Required reading: “The problem of Speech Genres” by Mikhail Bakhtin. If you haven’t read this you have no business talking about language. I’m looking at you, Noam!

Haven’t read this, but the obvious question is “why would you think language is in the business of ‘representing’ reality (whatever that is)”?

“Nothing we know of” - I wonder if that’s just a blind spot. Ie nobody has ever seen it because nobody has been looking for it. Take the vast ancient literature on Jewish law. Did they never discuss linguistic matters, one way or another?

Reading Sībawayhi Reading the Kitāb of Sībawayhi

I like the 2 column format: Akkadian on the left, English on the right. That’s what I’m doing with www.sibawayhi.org

Haha, no, I want 24/7 News Now delivered in flawless Akkadian!

Akkadian online! Do it, somebody!

True, especially with the internet! When I started Arabic 100 years ago it was almost impossible to actually hear spoken Arabic outside of class (in Chicago). I would literally have killed to get what is now easily available online!

Given that, I have mixed feelings about trying to show how they’re “the same”.

Agreed! But this gets down to very Deep Questions for which I see no answers. Are all languages “the same” in any non-trivial sense? I like to think each language is a rich unique… something. You can say things in Arabic that simply cannot be said in English, and vice-versa.

Point taken. Realis/irrealis is a useful concept. You can see it in Sībawayhi if you squint hard, but it’s clear he had so such concept explicitly. We cannot read it into the Kitāb without anachronizing. Even “how did he think about the subjunctive?” rigs the game, presupposing that there is such.

“Twins are birds” sayeth the Nuer. (According to the anthropologist.) Is that really more opaque than “‘Horse’ is a noun”?

If I had another lifetime I’d learn Hebrew (and Akkadian etc) and scour the literature for evidence of development of linguistic self-awareness. Scribal manuals, etc. Or to put it differently: anthropology of linguistic thought.

But there must be a Hebrew grammatical tradition that predates Islam and the Arab grammarians. They must have reflected on their language- how could one teach or learn to read and write without some kind of metalinguistic vocabulary?

You’re right, of course. I was sloppy. Point being that the عامل “factor” that motivates/justifies the inflection is mandatory in Arabic, but not in Latin et al. It also plays a more essential semantic role. We could probably think of it (for verbs) as a kind of prefixed inflection.

Minor quibble: I don’t think Sībawayhi would allow qabl# (التقاء ساكنين). Suggests “marartu bihū qablu yā fatā” 😂

Thanks! Regarding qablu: good catch! He uses that in a variety of places, and it’s always puzzled me. Did not occur to me that he was using it like yā fatā.

As an aside, I would like to humbly register my profound and visceral hatred for academia.edu

Furthermore both concepts are central to traditional western grammar which in general controls how we think about language.

Aristotle: a proposition is a sentence that has truth value (unlike sentences like “what the f**k?”). Moderns: a proposition is an abstract object denoted by a declarative sentence (or some such). Either way completely alien to Sībawayhi.

Try to imagine the western linguistic tradition without the concepts of “sentence” and “proposition”.

Thank you, will read or try to (my French is kinda sad).

No I definitely mean “proposition”. Aristotle was quite explicit about this (Categories?) it’s not about the “true nature” of speech/language, is about how people talk (conceptualize) about it.

“Subjunctive except when it isn’t” doesn’t seem very helpful.

“[the] -لِ that actually gives the jussive meaning” is the critical point! In Latin (IE?) inflection is enough. Not so in Arabic, the meaning depends on both the inflection and the antecedent term (the عامل). I think that’s a very profound difference.

But then why should we look to the Romans for a description of Hebrew? I’m not being snarky. It’s a serious methodological question. How did the Hebrew speakers themselves think about such things? Did they have a term/concept equivalent to Latin “jussive”?

Great new article by Geoff Pullum on Post, Chomsky, and the roots of generative grammar, written with his customary verve, depth, and precision. doi.org/10.1075/hl.0.... #histlx #Linguistics #LangSky

You know what really hurts? Listening to a piano player with no sense of rhythm playing Corea’s “Spain”.

I’ve been rereading Michael Carter’s 1994 book on Sibawayhi. Carter is widely recognized as an authority (even the authority) on Sībawayhi. That depresses the fuck out of me. It’s like reading a Creationist’s interpretation of Darwin. Complete nonsense.

Even more thermo-nuclear: no “sentence”, and no “proposition”. Not a minor quibble: those ideas pervade the Western tradition, where they are usually taken for granted. But there is nothing obvious about those ideas. One could reasonably argue that they are grotesque perversions.

Perhaps even more noteworthy is that mood/modality is not limited to expressions involving a verb in Arabic. Consider الحروف الخمسة (the 5 terms) إنَّ لعلَّ ليتَ etc. All of which could be considered “nominal modals” (or something like that).