The Arabic Language

7.3 Morphology
The most characteristic feature of all Semitic languages is the peculiar relation
-
ship between form and meaning. In the majority of words, the lexical meaning is 
represented by three radicals and the morphological meaning is added to these 
radicals in the form of a vowel pattern, sometimes with auxiliary consonants or 
augments (
zawāʾid
). The radicals 
k-t-b
, for instance, represent the general meaning 
of ‘writing’, and from these radicals we get: 
kātib
‘writing [participle]’, plural 
kuttāb
; 
yaktubu
‘he writes’, perfect 
kataba
; 
kitāb
‘book’, plural 
kutub
; 
maktab
‘desk, 
office’, plural 
makātib
; 
maktaba
‘library’, plural 
maktabāt
; 
takātaba
‘to correspond’, 

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The Arabic Linguistic Tradition 
115
etc. At a very early date, the grammarians invented a notation for the morpho
-
logical patterns, which represented the three radicals with the consonants 
f-ʿ-l
, in 
which the vowels and the auxiliary consonants were inserted. The pattern of the 
word 
kātib
, for instance, is represented as 
fāʿil
, and the pattern of 
maktab
as 
mafʿal
.
For the Arabic grammarians, the primary task of morphology (
taṣrīf
) was the 
breakdown of words into radical consonants and auxiliary consonants (
zawāʾid
). 
There are ten consonants that may serve as augments (/”/, /w/, /y/, /ʾ/, /m/, 
/t/, /n/, /h/, /s/, /l/, contained in the mnemonic phrase 
ʾal-yawma tansāhu
‘today 
you will forget him’. Since all ten consonants (except the abstract element /”/; cf. 
below, p. 121) may serve either as augment or as radical, it is not always obvious 
which of the consonants in a given form are radicals and which are 
zāʾid
. Grammar
-
ians set up methods to identify the radicals, of which the most important was the 
ištiqāq
(lit. ‘splitting’, sometimes translated with the Western term ‘etymology’), 
the comparison of the form under scrutiny with other words containing the same 
radicals and with the same semantic content. When 
ʾaktaba
‘he caused to write’ 
is compared with 
kataba
‘he wrote’, they turn out to have the same semantic 
load, so that the /ʾ/ must be regarded as an augment. Since not all words are 
triradical, this analysis is not as simple as it may sound. Apart from the triradical 
words, there are quadriradical verbs, and nouns consisting of four or maximally 
five radicals. The small group of biradical nouns such as 
yad
‘hand’, 
ibn
‘son’, 
fam
‘mouth’ were incorporated in the system by deriving them from triradical roots 
(
y-d-y
, 
b-n-w
, 
f-w-h
). In a word such as 
ʿankabūt
/ʿankabuwt/ ‘spider’ there are 
six consonants (counting the ‘lengthening’ 
w
as a consonant; cf. below), any of 
which may be a radical. The form of the plural, 
ʿanākib
, shows that only four of 
them, 
ʿ-n-k-b
, are really radicals, since these are the only ones to be preserved in 
derivational processes.
7.3.1 The noun
The first part of speech is the noun (
ism
). We have seen above that nouns receive 
case endings (nominative, genitive, accusative) and, when they are indefinite, the 
nunation. However, there is a category of nouns with only two endings: one for 
the nominative; and one for the genitive and the accusative, which is identical 
with the accusative ending of other nouns (called in Western grammars the 
diptotic declension). Nouns belonging to this category, for example,