwi) tribes are known for their way of living, mainly based on sheep herding, alth…
Date:
2018-04-01
Scope and approach of the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics
(1,075 words)
The
EALL is a comprehensive encyclopedia covering all relevant aspects of the study of Arabic and dealing with all levels of the language (pre-Classical Arabic, Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Arabic vernaculars, mixed varieties of Arabic), both synchronically and diachronically. It has been published in five volumes with a total of two million words, distributed over approximately 500 entries. The treatment includes both the external and the internal history of the language, as well as…
Date:
2018-04-01
Script and Art
(4,145 words)
The 28 (or 29, if we include the
lām ʾalif) letters of the Arabic alphabet, as we know them today, developed from a primitive set of 17 basic letter shapes (graphemes), which included a number of same-looking forms (homographs; Arabic alphabet: origin). These letter forms at the beginning of Islam had nothing in themselves that would indicate their future grand place in Islamic art. And yet, within perhaps several decades after the birth of Islam, the Arabic script began to take on qualities which later in the Abbasid period blossomed into beautiful handwriting used to adorn the pages of the
Q…
Date:
2018-04-01
Second Language Acquisition
(5,211 words)
1. Introduction While the pedagogy of foreign language teaching (second language teaching) is concerned with the various approaches, methods, and techniques of how a second/foreign language is taught, the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is concerned with how a second/foreign language (L2) is actually learned. Other terms are also used to refer to the same phenomenon, including L2 acquisition, second language development (L2 development), and L2 learning. SLA focuses on the development of the learner's language, whether in a f…
Date:
2018-04-01
Second Language Teaching
(6,920 words)
1. Introduction This entry focuses on the didactics of teaching Arabic in a Western context, particularly at the university level, since this is where Arabic is most often taught in the West. In recent years, the teaching of Arabic has also spread to secondary schools and private language institutions, but they are still few in number and do not differentiate substantially, at least at this stage, from the teaching approach at universities. The teaching of foreign languages is always set in a historic and social context, and this is the case for the teaching of Arab…
Date:
2018-04-01
Secret Languages
(2,996 words)
1. Definition of secret languages Dissimulation, one of the current functions of language, is the process whereby communicants resort to various stratagems to conceal from outsiders the content of what are intended as private or restricted exchanges (slang; jargon). Effected through the use of secret languages, this function is performed, basically, in one of two ways: i.The use of foreign or minority languages, or the use of metaphorical speech (usually slang, argot, etc.); this type, which consists in referring to things by different names, may be called
notional or semantic sec…
Date:
2018-04-01
Semantic Bleaching
(2,615 words)
The term ‘semantic bleaching’ refers to loss of lexical content or categorial status of a lexical item in the course of diachronic semantic change, typically resulting from a grammaticalization process whereby certain lexical items develop into markers of grammatical relations, thus acquiring grammatical functions. This phenomenon is variously labeled ‘desemanticization’ (Lehmann 1995:127), ‘semantic weakening’ (Guimier 1985:157), ‘abstraction’ (Heine a.o. 1991:41–45; Heine 1991:155–157), ‘seman…
Date:
2018-04-01
Semantic Extension
(3,462 words)
Semantic extension refers to the process through which one or more semantic senses within the same or another conceptual domain are added to the core semantic sense or focus of a linguistic item. Defined as such, semantic extension has a diachronic dimension, in which a single linguistic form accumulates additional senses over time. These senses are sometimes demonstrably close and are thereby regarded within cognitive semantics as cases of polysemy; other cases in which no apparent set of seman…
Date:
2018-04-01
Semitic Languages
(5,293 words)
1. Arabic as an archaic Semitic language Historically, the core region of the Semitic peoples during the 3rd and 2nd millennia B.C.E. lay in the Fertile Crescent (Palestine – Syria – Mesopotamia). Therefore, their assumed shared original homeland cannot have been situated very far from there. Applying a genetically based distribution model of the individual Semitic peoples, it may be assumed that they emerged from the Syrian desert/steppe and infiltrated the fertile agrarian lands to the east, west, a…
Date:
2020-08-01