Anachronistic bias in the study of Arabic grammatical tradition: The case of the term ḥarf in Sībawayhi’s al-Kitāb
AlmogKasher
Bar-Ilan University
Abstract
One of the most obscure and most frequently commented on texts in Arabic grammatical tradition is the opening
formulation in its earliest extant book, Sībawayhi’s al-Kitāb, concerning the tripartite division of parts of
speech. For the third part of speech, the particle, around which the present article revolves, Sībawayhi uses a complex term,
whose head is ḥarf, a term which is commonly used by itself by later grammarians for this part of speech. This
article revisits the question of whether the term ḥarf by itself denotes “particle” in al-Kitāb,
alongside the denotation “word”. Following Weiss’ article, published more than a hundred years ago, it will be argued that
ḥarf does not denote “particle” in al-Kitāb, though occurrences thereof may refer to
particles, and that scholars who ascribe the later denotation “particle” to ḥarf in al-Kitāb do
so due to an anachronistic bias.
In what seems to be an echo of Whitehead’s famous saying on European philosophy as consisting of a “series of footnotes to
Plato”, Versteegh (1997: 39) characterises Arabic grammatical tradition as “nothing but a
huge commentary” on Sībawayhi’s (d. ca. 180/796)
al-Kitāb, the earliest extant book in this tradition. Notwithstanding the uncontested position of this work,
sometimes referred to as the “Qurʾān of grammar”, it is well known that its technical terminology was not always adopted unaltered by
later grammarians (who of course also coined new technical terms). Consequently, the fact that certain technical terms in
al-Kitāb do not have the meaning they do in later treatises poses considerable difficulties to its reader. What
renders the task of understanding al-Kitāb even more challenging is the tendency of its most renowned commentator,
al-Sīrāfī (d. 368/979), to read the later usage of technical terms into this text, although he was well aware of the differences
between Sībawayhi and later grammarians in this respect.
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