Arabic is one of the world's largest languages, spoken natively by nearly 300 million people. By strength of numbers alone Arabic is one of our most important languages, studied by scholars across many different academic fields and cultural settings. It is, however, a complex language rooted in its own tradition of scholarship, constituted of varieties each imbued with unique cultural values and characteristic linguistic properties. Understanding its linguistics holistically is therefore a challenge. The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics is a comprehensive, one-volume guide that deals with all major research domains which have been developed within Arabic linguistics. Chapters are written by leading experts in the field, who both present state-of-the-art overviews and develop their own critical perspectives. The Handbook begins with Arabic in its Semitic setting and ends with the modern dialects; it ranges across the traditional--the classical Arabic grammatical and lexicographical traditions--to the contemporary--Arabic sociolinguistics, Creole varieties and codeswitching, psycholinguistics, and Arabic as a second language - while situating Arabic within current phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexicological theory. An essential reference work for anyone working within Arabic linguistics, the book brings together different approaches and scholarly traditions, and provides analysis of current trends and directions for future research.

The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics (Oxford Handbooks)

Reference

Owens, Jonathan

Words, Language & Grammar

Oxford University Press

This book explores the long history of the Arabic language, from pre-Islamic Arabic via the Classical era of the Arabic grammarians up to the present day. While most traditional accounts have been dominated by a linear understanding of the development of Arabic, this book instead advocates a multiple pathways approach to Arabic language history. Arabic has multifarious sources: its relations to other Semitic languages, an old epigraphic and papyrological tradition, a vibrant and linguistically original classical Arabic linguistic tradition, and a widely dispersed array of contemporary spoken varieties. These diverse sources present a challenge to and an opportunity for defining a holistic but not necessarily linear Arabic language history.\nThe geographical breadth and chronological depth of Arabic make it a fertile ground for a critical appraisal and application of perspectives from a range of subdisciplines including sociolinguistics, typology, grammaticalization, and corpus linguistics. Jonathan Owens draws on these approaches to investigate more than 20 individual case studies that cover more than 1500 years of documented and reconstructed history: the results demonstrate that Arabic is a far more complex historical object than traditional accounts have assumed. This complexity is further explored in a comparison of the historical morphology of three languages that can be compared over roughly the same period (500 AD-2022 AD): Icelandic, English, and Arabic. Icelandic and English are diametrically opposed on a parameter of linearity. Icelandic is effectively alinear: the morphology of the earliest Icelandic writings is the morphology of today. English is linear, having undergone a drastic change in morphology from its Old English stage to the Middle English period. Arabic is shown to be alinear in many important respects, but multilinear in others, with different sorts of linguistic changes being spread across many individual historical speech communities.

Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics)

A Linguistic History of Arabic (Oxford Linguistics)

A Linguistic History of Arabic challenges the traditional accounts of the progression of classical Arabic to contemporary dialects. It presents a rich and complex picture of early Arabic language history and establishes the basis for a comprehensive, linguistically-based understanding of the history of Arabic. The arguments are set out in a manner accessible to students and scholars of Arabic and Islamic culture, as well as to those studying Arabic and historical linguists.

A Linguistic History of Arabic

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

A Linguistic History of Arabic presents a reconstruction of proto-Arabic by the methods of historical-comparative linguistics. It challenges the traditional conceptualization of an old, Classical language evolving into the contemporary Neo-Arabic dialects. Professor Owens combines established comparative linguistic methodology with a careful reading of the classical Arabic sources, such as the grammatical and exegetical traditions. He arrives at a richer and more complex picture of early Arabic language history than is current today and in doing so establishes the basis for a comprehensive, linguistically-based understanding of the history of Arabic. The arguments are set out in a concise, case by case basis, making it accessible to students and scholars of Arabic and Islamic culture, as well as to those studying Arabic and historical linguists.

My World Of Poetry: With Life Comes Death

Now you know about the people who played big roles in my life. Here’s a brief description of my book. This book contains a collection of poems I wrote throughout my life. I did not put them in chronological order so the reader can figure out the puzzle of my life. Let me mind you I still didn’t figure that puzzle out, and that’s what this book is about. Finding yourself isn’t the easiest so remember it’s the choices we make that define our lives. These are the choices I made the experiences I learned from. It takes a smart man to learn from his own mistakes but a wise man can learn from others. Everyone has an opinion on what life means to them. These are my opinions because I believe if you can overcome the fear of death you can truly live life.

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Xlibris, Corp.

In this book you will experience real emotions that I dealt with in my life. I felt different like I didn't belong, poetry was the only way I could express myself. Some of the poems may seem like rap or hip-hop, which was my way of fitting in. I also fell victim to the world of addiction for me that is how I dealt with my emotions. As a member of a 12 step fellowship I realized that I didn't want to feel. Drugs and Alcohol made me feel alive, but that feeling would only last so long. After a while I felt misery, pain, and unhappiness. Until one day God granted me the gift of desperation. From that day on I've been sober, but like a good addict those feelings come back. That's why I consider myself "Still in The Grips".

My World of Poetry: Still In The Grips

Xlibris

A short reference grammar of eastern Libyan Arabic

O. Harrassowitz

The Arabic grammatical tradition is one of the great traditions in the history of linguistics, yet it is also one that is comparatively unknown to modern western linguistics. The purpose of the present book is to provide an introduction to this grammatical tradition not merely by summarizing it, but by putting it into a perspective that will make it accessible to any linguist trained in the western tradition. The reader should not by put off by the word ‘medieval’: Arabic grammatical theory shares a number of fundamental similarities with modern linguistic theory. Indeed, one might argue that one reason Arabic theory has gone unappreciated for so long is that nothing like it existed in the West at the time of its ‘discovery’ by Europeans in the 19th century, when the European orientalist tradition was formed, and that it it only with the development of a Saussurean and Bloomfieldian structural tradition that a better perspective has become possible.

The Foundations of Grammar (Studies in the History of the Language Sciences)

John Benjamins Publishing Company

The Arabic grammatical tradition is remarkable for having organized a large amount of descriptive material within a sophisticated formal framework. The present study seeks to elucidate the early development of this system from a theory-internal perspective; it is mainly concerned with the development of the syntactic theory as a formal object, as system of rules. This endeavor is constituted of four sub-goals: a description of early developments, their periodization, their relation to the traditional account in terms of the Basran and Kufan schools, and their relation to modern linguistic theory.

Early Arabic Grammatical Theory (Studies in the History of the Language Sciences)

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