Contribution Of Early Arab Grammarians To Sound Study: Classification Of Speech Sounds And Distinctive Features And Phonological Terminology

This paper deals with an important phase of the development of sound study and classification of speech sounds. This led to the very first steps of the development of distinctive features which has paved the way to the distinctive feature theory later on. The researcher explores the linguistic literature of Classical Arabic and some of that authored by some orientalists about Arabic linguistics where they talk about the efforts of the ear;y Arab grammarians in the different fields of language studies. The researcher also tackles the idea about the level of influence of the Indian grammarians on Arab grammarians. Then the researcher attempts to establish a table showing the classification of speech sounds according to the general consensus of the Arab grammarians by using a binary (─/+) feature system. Because language study is developmental by its own nature, it is possible to find disagreement between later and earlier linguists on certain matters or features. The researcher tries to establish which feature to settle on when he comes to composing the table of the distinctive features toward the end of this paper.