Studies in the Linguistic Structure of Classical Arabic

Book excerpt: In 1997 Naphtali Kinberg died, one of the best specialists in Classical Arabic and the Arabic grammatical tradition. His main work, the index on Farrā’'s Ma‘ānī l-Qur’ān, which appeared in the Brill series Handbook of Oriental Studies (1996) will remain one of the most important reference tools for future research in this field. In this volume the editors have collected a number of articles in which Kinberg demonstrates his ability to combine modern linguistic insights with the theories of the Arab grammarians. The result is a series of detailed studies on such aspects of the structure of Arabic as conditional sentences, adverbial clauses, and the particles lākin and qad. These articles have been published before, sometimes in relatively inaccessible journals. They are now made available in a collective volume, and made accessible by an index that will facilitate using them in research on Arabic linguistics. This volume also contains an important study that was part of Kinberg's legacy, the edition and translation of a treatise on the pronunciation of the ḍād by the grammarian ‘Alī al-Mansūrī (12th/18th century). This treatise is an important document on a hitherto neglected aspect of Arabic phonetic studies. It discusses the phonetic status of the sound that was regarded by the Arabs themselves as the most characteristic sound of their language.