The History of the Arabic Language

Centre for Medieval Studies

Professor Michael G. Carter
BA (Oxon), MA (Oxon), DPhil (Oxon)
PhD (hon. causa) University of Lund, Sweden, 2003
Corresponding Member of the Arab Academy, Cairo.

The History of the Arabic Language, commissioned some time ago by the Cambridge University Press, will be completed this year. It covers the history of the language from the earliest historical mention of the Arabs (possibly 3rd millennium BC but certainly by 853 BC) to the present, from the first inscriptions on stone to text messaging.

The History of Arabic Grammar, commissioned by the Cambridge University Press five or six years ago, covers the entire history of the language from the earliest times to the present. The book will run to about 500 pages and is divided into 8 chapters:

1. The Arabs in History
2. The Emergence of Arabic
3. Varieties of Arabic
4. Phonology
5. Morphology
6. Syntax
7. Lexicon
8. Arabic as a World Language

The aim is to identify every fact and specimen of the language (the earliest direct evidence is only of the first century or two BC, but the Arabs may have been known to the Ancient Egyptians already in the 3rd millennium BC) and to describe in detail the formal evolution of their language in terms of the features dealt with in chapters 4 to 7, with special attention to the emergence of the dialects and modern written Arabic.

The final chapter reviews Arabic as a world language, represented today by large communities in every continent, and with an enhanced political relevance and interesting linguistic side-effects as the consequences of Western colonialism continue to work themselves out.

Long term objectives

Funding will be sought in 2006 from ARC for a discovery grant to complete a project which began in 1997 in Oslo to digitalise the most important text in the history of Arabic grammar. The Kitab of Sibawayhi (died about 795 AD) is a masterpiece of linguistics both at the language-specific and the general level. Its description of Arabic occupies more than 900 pages and the best-known edition is still the final reference point for all discussions of the language.

The first two stages of this project can be viewed on http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/research_projects/sibawiki/homepage/, This website contains a demo version containing the first seven and last seven chapters of the Kitab comprising:

• a base text, being a plain version for reference
• the full texts of three printed editions and some fragmentary editions
• the complete text as a single document to faciliate searching
• the complete German translation (the only one available) and some partial French translations and,
• (e) facsimiles of three manuscripts.

All the texts are hyperlinked both to each other and to any annotations or commentary, and all are HTML text files except the manuscripts, which are graphics at this stage.

Please note on-line versions of the text of the Kitab do exist elsewhere, but they are neither critical editions nor accompanied by any explanatory or interpretative material.

The Project will be designed around the following activities:

1. Upgrading all the files to Unicode while it is still practicable, thereby replacing the private transliteration font, which is not doing too well under the constant Windows updates (a move to Linux is being seriously considered). This will also be a chance to revise the URLs and filenames so that they are no longer case sensitive (an error of inexperience).
2. Completing the formal digitisation and mark-up of the texts: the corpus as it stands is about twelve thousand pages in all, though there are many more documents which will be added at a later stage. OCR will be used, but it is still relatively primitive for Arabic.
3. Exploring the possibility of OCR with manuscripts (there are about seventy more which should be incorporated eventually). There are also other secondary works which will eventually be added to the corpus: the aim is to create an entire library of linked material around this fundamental text.
4. Investigating the commercial possibilities of: (a) publishing the whole document in portable media or making it a subscription site (with opportunities for user input), (b) developing software to automate the production of similar web editions of other texts (not language or culture specific), (c) developing browsing software (again non-language specific) which would enable the best use of the web-site. At the moment all the files are searchable as texts (except the graphics files) but there is no smart searching which could, for example, bring up all versions of a specified portion of the text for comparison or highlight differences between them and so on.
5. Contemplating an English translation of this work: so far there is none except for a few short passages and a partial effort from Georgetown University. The production of an English translation is certainly worth undertaking as the German translation cited above is not as accessible as one would like, however I believe you should learn Arabic and German first anyway, by which time a translation becomes superfluous.
6. The relevance of the project increases as the pressures to modernise Arabic grow in strength, and will be an important contribution to that debate by providing easy access to the ultimate reference point of all discussions of language reform in the Arab and perhaps the Islamic world.

In the longer term if funding is obtained there will be collaboration between St, Petersburg and Oslo Universities (which were both involved in the first two stages) and we also will hope to interest the Arab universities, possibly Oman, where there is a very good resident Sibawayhi expert.

A Comprehensive Grammar of Modern Written Arabic,co-authored with Elsaid Badawi and Adrian Gully, Routledge, London, New York, 2003. ISBN 0-415-13084-0. 812 pp.

Sibawayhi, in the series Makers of Islamic Civilization, Oxford University Press and I. B. Tauris, Oxford 2004, ISBN 1-85043-671-1, 159 pp.

Linguistics and SETIS would be approached for the long-term project.