What others said about Arabic Via a reliable witness
Concluding his paper for the King Saud University conference, 2020:
“The grammarians’ tradition was built on general, universal principles… Even if we differ decisively among ourselves, all who study the tradition agree that it is an intellectual achievement unique of its kind, and that the study of the Arab grammarians’ ideas is of great value in itself.”
Jonathan Owens
American linguist, professor of Arabic at the University of Bayreuth, a leading Western scholar of the Arabic grammatical tradition.
In Arabic
لقد بُنِيَ تراثُ النحويّين على مبادئ عامّةٍ وعالميّة… فحتّى لو كان بيننا اختلافاتٌ حاسمة، فيتّفق كلُّ الذين يبحثون في التراث بأنّه إنجازٌ ذهنيٌّ فريدٌ من نوعه، ودراسةُ أفكار النحويّين العرب هي فائدةٌ بالغةُ القيمة في حدّ ذاتها.
Source
Owens, “The Arabic linguistic tradition from a Western perspective: its limits and prospects”, conclusion, in al-Munjaz al-ʿarabī al-lughawī wa-l-adabī fī l-dirāsāt al-ajnabiyya (Proceedings of the Third International Conference, King Saud University, Riyadh, 2020), p. 126
The English is ours, from the reported Arabic.
From the printed Arabic of his conference paper; the English is our rendering. His English abstract notes that “the theoretical sophistication of the Arabic linguistic tradition is now well appreciated in western scholarship”.
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