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The Standardisation of the Language

Even before the language shift of the deewaan, Arabic was used as a written language: the earliest papyri date from year 22 of the Hijra, and at the end of the first century of the Higra quite a number of papyrus texts must have been circulating. The language of these papyri is highly irregular from the point of view of the codified grammar of Classical Arabic, but the fact that they contain a large number of hypercorrections demonstrates that the scribes tried to emulate a linguistic ideal. In Chapter 8, on the so-called Middle Arabic texts, we shall deal with the linguistic features of the corpus of papyri. In this chapter, our main purpose is to sketch the process of standardisation that was soon under way.

The Qur’aanic language, though virtually identical with the language of pre-Islamic poetry, has a typically religious flavour, manifesting itself in peculiarities of style and language that must have been absent in other registers. Likewise, the language of the poems was marked by poetic licences that did not occur in ordinary language. Although both sources constituted a model for correct Arabic, they could hardly serve as a model for ordinary prose. The arbiters of linguistic correctness, the Bedouin, were frequently called in for help in linguistic matters, but they were in no position to enforce a standard language, if only because of their own linguistic differences. We have seen above (Chapter 4) that in the period of the Jaahiliyya the language of the various tribes varied to a certain extent; and, even though it is reasonable to assume that there were no real problems of communication, there was no general standard either. On the other hand, the growing sedentary population with a more or less complete command of the language was very much in need of such a standard, but could hardly be expected to devote themselves to decisions about linguistic correctness. As a matter of fact, their slipshod use of the language for practical purposes, as in the texts which we find in the papyri, was one of the reasons for a growing concern on the part of those who regarded themselves as the true heirs of Bedouin civilisation, the pure Arabs. Even if we do not believe the account of Muslim historians such as Ibn Khaldoon about the corruption of speech as the main motive behind the ‘invention’ of grammar (cf. p. 102), it can hardly be denied that in the early decades of Islam there was an increasing call for specialists who could provide adequate teaching in Arabic.

According to most of our sources, the fourth caliph ‘Alee (r. 35/656-40/661) was the first to insist that something be done about the growing number of mistakes in speech (other sources mention the governor of the two Iraqs, Ziyaad ibn ‘Abeehi). The person whose name has become connected with the first efforts to standardise and codify the language was the same ‘Aboo l’Aswad whom we met above as the reformer of the writing system. Several stories are told about his reluctance to accept this job; according to some historians, he was finally persuaded when his own daughter made a terrible mistake in the use of the declensional endings, by confusing the expressions maa ‘a Hsana s-samaa’a ‘how beautiful is the sky!’ and maa ‘a Hsanu s-samaa’i ‘what is the most beautiful thing in the sky?’ (as-Seeraafee, ‘Akhbaar, ed. F. Krenkow, Beirut, 1936, p. 19). Another version of this story, in which the mistakes occur in the recitation of the Qur’aan, has been mentioned above (Chapter 4, p. 50).

The historicity of these anecdotes is, of course, doubtful, and Talmon (1985) has shown that the figure of ‘Aboo l-’Aswad was used by later grammarians as some kind of eponym for their own grammatical school. But the point remains that grammarians must have played an important role in the standardisation of the language. The earliest scholarly efforts concerned the exegesis of the Revealed Book, but since study of the language of the Qur’aan could hardly ignore that other source of pre-Islamic Arabic, the poems, very soon the two main components of the corpus of texts that was to become canonical for the linguistic study of Arabic were combined in the writings of the grammarians.

The first grammarian to give an account of the entire language in what was probably the first publication in book form in Arabic prose, Seebawayhi, was not of Arab stock himself, but a Persian from Hamadhan. His example set the trend for all subsequent generations of grammarians. The grammarians believed that their main task was to provide an explanation for every single phenomenon in Arabic, rather than a mere description, let alone a set of precepts on how to talk Arabic correctly. Consequently, they distinguished between what was transmitted and what was theoretically possible in language. In principle, they accepted everything that was transmitted from a reliable source: in the first place the language of the Qur’aan, which was sacrosanct anyway, in the second place everything that had been preserved from pre-Islamic poetry, and in the third place testimonies from trustworthy Bedouin informants. In this framework, even singularities or deviant forms were incorporated without, however, being accepted as productive forms that could constitute the basis for a theoretical linguistic reasoning. Such a distinction is characteristic of Islamic science as a whole, where ‘aql ‘logical reasoning’ is always carefully distinguished from naql ‘transmitted knowledge’. In this way, a separation was realised between the study of attested forms and the theories of the grammarians, and without being prescriptive the grammarians could still impose a canonical norm of the language.

The codification of grammatical structure went hand in hand with the exploration of the lexicon and its necessary expansion. These two aspects of the process of standardisation are connected. Just as the grammarians were needed because of the perceived ‘corruption’ of the language, the first aim of the lexicographers seems to have been the preservation of the old Bedouin lexicon, which was at risk. There are several reasons for the lexicographers’ worries. In the first place, the sedentary civilisation of early Islam was markedly different from that of the desert tribes, who had been the guardians of the special vocabulary of the pre-Islamic poems. No city-dweller could be expected to know all the subtle nuances of a vocabulary connected with camels and animal wildlife and tents. There are several anecdotes about grammarians that stress this component of a grammarian’s activities. Thus, the grammarian ‘Aboo ‘Amr ibn al-’Alaa’ (d. 154/770), when he started lecturing about language and poetry, was confronted by a real Bedouin, who interrogated him about the explanation of obscure words. When the grammarian passed the test, the Bedouin said khu th oo ‘anhu fa-’innahu daabba munkara ‘transmit from him, because he is an extraordinary beast of burden [i.e. a depository of knowledge]!’ (az-Zajjaajee, Majaalis, ed. Haaroon, Kuwait, 1962, p. 262). This anecdote shows how grammarians had to prove their worth by their knowledge of the Bedouin lexicon.

For the ordinary speaker, who had grown up in an Islamic city and knew nothing about the Bedouin milieu, even ordinary Arabic words had become unfamiliar. From one of the earliest commentaries on the Qur’aan, we can get an idea about which words had fallen into disuse. Muqaatil ibn Sulaymaan’s (d. 150/767) Tafseer contains a large number of paraphrases of Qur’aanic words that he felt to be in need of explanation, e.g. ‘aleem ‘painful’ (replaced by wajee’ ), mubeen ‘clear’ (replaced by bayyin ), naba’un ‘news’ (replaced by hadeethun ), naseeb ‘share’ (replaced by Ha D D ), the verb ‘aataa ‘ ‘to give’ (replaced by ‘a’ Taa ) and the interrogative adverb ‘ayyaan ‘when?’ (replaced by mataa ).

The second threat to the lexicon had to do with the contact with other languages. When the Arabs became acquainted with the sedentary culture of the conquered territories, they encountered new things and notions for which there did not yet exist Arabic words. The most obvious sources for terms to indicate the new notions were, of course, the languages spoken in the new Islamic empire. And this was precisely what some of the Arab scholars feared. They were convinced that the influx of words from other cultures would corrupt the Arabic language, which had been chosen by God for His last revelation to mankind.

In the first century of the Hijra, this attitude did not yet make itself felt, as the comments by the earliest exegetes on the vocabulary of the Qur’aan demonstrate. In preIslamic times, the Arabs had taken over a considerable number of words from the surrounding cultures. Most of them were borrowed either through the Jewish/Aramaic language of Syria, or through the Christian/Syriac language in Mesopotamia, where al-Heera was the most important centre for cultural and linguistic contacts. Examples of early borrowings that occur both in pre-Islamic poetry and in the Qur’aan are the following:

from Middle Persian (Pahlavi) through Syriac/Aramaic:

zanjabeel ‘well in paradise’ fromSyriac zangabeel fromPahlavi singa b ēr ‘ginger’

warda ‘rose’ fromAramaic warda fromAvestan varǝda .

Some words must have been borrowed directly from Middle Persian, such as:

istabraq ‘brocade’ fromPahlavi sta b r ‘thick (of clothing)’ + suffix -ak

jund ‘army’ fromPahlavi gund ‘army, troop’

kanz ‘treasure’ fromPahlavi ganǰ ‘treasure’

dirham ‘silver coin’ fromPahlavi draxm fromGreek drachmè .

or from Greek/Latin through Syriac/Aramaic:

burj ‘tower’ fromSyriac boorgaa fromGreek púrgos

zawj ‘pair, married couple’ fromSyriac zoogaa ‘yoke’, bar zoogaa ‘husband, wife’ fromGreek zeũgos ‘yoke

‘ deenaar ‘gold coin’ fromSyriac deenaraa fromGreek dènárion fromLatin denarius

qa Sr ‘castle’ fromAramaic qa Sraa fromGreek kástron fromLatin castrum, castra

Siraa T ‘path’ fromAramaic is Traatiyaa fromGreek stráta fromLatin strata

yaqut ‘sapphire’ fromSyriac yaqoon Taa fromGreek huákinthos ‘hyacinth’

qir Tas ‘scroll of paper’ fromSyriac qar Teesaa, kar Teesaa fromGreek chartès .

And, of course, there was a large number of words that came in straight from Syriac/Aramaic, such as:

Salaat ‘prayer’ fromAramaic Slōthaa

teen ‘fig’ fromAramaic teenaa

sifr ‘large book’ fromAramaic sifraa

masjid ‘place of worship’ fromAramaic/Nabataean msgd’ .

A special category of loanwords is constituted by those words that came in by a southern route, from languages such as South Arabian or Ethiopic, e.g.:

Sanam ‘idol’ fromSouth Arabian Snm, Safaa’itic Snmt .

The oldest commentaries on the Qur’aan, such as the one by Mujaahid (d. 104/722), had no qualms in assigning words in the Qur’aan to a foreign origin. Mujaahid stated, for instance, that the word Toor ‘mountain’ came from Syriac, the word sijjeel ‘baked clay’ from Persian or Nabataean, and the word qis Taas ‘balance’ from Greek. In the cases mentioned here, he was not that far off, since Toor comes indeed from Syriac Toor, sijjeel from Pahlavi sang ‘stone’ + geel ‘clay’, and qis Taas perhaps ultimately derives from Greek dikastès ‘judge’, through Syriac deeqas Toos . Some of the etymologies quoted by the commentators may be fanciful, but the important thing is that they looked upon the enrichment of the vocabulary as an advantage and as a sign of the superiority of the creative genius evidenced in the Qur’aan . By the end of the second century of the Hijra, however, some philologists had started to attack the notion that the Qur’aan could contain foreign loanwords, and attempted to connect the vocabulary of the Qur’aan with a Bedouin etymology. Thus, for instance, ‘Aboo ‘Ubayda (d. 210/825) says that ‘the Qur’aan was revealed in clear Arabic language, and whosoever claims that the word taahaa is Nabataean makes a big mistake’ ( nazala l- Qur’aanu bi-lisaanin ‘arabiyyin mubeenin fa-man za’ama ‘anna taahaa bi-n-Nabatiyyati fa-qad ‘akbara, Majaaz I, ed. F. Sezgin, Cairo, 1954, p. 17). Although most Arab lexicographers, such as as-Suyootee (d. 911/1505), continued to assign a foreign origin to many Arabic words, the idea of the purity of the Arabic language remained the prevalent attitude among some Islamic scholars, and attempts by Western scholars to find traces of other languages in the Qur’aan were and still are vehemently rejected.

The real problem arises in the case of Qur’aanic words that have developed a new technical meaning not supported by the semantics of the Arabic root. In such cases, the exegetes goout of their way to find a connection. Thus, for instance, for the expression yawm al-qiyaama ‘the day of resurrection’, the standard explanation in the commentaries is that it is connected with the root q-w-m ‘to stand up’, but most likely the Christian Syriac term qiyaametaa as a translation of the Greek anástasis ‘resurrection’ prompted the semantic extension of the Arabic word. Similar examples are those of zakaat ‘alms’, masjid ‘mosque’, suhuf ‘scriptures’, sabt ‘Saturday’, soora ‘portion of the Qur’aan ‘, and such central notions in the Qur’aanic message as kitaab ‘book’, saa’a ‘hour’ etc. The term Su Huf ‘scriptures’, plural of Sa Heefa, is connected by the Arab commentators with a root S Hf, which occurs only as a denominative in the second measure with the meaning of ‘making a mistake in reading’. In pre-Islamic poetry, Sa Heefa (plural Sa Haa’if ) is used in the sense of ‘page of writing’. The Qur’aanic use of the word in the sense of ‘scriptures’ (e.g. Q 20/133 as- Su Huf al-’oolaa ‘the first scriptures’ is difficult to explain from this, which is why Western commentaries often connect it with an Old South Arabian word S Hft or with the common Ethiopic root s’- H-f ‘to write’.

In line with the idea of the purity of the language, the semantic extension of an existing word was regarded as the most appropriate device for the expansion of the lexicon. The model for this procedure was believed to have been given by the language of the Qur’aan itself. Since the grammarians analysed many religious terms such as Salaat ‘prayer’, zakaat ‘alms’, and the term ‘islaam itself, as old Bedouin words which had received a specialised meaning in the religious context, semantic extension became an accepted method of creating new terminology. They were doubtless right in the sense that part of the religious vocabulary of the Qur’aan is the result of an internal development without external influence. A case in point is the word ‘islaam, which meant in general ‘to surrender oneself’, but came to mean ‘to surrender oneself to God, to convert to the new religion brought by the Prophet’. Besides, even when the new meanings of existing words were calqued on cognate words in other languages, their occurrence in the Qur’aan canonised the new meaning.

The large-scale influx of new notions and ideas in the early Islamic period could not be handled by giving new meanings to existing words alone. In spite of the purists’ opposition, many words from other languages were simply taken over, either in their original form or with some slight adaptation to Arabic phonology or morphology. Loanwords from Persian abound in the domains of pharmacology, mineralogy and botany, for instance in the name of plants: banafsaj ‘violet’; sankhaar ‘gladiolus’; baa th injaan ‘eggplant’; baaboonij ‘camomile’; banj ‘henbane’; fustuq ‘pistachio’; khashkhash ‘poppy’; narjis ‘narcissus’.

In the earliest translations of Greek logical, medical and philosophical writings, some of the technical terms are simply transliterations of a Greek word for which the translators were unable to find an Arabic equivalent. Thus we have, for instance, hayoolaa ‘substance’ (from Greek hulē ), bulghum ‘phlegm’ (from Greek phlégma ) and ‘u S Tuquss ‘element’ (from Greek stoichĩon ). The next best solution was to create a new word on the basis of an existing root by the application of one of the numerous morphological patterns of Arabic. In the beginning, each translator created in this way his own set of terms. The ensuing confusion was more or less ended with the establishment of the Bayt al- Hikma ‘House of Wisdom’, the translators’ academy founded by the Caliph al-Ma’moon in 215/830. The Greek term katègoroúmenon ‘predicate’, for instance, had been variably translated as ma Hmool, maqool, Sifa or na’t, until it was standardised as ma Hmool . The Greek term apóphansis ‘proposition’ had been translated by as many as five different terms ( Hukm, khabar, qawl jaazim, qawl qaa Ti’, qa Diyya ), until qa Diyya became the usual term.

The use of patterns to create neologisms from existing roots was particularly useful in the translation of Greek medical terminology. A few examples may suffice to illustrate this method of inventing new vocabulary items. In his terminology of the skins of the eye, Hunayn ibn ‘Ishaaq translated Greek words in -eidès with abstract adjectives, e.g. qarniyya (Greek keratoeidès ) ‘cornea’, zujaajiyya (Greek hualoeidès ) ‘corpus vitreum’, ‘inabiyya (Greek rhagoeidès ) ‘uvea’, shabakiyya (Greek amphiblèstroeidès ) ‘retina’. The pattern fu’aal was used to systematise the names of illnesses, e.g. zukaam ‘catarrh’, Sudaa’ ‘headache’, Sufaar ‘jaundice’, duwaar ‘dizziness’, Tu Haal ‘infection of the spleen’, and even khumaar ‘hangover’.

A prerequisite for the creative use of the existing lexicon was its codification. The first complete dictionary of the Arabic language was composed by Seebawayhi’s teacher, al-Khaleel ibn ‘A Hmad, who had also been involved in the reform of the Arabic script (cf. above, p . 56) and who is generally acclaimed as the inventor of Arabic metrical theory. The professed aim of the Kitaab al-’ayn, which goes under his name, was the inclusion of all Arabic roots. In the introduction, a sketch is given of the phonetic structure of Arabic, and the dictionary fully uses the available corpus of Arabic by including quotations from the Qur’aan and from the numerous pre-Islamic poems, which had both undergone a process of codification and written transmission by the hands of the grammarians.

The arrangement of al-Khaleel’s dictionary, which seems to have been completed by his pupils, set the trend for many subsequent lexicographical writings. The dictionary is divided into books, one for each letter, starting with that of the letter ‘ayn, hence the name of the dictionary. Each book is divided into chapters, each dedicated to one set of radicals and containing all the permutations of these radicals. Thus, for instance, the chapter on the radical ‘-q-z, contains the roots ‘-z-q, q-z-’, z-’-q, and z-q-’, which are the ones actually used in the language ( musta’malaat ). Perhaps this reflects some idea of a higher semantic connection between the permutations of radicals, although al-Khaleel does not mention such a connection. The system of the Kitaab al-’ayn remained in use for a long time, even after a new system had been introduced by the grammarian al-Jawharee (d. 393/1003) in his Si Haa H . He arranged all roots in a kind of rhyming order, that is, alphabetically according to the last radical, then the first, then the second. This system became the current dictionary arrangement with the Lisaan al-’Arab by Ibn Man D oor (d. 711/1311), the most popular dictionary ever written in the Arab world.

In the Kitaab al-’ayn, the emphasis had been on those words that were in common use in Arabic writing, but later compilers aimed at complete coverage of all Arabic words, both common and rare. This sometimes led to the inclusion of ghost-words that had never existed as such, or the recording of several meanings for a word on the basis of just one particular context. A rich source of lexical items is constituted by the vocabulary of rajaz poetry in the slightly informal iambic trimeter, which often had an improvised character. The poets in this genre stretched the potential of Arabic word-building to its limits. Ullmann (1966) has shown that the many words in the dictionaries that are quoted from rajaz poetry are very often neologisms on the basis of existing roots, rather than separate roots. Triliteral words may be expanded more or less at will with prefixes, infixes and suffixes. Thus, for instance, from the existing word ‘adlamu ‘very black’ the verb idlahamma was created, from kada Ha ‘to make an effort’ the verb karda Ha from the root j-l-b ‘to bring’ the verb ijla’abba . New verbs were made with the infixes -ran-, -lan-, -’an- or - Han-, e.g. islan Taha ‘to be wide’ from sa Ta Ha ‘to expand’, iq’an Sara, with verbal adjective qin Sa’run, from qa Sura ‘to be short’, and many more examples. New nouns were made with the suffix -m, e.g. baldamun, balandamun with the same meaning as baleedun ‘stupid’, shaj’amun with the same meaning as shujaa’un ‘courageous’. The point is that the lexicographers took such invented words, which never gained any currency, for existing roots, which were then duly entered in the dictionary.

The early beginnings of grammar and lexicography began at a time when Bedouin informants were still around and could be consulted. There can be no doubt that the grammarians and lexicographers regarded the Bedouin as the true speakers ( fu Sa Haa’ ) of Arabic. As late as the fourth/tenth century, the lexicographer al-’Azhari (d. 370/980) extolled the purity of their language. He had been kidnapped by Bedouin and forced to stay with them for a considerable period of time. On the basis of this ‘fieldwork’ he wrote his dictionary Tah th eeb al-lugha ‘The reparation of speech’, in the introduction to which he says: ‘They speak according to their desert nature and their ingrained instincts. In their speech you hardly ever hear a linguistic error or a terrible mistake’ ( yatakallamoona bi- Tibaa’ihim al-badawiyyati waqaraa’i Hihim allatee ‘taadoohaa wa-laa yakaadu yaqa’u fee man Tiqihim la Hnun ‘aw kha Ta’un faa Hish, Tah th eeb I, ed. Haaroon, Cairo, 1964-7, p. 7). Other grammarians, too, collected materials from the nomad tribes, and it is often reported that caliphs or other dignitaries sent their sons into the desert in order to learn flawless Arabic.

In the course of the centuries, the Bedouin tribes increasingly came into the sphere of influence of the sedentary civilisation, and their speech became contaminated by sedentary speech. In his description of the Arabian peninsula, al-Hamdaanee (d. 334/945) sets up a hierarchy of the Arab tribes according to the perfection of their speech. He explains that those Arabs who live in or near a town have very mediocre Arabic and cannot be trusted; this applies even to the Arabs who live near the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. The grammarian Ibn Jinnee (d. 392/1002) includes in his Kha Saa’i S a chapter about the errors made by Bedouin and he states that in his time it is almost impossible to find a Bedouin speaking pure Arabic ( li-’anna laa nakaadu naraa badawiyyan fa Seehan, Kha Saa’i S II, ed. an-Najjaar, Cairo, 1952-6, p. 5). At the same time, Ibn Jinnee advises his students always to check their linguistic facts with Bedouin informants.

Even in the early period of Arabic grammar, our sources record examples of Bedouin who sold their expertise in matters of language to the highest bidder, as in the case of the famous mas’ala zunbooriyya . In this controversy between Seebawayhi and a rival grammarian, a question was raised about the expression kuntu ‘a D unnu ‘anna l-’aqraba ‘ashaddu las’atan min az-zunboori fa-’i th aa huwa ‘iyyaahaa ‘I thought that the scorpion had a stronger bite than the hornet, but it was the other way round’. Seebawayhi gave the correct answer - the last clause has to be fa-’i th aa huwa hiya ―but was defeated by the judgment of a Bedouin arbiter, who had been bribed by his adversary (Ibn al-’Anbaaree, ‘Insaaf, ed. G. Weil, Leiden, 1913, Pp. 292-5).

Modern critics of the attitude of the grammarians towards the alleged perfection of Bedouin speech often point out that the idealisation of their speech may have been part of a general trend to extol the virtues of desert life, and that even nowadays one sometimes hears stories about Bedouin speaking perfect Classical Arabic. Usually this means that they use words that have become obsolete elsewhere, or it refers to their poetical tradition, which often uses a classicising style of language. We are not concerned here with the question of whether the Bedouin had still preserved declensional endings in the third/ninth century (for which see above, Chapter 4). What is important for our present discussion is the fact that in the fourth/tenth century linguistic experts could apparently still find informants whom they trusted. From the fourth century onwards, however, this tradition disappeared. In the story about Seebawayhi and the Bedouin informant, there is already an element of corruption, and later the general image of the Bedouin became that of a thieving and lying creature whose culture was inferior to the sophisticated sedentary civilisation. For the practice of grammar, this meant that the process of standardisation had come to a standstill. Since there were no longer living informants to provide fresh information, the corpus of the language was closed, and ‘fieldwork’ could no longer produce reliable results. References to the kalaam al-’Arab ‘language of the Bedouin’ still abounded in the books of the grammarians, but these were no longer connected with any living speech.

From The Arabic Language
© 1997 Kees Versteegh
Used by permission of the Edinburgh University Press.

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