The Arabic Language

Kitāb al-ʿayn
, the emphasis had been on those words that were in common 
use in Arabic writing (
mustaʿmalāt
), but later compilers aimed at complete coverage 
of all Arabic words, both common and rare. This sometimes led to the inclusion of 
ghost-words that had never existed as such, or the recording of several meanings 
for a word on the basis of just one particular context. A rich source of lexical 
items is constituted by the vocabulary of 
rajaz
poetry in the slightly informal 
iambic trimeter, which often had an improvised character. The poets in this genre 
stretched the potential of Arabic word-building to its limits. Ullmann (1966) has 
shown that the many words in the dictionaries that are quoted from 
rajaz
poetry 
are very often neologisms on the basis of existing roots, rather than separate 
roots. Triliteral words may be expanded more or less at will with prefixes, infixes 
and suffixes. Thus, for instance, from the existing word 
ʾadlamu
‘very black’ the 
verb 
idlahamma
‘to be/become very black’ was created, from 
kadaḥa
‘to make an 
effort’ and 
jalaba 
‘to bring’ came the verbs 
kardaḥa 
and 
ijlaʿabba 
with the same 
meaning. New verbs were made with the infixes 
-ran-
, 
-lan-
, 
-ʿan-
or 
-ḥan-
, for 
example, 
islanṭaḥa
‘to be wide’ from 
saṭaḥa
‘to expand’, 
iqʿanṣara 
‘to shrink, 
dwindle’, with a verbal adjective 
qinṣaʿrun
, from 
qaṣura
‘to be short’, and many 
more examples. New nouns were made with the suffix
 -m
, for example, 
baldamun
, 
balandamun
with the same meaning as 
balīdun
‘stupid’, 
šajʿamun
with the same 
meaning as 
šujāʿun
‘courageous’. The point is that the lexicographers took such 
invented words, which never gained any currency, for existing roots, which were 
then duly entered in the dictionary.
The early beginnings of grammar and lexicography began at a time when 
Bedouin informants were still around and could be consulted. The stories about 
grammarians travelling deep into the desert to find Bedouin informants are 
probably exaggerated, and it is more likely that they received their informa
-
tion from Bedouin dwelling at the fringes of the cities, who had become profes
-
sionals in handing down linguistic data (Gouttenoire 2010). Yet there can be no 
doubt that the grammarians and lexicographers regarded the Bedouin as the true 
speakers (
fuṣaḥāʾ
) of Arabic. As late as the fourth/tenth century, the lexicogra-
pher al-ʾAzharī (d. 370/980) extolled the purity of their language. He had been 
kidnapped by Bedouin and forced to stay with them for a considerable period of 
time. On the basis of this ‘fieldwork’ he wrote his dictionary 
Tahḏīb al-luġa
(
The 
Reparation of Speech
), in the introduction to which he says: ‘They speak according 
to their desert nature and their ingrained instincts. In their speech you hardly 
ever hear a linguistic error or a terrible mistake’ (
yatakallamūna bi-ṭibāʿihim 

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72
The Arabic Language
al-badawiyyati wa-qarāʾiḥihim allatī ʿtādūhā wa-lā yakādu yaqaʿu fī manṭiqihim laḥnun 
ʾaw ḫaṭaʾun fāḥiš
) (
Tahḏīb
, I, ed. Hārūn, Cairo, 1964–7, p. 7). Other grammarians, 
too, claimed to have collected materials from the nomad tribes, and it is often 
reported that caliphs or other dignitaries sent their sons into the desert in order 
to learn flawless Arabic.
In the course of the centuries, the Bedouin tribes increasingly came into 
the sphere of influence of the sedentary civilisation, and their speech became 
contaminated by sedentary speech. In his description of the Arabian peninsula, 
al-Hamdānī (d. 334/945) sets up a hierarchy of the Arab tribes according to the 
perfection of their speech. He explains that those Arabs who live in or near a 
town have very mediocre Arabic and cannot be trusted; this applies even to the 
Arabs who live near the Holy cities of Mecca and Medina (Rabin 1951: 43–4). The 
grammarian Ibn Jinnī (d. 392/1002) includes in his 
Ḫaṣāʾiṣ
a chapter about the 
errors made by Bedouin, and he states that in his time it is almost impossible to 
find a Bedouin speaking pure Arabic (
li-ʾannā lā nakādu narā badawiyyan faṣīḥan
) 
(
Ḫaṣāʾiṣ
, II, ed. an-Najjār, Cairo, 1952–6, p. 5). At the same time, Ibn Jinnī advises 
his students always to check their linguistic facts with Bedouin informants.
Even in the early period of Arabic grammar, our sources record examples of 
Bedouin who sold their expertise in matters of language to the highest bidder, 
as in the case of the famous 
masʾala zunbūriyya
. In this controversy between 
Sībawayhi and a rival grammarian, a question was raised about the expression 
kuntu ʾaḏ̣unnu ʾanna l-ʿaqraba ʾašaddu lasʿatan min az-zunbūri fa-ʾiḏā huwa ʾiyyāhā
(‘I 
thought that the scorpion had a stronger bite than the hornet, but it was the other 
way round’). Sībawayhi gave the correct answer – the last clause has to be 
fa-ʾiḏā 
huwa hiya
– but was defeated by the judgement of a Bedouin arbiter, who had been 
bribed by his adversary (Ibn al-ʾAnbārī, 
ʾInṣāf
, ed. Weil, Leiden, 1913, pp. 292–5).
Modern critics of the attitude of the grammarians towards the alleged perfec
-
tion of Bedouin speech often point out that the idealisation of their speech may 
have been part of a general trend to extol the virtues of desert life, and that even 
nowadays one sometimes hears stories about Bedouin speaking perfect Classical 
Arabic. Usually this means that they use words that have become obsolete 
elsewhere, or it refers to their poetical tradition, which often uses a classicising 
style of language. We are not concerned here with the question of whether the 
Bedouin had still preserved declensional endings in the third/ninth century (for 
which see above, Chapter 4). What is important for our present discussion is the 
fact that in the fourth/tenth century linguistic experts could apparently still find 
informants whom they trusted. From the fourth century onwards, however, this 
tradition disappeared. In the story about Sībawayhi and the Bedouin informant, 
there is already an element of corruption, and later the general image of the 
Bedouin became that of a thieving and lying creature whose culture was inferior 
to the sophisticated sedentary civilisation. For the practice of grammar, this meant 
that the process of standardisation had come to a standstill. Since there were no 

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The Development of Classical Arabic 
73
longer living informants to provide fresh information, the corpus of the language 
was closed, and ‘fieldwork’ could no longer produce reliable results. References 
to the 
kalām al-ʿArab
‘language of the Bedouin’ still abounded in the books of the 
grammarians, but these were no longer connected with any living speech.