11 Facts About Sibawayh

Sibawayh's famous unnamed work, referred to as Al-Kitab, or "The Book", is a five-volume seminal discussion of the Arabic language.

Sibawayh is Amr ibn Uthman, and he was mainly a grammarian.

Sibawayh arrived in Baghdad, fell out with the local grammarians, was humiliated, went back to some town in Persia, and died there while still a young man.

Sibawayh has been called the greatest of all Arabic linguists and one of the greatest linguists of all time in any language.

Sibawayh came to Iraq in the days of Harun al-Rashid when he was thirty-two years old and died in Persia when he was over forty.

Sibawayh was a student of the two eminent grammarians Yunus ibn Habib and Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, the latter of whom he was most indebted.

Each testified that huwa 'iyya-ha was the proper usage and so Sibawayh's was judged incorrect.

Sibawayh was the first to produce a comprehensive encyclopedic Arabic grammar, in which he sets down the principles rules of grammar, the grammatical categories with countless examples taken from Arabic sayings, verse and poetry, as transmitted by Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, his master and the famous author of the first Arabic dictionary, "Kitab al-'Ayn", and of many philological works on lexicography, diacritics, poetic meter, cryptology, etc.

Sibawayh's book came from flourishing literary, philological and tafsir tradition that centred in the schools of Basra, Kufa and later at the Abbasid caliphal seat of Baghdad.

Al-Mubarrad's pupil and tutor to the children of the Caliph al-Mu'tadid, Ibn as-Sari az-Zajjaj wrote a Commentary on the Verses of Sibawayh, focusing on Sibawayh's use of both pre- and post-Islamic poetry.

Sibawayh introduces a discussion on the nature of morality of speech; that speech as a form of human behavior is governed by ethics, right and wrong, correct and incorrect.