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
Taʿaddin
(4,466 words)
1. Definition The Arabic verb
taʿaddā and its derivatives
mutaʿaddin and
taʿdiya express the lexical concept of something going beyond something else. These terms are used by Arabic grammarians to refer to the concept of transitivity (for a general treatment of transitivity in Arabic grammar, see Owens 1988:167–172; Taha 1995). In the linguistic sense, the verb is said to go beyond its agent (fāʿil) to an object (mafʿūl). Verbs whose action goes beyond their agents to their direct objects are called transitive (
mutaʿaddin); verbs whose action does not go beyond the agent to a…
Date:
2018-04-01
Taboo
(3,399 words)
1. Introduction Originally from the Tongan language, which belongs to the Polynesian group of languages, the word ‘taboo’ was first introduced into English in 1777 by the naval explorer Captain James Cook (1728–1779), and later entered other European languages. The concept refers to anything sacred and inviolable and later, by extension, to anything that is in contradiction to moral standards or good manners and is, therefore, forbidden or prohibited. ‘Taboo language’ refers to words and expressions that may cau…
Date:
2018-04-01
Tafxīm
(1,763 words)
The term
tafxīm is derived from the Arabic triliteral root
f-x-m, generally signifying ‘thickening, magnifying, enlargement, emphasizing’. This notion was applied to the Arabic sound system to differentiate between certain sound groups. One class includes the four
muṭbaqa consonants (
ʾiṭbāq): /ḍ/ ض, /ṣ/ص , /ṭ/ ط, and /ḏ̣/ ظ. In addition, three more consonants, /q/ ق, /ġ/ غ, and /x/ خ, are grouped with these four consonants to form a larger class, known as
mustaʿliya ‘elevated, raised [consonants]’. They are called thus because of “the raising of the back of the tongue…
Date:
2020-09-01
Tajik
(1,117 words)
Tajik Persian (
zabån-e fårsi-e tåjiki; as transliterated from Cyrillic,
zaboni forsi-i tojikī) is the New Persian dialect of Central Asia, a descendant together with Persian of Iran (
fårsi) from the spoken Middle Persian of the Sasanian Empire at the time of the Arab Muslim conquest of 640–712 C.E. The Arabic alphabet and vocabulary were instrumental in the rise of this language, which, in the form of Classical Persian, furnished a common idiom for writers of Iran, India, and Central Asia over many centuries. This survey …
Date:
2020-09-01
Tajwīd
(2,157 words)
1. Definition and material of tajwīd
Tajwīd is the system of rules regulating the correct and clear rendering of the
Qurʾān, preserving the nature of a religious revelation whose meaning is expressed as much by its sound as by its content and expression. Muslims believe that
tajwīd is the codification of the sound of the revelation as it was revealed to the Prophet Muḥammad and as he subsequently rehearsed it with the Angel Gabriel. Therefore, in Islam, there can be no history of the development of
tajwīd except in terms of its scholarly codification, and it is generally believed…
Date:
2018-04-01
Taʿlīq
(1,108 words)
The term
taʿlīq (or ʾilġāʾ) ‘hanging’, i.e. ‘abrogation, interruption, cancellation’, indicates the interruption of grammatical effect when a word is not used in a governable position although it is a governable word, as shown by the fact that it exhibits the normal case or mood distinction (Owens 1988:50–51). Cancellation of government is mostly connected with judgment verbs (
ʾaf ʿāl al-qalb) such as
ḥasiba ‘to consider, to reckon’;
xāla ‘to believe, to imagine’,
darā and
ʿalima ‘to know’;
raʾā ‘to see, to consider’,
ḏ̣anna ‘to think, to believe’; ʿ
adda‘to consider; to regard’;
zaʿam…
Date:
2018-04-01
Taltala
(396 words)
The ancient Arabic grammarians made a distinction between two types of Arabic according to the nature of the vowel of the imperfect preformative: some Arab tribes used
ya-, while others used
yi-. The name which designates the usage of
yi- is
taltala. According to Rabin (1951:60), who carefully collected all available data mentioned by the Arabic grammarians, a group of tribes who lived in a large area from Egypt to Iraq, the Quḍāʿa, had the full
taltala. Some other tribes had a partial
taltala only, i.e., they used
yi-, ti-, ʾi-, ni- for the different persons of imperfect and imperati…
Date:
2018-04-01
Tamakkun
(1,360 words)
The lexical meaning of the verb
tamakkana is ‘to be powerful, to be able to do something’. In grammatical terminology,
tamakkun is used for a general grammatical and semantic category indicating the ability of words to be inflected and to perform various grammatical functions (for a survey of previous reconstructions of this term's function, see Danecki 1993; Talmon 2003:287, n. 2). A part of speech possessing
tamakkun is called
mutamakkin; it should have regular inflection and regular form. That which is irregular is classified as
ġayr mutamakkin. The more functions a word can p…
Date:
2018-04-01
Tamil
(2,135 words)
At first glance, Tamil, a Dravidian language spoken by more than seventy million people in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore, appears to be largely devoid of loanwords from Arabic, especially if compared to other South Asian languages. Even with reference to Muslim religious practice, Tamil words often replace Arabic ones, such as Tamil
toḻukai instead of Arabic
ṣalāt. Nevertheless, Arabic words are used by Tamil-speaking Muslims in both everyday conversation and Islamic literary texts dating back to the 16th century, and even among non-Muslims…
Date:
2018-04-01
Tamyīz
(1,092 words)
The term
tamyīz is used by the Arab grammarians to refer to one of the functions of the accusative. Generally translated as ‘specification’ or ‘specifier’,
tamyīz, especially in the earlier sources, has the synonyms
mumayyiz, mufassir, tafsīr, mubayyin, and
tabyīn (see, however, Ibn Šuqayr,
Muḥallā 15–16, where
tafsīr is reserved for the accusative after numbers; cf. Mubarrad,
Muqtaḍab II, 144, 164, 173, III, 32, 91, 259, where
tabyīn and
tamyīz are distinguished, but not uniformly). Although Sībawayhi (d. 180/796) discusses
tamyīz in various places of his
Kitāb (I, 204–211, II, …
Date:
2018-04-01
Tanāzuʿ
(2,262 words)
1. Definition
Tanāzuʿ lit. ‘conflict’ is a syntactic phenomenon that deals with two coordinated verbs competing for assigning case to a shared constituent, as in (1). (1) [1 ḍaraba-nī] wa-[2 ḍarab-tu
zayd-an] hit-me and-hit-I Zayd-Acc ‘Zaydi hit me and I hit himi’ The shared constituent (in bold) in (1) serves two distinct grammatical functions: it serves as a subject for the first verb (henceforth clause 1) and as an object for the second verb (henceforth clause 2). However,
zayd-an belongs to clause 2, as it carries the accusative case, assigned under adjacency by the i…
Date:
2020-09-01
Tanwīn
(2,887 words)
The term
tanwīn (called in Western terminology ‘nunation’) is the
maṣdar of the verb
nawwana ‘adding an
n’. At first, it indicated the nasalization of the final vowel of the word, especially in the case ending of the noun (e.g.
rajulu-n). According to Ibn Yaʿīš (d. 643/1245;
Šarḥ IX, 29),
tanwīn became, due to metonymy, the actual name of the final
-n. Arabic script differentiates this
-n from the final
n belonging to the root of the word (e.g.
qaṭana, rasana), which is why
tanwīn is not represented graphically as a letter of the alphabet. The value of this
-n in traditional Arabic grammar tu…
Date:
2018-04-01
Taqdīr
(2,834 words)
The usual meaning of
taqdīr is ‘predestination, ordaining, decreeing’, semantically connected with
qadr in the sense of ‘(God's) decree, fate’. The word
taqdīr may also be connected with another sense of
qadr, ‘measure, quantity’, in which case it means ‘measuring; estimation of value, assignment of a value to something’. In this sense it is used, for instance, for assigning the portion of war booty to which each participant in a campaign is entitled (Kofler 1933:384). This latter sense is probably the one that is behind the technical use of the term, for instance in legal theory, where
taq…
Date:
2018-04-01
Tatar
(1,340 words)
Arabic was a superstrate language for Volga Tatar (and the predecessors of the modern Tatar language) for more than one thousand years, with economic and political ties to the Islamic world established well before the Volga Bulgars' early-10th-century conversion to Islam, and the influence of Arabic on the Tatar language was significant. Up until the 19th century, Tatars shared three literary languages with the other Muslims of Russia: Classical Arabic, Classical Persian, and Chagatay. The first…
Date:
2020-09-01
Telugu
(1,342 words)
1. Interaction between the Arabic and Telugu speech communities Telugu belongs to the Dravidian language family. It is spoken as the major language in Andhra Pradesh in India by more than 66 million people, and speakers of the language have spread to different parts of the world. The interaction between the Arabic and Telugu speech communities began when the Muslim king Allauddin Khilji invaded the south in 1296 C.E. Later, Giasuddin Tughlak invaded the south as well (Siddiqui 1956). Although no Muslim empire had yet been established there, during the 13th century…
Date:
2020-09-01
Tense
(2,360 words)
A controversy prevails in the study of Semitic languages, both ancient and modern, namely whether their verbal morphologies mark tense (e.g. past vs. non-past), or aspect (perfective vs. imperfective), or some combination of both. Also something of an issue are and modality, but they are not usually as problematic (or they are problematic in different ways) as tense and aspect. Arabic is consistent with other Semitic languages in its nonconcatenative morphology. Verbal and nominal forms alike are typically formed by interdigitation of consonantal roots (ideally c…
Date:
2020-09-01
Terminology
(5,478 words)
1. Definition Although terminological creation is governed by the same linguistic framework as common vocabulary, it is subject to specific conditions of its own. ‘Terms’ can be defined as words or phrases aiming at the designation of concepts related to a particular field of knowledge or activity. New terms can be introduced either by individuals or by a limited community, in answer to particular needs and under conditions which vary from one field to another. As a result, prime occurrence of ter…
Date:
2018-04-01
Terms of Address
(3,696 words)
1. Introduction The terms ‘address form’ and ‘term of address’ indicate any linguistic form used by speakers to refer to the person they are talking to (the addressee). These include pronouns, honorific ‘pronoun substitutes’, names, nicknames, teknonyms, titles, and other words used vocatively. Arabic varieties have overt vocative markers (the most common being the particle
yā, which occurs before the name or term), but in many instances a term may be used vocatively without the vocative particle. Terms of address are used for a variety of communica…
Date:
2018-04-01
Textlinguistics
(3,043 words)
Textlinguistics is the discipline that concerns itself with the investigation of the regularities and features of texts. Texts, as discourse realizates and irrespective of their syntactic size, are the basic units of textlinguistics. For any stretch of language to be considered a text, thus displaying full textness or textuality, it should display both text features (TFs), i.e. internal unity (cohesion) and conceptual sequence (coherence), and user features (UFs), i.e. intentionality, acceptabil…
Date:
2018-04-01