The Arabic Language

ʾuḍʿifa l-iʿtimād fī mawḍiʿihi ḥattā jarā n-nafas maʿahu
)
Elsewhere, he adds that in the case of the 
majhūra
consonants the articulation is 
accompanied by a 
ṣawt fī ṣ-ṣadr
‘sound in the breast’, apparently in an effort to 
account for the difference in sound between voiced and voiceless consonants. 
He could not refer to the action of the vocal cords as such, since their function 
was unknown at the time (they were not discovered until the sixteenth century). 
The inclusion of 
ṭ
and 
q
in the category of the 
majhūra
may seem surprising, 
since these are usually classified as voiceless consonants, which is how they are 
realised in Modern Standard Arabic. On the basis of historical data (cf. above, 
p. 24) it is not unreasonable, however, to suppose that in Sībawayhi’s time these 
two consonants were indeed voiced. In most of the modern Bedouin dialects, 
q
is 
still realised as [ɡ] (cf. below, Chapter 10, p. 187).

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The Arabic Linguistic Tradition 
121
A third consonant, whose description by Sībawayhi differs from the modern 
pronunciation, is the 
ḍād
. The unique character of this consonant is borne out 
by the fact that the grammarians called the Arabic language ‘the language of 
the 
ḍād
’ (
luġat aḍ-ḍād
), apparently believing that only an Arab would be able to 
pronounce this sound. The modern realisation of the 
ḍād
is that of an emphatic 
ḍ 
[d̴], yet there is reason to believe that in Classical Arabic it was a lateral conso-
nant, possibly 
ḍ
l
[d̴ɫ] (cf. above, Chapter 2, p. 24). This is supported by Sībawayhi’s 
description (
Kitāb
, II, p. 405) of the place of articulation of the 
ḍād
, which he says 
is ‘between the first part of the side of the tongue and the adjoining molars’ (
min 
bayna ʾawwal ḥāfat al-lisān wa-mā yalīhi min al-ʾaḍrās
).
Although Arabic grammarians were not interested in phonetics as such, they 
did distinguish a number of allophones, some of them permissible variants, 
others incorrect realisations of the phonemes of Arabic. In Classical Arabic, in 
certain contexts, the consonants 
r
and 
l
, for instance, could have an emphatic 
allophone (e.g., in the name of God after a back vowel: 
waḷḷāhi
as against 
billāhi
). 
Such emphatic realisations are called by the Arabic grammarians 
mufaḫḫam
. 
Impermissible allophones refer to deviations in the pronunciation of Arabic by 
non-native speakers, for instance, ‘the 
kāf
between the 
jīm
and the 
kāf
’ (i.e., 
č 
[ʧ]), 
‘the 
jīm
that is as the 
šīn
’ (i.e., 
ž
[ʒ]) and ‘the 
bāʾ
that is as the 
fāʾ
’ (i.e., 
v
[v]).
Arabic script, like most Semitic scripts, does not represent the vowels in writing. 
In Classical Arabic, there are only three vowels, 
a
, 
i
and 
u
. The descriptions of 
the grammarians indicate, however, that there were various allophones, as in 
the Modern Standard realisation. The 
a
has the allophone [æ] in non-emphatic, 
non-pharyngal contexts; this pronunciation is usually called 
ʾimāla
‘leaning 
[towards an anterior realisation]’; in emphatic contexts the allophone is [ɑ] 
(
tafḫīm
). The 
i
has an allophone in emphatic contexts that was probably a central
-
ised [ɨ]. It is not entirely clear why the grammarians occupied themselves with the 
allophones of the vowels, which are irrelevant for the morphological structure 
of the words. One possible explanation may be that the rules for ʾ
imāla
are not 
exclusively phonological in nature, but depend at least in part on the morpho
-
logical context. 
With regard to the long vowels, the relevance of phonological analysis for 
morphology is much more obvious. Arabic script indicates what we call ‘long 
vowels’ with an orthographic device, by writing the short vowels together with 
one of the three letters 
wāw
, 
yāʾ
and 
ʾalif
. According to Arabic grammarians, the 
long vowels are to be analysed as combinations of a short vowel and a glide (
ḥarf 
al-līn wa-l-madd
). The three glides that they distinguish are 
w
, 
y
and an abstract 
element called 
ʾalif
, indicated here with the sign /”/. Thus, for instance, 
sūdun
‘black [plural]’ is represented as /suwdun/, 
bīḍun
‘white [plural]’ as /biyḍun/, 
dārun
‘house’ as /da”run/. In this analysis, the glide 
ʾalif
is an abstract element, 
which does not have any phonetic status, but serves purely as an element in the 
underlying phonological structure. Since the names of the phonemic glides are 

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122
The Arabic Language
identical with those of the letter signs that are used to indicate the long vowels 
in the script, it has sometimes been assumed that the analysis of the Arabic 
grammarians was based on a confusion between letters and phonemes; but this 
is certainly wrong. The main argument for their analysis was its advantage in 
the analysis of word structure: compare, for instance, /suwdun/ with the word 
/ ḥumrun/ ‘red [plural]’, which has the same pattern. This analysis forms the 
basis for their explanation of the changes in the weak verbs (cf. above, pp. 118f.).
Finally, there is one topic that is completely missing in Arabic linguistic 
treatises, that of stress. In Classical Arabic, stress is not phonemic: there are no 
two words that are distinguished solely by a difference in stress. It is, therefore, 
understandable that Arabic grammarians did not feel the need to discuss stress as 
a feature of Arabic. Stress must have existed as a prosodic feature in speech, but it 
is absent from the grammatical treatises (see above, Chapter 6, pp. 87f.).