Ahmad Muhammad Abdullah

Ahmad Muhammad Abdullah is an Arabic grammarian and scholar who served as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Arabic Language, known for his specialized study on syntactic borrowing titled Zahirat al-Taqarud fi al-Nahw al-Arabi (The Phenomenon of Mutual Borrowing in Arabic Grammar) Majallat al-Jami'a al-Isl…+1.

Scholarly Contributions

Abdullah's primary contribution focuses on the phenomenon of al-taqarud (reciprocal borrowing) in Arabic grammar, which was published as a multi-part study in the Journal of the Islamic University of Madinah (issues 58 and 59) Majallat al-Jami'a al-Isl…+3. He treated this concept as an illustration of the inherent flexibility and expansiveness of the Arabic language, expanding on brief allusions to the topic made by classical grammarians such as Ibn Hisham al-Ansari in Mughni al-Labib Majallat al-Jami'a al-Isl…+1.

In his analysis, Abdullah classified grammatical borrowing into three distinct categories:

• Borrowing in inflectional rulings (al-ahkam al-iʿrabiyyah), encompassing instances where words take on each other's parsing rules, such as the reciprocal usage between illa (إلا) and ghayr (غير), or between an (أن) and ma (ما) Zahirat al-Taqarud fi al-…+1.
• Borrowing in grammatical form and structure (al-hayʾah wa-al-shakl), such as the interchangeability between the circumstantial accusative (hal) and specification (tamyiz) regarding derivation and non-derived forms Zahirat al-Taqarud fi al-…+1.
• Borrowing in semantic meaning (al-maʿani), particularly among grammatical particles (huruf al-maʿani), where a particle acquires the specific semantic function of another, addressing longstanding debates between the Basran and Kufan grammatical schools concerning particle substitution Zahirat al-Taqarud fi al-…+1.