A Study of Arabic Phonetics in the light of Linguistics

دراسۃ الأصوات العربیۃ فی ضوء علم اللغۃ العربیۃ

Abstract

Linguistics is commonly assumed and expressed by western scholars, as a modern science of language. Although, Arab scholars engaged with thus important science from early ages and its history goes back to the second century of hijrah. Arabs produced literary works that consisted upon the studies of language, specially arabic language and compiled books on those words or phrases or mustlahat that belonged to one subject or any living thing, for example, Kitab-ul-sha, kitab-ul- ibl etc. it is notable that they, at that time were ignorant of this fact how valuable work, they are producing.

It is because studies of language as linguistics was not introduced at that time Linguistics is indeed, the study of human language. It studies and expresses human language from different aspects and angles. The study of phoentics is one of its major and basic studies, as it discusses human sounds that are the basic of any human language. Eminent Arab scholar, Ibn-e- Jinni (392h) defines language in his famous book “Al-Khasais” and says “language is indeed those sounds by which one expresses his thoughts and feelings”.So I have tried to discuss Arabic phoentics with detail in the following article, elaborting the system of speech of human beings and functions of its different organs in producing different types of sounds. I have also discussed properties of different sounds, like Hams, Jahr, Rikhve, Mutta-wassat etc, along with sounds of consonants and vowels. I hope this article will help the students to understand Arabic phoentics and will open new aspects of research to the researchers.