By Gregg Reynolds — Last updated on Oct 26, 2025

"As you see, o youth"

Sībawayhi occasionally adds كَمَا تَرَى kamā tarā “as you see” or يَا فَتَى yā fatā “o youth” for no apparent reason. If you find this puzzling, you're not alone: it has flummoxed even Michael Carter[1], who writes:

Al-Akhfaš claimed that Sībawayhi used to check everything with him as he wrote it, implying that Sībawayhi was concerned to ensure an accurate transcript. This raises a problem with the expression yā fatā ‘O young man’, which occurs from time to time when Sībawayhi is clearly addressing someone... [pg. 35]

But Carter has simply misunderstood the text. It is quite clear that Sībawayhi uses both yā fatā and kamā tarā as literary disambiguation devices whose purpose is to force pronunciation of final inflection in continuous speech. He's not addressing anyone; he's just adding a few nonce words in order to emphasize that the ending of the preceding speech is to be fully articulated, rather than dropped as it would be if uttered followed by silence.

Take for example ذَهَبَ زَيْدٌ ðahab zaydun “Zayd went”. Spoken in isolation - i.e. followed by silence - this would be pronounced without the final -un, i.e. ðahaba zayd. (He explicitly addresses this, but for our purposes here I'll omit the details.) But of course in a written text, the difference between such “pausal” speech, and the same utterance followed by more speech, is problematic - it cannot be made explicit using only the writing conventions available to Sībawayhi. More specifically, if a text is to be read aloud, there is no purely orthographic way to tell the reader how to articulate the final inflection of a "sentence". So if he were to write, for example, وذلك قولُكَ ذَهَبَ زيْدٌ “and that is your saying ‘Zayd went’” it would not be clear, whether or not he intends the the final inflection -un to be read/uttered by the reader, since it would be natural (or at least reasonable) for a reader to treat the quoted passage ذَهَبَ زَيْدٌ as a "complete" utterance, to be pronounced followed by silence, and thus without the final inflection.

That's why he uses yā fatā. If he were to write instead وذلك قولُكَ ذَهَبَ زيْدٌ يَا فَتَى “and that is your saying ‘Zayd went’, O youth” then there would be no doubt that the continuous form is intended, since there would be no pause between زَيْدٌ and the following يَا فَتَى . Hence the -un inflection is to be articulated when the text is read aloud.

There's a little more to it than that; sometimes more than inflectional vowels and tanwīn are involved, as in the case of مَنْ man “who”, which may be inflected to مَنَان manāni (dual), مَنِيْنَ manīna (plural), or as مَنَة. To make this clear, he says (article 226): فَيَقُوْلُ مَنَةٌ وَمَنَةً وَمَنَةٍ إِذَا قَاْلَ يَا فَتَى - i.e., if مَنَة is pronounced in continuation (“if one says yā fatā”, by implication after saying مَنَة) then the inflectional vowel and the tanwīn are to be pronounced.

Articles 225-232 make this use of yā fatā quite explicit. Article 299 uses كَمَا تَرَى kamā tarā to make the retention or dropping of tanwīn explicit.

Sometimes the issue is whether a term is nunated or not. Pronunciation of the /t/ of feminization is also at issue. For example article 44: وَتَقُوْلُ صِيْدَ عَلَيْهِ يَوْمَ الْجُمْعَةِ غُدْوَةُ يَا فَتَى where يَا فَتَى makes it clear that غُدْوَةُ is articulated gudwatu with the /t/ of feminization and inflection /u/ rather than /un/ or /a/ etc. Without the trailing يَا فَتَى the (pausal) pronunciation would be just gudwah.

In article 289 he uses يَا هذَا instead of يَا فَتَى for the same purpose: أَلَا تَرَى أَنَّكَ تَقُوْلُ هٰذَا رَجُلٌ حَبَنْطًى يَا هٰذَا