Arabic-L:LING:New book on history of Arabic linguistics

[Dilworth Parkinson]

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arabic-L: Fri 11 Dec 2009
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <
dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu
>
[To post messages to the list, send them to 
arabic-l at byu.edu
]
[To unsubscribe, send message from same address you subscribed from to

listserv at byu.edu
 with first line reading:
            unsubscribe arabic-l                                      ]

-------------------------Directory------------------------------------

1) Subject:New book on history of Arabic linguistics

-------------------------Messages-----------------------------------
1)
Date: 11 Dec 20099
From:
BearMeiser at aol.com

Subject:New book on history of Arabic linguistics

Language and Heresy in Isma'ili Thought
by Jamal Ali, 
ISBN: 978-1-59333-781-0
Gorgias Press.
 
This book mines the unpublished manuscript of Kitaab al-Ziina by the Ismaili Abu Hatim al-Razi for new information about the history of Arabic linguistics. The chapter on Arabic grammar is of particular interest to the linguist and the student of Arabic linguistic thought. This chapter shows how the ideas of the early generation of linguistic thinkers, particularly Farra', who used ad hoc terminology and conceived of syntactic transformations as vital, living processes, evolved into the method used by Razi and his Kufan contemporaries, Tha'lab and Ibn al-Anbari, a method in which calcified technical terms had become the main tools for describing sentence structure and syntactic phenomena.
 
The chapter on the word "kalima" reveals how there has been a longstanding debate among linguists regarding the differences between "kalima," "kalaam," "kalim," and "qawl." This debate began with the very early Arabic linguists and still has echoes in twentieth-century works on Arabic grammar.
 
Another chapter is on strange and little-seen etymologies of place names that Razi cited, and which pushed the limits of believability, but which fell out of favor and were replaced by more plausible etymologies. Yet another chapter is on heresiography, the divisions of the Muslim community, and the names given to those divisions.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
End of Arabic-L:  11 Dec 2009