Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics

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(4,466 words)

Author(s): Zeinab Ahmed Taha
1. Definition The Arabic verb taʿaddā and its derivatives mutaʿaddin and taʿdiya express the lexical concept of something going beyond something else. These terms are used by Arabic grammarians to refer to the concept of transitivity (for a general treatment of transitivity in Arabic grammar, see Owens 1988:167–172; Taha 1995). In the linguistic sense, the verb is said to go beyond its agent (fāʿil) to an object (mafʿūl). Verbs whose action goes beyond their agents to their direct objects are called transitive ( mutaʿaddin); verbs whose action does not go beyond the agent to a…
Date: 2018-04-01


(3,399 words)

Author(s): Avihai Shivtiel
1. Introduction Originally from the Tongan language, which belongs to the Polynesian group of languages, the word ‘ taboo’ was first introduced into English in 1777 by the naval explorer Captain James Cook (1728–1779), and later entered other European languages. The concept refers to anything sacred and inviolable and later, by extension, to anything that is in contradiction to moral standards or good manners and is, therefore, forbidden or prohibited. ‘Taboo language’ refers to words and expressions that may cau…
Date: 2018-04-01


(1,766 words)

Author(s): Muhammad Hasan Bakalla
The term tafxīm is derived from the Arabic triliteral root f-x-m, generally signifying ‘thickening, magnifying, enlargement, emphasizing’. This notion was applied to the Arabic sound system to differentiate between certain sound groups. One class includes the four muṭbaqa consonants ( ʾiṭbāq): /ḍ/ ض, /ṣ/ص , /ṭ/ ط, and /ḏ̣/ ظ. In addition, three more consonants, /q/ ق, /ġ/ غ, and /x/ خ, are grouped with these four consonants to form a larger class, known as mustaʿliya ‘elevated, raised [consonants]’. They are called thus because of “the raising of the back of the tongue…
Date: 2018-04-01


(1,117 words)

Author(s): John R. Perry
Date: 2018-04-01


(4 words)

see Jinās
Date: 2018-04-01


(2,157 words)

Author(s): Kristina Nelson
1. Definition and material of tajwīd Tajwīd is the system of rules regulating the correct and clear rendering of the Qurʾān, preserving the nature of a religious revelation whose meaning is expressed as much by its sound as by its content and expression. Muslims believe that tajwīd is the codification of the sound of the revelation as it was revealed to the Prophet Muḥammad and as he subsequently rehearsed it with the Angel Gabriel. Therefore, in Islam, there can be no history of the development of tajwīd except in terms of its scholarly codification, and it is generally believed…
Date: 2018-04-01


(1,108 words)

Author(s): Valeriy Rybalkin
The term taʿlīq (or ʾilġāʾ) ‘hanging’, i.e. ‘abrogation, interruption, cancellation’, indicates the interruption of grammatical effect when a word is not used in a governable position although it is a governable word, as shown by the fact that it exhibits the normal case or mood distinction (Owens 1988:50–51). Cancellation of government is mostly connected with judgment verbs ( ʾaf ʿāl al-qalb) such as ḥasiba ‘to consider, to reckon’; xāla ‘to believe, to imagine’, darā and ʿalima ‘to know’; raʾā ‘to see, to consider’, ḏ̣anna ‘to think, to believe’; ʿ adda‘to consider; to regard’; zaʿam…
Date: 2018-04-01


(396 words)

Author(s): Jacques Grand'Henry
The ancient Arabic grammarians made a distinction between two types of Arabic according to the nature of the vowel of the imperfect preformative: some Arab tribes used ya-, while others used yi-. The name which designates the usage of yi- is taltala. According to Rabin (1951:60), who carefully collected all available data mentioned by the Arabic grammarians, a group of tribes who lived in a large area from Egypt to Iraq, the Quḍāʿa, had the full taltala. Some other tribes had a partial taltala only, i.e., they used yi-, ti-, ʾi-, ni- for the different persons of imperfect and imperati…
Date: 2018-04-01


(1,360 words)

Author(s): Janusz Danecki
The lexical meaning of the verb tamakkana is ‘to be powerful, to be able to do something’. In grammatical terminology, tamakkun is used for a general grammatical and semantic category indicating the ability of words to be inflected and to perform various grammatical functions (for a survey of previous reconstructions of this term's function, see Danecki 1993; Talmon 2003:287, n. 2). A part of speech possessing tamakkun is called mutamakkin; it should have regular inflection and regular form. That which is irregular is classified as ġayr mutamakkin. The more functions a word can p…
Date: 2018-04-01


(2,135 words)

Author(s): Torsten Tschacher
At first glance, Tamil, a Dravidian language spoken by more than seventy million people in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore, appears to be largely devoid of loanwords from Arabic, especially if compared to other South Asian languages. Even with reference to Muslim religious practice, Tamil words often replace Arabic ones, such as Tamil toḻukai instead of Arabic ṣalāt. Nevertheless, Arabic words are used by Tamil-speaking Muslims in both everyday conversation and Islamic literary texts dating back to the 16th century, and even among non-Muslims…
Date: 2018-04-01


(1,092 words)

Author(s): Ramzi Baalbaki
The term tamyīz is used by the Arab grammarians to refer to one of the functions of the accusative. Generally translated as ‘specification’ or ‘specifier’, tamyīz, especially in the earlier sources, has the synonyms mumayyiz, mufassir, tafsīr, mubayyin, and tabyīn (see, however, Ibn Šuqayr, Muḥallā 15–16, where tafsīr is reserved for the accusative after numbers; cf. Mubarrad, Muqtaḍab II, 144, 164, 173, III, 32, 91, 259, where tabyīn and tamyīz are distinguished, but not uniformly). Although Sībawayhi (d. 180/796) discusses tamyīz in various places of his Kitāb (I, 204–211, II, …
Date: 2018-04-01


(2,262 words)

Author(s): Wafaa Batran
1. Definition Tanāzuʿ lit. ‘conflict’ is a syntactic phenomenon that deals with two coordinated verbs competing for assigning case to a shared constituent, as in (1). (1) [1 ḍaraba-nī] wa-[2 ḍarab-tu zayd-an] hit-me and-hit-I Zayd-Acc ‘Zaydi hit me and I hit himi’ The shared constituent (in bold) in (1) serves two distinct grammatical functions: it serves as a subject for the first verb (henceforth clause 1) and as an object for the second verb (henceforth clause 2). However, zayd-an belongs to clause 2, as it carries the accusative case, assigned under adjacency by the i…
Date: 2018-04-01


(2,887 words)

Author(s): Georgine Ayoub
The term tanwīn (called in Western terminology ‘nunation’) is the maṣdar of the verb nawwana ‘adding an n’. At first, it indicated the nasalization of the final vowel of the word, especially in the case ending of the noun (e.g. rajulu-n). According to Ibn Yaʿīš (d. 643/1245; Šarḥ IX, 29), tanwīn became, due to metonymy, the actual name of the final -n. Arabic script differentiates this -n from the final n belonging to the root of the word (e.g. qaṭana, rasana), which is why tanwīn is not represented graphically as a letter of the alphabet. The value of this -n in traditional Arabic grammar tu…
Date: 2018-04-01


(5 words)

see East Africa
Date: 2018-04-01


(2,834 words)

Author(s): Kees Versteegh
The usual meaning of taqdīr is ‘predestination, ordaining, decreeing’, semantically connected with qadr in the sense of ‘(God's) decree, fate’. The word taqdīr may also be connected with another sense of qadr, ‘measure, quantity’, in which case it means ‘measuring; estimation of value, assignment of a value to something’. In this sense it is used, for instance, for assigning the portion of war booty to which each participant in a campaign is entitled (Kofler 1933:384). This latter sense is probably the one that is behind the technical use of the term, for instance in legal theory, where taq…
Date: 2018-04-01


(4 words)

see Mutarādif
Date: 2018-04-01


(4 words)

see Ṣarf
Date: 2018-04-01


(1,340 words)

Author(s): Suzanne Wertheim
Arabic was a superstrate language for Volga Tatar (and the predecessors of the modern Tatar language) for more than one thousand years, with economic and political ties to the Islamic world established well before the Volga Bulgars' early-10th-century conversion to Islam, and the influence of Arabic on the Tatar language was significant. Up until the 19th century, Tatars shared three literary languages with the other Muslims of Russia: Classical Arabic, Classical Persian, and Chagatay. The first…
Date: 2018-04-01


(1,342 words)

Author(s): V. Swarajya Lakshmi
1. Interaction between the Arabic and Telugu speech communities Telugu belongs to the Dravidian language family. It is spoken as the major language in Andhra Pradesh in India by more than 66 million people, and speakers of the language have spread to different parts of the world. The interaction between the Arabic and Telugu speech communities began when the Muslim king Allauddin Khilji invaded the south in 1296 C.E. Later, Giasuddin Tughlak invaded the south as well (Siddiqui 1956). Although no Muslim empire had yet been established there, during the 13th century…
Date: 2018-04-01


(8 words)

see Obligatory Contour Principle ; Morphology
Date: 2018-04-01
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