From: Eric van Lit <fifkik...@hotmail.com>

It's a good idea but I think there should at least be a citation to a
source, for the readers to be able to double-check what it means.
Authoritative sources in Western languages are Wright's "A Grammar of the
Arabic Language" and Fisher's "Grammatik des klassischen Arabisch". Or it
should at least be double-checked before publication.

There are some finer points in grammar which specifically pertain to the
Quran which for example sometimes makes a general rule not entirely true and
one of such is actually the gender. This page states that non-human plurals
always take feminine singual for adjectives, but this is not ALWAYS the case
in the Quran. Example:

Q24:24

وَلَقَدْ أَنزَلْنَا إِلَيْكُمْ آيَاتٍ مُّبَيِّنَاتٍ

Here we see "verses", a non-human plural, taking "clear" in feminine plural.
According to Classical Arabic grammar it should be: آيات مبينة

I also have never heard of words that behave neither masculine nor feminine
in Arabic. This page claims that they exist (the example given is 'chairs')
but then contradicts itself in using 'chairs' as a masculine plural at the
end. The distinction the page makes is between 'semantic gender' and
'grammatical gender' but I doubt if Arabic really has this distinction. For
example, the word ملائكة is semantically masculine plural and is as such
grammatically treated, while this page gives the false impression it is only
'semantically masculine'.

I did not investigate this issue further (I will, but not now) so if anyone
has something to say on it, please do.

Kind regards,
Eric
M.A. student Islamic Studies
McGill University, Montreal



Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2010 11:01:40 +0100
Subject: Would you like to write a brief summary of a key topic in Quranic
Arabic grammar?
From: k...@kaisdukes.com
To: comp-quran@comp.leeds.ac.uk

Salamu Alaykum,

Hello All. We are hoping to soon release a new version of the Quranic
Arabic Corpus (version 0.21). Major highlights in this release include
an extended treebank, improved linguistic annotation, and the first
version of pronoun resolution for key chapters of the Quran. An
informal list of new planned features here can be found here:
http://kaisdukes.wordpress.com/category/quranic-arabic-corpus.

As! part of this release, we would really like to see the grammar
documentation section extended. These online annotation guidelines are
useful not only to ensure consistency in the word-by-word grammar
pages, but also allow new visitors of the site to get an overview of
key topics. We would like to extend an open invitation for submissions
to the annotation guidelines. Would you be interested in putting
together a brief 1 or 2 page write-up on a particular topic in Quranic
grammar? For example, here is an interesting page on gender:
http://corpus.quran.com/documentation/gender.jsp

Here is another example page, on the different semantic usages of the
prefix alif in the Quran:
http://corpus.quran.com/documentation/particlealif.jsp

If you have a small amount of time, it would be great to get a write
up on an interesting topic! Some ideas for this (but not lim! ited to):

- An explanation of Arabic roots for beginners (trilateral and
quadrilateral radicals)
- Brief summary of Arabic verb patterns (wazn and masdar)
- A table explaining verb forms I to XII (we annotate these forms on
the corpus, but we don't have any documentation on them online)
- The difference between harf tafseer and harf madsadree

It would be great for others with knowledge on these topics to
contribute even a little bit to this. Feel free to submit a write up
to me directly: k...@kaisdukes.com

You don’t even have to write up something too long. Even a couple of
paragraphs on a key topic would be great, although a strong preference
is for submissions to include references to well-accepted literature.
Don’t feel limited to the above topics; anything is more than welcome.
We can also extend the existing documentation pages here! :
http://corpus.quran.com/documentation/grammar.jsp, so feel fr! ee to
include new notes on an existing topic as well. If you feel like
writing something, please drop me an e-mail, and we can talk about it
further. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Kind Regards,

-- Kais Dukes

Language Research Group
School of Computing
University of Leeds

http://www.kaisdukes.com - Kais Dukes
http://corpus.quran.com - The Quranic Arabic Corpus


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