The Legacy of the Kilab: Sibawayhi's Analytical Methods Within the Context of the Arabic Grammatical Theory.

• Author: Carter, Michael G.
• Position: Book review

The Legacy of the Kilab: Sibawayhi's Analytical Methods Within the Context of the Arabic Grammatical Theory. BY RAMZI BAALBAKI, Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, 51. Leiden: BRILL, 2008. Pp. xi + 335. $199.

Here Baalbaki has abstracted the contents of his many articles on this topic and strung them together in three thematically arranged chapters on the background of the Kitab, its "fundamental analytical tools.'' and Sibawayhi's methods, concluding with a fourth chapter entitled "Comparison with subsequent authors." We can learn much about Sibawayhi from this book, which has copious references to the author's fuller treatments elsewhere (among them thirteen articles also reprinted in a 2004 collection). There is an abundance of well-illustrated discussion of Sibawayhi's unique contribution to Arab linguistics; his originality, his independence of mind, his terminological and methodological coherence, and the exhaustiveness of his data are described and exemplified in detail; and Baalbaki's premise, that the Kilab is "the first unequivocally authentic" Arabic grammar (p. viii), is fully substantiated.

There is a useful summary of the disagreements among scholars over the identity of the nahwiyyun and the nature of their linguistic ideas (pp. 18-24). To be sure, Talmon's attempt to prove the existence of pre-Sibawiiyhian "schools" in the strict sense does lack conclusive supporting documentation, but after dismissing it as based on "a working hypothesis which we should not expect to yield any definitive result" (p. 21), Baalbaki replaces it with an e silentio argument of his own (p. 23) that, since we cannot know anything worth knowing about the nahwiyyun. al-Khalll and Slbawayhi must be the first grammarians by default. This happens also to be close to the reviewer's opinion, for a different reason, namely, that the little we do know about the nahwiyyun docs not extrapolate into a significant influence on or contribution to Sibawayhi's system, which is qualitatively different. Versteegh has already identified in tafsir sources the limited technical vocabulary before the Kilab (p. 10) and Talmon's contribution, which deserves to be acknowledged, is to show in comprehensive detail how all the early "grammarians" (whoever and whatever they may have been) were trying to systematize a language that was not yet definitively stabilized, hence the many conflicting opinions among them.

Several large sections of this thought-provoking work must here be passed over with only a brief mention. The "analytical tools" are treated in depth, viz., the sources of linguistic evidence (sama), the nature and role of analogy (qiyas), linguistic causality (illa), the process of "suppletive insertion" (taqdir). grammatical operation (amal), basic forms or principles (asl), and various items that Baalbaki gathers under the heading of "group membership." This last involves the set of kinship terms used metaphorically in Sibawayhi's classification of speech elements, where the dominant member is the "mother" and the others are her "daughters" or have a collateral relationship as "sisters." Also in this set Baalbaki includes being "busy" or "idle," "well established," "fully circulating," "used," "not used," "light," and "heavy," although these are processes rather than categories, and apart from being personifications, their connection with "group membership" is not obvious. More attention could perhaps have been given to the fact that Sibawayhi has no term for "hierarchy": his manzila "status" does refer to a position on the paradigmatic axis but only insofar as it denotes the ability of elements from different form classes to have the same function when given the same manzila, e.g., ma can negate sentences because it has the status of laysa. Likewise there is no term for "wisdom" in the Kitab, which Baalbaki rather self-consciously imposes on Sibawayhi in the form of hikma (p. 67, borrowed from Ibn Jinni). Another such imposition is "merit" (p. 114 and elsewhere), apparently ascribed to Sibawayhi to indicate the higher place in a hierarchy; the concept is not formally identified in the Kitab, nor does Baalbaki say what the Arabic word for it might be (ajdar is suggested, p. 118, awla is also a possibility). We have enough trouble with the technical terms that do appeal' in the Ktiab. without being distracted by terms that Sibawayhi does not use.

There is a similar problem in the third chapter, on Sibawayhi's analytical methods, with the introduction of "basic rides," always in (real estate agent's) quotation marks, and for the same reason (acknowledged p. 135), namely, that this concept is not explicitly mentioned in the Kitab. The choice of "rule" here for the most truly descriptive grammarian in the whole literature is unfortunate, especially in light of Baalbaki's disparaging comments on pedagogical grammar, where there arc several terms, viz., qd'ida. dabit, hukm, uslub, naimullmj, qanun. dustur, for the rule-governed nature of Arabic as it was taught. Sibawayhi had little interest in formulating "rules" as such: he does refer to the underlying regularities of language by the complementary terms asl and qiyus, but together they mean considerably more than "basic rules." Paradoxically the Kitab abounds in axiomatic generalizations about Arabic, never labeled as "rules,"...