Fawa'it Kitab Sibawayh
- Author died
- 368 AH
- Editions
- Dār al-Shu’ūn al-Thaqāfiyyah al-‘Āmmah «Āfāq ‘Arabiyyah»
Fawa'it Kitab Sibawayh (The Omissions of Sibawayh’s Book) is a specialized grammatical and morphological tractate by the tenth-century scholar and judge Abu Said al-Sirafi (d. 368 AH / 979 CE) . The work investigates the nominal and morphological patterns (abniyah) of the Arabic language that later grammarians claimed were omitted or overlooked by Sibawayh in his foundational text, al-Kitab .
Background and Purpose
Al-Sirafi opens the work by highlighting Sibawayh's unprecedented achievement in attempting an exhaustive classification of Arabic morphological structures, a comprehensive undertaking that no grammarian before him or in his era had attempted due to its sheer difficulty and the necessity of mastering the entirety of the Arabic linguistic corpus . Subsequent grammarians sought to supplement or critique al-Kitab by identifying forms they considered missing, prompting al-Sirafi to scrutinize these alleged omissions systematically .
Content and Method
The tractate reviews the claims put forward by prominent early grammarians:
- Al-Zajjaj's critique: al-Zajjaj maintained, following extensive investigation, that Sibawayh omitted only three morphological structures from the language of the Arabs: hundali' (هُنْدَلِع, a type of legume), durdaqis (دُرْدَاقِس, the bone protrusion above the nape of the neck, which al-Asmai considered a Roman loanword, with the similar foreign pattern khuzraniq), and shamansir (شَمَنْصِير, a toponym attested in Hudhali poetry) .
- Ibn al-Sarraj's list: Ibn al-Sarraj recorded a larger collection of alleged omissions in al-Usul fi al-Nahw, including forms such as tilqamah, til'abah, firnas, tanufi, turjuman, shahm amhaj, muhawa'an, 'ayaham, turamiz, tumadir, yanabi'at, dihindah, layth 'ifrin, tir'ayah, al-sinbar, zaytun, kadhubdhab, haznabazan, 'afzaran, and haydakar .
Al-Sirafi analyzes these examples individually and concludes that the vast majority of the cited words do not represent genuine omissions by Sibawayh . In defending Sibawayh's framework, al-Sirafi demonstrates that:
- Many disputed forms conform directly to patterns Sibawayh had already established by analogy; for example, tilqamah and til'abah follow the measure tif'alah, analogous to tihmalah mentioned in Sibawayh's chapter on verbal nouns .
- Certain terms are present in variant manuscript recensions of al-Kitab, such as haznabazan and 'afzaran .
- Other words represent derived personal names transferred from verbs (such as tumadir), reduplicative onomatopoeic cries (such as dihindah), foreign borrowings, unverified transmissions (such as forms sourced from Kitab al-Ayn), or phonological alterations driven by poetic necessity (darurah shi'riyyah) and pausal shortening rather than independent standard patterns .
The text also forms an integral section within al-Sirafi's larger commentary on Sibawayh, Sharh Kitab Sibawayh .
Answer updated