Welcome. This is a Beta (test) version of the site, which I'm making available in order to test the design and find bugs. You are welcome to poke around, on one condition: that you provide feedback to editor at sibawayhi.org. Also, please do not link to this page; instead link to the home page. Thanks!
أهلا وسهلا
Updates to the site will be announced on Twitter.
أهلا وسهلا
Where's the translation? A previous version of this site contained preliminary translations of a dozen or so articles. They are currently under revision and will be republished sooner or later.
أهلا وسهلا
You may also be interested in two other (independent) Sibawayhi-related projects:
The Sībawiki Project (Carter, Matveev, Edzard)
Journal of Arabic Linguistics Tradition (Solomon Sara's translation-in-progress)
Status 30 Sept 2012: new "Status" tab; maximal spelling; quotation markup; notes on fonts; usable Table of Contents; etc. For details click on the "Status" tab.
Welcome to Sibawayhi.Org. This website is devoted the study of the Kitāb of Sībawayhi.
Sībawayhi (أبو بشر عمرو بن عثمان بن قنبر) was born in Persia, went to Basra to study, and died young, sometime around 180/796. The Kitāb (literally "Book") is his sole literary work. Consisting of 571 articles running to some 1,000 pages, it is a detailed account of "the speech of the Arabs" (كلام العرب). It is probably the first literary composition expressly intended for public dissemination as a book in the history of Arabic-Islamic civilization.
The Kitāb quickly became established as the last word on Arabic. It remains to this day the authoritative voice on Arabic grammar. In this respect Sībawayhi and his Kitāb are analogous to Euclid and his Elements in the European tradition.
Why study the Kitāb today? The brief answer is the Kitāb is the single most important piece of literature in the history of Islamic civilization after the Qurān. Language is at the very core of Islam; in the Kitāb, Sībawayhi left a record of how the Arabs of his day thought about language; and later generations of Muslims (and non-Muslim Arabic speakers) learned their Arabic at the feet of the master, Sībawayhi, by studying his Kitāb or one of the thousands of manuals based on it. The tradition produced a seemingly endless flow of books, manuals, guides, etc. about Arabic, but they were all based on the Kitāb. So for students of Arabic and Islam, mastery of the Kitāb lays the foundation for study of the tradition.
But there is another more profound reason to study the Kitāb, a reason that has little to do with Islamic intellectual history or even Arabic per se and everthing to do with contemporary intellectual life. Struggling with the text of the Kitāb is a profoundly therapeutic exercise; it takes the student directly to the most fundamental questions we can ask about the nature of language, meaning, and understanding. For arriving at an understanding of the text as Sībawayhi and his contemporaries would have understood it involves far more than just deciphering the ``literal'' meaning of the text. Western (European) culture, like every culture, rests on a host of presuppositions about the world and language. These mostly implicit commitments are so deeply embedded as to be practically invisible to those brought up within the tradition. For example, the West has traditionally thought of language as made of consonts, vowels, words, and so forth, and variously as representational, instrumental, etc.; and in general western scholars have not shied away from claiming universality for such notions. The Kitāb exposes such notions as fundamentally historical creatures, dependent for their intelligibility on particular times, places, and traditions.
Approach the Kitāb without an awareness of your implicit commitments and you will surely misread it. For the implicit presuppositions of Sībawayhi differ radically from those of the Western tradition, both ancient and modern. It is first and foremost an Arabic description of Arabic. The Arabic of Sībawayhi's day, like any historically situated linguistic practice, came with its own unique set of conceptual resources and constraints. What Sībawayhi had to say in Arabic about Arabic cannot be expressed in ordinary English. It can be expressed - it is not radically inaccessible to the English speaker - but not by any sort of direct simple translation. Grappling with the Kitāb is therapeutic in this sense, that it forces the student to come to an awareness of the implicit presuppositions that inform his or her reading. In particular, it demands an awareness of how the expressive resources and constraints of one's own language subtly condition one's grasp of what language is and how it works.
Once you have mastered the Kitāb you will find it difficult to take seriously the grand universalist pronouncements of Western Poobahs of modern linguistics.
This website is designed to facilitate the study of the Kitāb. It is a labor of love, not profit, although I hope to find a way to generate some revenue to finance the project eventually; it will be years before the website does all the things I plan for it - indices, hyperlinks, etc. Since this is a Beta version intended for testing the technical implementation and design, it currently it contains minimal content. But the planned outline will be evident.
The exception is that a complete (albeit unedited) text of the Kitāb is available on the "Text" subtab of "The Kitāb" tab. It also contains references to the page numbers of each article in the three main published editions, which should be useful to anybody checking references in papers on Sībawayhi.
Since this is a beta version, I ask that you run it through its paces and email editor at sibawayhi.org with any bug reports or suggestions. I would also appreciate it if you would send me a postcard from your local area by snailmail. You can send it to : Gregg Reynolds, 5075 N. Wolcott Apt 2, Chicago IL 60640, USA. Thanks!
أهلا وسهلا إلى موقع سيبويه
Prefaceمقدمة
Introductionمقدمة
Intro...
More intro...
Organization of this workنظام هذا الموقع
Introduction...
Introductionمقدمة
It's easy to give a facile account of what the Kitāb is: a grammar, a detailed description of Arabic, a theory of Arabic, etc. But these are not very satisfactory answers. The Kitāb does not fit any of the familiar genres in the Western literary tradition. There is nothing even remotely like it in the relatively sparse Western literature about language, ancient or modern.
Sībawayhi is hard to categorize as well. Among Western writers, he is routinely referred to as a linguist, grammarian, philologist, or the like. But these labels are more harmful than helpful. He could not have been a linguist in the modern sense of the word; linguistics as a first-class academic discipline is barely 100 years old. It depends critically on the formation of particular ontological notions about ``Language'' as an object of study, notions which are completely alien to Sībawayhi's way of thinking. Philology has historically focussed exclusively on written texts. But Sībawayhi was writing at the dawn of the Arabic literary tradition; Schoeler has argued that the Kitāb is the first book expressly composed for publication in the history of the tradition. As the text of the Kitāb makes abundantly clear, Sībawayhi's exclusive focus was on نحو كلام العرب, the "way of the speech of the Arabs". If he was a philologist it was only in the literal sense of the term, a lover of speech.
Nor was Sībawayhi a grammarian. The concept of grammar is a Western invention, inseparable - as its etymology suggests - from the sort of literacy that has been central to Western thought for millenia. Grammar is fundamentally about written language, and modern attempts to extend it to cover all of language have generally failed to escape its entanglement with writing. Theoretical linguists have invented dozens of so-called grammars, as models of language, but virtually all of them rely on often hidden presuppositions derived from writing. It is only within the past several decades that researchers - most working outside of mainstream linguistics - have begun to seriously investigate actual speech practices; one result of such research has been to throw into question the very idea that language practice can be adequately characterized in terms of grammar (formal structure). Sībawayhi could not have been a grammarian even if he had wanted to be one, since he was writing at or near the beginning of the Arabic literary tradition, when neither writing conventions nor genres were well established. The stable written tradition upon which the notion of grammar depends had not yet fully emerged. Nowhere in the Kitāb does Sībawayhi mention writing; and he repeatedly stresses that his primary concern is with the way the Arabs speak.
One reason Sībawayhi and his masterpiece are hard to pigeonhole is that we have almost no direct, reliable information about him.
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