In praise of sputum

Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum – Vladimir Nabokov

I'm not very ambitious, nor am I particularly hearty, but I plead guilty to “mediocre nonentity”. Hence I do not feel so bad about offering this website, which is rough and unfinished. I have, however, tried to make my expectorations clean and sanitary.

The web changes things. Before the days of easily updatable hypertext websites, publishing drafts was not only vulgar, it was economically unfeasible. It may still be vulgar, but it is also (relatively) easy.

The main reason I'm making this site available is that it will probably take years to completely finish it (it's already been years in the making). Furthermore the point of the site is not to offer a complete definitive edition of the Kitāb for all to adore, but simply to make it more easily accessible and understandable to anybody interested.

So in the meantime, as I continue to work on it, it contains a great deal of useful and usable information about the Kitāb of Sībawayhi. With web technologies I can update the site as often as possible, so that it becomes a kind of living document.

Here are some of the beneficial features of this rough draft:

• Quick look-up of articles by article number or by edition/volume/page number for the five printed editions known to me:
  • Le livre de Sībawaihi, ed. Hartwig Derenbourg.
    2 vols., Paris 1881–89.
  • al-Kitāb, 2 vols. Būlāq, 1316–17 A.H.
  • Kitāb Sībawahyi. Ed. عبد السلام محمد هارون ʿAbdulsalām Muḥammad Hārūn.
    5 vols. Cairo: مكتبة الخانجى Maktaba l-Khānijy. 3rd edition, 1988/1408.
• al-Kitāb. ed. د. إميل بديع يعقوب Dr. Emīl Badīʕ Yaʕqūb
  5 vols. Beirut: دار الكتب العلمية Dar l-Kutub l-ʿilmiyya 1999/1420.
• al-Kitāb. ed. أ.د. محمد كاظم البكّاء Dr. Muḥammad Kāẓim al-BakkāɁ
  6 vols. Beirut: منشورات زين الحقوقية Manshūrāt Zayn l-Ḥuqūqiyya, 2015.
• Hundreds of articles have been edited to add full tashkīl (diacritical marks, i.e. vowels, shadda, sukun). Not needed by readers fluent in Arabic but, makes the text accessible for those who take the trouble to memorize the “letters” of Arabic. Not yet error-free (I estimated that will take at least three rounds of editing), but close enough to be useful. Most of the errors you may encounter are trivial things like a missing or incorrect internal vowel mark (e.g. وذٰلِكَ instead of وَذٰلِكَ, or يَذَهَبُ for يَذْهَبُ). The remaining articles, which have not been edited manually, have been processed by automation, resulting in tashkīl that is pretty good in general but nonetheless contains many substantial errors requiring correction by hand. I'll get to them all eventually.
• An immediate goal is to gradually and continuously edit the articles to achieve complete and error-free tashkīl. I will announce new versions as I go along. If you are eager to see a correct version of a particular article feel free to send a request to editor at sibawayhi.org, or message me on Bluesky. (Signing up for a paid subscription will help me prioritize. 😏)
• Sībawayhi's example “sentences” (not his word) are marked up and hyperlinked. These are snippets he sets apart by calling them أَقْوَال “sayings” (sg. قَول), as in وَهُوَ قَوْلُكَ عَبْدُ اللهِ أَخُوْكَ wa-huwa qawluka Adbullah Ɂẋūka “and it/that is your saying ‘Zayd is your brother’”. (I gloss قَول as “dictum”, pl. “dicta”). Dicta like this are typeset in blue.
• Sībawayhi sometimes refers to single terms or phrases in isolation; for example he might refer to الرَّجُل _l-rrajul in a dictum like مَرَرْتُ بِرَجُلٍ marartu bi-rajulin “I passed by a man”. These are marked up as حَرْف ḥarf “term”, and typeset in red.
• Various other word classes are marked up in similar fashion. For example, in the second part of the book he discusses the فعل morphological forms that generalize over particular words, e.g. فَاعِل for active participles like ضَارِب and ذَاهِب. These I tag as <مثال> and typeset with distinctive colors and fonts. Other tags cover nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. (Note that the actually markup tags are not visible on the webpages; you'll know they're there by the distinctive typesetting.)
• In articles containing translations (only a few at this point, with plans to regularly add more), the dicta and harf elements are hyperlinked: mouseover either an Arabic قول or the corresponding English dictum transliteration, and both will be highlighted, and a free translation pop-up will appear.
• Dicta are transliterated rather than translated, for the benefit of readers with limited knowledge of Arabic. Free translations are provided by mouseover pop-ups.
• The Lex section of the website is very rough; at this point it is mainly intended to demonstrate what is planned. The content of the pages in that section is generated programmatically, which ensures that the cited passages match the source text and translation. Quotes are hyperlinked to the source text. The ultimate goal is to aggregate the examples of usage for each term, so that the reader can easily explore its core meaning without relying on my (or any other) interpretation.
• Reading the Kitāb is not easy, in spite of the fact that the explanatory vocabulary Sībawayhi uses is surprisingly small and relatively simple. His prose is another matter; it can be very complex and opaque. The Kitāb can only be read holistically; what a given term means in a given article often cannot be determined based solely on the article in question, since the same term in other articles may express additional dimensions of meaning - the term حَرْف is only the most infamous example. Furthermore Sībawayhi himself sometimes offers explicit guidance in a later article that illuminates the reading of a preceding article. And he has certain stylistic quirks that are by no means obvious – for example, he might use proper names like زيد or عبد الله where we might say “the subject” of a sentence, or he might use فَعَلَ faʕala when he means something like “third-person masculine singular perfect verb”. Awareness of such quirks before you get started will make the reading much easier, so in the articles planned for the Guide section of this site I will try to offer guidance to the reader based on my (long) experience trying to decipher the text.

Finally, I've made a small number of articles (1-10, 508) accessible to everyone, but to access the remainder you must register as a member. Registration is free; I just want some idea of who uses the site, which I think is a fair trade-off. For the record I will not be using email addresses for any purpose other than to distribute blog posts etc. from this site. I will treat them as confidential information and will not sell them or pass them on to anybody else and I will not badger you to buy stuff from me.

I hope you will consider contributing to this project by signing up for a paid subscription. I've never received any funding for this work, but I do have bills to pay. Your contribution will help ensure that the work will continue. $5 per month is roughly the price of a cup of coffee.