al-Kalam ala Tasrif "Dhu" - dimn "Athar al-Muallimi
- Author died
- 1386 AH
- Editions
- Dar Alam al-Fawa'id lil-Nashr wa-al-Tawzi'
al-Kalam ala Tasrif "Dhu" (The Discourse on the Morphology of "Dhu") is a short grammatical and morphological treatise by the Yemeni scholar Abd al-Rahman al-Muallimi (d. 1386 AH / 1966 CE), dedicated to analyzing the underlying linguistic structure, etymology, and morphological transformations of the Arabic word dhu (ذو) and its derived forms.
Background and Topic
The treatise focuses on the particle dhu in the sense of "possessor" (sahib), which is counted among the "Five Nouns" (al-asma al-khamsa) according to al-Farra' and al-Zajjaj, or among the "Six Nouns" according to the majority of Arab grammarians. The morphological difficulty that prompted this study arises because the default pattern for Arabic nouns is triliteral (three consonantal radicals), whereas dhu overtly appears as two letters.
Morphological Analysis
Al-Muallimi explains that the underlying root of dhu is dh-w-y (ذَوَيٌ) on the metric measure fa'al (فَعَلٌ), where the medial radical (ayn) is a waw and the final radical (lam) is a ya. Under standard phonetic rules, because the ya is vocalized and preceded by an a-vowel (fatha), it should have converted to an alif (dhawa, on the weight of hawa); however, Arabs elided the final radical arbitrarily (i'tibat), similar to what occurred in nouns such as ab (father), akh (brother), yad (hand), and dam (blood). The case vowels were then shifted to the waw, with the initial dhal assimilating its vowel through harmony (itba').
In examining the feminine and dual paradigms, al-Muallimi notes:
- Feminine Singular: If constructed from the reduced derivative, it takes the form dhat (ذات) on the pattern fa't (فَعْت), comparable to bint and ukht; if formed from the original root, it would be dhawat (ذواة) on the pattern fa'ala.
- Feminine Dual: The dual can be formed from the reduced derivative as dhata (ذاتا) on the pattern fa'ta, which is rare in usage, or by restoring the original root as dhawata (ذواتا) on the pattern fa'alata, as in the Quranic passages ذَوَاتَا أَفْنَانٍ (Surah al-Rahman: 48) and ذَوَاتَيْ أُكُلٍ خَمْطٍ (Surah Saba: 16).
- Plural: The feminine plural is formed as dhawat (ذوات) on the pattern fa'at (فَعَات), after the elision of the first of two adjacent silent alifs upon attaching the sound feminine plural suffix.
Sources and Compilation
In building his argument, al-Muallimi quotes and analyzes statements from several classical lexicographical and grammatical authorities, including Abu al-Baqa al-Kafawi's al-Kulliyyat, al-Fayyumi's al-Misbah al-Munir, al-Razi's Mukhtar al-Sihah, Tafsir al-Jalalayn, al-Sabban's supercommentary on al-Ushmuni's commentary on the Alfiyya, al-Radi al-Astarabadhi's commentary on the Kafiya and Shafiya, and al-Suyuti's Ham' al-Hawami.
The treatise is included as the sixth essay within the twentieth volume of the collected works project Athar al-Mu'allimi (The Works of al-Muallimi), which compiles his Arabic language treatises.
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