Browsing by Subject "Early Bedouin speech"

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Part-of-speech ambiguity and the category of ka- in the Arabic grammatical tradition
(2023-04-22) Phoennik, Connor; Noy, Avigail; Pat-El, Na'ama
Arabic grammar traditionally recognized only three parts of speech: the noun (ism), the verb (fiʿl), and the particle (ḥarf). Over the centuries, scholars propounded a battery of criteria to assign any given word to one of these three categories, but certain word classes defied easy placement within the tripartite system. Among these were exceptives and other pseudo-verbs, and temporalizers like mud and mundu, as well as prepositions (ḥurūf ǧarr), many of which were category-ambiguous between particle and noun. The category of ka- (or kāf), “like, as,” featured prominently in this debate, with advocates of its nounhood often adducing verses of poetry in which kāf behaved as a noun. Meanwhile, opponents supplied restorations (taqādīr, sg. taqdīr) to account for aberrant usage at the surface by conventional means. Of the Andalusian grammarians, who were especially engrossed in this debate, Ibn Maḍāʾ contended that, owing to its synonymy with mitl—a proven noun—kāf had always to be a noun, even in prose. Though those of Ibn Maḍāʾ’s works germane to kāf are not thought to have survived, other grammarians record his view. Their own comments on kāf and related matters reference the main touchpoints in the discourse, without which any argument for or against kāf’s nounhood would be inadmissible. I conclude that Ibn Maḍāʾ’s minority opinion is the better portrayal of kāf because more reliable gauges of nounhood suggest as much, as does the evidence from etymological derivatives of kāf in prose.