Arabic: A Linguistic Introduction by Karin Ryding (review)

This book, with its well-honed linguistic treatment drawing on Karin Ryding’s deep knowledge of Arabic, complements her well-known, comprehensive reference grammar (A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic, 2005). More than that, it seeks to concisely integrate the study of the structure of Arabic into a basic contemporary linguistic framework. This goal is not as self-evident as it seems, nor, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, is it anachronistic. The study of Arabic language structure knows a number of distinct traditions, which often largely ignore one another—the Arabic grammatical tradition as practiced in much of the Arabic world, the philological tradition of Semiticists and largely European or European-tradition Arabists, and the contemporary linguistic perspective. While all roads ultimately lead to Mecca as far as learning the Arabic language goes, which path one chooses largely marks the research orientation that one will assume throughout a career, as far as those specializing in the Arabic language itself go. Although Ryding traces her modern linguistic orientation back to Noam Chomsky (1950–60s), this is the first introductory work that explicitly sets Arabic within a vocabulary of and orientation to the contemporary linguistic world.

The work consists of eleven chapters, three appendices, and useful glossaries of technical linguistic terms relating to phonology, morphology, syntax, and general categories. Here Ryding goes well beyond traditional terms such as “morpheme” and “phoneme” to include many theory-specific concepts, a knowledge of whose existence at least, is necessary in modern linguistics.

Ryding begins with an overview of the history of Arabic linguistics in the West, its main contemporary strands of research, and a parallel overview of the development of linguistics over the last fifty-plus years. Here she is inclusive rather than dogmatic, drawing on her vast background in all research traditions. Indeed, wherever appropriate, Ryding gives technical linguistic terms from the Arabic tradition that correspond to contemporary ones—for instance, idɣaam for “assimilation” (23) or ħađf for “deletion” (28)—hence underscoring the basic conceptual agreement between the two traditions.

Thereafter follow chapters on Arabic phonology and morphophonology; syllable structure and stress; morphology, both inflectional and derivational; and Arabic syntax, summarized at the phrase and clause levels. Each chapter concludes with a set of questions that ask students to think about general linguistic questions, questions specific to Arabic grammar, and questions about Arabic grammar in the context of theoretical linguistic issues. These draw on Ryding’s own distinguished career in teaching Arabic and cover all eras of the long tradition on grammatical research on Arabic. Questions in chapter 9 (115), for instance, challenge students to read a short chapter of Ibn Uthman Sibawaih’s Al-Kitaab, to analyze it as an independent text, and also to think about it in generative-linguistic terms, while asking further questions about the linguistic analysis of sentences from a purely contemporary theoretical perspective. This integrative approach, which a generation ago might have pejoratively been called eclectic, should inspire students to look beyond superficial differences in the different traditions, toward the conceptual unity that can be found in the study of grammar across centuries and cultures. Each chapter is short, but much is packed into every one, including in particular an excellent summary of each linguistic domain treated and background as to their relevance within contemporary linguistics.

One point that might have been treated differently is when Ryding writes, “The language of the Qur’an was not only revered, but sacred, an ‘inimitable rhetorical gift’” (7). The status of the Qur’an and its relation to Arabic has a long history within the Arabic linguistic tradition itself. The dogma of inimitability did not really become established until relatively late in the tradition, with Jurjani (fifth/eleventh century). This in fact appears to be an interesting question to add at the end of the chapter. Had this been a crucial, constraining point of debate in the earlier era, say the second/eighth and early third/ninth centuries of Sibawaih and Farraa...