Recently Published: A Comprehensive Study of the First Arabic Book on Grammar

Baalbaki's book cover

Ramzi Baalbaki, the Margaret Weyerhaeuser Jewett Chair of Arabic, has published a new book, entitled The Legacy of the Kitab: Sibawayhi's Analytical Methods Within the Context of the Arabic Grammatical Theory (Brill, 2008). The book is a comprehensive study of the first and most impressive treatise on Arabic grammar, simply known as the Kitab of Sibawayhi (d. 796 A.D.), since its author died before giving a title to his work.

Baalbaki carefully examines the concepts and methods that characterize the Kitab and demonstrates the coherency of its author's systeam of grammatical analysis and the interrelatedness of his analytical tools and notions. He also highlights the centrality of grammar as a discipline for neighboring fields of study, in particular Quranic readings, stylistics, jurisprudence, logic, and epistemology. Baalbaki argues that grammar's central position within the wider Arab culture promotes our understanding of the various disciplines with which it has interacted throughout its long history of development.

Another theme in the book is the huge influence of the Kitab on the overall grammatical tradition. In fact, most of Sibawayhi's terms, notions, categories, arguments, and analytical tools were largely adopted by subsequent grammarians. Yet, his vivid analysis of speech as a process of communication, which takes place in a particular context and his analysis of the mental operations performed by both the speaker and the listener, often gave way to an increasing interest in formal considerations at the expense of meaning and to a speculative and uninspiring pedagogical approach to most morphological and syntactical issues.

Finally, Baalbaki demonstrates the relevance of his study to the present by arguing that the difficulty which students of Arabic face in mastering its grammar is an old phenomenon that goes back to the time of the earliest grammarians.