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
Modal Verbs
(3,283 words)
1. Modal verbs in Classical Arabic The modal verbs in Arabic, as in other languages, are those verbs which through their meaning and function are linked to the category of ‘mood’ (
modus vs.
dictus; cf. Ducrot and Schaeffer 1972), within a framework of ‘modalization’, borrowed from Aristotelian logic. The presence of a ‘modal’ verb in a sentence changes its content by offering information on the manner in which the speakers relate themselves to the respective content: whether they assume it to be true or false, known, necessary,…
Date:
2018-04-01
Modern Standard Arabic
(12,573 words)
1. General Arabic is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages; it is the official language of the 22 nations of the Arab world, the area bounded by the Atlantic on the west, the Mediterranean on the north, the Sahara on the south, and the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq on the east; it is spoken by more than two hundred million people. Modern Standard Arabic is the High literary form of Arabic that goes back to the literary language of pre-Islamic Arabia (poetic koine; Classical Arab…
Date:
2019-03-23
Mood (Arabic Dialects)
(4,479 words)
1. Introduction Mood in spoken Arabic is a complex grammatical category. Standard Arabic grammarians did not have a term for it and therefore made no explicit reference to it (mood (Standard Arabic)). Mood in spoken Arabic is complex for the following reasons: (i) There is no universally agreed definition of the term; (ii) spoken Arabic, including Educated (Spoken) Arabic, is characterized by variation, which, albeit systematic, is manifested in seemingly messy realizations of forms and structures…
Date:
2018-04-01
Mood (Standard Arabic)
(1,961 words)
1. Mood in Arabic grammar The term ‘mood’ in Western grammars of Standard and Classical Arabic applies to the ‘imperfect’ or ‘prefixed’ verbal stem -
qtul- and its four endings -
u, -a, -Ø (zero), and -
an(na). (The full paradigms are given in Table 2, and the prefixes for grammatical person are discussed in Table 1.) The form
ya-qtul-u ‘he kills/will kill’ (hyphens separate morphemes) serves as the present/future tense in direct opposition to the past or perfect tense stem
qatal-. The same
ya-qtul-u is called indicative or ‘realis’ mood in contrast to the two ‘irrealis’ moods, subjunctive
ya…
Date:
2019-03-23
Moroccan Arabic
(7,514 words)
1. General This is a tentative description of the Moroccan koine, spoken in most urban areas of Morocco. It is important to note that this is not one of the old, prestigious, pre-Hilālian dialects like the ones spoken in Fes, Old Rabat, Salé, or Tetouan. The latter present too many peculiarities to become koineized. There are many regional varieties of Moroccan Arabic, but among a group of speakers from the Maghreb, one can always distinguish a Moroccan from an Algerian or a Tunisian after only a few words. 1.1 Area, range The Moroccan koine serves as a linguistic vehicle in most larg…
Date:
2019-05-01
Morocco
(6,422 words)
1. Studies on Moroccan dialects 1.1 Modern research on Moroccan Arabic is more than two centuries old: the first grammar of a Moroccan dialect was published in the year 1800 in Vienna (Dombay 1800). But it was at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century that publications on Moroccan dialects increased (Lerchundi 1872, 1892; Marçais 1911; Kampffmeyer 1912). During the French-Spanish Protectorate (1912–1956), some of the most important works on Moroccan dialectology were published (see, fo…
Date:
2018-04-01
Morphology
(6,570 words)
Morphology is the study of word formation. Arabic has a rich morphological system with many interesting properties. This entry begins in Section 1 with a synopsis of some important morphological concepts. Sections 2 and 3 de-scribe the morphology of Arabic verbs and nouns. Section 4 is an overview of recent research on morphology in Arabic and other Semitic languages. 1. Morphological concepts Words are composed of meaningful units called morphemes. The English word
obese consists of a single morpheme, while
obesity has two morphemes, the root
obese and the affix +
ity, which changes …
Date:
2018-04-01
Muḥaqqaq
(2,386 words)
Although the term
muḥaqqaq as a script or style of handwriting appears in a number of early sources, it is far from clear what its salient features were. Moreover, some of these sources explore the term
muḥaqqaq not as a particular script, but as a standard of handwriting. Thus, for instance, aṣ-Ṣūlī (d. 335/946), to begin with the earliest text, says that “the best looking of scripts is the delicate
muḥaqqaq, with its rounded letters, its open (
maftūḥ)
ṣ's and
ṭ's, and its slurred or curtained (
muxtalis)
t's and
ḥ's” (Abbott 1939:29). ʾAbū Ḥayyān at-Tawḥīdī (d. after 400/1009), the author of
R…
Date:
2018-04-01
Multilingualism
(6,277 words)
Multilingualism can be defined either at the societal level, where two or more languages are used within a single community, or at the level of the individual, where the same person uses more than one language. These two phenomena do not always co-occur; within the Arab world, multilingual individuals may live within states that are regarded as monolingual, while in multilingual states many or even most individuals may be monolinguals. The multilingualism of individuals or communities may or may…
Date:
2018-04-01
Music and Arabic Language
(5,825 words)
Music and language have things in common. It is even thought by some that they have a common origin and were once indistinguishable. Whatever the truth of this, they share several characteristics: although they can be written down, they are primarily oral/aural; they are organized sound; they progress linearly in time; their constituents use differences in length and pitch as distinctive elements; there is a hierarchy of structured constituents from the smallest ones (notes or phonemes) to larg…
Date:
2018-04-01
Muštarak
(2,042 words)
Muštarak (or, currently,
al-muštarak al-lafḍī) is used in Arabic rhetoric and grammar to indicate the ‘homonymous polysemic word’ (lit. ‘the common one’). The question at the origin of the lexical category of
muštarak is ‘how the nouns apply to the
nominatum (the named things)’ (see, for instance, Ibn Fāris [d. 395/1004],
Ṣāḥibī 114,
bāb al-ʾasmāʾ kayfa taqaʿu ʿalā l-musammayāt). In the most general and common state of affairs, every thing gets its own noun, such as
rajul ‘man’,
faras ‘horse’, and so on (Ibn Fāris,
Ṣāḥibī 327), but there are also single ‘things’ with many nouns,…
Date:
2018-04-01
Mutarādif
(1,673 words)
The term
mutarādif means ‘synonym’; in addition to this technical term, other expressions are found in Arabic medieval works:
muwāfiq li- ‘corresponding to’,
makāna ‘in the place of’ (Gully 1994:38–39). The question of synonymy was dealt with by medieval Muslim scholars from both a practical and a theoretical point of view. Of the former type are works such as al-ʾAṣmaʿī's (d. 213/828)
Mā xtalafa ʾalfāḍu-hu wa-ttafaqat maʿānī-hi ‘A collection of synonymous words and expressions’, a sort of mirror image of works bearing titles such as
Mā ttafaqa lafḍu-hu wa-xtalafa maʿnā-hu ‘A collec…
Date:
2018-04-01
Muwaššaḥ
(6,492 words)
The Appearance of the Muwaššaḥ in al-ʾAndalus: Description and Definition In Muslim Spain, the
muwaššaḥ – or ‘girdle poem’ (strophic poetry in classical Arabic) – was developed from the end of the tenth century onwards together with the strophic genre of the
zajal in colloquial Arabic. This colloquial was a Western Arabic dialect, which we call
ʾandalusī. Although the
muwaššaḥ is normally conceived in classical Arabic, we find in it quotations in colloquial Arabic and, in the last part of the poem (the
xarja or ‘exit refrain’), in Romance language. Both strophic genres norma…
Date:
2018-04-01