Arabic Syntax: علم النحو العربی (edited)

Appendix A - Expressiveness of the Arabic Language

Ibn Khalidun, may Allah elevate his rank, wrote in his magnificentمُقَدِّمَه regarding the Arabic language and its superiority over all other languages.  He said,رَحِمُهُ الله , it is because in Arabic even “non-words” i.e. vowel sounds and patterns carry meaning.  In other languages, to convey these ‘non-word’ meanings whole words need to be used.  He said that is why we see massive difference in length when some Arabic passage is translated into a non-Arabic language.  The Prophet, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said,

“Speech has been made comprehensive for me”.

Basically we have three distinct sources for meanings, only one of which is because of the words themselves:

A meaning originating from the base letters of a word i.e. wherever and in whichever pattern those letters are found, the base letter meaning will be present e.g. the base letters ‘kaf, taa, and baa’ express the meaning of writing.  Wherever these letters are found, the ‘base letter meaning’ of writing will be there.  In Arabic almost all combinations of three consonants have meaning.  It is the job of the dictionary to give us this base letter meaning.

A meaning coming from the pattern.  The letters themselves are all consonants.  Consonants alone can not be pronounced.  For instance, try pronouncing the letter ‘b’ without adding a vowel to it!  The moment a sound comes out, one realizes it’s either ‘ba’, ‘be’ or the like which has been pronounced, not just the letter ‘b’ by itself.  The reality is all consonants need to be coupled with vowels in order to become syllables and thus pronounceable.  This is the nature of human utterance.  By definition, a syllable is the sound produced by coupling a consonant with a vowel.  This is nothing more than a manifestation of human limitations.  In other languages, this ‘vowelling’ which arose out of pure necessity is mostly random and carries little significance. However, in Arabic it is this very vowelling which Ibn Khaldun is calling our second meaning, namely the ‘pattern meaning’.  ‘ك ’, ‘ت , and ‘ب ’ we said expresses the meaning of ‘to write’.  In Arabic there are literally dozens, if not hundreds of ways to vowel those three letters, some of which include the addition of ‘non-base’ letters.  All of these patterns carry distinct meaning.  Now, depending on the particular pattern, the base-letter meaning of writing will be expressed in a unique way.  For instance,كَتَبَ (he wrote),كُتِبَ (it was written),يَكتُبُ (he writes, is writing or will write),كاتِب (writer),مَكتَب (desk i.e. place of writing),أُكتُب (write!) and many, many others.  Also recall that we said the subjects of all of these verbs i.e. the pronouns are not separate words but letters.  The recognition of these patterns and designated letters which come at the end of the verbs to reflect the pronouns is the subject matter ofصرف (Arabic Morphology).

As for the third and final meaning, which is also a ‘non-word’ meaning, we refer back to the first section of this discussion i.e. introducing grammatical states.  Recall that grammatical structure in Arabic is reflected by change in the last letter.  It is from the ending of a given word that we determine whether that word is being used in the sentence as a subject of the verb, an object, or whether the word is in the possessive case.  It isنحو which deals with all the technicalities of grammatical meaning.

In summary, we may say the most basic meaning originates from the given three base letters of a word.  These three letters then need to be arranged with vowels in order to be pronounced.  In most languages this vowelling carries little if any meaning.  In Arabic whole distinct meanings such as tenses and the gender, plurality and person of pronouns is conveyed via these vowels and letters.  When the individual words are constructed, they need to be used in sentences, because people do not speak in words.  They speak in sentences.  Sentence structure is reflected again, not by separate words (like in other languages), but by vowels or letters!  This is our third meaning.

[^1] See Appendix A for a discussion of how meanings are conveyed in the Arabic language, with reference to Ibn Khaldun and the Prophet (pbuh).