The Myth of the Innate Acquisition and Mastery of Arabic Before Islam

Arabic is a language that is both fascinating and baffling, in several respects. Of all its Semitic sisters, Aramaic, Syriac and Hebrew, it alone has inflection (i‘rab) as an inherent property, which means Arabic cannot be used correctly, in speech or writing, without knowing the appropriate inflectional marks. We may spend long years studying grammar and inflection, in primary, secondary and university education, without managing to use Arabic without error or solecism. Yet we have grown used to the firm belief that the pre-Islamic Arabs mastered the oral use of Arabic in an exemplary, correct and eloquent way, and that, according to this belief, they acquired it by instinct (saliqa) and by nature, without learning its rules as we do, since they had neither writing nor school at the time. Is the instinctive acquisition of Arabic consistent with its inflectional nature, or did the Arabs of the Jahiliyya speak an Arabic other than the inflected Arabic we know? And if that is possible, might this inflected Arabic not be the work of the grammarians after Islam, made in imitation of the language of the Qur’an, which, with its new inflectional language, represented a genuine miracle with which the Qur’an challenged the Arabs?

These are a number of questions and issues I will discuss in this article.

Language between acquisition and learning:

It is known that oral use, that is, speech, is the first and the basis of language, before its written use. This is true both for the history of humankind (phylogenesis) and for the history of individuals (ontogenesis): spoken language appeared some hundreds of thousands of years ago (Encyclopædia Universalis, “Langues et langage”), whereas writing is a recent phenomenon that arose less than 6,000 years ago. Likewise, an individual begins acquiring spoken language from birth and becomes able to communicate with it by the age of four. After that, for languages with written use, he learns to write through school or its equivalent. To this day, hundreds of languages and dialects remain in use without yet having writing. Acquiring a language is spontaneous and unconscious, as when a child acquires the mother tongue within the family. Learning it, by contrast, just like learning to write it, is a voluntary and deliberate act, and mostly a compulsory one (school, for example).

It is also known that when a person acquires the mother tongue, he becomes able to speak it naturally, correctly and intelligibly, without necessarily being aware of, or knowing, the grammatical rules that make his speech correct and intelligible, as we see in children before they enter school and in illiterate people who speak the language they acquired from early childhood as a mother tongue. It goes without saying that these grammatical rules, which such children and illiterate people do not know, are not absent from the language or dialect they speak; otherwise they could not communicate with it. They are always present, but in a hidden form that the uneducated users of that language do not perceive, unlike those who have studied its grammar and rules.

The myth of the innate acquisition and mastery of Arabic before Islam:

This is the case of natural languages (mother tongues), which are acquired by instinct and whose grammar and rules are revealed only by those who study the characteristics of these languages, specialists and linguists…, or, among their speakers, those who learned their writing and rules at school, for languages that have reached written use. It must be accepted that Arabic is no exception to this natural course of all languages, which means that it remained a language of oral circulation, acquired and spoken by its speakers by instinct, correctly and intelligibly, before it was codified at a later period, with the grammatical, syntactic and morphological rules drawn from its oral use.

When this codification began, from the second half of the first century of the Hijra to the fourth, the famous grammarians, such as al-Asma‘i, Hammad ar-Rawiya and al-Kisa’i…, according to the books of the heritage, turned to the Bedouins of the desert to take from them the Arabic language as they had acquired it by instinct and spoke it naturally, in its natural, pure, correct and eloquent form, before it was corrupted by foreign speech (‘ajama) or mixed with the alien dialects of town-dwellers. The famous debate held in Baghdad between Sibawayh (148–180 AH) and al-Kisa’i (119–189 AH), known as the “hornet question” (concerning the hornet’s sting), gives us a very telling testimony to this supposed recourse to the speech of the Bedouins to cite as evidence of what is correct, acquired by instinct and authoritative, and of what is wrong and must be abandoned and set aside. In short, after each debater insisted on the correctness of his view and declared his opponent’s wrong, they agreed to bring in a group of Bedouins to be the arbiters of what was more correct and sound in pronunciation (regarding the appropriate inflectional marks) and in language, based on the similar expressions the Bedouins were used to employing in their speech, in comparison with those the two debaters had discussed, since their speech was considered the soundest and most eloquent, acquired by nature and instinct. What is certain, despite how often this story is repeated in the books of the Ancients, is that this way of settling the dispute between the debaters by appealing to the speech of the Bedouins is nothing but a piece of staging whose aim is to convince that the spoken word of the illiterate Bedouins (who could neither read nor write) was the reference used in collecting, recording and codifying Arabic. From this the late Mohamed Abed al-Jabri concluded that the Bedouin, the son of the desert and the steppe, is the maker of the world of Arab man, because he passed on to him his language, through which he also passed on his Bedouin mode of thinking, his view of the world, of nature, of things, of himself and of others…

This belief that the Arabs before Islam, in all the variety of its dialects, acquired Arabic by instinct and spoke it correctly and intelligibly, in conformity with its grammatical rules which they did not know, has remained a self-evident truth that is never discussed, entrenched by the Ancients, endorsed by the Moderns and believed by the Orientalists. Why a self-evident truth? Because this is what happens with all natural languages when their users acquire them spontaneously and unconsciously as a mother tongue from early childhood and speak them correctly, respecting their grammatical, morphological and syntactic rules despite not knowing those rules, like illiterate people who speak Spanish, French, English, Amazigh or Darija…, correctly and soundly, in grammar, syntax and morphology, without knowing anything of the grammatical, syntactic and morphological rules of these languages. By analogy with these natural languages, what applies to them applies to Arabic regarding its acquisition and its sound oral use, without breaching its grammatical, syntactic and morphological rules, even before those rules were known.

But “there is no analogy where there is a difference”, as the famous principle of jurisprudence states. And the difference here, between Arabic and natural languages, is so great that it makes such an analogy invalid and gives, as a result, invalid and erroneous conclusions, so that the self-evident truth that the Bedouin acquired Arabic by nature and instinct in the Jahiliyya becomes a mere myth, refuted by the essential property of Arabic, which is incompatible with acquiring it by instinct.

Inflection (i‘rab) in the Arabic language:

This essential property of Arabic, which makes the great difference between it and natural languages, shows in the fact that the language of the dad, unlike Spanish, French, English, Amazigh or Darija…, and other living languages, is an inflected language (mu‘rab), that is, governed by i‘rab, and not an uninflected (mabni) one. I‘rab can be briefly defined as the change in the vowel (nominative, accusative, genitive, jussive, and the nunation that follows the first three vowels) of a word’s last letter according to its grammatical function (subject, object, predicate, genitive complement…, jussive imperfect verb…, etc.) in the speech or sentence, when it is a noun or an imperfect verb preceded by governing particles. Bina’, which is the absence of inflection, consists in the last vowel of the word staying the same whatever its grammatical function in the sentence, as in Spanish, French, English, Amazigh and Darija…

And i‘rab, in the school Arabic (which one cannot acquire without learning it at school or its equivalent) that we know, study and teach, is not a secondary or incidental property, as may be found in some other languages, but something essential in it, which makes up its nature, its soul and its essence. Dr Jamil ‘Alloush explains this essential role of i‘rab in Arabic when he says: “I‘rab is a prominent phenomenon of the Arabic language, indeed one of its unique and distinctive features. It is tied to Arabic by a tie that leaves no room for separation or division. What is more, there is no way to talk about Arabic without talking about i‘rab. I‘rab is the title of Arabic, indeed its soul and its core. It is impossible for anyone to take up the study of Arabic apart from i‘rab, its meanings, its rules and its marks.” (Dr Jamil ‘Alloush, Al-i‘rab wa-l-bina’: A Study in the Theory of Arabic Grammar, al-Mu’assasa al-Jami‘iyya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzi‘, Beirut, 1st ed., 1997, p. 15).

I‘rab is not an original element of Arabic:

And where is the problem if Arabic is an inflected language and not an uninflected one? The problem is that i‘rab, in the form inherent to Arabic as part of its nature, makes this language impossible to acquire and use orally by instinct, correctly and without errors that could blur meaning and understanding, and without learning its grammatical rules, as we were told of the Bedouins whose speech was taken as the model of correct, sound and eloquent Arabic, and as the reference from which these grammatical rules were drawn when the Arabic language was codified.

Why can Arabic, in this inflected form, not be acquired by instinct, as is commonly held to be self-evident, as I have already explained?

1. Because i‘rab, as applied in the school Arabic we know, is not a natural phenomenon belonging to a natural language. The inflectional marks, that is, the final vowels of nouns, are not, because they change, original elements of these nouns, according to what the speakers of the language agreed on in pronouncing those nouns with their sound components, made up of silent letters (consonants) and sounded ones (vowels) subordinate to the former. Take the word “طَرِيق” (tariq, “road”): although three consonants enter into its makeup, only two of the vowels subordinate to those consonants enter into the makeup of the same word: the fatha of the ta’ and the kasra of the ra’ with the long lengthening (ri). As for the final vowel of the qaf, because it varies, it is not one of the original components of the word “طريق”. If we took it as original like the first and second vowels and the long lengthening, we would have seven versions of the word “طريق”: طريقْ, طريقُ, طريقَ, طريقِ, طريقٌ, طريقًا, طريقٍ. Which is absurd, to use the logicians’ term. I‘rab was therefore not born with Arabic as an original part of it, but was added to it at a later stage. In this respect it resembles the script: if the script is not acquired by instinct because it is not part of natural languages but something introduced and added to the language for the purpose of its written use, so the inflectional marks are not part of a natural Arabic but something introduced and added to it, as we will explain in the section on how inflected Arabic arose. With this addition Arabic will lose the character of a natural language and turn into a “made” language in its inflectional part. It is no accident that this inflected, or “made”, Arabic is tied to writing by a constitutive relation: it arose with it and through it, and was never in oral circulation, in its inflected form, before it was written.

What also confirms that i‘rab is not an original and natural element of Arabic is that it belongs to Arabic alone, apart from its Semitic sisters such as Aramaic and Syriac (which are originally one language) and Hebrew, as Dr Ibrahim Anis explained in detail in his book “Min asrar al-lugha” (On the Secrets of Language; Anglo-Egyptian Bookshop, 3rd ed., 1966, p. 199 ff.), showing that what may be interpreted as an accusative at the ends of some Hebrew words does not mean i‘rab and has nothing to do with its function as practiced in Arabic.

Knowing grammatical functions is incompatible with the instinctive acquisition of language:

2. Then, and this is the most important point, because the i‘rab inherent to Arabic makes pronouncing the last vowel of the noun or imperfect verb, fatha, damma, kasra, sukun or nunation, according to their grammatical function in the context of speech, conditional on knowing that function. But this knowledge is not a requirement in a natural language. The proof is that a child or an illiterate person uses his natural language while not knowing the grammatical functions of the words he uses in his speech. The changing of the final vowels of words, nouns and imperfect verbs, according to their grammatical functions in Arabic, thus makes acquiring this language spontaneously, unconsciously and by instinct impossible, because this knowledge requires learning the rules that govern those functions. This is not available to the child who acquires his mother tongue in the family, nor to any Bedouin of the Jahiliyya, who we were told was a model of eloquence and correct pronunciation of Arabic, because he does not know these functions, which he never learned.

Yes, based on the mechanisms by which children acquire the mother tongue, we may understand and accept that a child can acquire, within his family, spontaneously and unconsciously, through hearing, analogy (modeling his speech on examples he has already heard and absorbed into his linguistic stock) and gradual practice of speech through interaction with those around him and with children his age, the correct use and pronunciation of sentences such as: “ضرَب زيدٌ محمدًا…” (“Zayd struck Muhammad”), “نشكر زيدًا…” (“we thank Zayd”), “زيدٌ مريضٌ…” (“Zayd is ill”), “إن زيدا مريضٌ…” (“indeed Zayd is ill”), “لم يحضرْ زيد…” (“Zayd did not come”), without knowing the grammatical functions of the words he uses in such expressions. Again through hearing, analogy, interaction and practice, as he grows older he extends the pronunciation, with the same final vowels, to expressions similar in construction and structure to the first type of sentences, which he will use in his speech, such as: “نواجه الخصمَ…” (“we face the opponent”), “الجوّ حارٌّ…” (“the weather is hot”), “إن السماءَ ممطرةٌ…” (“indeed the sky is rainy”), “الأطفال يلعبون…” (“the children are playing”). Up to here, the spontaneous and unconscious acquisition of language (the mother tongue), with correct and sound pronunciation of the inflectional marks, may seem possible, even ordinary. But the child, who gradually acquires the mother tongue from early childhood, or the illiterate adult Bedouin who was once in that child’s position, cannot, despite being able in principle to produce new sentences they have never used before and understand new sentences they have never heard, as the property of productivity (the unlimited capacity to use language to produce new sentences) that characterizes natural languages allows, take in every form of expression they will have to use in their daily communication, with their appropriate inflectional marks. The problem is therefore not in the language itself or in its instinctive acquisition, but in the fact that the sound use of this language is conditional on mastering its appropriate inflectional marks, because it is an inflected language, which is not acquired by instinct but requires learning the grammatical rules that govern these marks.

If the Bedouin of the Jahiliyya, who acquired Arabic by instinct as a mother tongue as a child, correctly pronounces grammatically, by generalization and analogy, the expression “صدّ الجيشُ هجوما…” (“the army repelled an attack”), on the model of “ضرب زيدٌ محمّدًا…”, and “نرعى الغنمَ…” (“we graze the sheep”) on the model of “نشكر زيدًا…”, how will he pronounce the correct inflectional marks of these two expressions: “نشتري الحلْويات…” (“we buy sweets”), “واجه خصمه زيد…” (“Zayd faced his opponent”)? These two expressions are not hypothetical cases invented by grammarians: they exist in Arabic before its codification, which means they were part of the Arabic that was supposed to be acquired by instinct. We find in the poetry attributed to ‘Amr ibn Kulthum: “بأَنا نـورد الـراياتِ بيضـاً / ونصـدرهن حمرا قد روينا” (“We lead the white banners [ar-rayati] to the watering place, and bring them back red, quenched”). And in the poetry attributed to Tarafa ibn al-‘Abd: “يشقّ حابَ الماء حيزومُها بها / كما قسم التربَ المفايلُ باليد” (“Her chest cleaves the surge of the water, as the mufayil player divides the sand with his hand”). If the first poet knew how to put the last letter of the word “رايات” in the genitive (this is how the transmitters reported it, with a kasra) although analogy with “نشكر زيدًا…” would require the accusative because it fulfils the same grammatical function (direct object), and if the second knew how to put the object before the subject without erring in the inflectional marks, that is proof that they acquired this by instinct, and not that they studied grammatical rules at school as we do today. This is what the widespread “instinct” (saliqa) thesis, taken as an accepted truth, repeats, asserting that the poets of the Jahiliyya composed their poems and Mu‘allaqat, in eloquent Arabic, sound in grammar and language, from their innate Arabic that they acquired by instinct like all Bedouins, and mastered it by that same instinct and used it correctly in grammar, syntax, morphology and lexicon, as the poetry of the Mu‘allaqat attests… But if we reflect on these two verses by ‘Amr ibn Kulthum and Tarafa ibn al-‘Abd, setting aside the myth of “instinct” which forbids such reflection, and keeping in mind the nature of Arabic as an inflected language, we will conclude that the first poet can only have known the rules of the sound feminine plural when it is a direct object, and the second the grammatical function of the words “حبابَ” and “التربَ”, which makes them fronted direct objects, and then of the words “حيزومُها” and “المفايلُ”, which makes them postponed subjects.

And it is not valid to object that poetry cannot be used as evidence, because its language involves quite a lot of artifice that departs from innate language. If this is true, and it is, where did those poets get that artifice in the grammatical forms that appear in the correct inflectional marks of their poetry?

— Either they learned it until they could use it. Here we leave “instinct” and are dealing with learning, which is done with awareness, intention and effort, the opposite of acquisition by instinct.

— Or they acquired all of that by instinct, as the widespread thesis says. That is incompatible with the mechanisms of language acquisition in the child, because the language is inflected, bearing in mind that these poets are supposed to have acquired their language within the family as children.

It should be noted that our mention of hearing as one of the mechanisms by which the child acquires the mother tongue within the family is only by way of comparison and clarification. The truth is that there was nobody from whom the Arab child of the Jahiliyya could have heard inflected Arabic, because what holds for him, the impossibility of acquiring inflected Arabic, holds for those who were like him, and it is from them that he is supposed to have taken inflected Arabic by hearing.

The collapse of the “instinct” myth:

We could cite countless examples that undermine the myth of “instinct” in the acquisition and use by the Arabs of the Jahiliyya of an inflected Arabic, correctly and intelligibly, without solecism or error. Is it reasonable to accept and believe that someone who does not know the grammatical function of the words “راكبا” and “راكب” will pronounce one of these two expressions rather than the other correctly, soundly and intelligibly: “جاء راكبا” (“he came riding”) and “جاء راكبٌ” (“a rider came”)? Can he explain why he chose the accusative or the nominative if he does not know that the first choice is because the word’s grammatical function is that of a circumstantial adverbial of state, and the second because it is a subject? And how will he pronounce correctly, according to the context, the inflectional marks of these two expressions: “نحن العربَ كرماء” (“we, the Arabs, are generous”), “نحن عربٌ كرماء” (“we are generous Arabs”), if he does not know that “عرب” in the first sentence is in the accusative of specification and in the second in the nominative because it is a predicate? How will he distinguish the pronunciation of “هذا سارقُ نقودي” without nunation from “هذا سارقٌ نقودي” with nunation? And why will he say “تسعة عشر رجلا”, “تسع عشرة امرأة”, “وصل الرجل التسع عشر”, “وصلت المرأة التاسعة عشرة”, and not “تسع عشر رجلا”, “تسعة عشرة امرأة”, “وصل الرجل التاسع عشرة”, “وصلت المرأة التاسعة عشر”, if he does not know the rules of number and counted noun?

As for verb conjugation, which is a condition of mastering and using the language, it must be admitted that, with the exception of the imperfect verb, it is easy to acquire by hearing, analogy, interaction and practice…, despite the many pronouns and kinds of verb (triliteral, quadriliteral, quinquiliteral, sexiliteral; then sound and weak…). Why? Because the morphological forms (second person masculine plural, third person feminine dual, third person feminine singular…, etc.) other than the imperfect are fixed and stay the same, which makes them easy to acquire by hearing, analogy, interaction and practice. That does not hold for the imperfect verb when the governing particles of the jussive or the subjunctive apply to it. These particles do not allow the imperfect verb they govern to be used correctly and soundly on the basis of hearing, analogy and practice alone, as part of the mechanisms of spontaneous and unconscious acquisition of the mother tongue, like the simple sentences we cited above (“ضرَب زيدٌ محمدًا”, “نشكر زيداً”, “زيد مريضٌ”, “إن زيدا مريضٌ”, “لم يحضرْ زيد…”). What prevents this is that they are multiple (more than one particle for the jussive, and likewise for the subjunctive). Add to that that their grammatical functions, on the basis of which they act (jussive and subjunctive of the imperfect), are themselves mostly multiple. For example the particle “لا” may be prohibitive, in which case it puts the imperfect in the jussive, or negative, in which case it has no effect… And the letter “فاء”, when it enters the imperfect, may function as coordination, or explanation, or a link to the answer of a condition, or causation… The result is that it is very unlikely for the speaker to succeed in using the imperfect verb correctly in all the expressions where these governing particles act on it, relying on spontaneous acquisition alone, without knowing the rules of these governors. From this we can assert that this verse attributed to Imru’ al-Qays: “فقلت له لا تبك عينك إنما / نحاول ملكا أو نموت فنعذرَ” (“I said to him: do not weep, for we seek a kingdom or we shall die and be excused”) can only be said by someone who knows the rules of the fa’ of causation, by virtue of which the verb “فنعذرَ” is put in the subjunctive.

The proponents of the instinct myth may reply that all these cases, whether the final vowels of words that change according to the words’ grammatical functions, or the adding or dropping of a letter as in number and counted noun, or a change in the conjugation form of the imperfect when governing particles act on it, or the dropping of the nun of the five verbs when the same particles act on them…, can be mastered by hearing and analogy, so that, with practice, speakers’ use of them becomes correct and sound, conforming to the grammatical rules these speakers do not perceive. But if we know (and this is only an example) the huge number of governing particles for both noun and verb, the even greater number of their rules and effects, the vast number of rules of number and counted noun, and the unlimited number of forms of sentences and speech…, we will become certain that it is impossible for the Bedouin, even from his birth to the age of seventy, to take in all the changes that these particles, rules, norms and forms bring about in the final vowels of words so that his speech would be correct, sound and intelligible, conforming to the grammatical rules that govern it without his knowing or perceiving them. Yes, perhaps he might succeed if we suppose that he resorted to recording what he heard (and even here the question will arise: where did the correctness of what he heard come from, since what holds for him holds for those from whom he is supposed to have heard?) of speech whose final vowels differ from what he knows, to use as a model when he uses similar expressions. But setting aside that it is impossible to list all the forms of expression that vary with situations and contexts, resorting to recording (assuming knowledge of writing) would take us out of the instinctive and unconscious acquisition of language and into learning, which is done consciously, intentionally and willingly.

With this reasoning we want to show that the prevailing belief that the Bedouin acquired and mastered Arabic by instinct is merely a myth. To refute this myth it is enough to recall that there are people who study Arabic, grammar, morphology, syntax and lexicon, at primary, secondary and university level, and may even get a doctorate in it, and yet you find them making mistakes when they speak it or read it if the text is not vowelled. If this is so for those who spent a long stretch of time learning and studying Arabic, what of a Bedouin who knows neither writing nor school acquiring what a learned doctor failed at, by instinct and without effort, preparation, fatigue or sleepless nights… And is it conceivable that Sibawayh, the undisputed master of grammarians, said, as is attributed to him, “I shall die with something in my soul about hatta”, meaning he would die without having mastered all the rules of the particle “حتى” and its action on the noun and the verb when it applies to them, and yet we believe that the Bedouin had mastered all of that, and knew by instinct every case of “حتى”, as shown by his supposed correct pronunciation of the inflectional marks of every noun or verb that follows it?

The upshot is that Arabic, being an inflected language, as we have explained, requires for oral speech to be sound in terms of inflectional marks what the same speech requires when it is a written text, which can be read correctly, in terms of its inflectional marks, only by someone who knows the grammatical functions of that text’s words. This makes Arabic, as an inflected language, a language that must be learned, consciously and willingly, as its writing and reading are learned, and that is not acquired spontaneously and unconsciously.

Arabic dialects had no inflection before Islam:

And if it is impossible for the inflected Arabic we know to have been the language of circulation and conversation of all, some or any of the tribes of the Jahiliyya, because its inflectional nature is incompatible with the instinctive acquisition of language, what did the Arabs speak before Islam?

They spoke, quite simply, their Arabic dialects, which really were acquired, unlike inflected Arabic, by instinct and without learning, as a mother tongue. The difference between this instinctive Arabic and inflected Arabic is that the former was necessarily uninflected (I say necessarily because, as we have seen, it is impossible to acquire by instinct and without learning an inflected language like the Arabic we learned, studied and write in), that is, a language without inflection, meaning that the final vowels of its nouns and imperfect verbs did not change according to their grammatical functions in speech, and were mostly quiescent, as is the case in present-day Arabic dialects. And if Arabic dialects were non-inflected in the Jahiliyya, this does not mean, as some believe out of ignorance, that they had no grammatical, morphological and syntactic rules because they were mere dialects. A language without rules, even a colloquial dialect that has never known writing or codification, amounts to no language. What makes communication possible with any language, scholarly or colloquial, is its rules, which the user of that language may not know, like the child and the illiterate who speak their oral language correctly according to its grammatical, morphological and syntactic rules without having any familiarity or awareness of these rules. Let us not forget that the difference between a language and a dialect is that the first is a dialect that is taught and written, whereas the second is deprived of school and writing.

The question that may come to mind is: how can an Arabic dialect be used correctly and intelligibly when it is uninflected, its words’ final vowels staying the same whatever their grammatical function in speech? In truth, in asking this question we are still looking at this uninflected dialect from the standpoint of inflected Arabic. That is why we can hardly believe there could be an intelligible Arabic without the final vowels of its words changing according to their grammatical function in the sentence or utterance, as the rules of the inflected Arabic we know require. Yet it is enough to reflect on the present-day Arabic dialects of the Gulf countries of the Arabian Peninsula to observe that they are used without inflection, that is, without the last vowels of their words changing according to their grammatical function in speech, and that speaking them is nevertheless intelligible and clear. It seems that this is what the dialects of the Arabic language were like before Islam, used without inflection, which made them mother tongues passed from one generation to the next by spontaneous instinctive acquisition.

And if these pre-Islamic dialects shared their lexicon with inflected Arabic, particularly the dialect of Quraysh, it is likely that they differed from it in their structures and in the conjugation of their verbs, to the extent that allowed dispensing with inflection and using them uninflected without harming understanding and meaning or causing ambiguity in communication. It is enough for the construction of speech to be such that the grammatical function of the noun is determined, as is observed in most present-day Arabic dialects, by its fixed place in the useful utterance (the sentence), for example the subject necessarily coming before the verb and the object in all similar expressions, so that the final vowels of nouns can be dispensed with and replaced by quiescence without any problem in understanding and communication. Such a problem arises in inflected Arabic because the grammatical function of the noun is not determined by the place of that noun in the sentence, whether it is first, second or third…, but by the meaning the speaker intends, which requires the speaker to perceive the grammatical functions (such as subject and direct object…) of the words he uses for his speech to be sound, in meaning and in grammar. Thus, to express the same meaning, inflected Arabic accepts constructions like “ضرب زيدٌ محمّدا”, “ضرب محمّدا زيدٌ”, “زيدٌ ضرب محمّدا”…

But if the order of the words in these sentences were, as in many dialects, “زيد ضرب محمد”, then even if we pronounced the ends of the nouns in this sentence with quiescence, as in those dialects, the meaning would be clear and intelligible: Zayd is the one who performed the act of striking, and Muhammad is the one on whom it fell. This is what Dr Ibrahim Anis confirmed when he wrote: “We content ourselves here with a short statement on the place of the subject in the sentence and the place of the object, to demonstrate that the subject is not recognized by a damma at its end, nor the object by an accusative ending, but that each of the two is recognized, most of the time, by its place in the sentence, which the language’s procedures have fixed” (Min asrar al-lugha, p. 228). He adds: “In any case, we can say with confidence that the ancient Arabic procedures fixed the place of the subject and the place of the object, leaving no room for confusion, and with no need for a nominative on the subject for its subjecthood to appear, or an accusative on the object for its objecthood to become clear” (p. 231). In the same direction, he explains that moving the ends of words with vowels was originally resorted to only to avoid the meeting of two quiescent letters (p. 236).

And if we add to all this that verb conjugation in the dialects is lighter, because there are fewer pronouns, the energetic nun is absent, the dual mostly does not exist, and the governing particles known in inflected Arabic are not used…, we will understand that it is not necessary to use inflected Arabic for speech to be useful and sound, clear and intelligible.

Qur’anic inimitability and the rise of inflected Arabic:

If the Arabic language, in its inflected form, was never, before its codification and the start of its written use in the Islamic period, passed down the generations through oral use as a mother tongue and a language of conversation acquired from early childhood by instinct, hearing and oral practice, how was it preserved until it reached the stage of codification and writing after Islam?

The answer is that Arabic, always in its inflected form, never existed before Islam. Its rise was simultaneous with, and inseparable from, the rise of Arabic grammar. It is indeed the offspring of this grammar and its daughter. It was by the grammarians’ setting rules for the correct pronunciation of the final vowels of nouns and imperfect verbs, according to their grammatical functions in expression, that inflected Arabic arose. Since its rise it has remained a written language learned at school or its equivalent, and not acquired by instinct as a mother tongue. All that passed into it from the Jahiliyya period is the lexicon of the Arabic dialects; as for the grammatical, syntactic and morphological system of this inflected Arabic, it is a new system that the grammarians created from scratch. But that was not creation from nothing: it started from the Qur’an, which came, for the first time, with a new Arabic in its inflected form, unknown in any of the Arabics in circulation in the Jahiliyya. This is what constituted a genuine miracle with which the Qur’an challenged the Arabs. And if we are objective, we may find nothing in the Qur’an, as the exegetes understood and explained Qur’anic inimitability, that makes the Arabs, or others, unable to produce the like of it, whether in form (expression, style…) or in content (legal rulings, scientific facts, announcing the unseen, which was already known in earlier religious books…).

But if we know, as shown above, that the Arabs before Islam spoke their Arabic dialects without inflection, that is, as an uninflected language in which inflectional marks play no role in understanding the intentions of speech, then the Qur’an would truly be something miraculous that neither the Arabs nor others could produce the like of. This inimitability lies in its use of an inflected language (and not an uninflected one like the Arabic dialects in the Jahiliyya), whose correct reading depends on mastering the inflectional vowels of words according to their grammatical function. This is something the Arabs of the Jahiliyya neither knew, nor mastered, nor practiced, contrary to what the myth of “instinct” affirms. The Qur’an’s greatest inimitability is the inflected language in which it was composed. When it challenged the Arabs to produce the like of it, it was because it knew they had no way to do so, since all they knew how to express themselves in was their uninflected language, not an inflected one as in the language of the Qur’an.

That is why there was, at first, a problem in reading the Qur’an correctly, on which the correct understanding of the Qur’an’s meanings depends, governed as they are by the inflectional marks that the Arabs did not know. This was the first motive for establishing grammatical rules to control these inflectional marks in order to protect the Qur’an from the error that disrupted meaning when it was read. There is a widely reported account, though Ibrahim Anis considers it fabricated, that Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali, to whom the rise of Arabic grammar is attributed, heard someone reciting: “أَنَّ اللَّهَ بَرِيءٌ مِنَ الْمُشْرِكِينَ وَرَسُولِهُ” (Surat at-Tawba, verse 3) with a kasra on the lam in “rasulihi”, and said: “I never thought people’s affairs would come to this”; so he began, by order of ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab or ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib depending on the account, to set the rules of grammar. But since the language of the Qur’an, because of its divine source according to the new Islamic creed, became, in its new inflected form, the model of the ideal normative language, perfect and complete, refined and eloquent, unlike the Arabic dialects of the Jahiliyya, every Arabic expression that did not conform to the inflectional model of the Qur’an’s language was ruled out as a wrong, incorrect and unacceptable expression. The result was that correct expression, in correct Arabic, became conditional on adhering to the rules of the inflected language that the Qur’an brought.

These are the rules that the grammarians would lay down and use to impose, as a condition of correct and acceptable expression, a new inflected language that had not been known in the Jahiliyya until the Qur’an brought it. With this inflected language, all other non-inflected Arabic expressions, such as those that circulated and were known in the Jahiliyya, passed into the status of dialects of lower rank and value than the inflected language that imitates the language of the Qur’an in its inflection. This deprived those dialects of developing towards codification and writing, which became confined to the language of the Qur’an and its like, the inflected language the grammarians made.

How the grammarians made inflected Arabic:

Anyone who follows the rise and development of Arabic grammar between the first and fourth centuries of the Hijra will be struck, as Mohamed Abed al-Jabri pointed out, by the rapid growth and astonishing flourishing of this new science, to the point that its schools multiplied and its scholars and figures became famous within a relatively short time, which is a unique phenomenon with no equivalent in other languages and cultures. Greek, for example, which was already, for centuries before the Christian era, a language of writing and rich written production, in which hundreds of books were composed on science, philosophy, politics, theater, poetry, literature, history…, did not know an interest in its grammar resembling, even by a tenth, the interest that Arabic knew at the start of its codification, although it had no written heritage like Greek, being at the beginning of its passage to written use.

Why, then, all this extraordinary interest in Arabic grammar after the Qur’an appeared? Because the function of this grammar was not only the correct reading of the Qur’an and understanding of its inflected language, but also the creation of a new inflected Arabic on the model of the Qur’an’s inflected Arabic, to replace the non-inflected Arabic dialects that circulated before Islam. There was excess interest in grammar because that work belonged to the making and building of a new Arabic language. And if the Qur’an is the original model of the new inflected Arabic, the grammarians would expand on that model to make molds in whose measure the new inflected Arabic would be cast, even if these molds represented hypothetical cases far removed from what circulates in the communicative and written use of Arabic, such as: “I ate the fish up to its head” (akaltu s-samaka hatta ra’sahā): accusative, nominative or genitive? Or which is more correct: “فإذا هو هي” or “فإذا هو إياها”; “خرجت فإذا عبد الله القائمَ, أو القائمُ”? As the books of the heritage relate in the debate between Sibawayh and al-Kisa’i. Thus grammar arose first, so that after it and through it the new inflected Arabic could arise. This is a strange and anomalous situation: grammar precedes the language in circulation and creates it. Whereas the natural course of natural languages is that they begin as oral languages that their speakers acquire and use by instinct as a mother tongue, and then their grammatical system is drawn from this use by those who study the nature of the language, linguists and grammarians. Grammar always comes after the language exists and is used in oral circulation. It is, as it were, its DNA:

Just as the DNA of any living organism is extracted from it once the organism exists, so the grammatical system of any language is extracted from it after the language is in circulation in communication and conversation. Yet inflected Arabic, even if it existed as a Qur’anic text read and recited, did not exist as a language of conversation in life when the grammarians set the rules of its grammatical system. With this inflected Arabic it is no longer the case that grammar is extracted from the language in circulation, as in the natural relation between grammar and language, but that the latter, in its inflected form, is extracted from grammar. This language came to exist only if its users speak or write it in conformity with the inflectional rules the grammarians laid down, and not with its natural form in which it circulated before Islam. Thus arose the normative classical Arabic, the Arabic of grammar, inflection and writing, as a parallel copy of the language of the Qur’an in its inflectional spirit. With its rise, everything else of Arabic speech that did not adhere to the rules of this normative Arabic became a mere dialect. It is therefore a non-natural language, a language made by the grammarians. The result is a language that cannot be acquired orally, spontaneously and unconsciously, that is, by instinct, as is supposed as an established truth about the Arabic of the Jahiliyya, but for which acquisition necessarily requires learning and writing. It is by definition a school and written language, that is, a language whose mastery and use depend on written learning, according to the rules the grammarians laid down.

Why did the Arabic language disappear from oral circulation?

Why did the Arabic language disappear from oral circulation with the spread of Islam, its use since then being confined to written use or the reading of what is written? The common explanation is that its mixing with foreign speech, after many non-Arab peoples entered Islam and rushed to learn and use Arabic as a language of religion, culture and political influence, led to a wide spread of error in its use until this error overran speech and conversation and became almost the rule. This is what lay behind setting grammatical rules to control the correct reading of the Qur’an and the correct pronunciation of Arabic, and to protect it from error, especially regarding the vowels at the ends of words. Thus grammar preserved inflected Arabic from error and mistakes. But that did not prevent the faulty Arabic, in which the rules of inflection are not observed, from circulating orally until it formed dialects particular to each region, which became the ones used in everyday conversation and communication. As for normative inflected Arabic, it continued as a language of learning, writing and cultural and literary production.

This explanation of the disappearance of normative inflected Arabic, that is, Classical Arabic, from everyday conversation, and of the rise of dialects, is not very different from the myth of “instinct” in explaining the Arabs of the Jahiliyya’s mastery of inflected Arabic by instinct and “without a teacher”.

— If the spread of error, as a result of the use of Arabic by non-Arabs, is what led to the appearance of the colloquial dialects and the disappearance of inflected Arabic from use in everyday conversation, how do we explain the disappearance of this same inflected Arabic from its original historical homeland of appearance and spread in the Arabian Peninsula before Islam, such as the Hejaz, where nobody uses it any longer as a mother tongue in this region, although it did not experience mixing with non-Arabs as the Levant, Egypt and North Africa did…?

— And why is Arabic alone damaged by the error resulting from its use by non-Arabs until it disappears for good from everyday use? Why did that not happen to English, Spanish or Portuguese, European languages that reached the American continent more than five centuries ago, which had behind them, like Arabic, religious, political, military and cultural influence, and spread on this continent among dozens of local dialects of the native population, who would use these European languages alongside their American dialects without this leading to the disappearance of the original European version of these languages from oral circulation, turning them into a colloquial English, Spanish and Portuguese totally different from those used in writing, as it is supposed happened to the Arabic dialects that became “languages” different from and independent of written Arabic, sharing with it only part of their lexicon?

The truth is that inflected Arabic, which we were told was acquired by instinct in the Jahiliyya, did not disappear from oral circulation through the influence of the foreign speech of the non-Arabs who embraced Islam, but disappeared because it was absent to begin with, having never existed as a mother tongue acquired in childhood and passed from generation to generation through oral circulation. And if those European languages kept, when they moved to America, their status as languages of oral circulation in daily life, it is because they were already used in their European homeland with that same status, that is, as languages used in oral conversation, which they carried with them to America because it is part of their makeup as natural languages.

As for inflected Arabic, because it was never an oral language, it did not carry its oral function with it (which it does not have) to the countries where Islam spread, but carried to them only its written function. And because Arabic is the language of Islam (even the language of Paradise according to some jurists), the new non-Arab Muslims wanted to learn it and use it in their daily lives, and even to give up their national languages, as the Imazighen, the Egyptians, the Levantines did… But they did not find it in circulation in conversation so as to acquire and speak it. All they found was either non-inflected Arabic dialects of limited spread owing to the small number of those called the Arab “conquerors”, or only the written Arabic they rushed to learn. But when they wanted to speak it, they used its lexicon as available in this written Arabic, for the literate among them, casting it in the molds of their local language. And because the lexicon of this new language is mostly Arabic, they believed they were speaking real Arabic, whereas what they spoke was a dialect built with the structures of their local language and an Arabic lexicon. Thus Darija arose in North Africa. But had Arabic possessed its oral function, like those European languages that conquered America, there would have been no Darija at all: why would the Imazighen have made a Darija of lower rank and standing than the inflected language of the Qur’an, whose desire to speak was behind this Darija, if Arabic had reached them in use in oral communication?

Criticisms and objections:

I understand that this analysis will provoke rejecting reactions, bitter criticism and strong objections. The first of these objections is the indignant question: how did these “truths” escape all those who have dealt with the rise of the Arabic language, its development and its characteristics, Ancients and Moderns, who have exhausted it in research, study and writing? How did they not notice that it was not acquired and used by instinct before Islam? These are legitimate and justified questions.

If we know that all productions of knowledge are answers to questions raised and solutions proposed to problems posed, the absence of questions about the self-evidence of “instinct”, regarding the acquisition of Arabic in the Jahiliyya, would be normal, because this question was never raised. The reasons do not matter, such as consensus, the frequency of the accounts confirming the reality of this “instinct”, the existence of poems composed by poets who could not read or write… What matters is that one cannot answer a question that is not posed at all. Those who studied pre-Islamic poetry, for example, started from questions such as: what are the features of this poetry? In which dialects was it composed? What is the nature of pre-Islamic society as we glimpse it through this poetry?… Many books have been written to answer these questions, without addressing the reality of the phenomenon of instinct, because this question was not raised by the authors of these books. Even Taha Hussein, when he cast doubt on this pre-Islamic poetry and considered it forged, composed in the Islamic period, did not start from a question about “instinct”, but his question was: why do we find the language of these poems unified in a single dialect, that of the Hejaz, not very different from the unified language of the Qur’an, without finding in them any trace of other Arabic dialects, such as the southern dialects? His answer was that this “pre-Islamic poetry” belongs to the Islamic era and has nothing to do with the era of the Jahiliyya. So Taha Hussein answered the questions he had posed, which did not include one concerning the reality of “instinct”, although the result would have been the same had he posed it: those poems do not belong to the pre-Islamic era. Likewise those Orientalists who wanted to explain the phenomenon of inflection by finding roots for it in the ancient Semitic languages, since Arabic is a Semitic language (details in the book Min asrar al-lugha, p. 199 ff.), started from this question: what is the Semitic origin of inflection? But had they posed this question: are the mechanisms by which the child acquires the mother tongue compatible with the property of inflection inherent to Arabic? they would have reached an answer confirming that inflection, as applied in Arabic, cannot exist in any oral language, whether Semitic, Indo-European or otherwise, passed from one generation to the next by children as a mother tongue, which absolutely negates the acquisition of inflected Arabic by instinct.

And this question concerning the relation between inflection and children’s ability to acquire Arabic, so that it passes through them to adults and to future generations, is the one that was the starting point of what I wrote.

And we note that in truth, before being a question about Arabic and its use before Islam…, it is a pedagogical and linguistic question in essence, concerning the process of children’s acquisition of the mother tongue, and the relation of this process to inflection, which is part of the Arabic language. From this pedagogical standpoint, the alleged instinctive acquisition of Arabic in the Jahiliyya provoked me, because I found no pedagogical and linguistic justification that convinces us of the possibility of a child’s acquiring an inflected language as a mother tongue. It is indeed the child that is concerned here, because the Arabs of the Jahiliyya, if they are supposed to have spoken Arabic by instinct, are also supposed to have acquired it as a mother tongue as children. The matter therefore concerns the mechanisms of the child’s acquisition of the mother tongue, and the question this raises about the compatibility or incompatibility of a language with inflectional properties with these mechanisms. This is the crux of this whole discussion, and what was behind the writing of this article. That is why any reply to these conclusions that does not prove that the child can, pedagogically and linguistically, acquire inflected Arabic as a mother tongue is a reply beside the point.

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