Everything about Sibawayh totally explained
Sibawayh (
Sibuyeh in
Persian, سيبويه
Sîbawayh in
Arabic, سیبویه) was a
linguist of
Persian origin born ca.
760 in the town of
Bayza (ancient
Nesayak) in the
Fars province of
Iran, died in
Shiraz, also in the Fars, around .
He was one of the earliest and greatest grammarians of the
Arabic language, and his
phonetic description of Arabic is one of the most precise ever made, leading some to compare him with
Panini. He greatly helped to spread the Arabic language in the Middle East.
Sibawayh was the first non-Arab to write on Arabic grammar and therefore the first one to explain Arabic grammar from a non-Arab perspective. Much of the impetus for this work came from the desire for non-Arab
Muslims to understand the
Qur'an properly and thoroughly; the Qur'an, which is composed in a poetic language that even native Arabic speakers must study with great care in order to comprehend thoroughly, is even more difficult for those who, like Sibawayh, didn't grow up speaking Arabic. Additionally, because Arabic doesn't necessarily mark all pronounced
vowel sounds, it's possible to misread a text aloud (See
Short vowels in Arabic); such difficulty was particularly troublesome for Muslims, who regard the Qur'an as the literal word of God to man and as such should never be mispronounced or misread.
The name Sibawayh is derived from the Persian words سیب-بو-یه
(
Sib-bu-yeh) meaning "the one with an apple's scent". His full name is: ʕAmr ibn ʕUthmān ibn Qanbar - al-mulaqqab bi-"Sibawayhi". That is: "ʕAmr ibn ʕUthmān ibn Qanbar - a.k.a. Sibawayhi".
On the other hand, the above explanation doesn't seem to be completely correct. There are words like "asal-wayh" (عسل ویه), "sar-wayh" (سارویه), and "shir-wayh" (شیرویه) that are the combination of the name of an animal or something edible plus "wayh". "wayh" (it is pronounced "uyeh" in modern Persian) is an ascriptive postfix. In modern Persian these words are pronounced "asaluyeh", "saruyeh", and "shiruyeh"; respectively. "asal", "Sar", and "Shir" mean Honey, Starling, and Lion/Milk (both spelled the same, so there's no way to say what the appropriate meaning of Shir is in this particular application), respectively. So based on this comparison sibuyeh doesn't mean "smell of apple" or anything like that. Another word with the same structure that's still spelled with the old style (or probably middle Persian) is "babvayh" in "ebn babvayh" (ابن بابویه) that's the old cemetery of Tehran. But the first part of the word (bab) isn't the name of neither something edible nor an animal.
Further Information
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