Sibawayh
Sibawayh (Arabic: سِيبَوَيْهِي Sībawayhi or Sībawayh; Persian: سِیبُویه Sībūyah [siːbuːˈja]; c. 760–796), whose full name is Abu Bishr Amr ibn Uthman ibn Qanbar al-Basri (أَبُو بِشْر عَمْرو بْن عُثْمَان بْن قَنْبَر ٱلْبَصْرِيّ, ’Abū Bishr ‘Amr ibn ‘Uthmān ibn Qanbar al-Baṣrī), was a Persian leading grammarian of Basra and author of the earliest book on Arabic grammar. His famous unnamed work, referred to as Al-Kitāb, or "The Book", is a five-volume seminal discussion of the Arabic language.
Sibawayh سيبويه | |
|---|---|
Entrance to Sibawayh's tomb in Shiraz | |
| Born | c. 760, Shiraz, Persia, Abbasid Caliphate |
| Died | c. 796, Shiraz, Persia or Basra, Iraq, Abbasid Caliphate |
| Era | Medieval philosophy |
| Region | Islamic philosophy |
Main interests | Arabic and Persian |
Ibn Qutaybah, the earliest extant source, in his biographical entry under Sibawayh simply wrote:
He is Amr ibn Uthman, and he was mainly a grammarian. He arrived in Baghdad, fell out with the local grammarians, was humiliated and went back to some town in Persia, and died there while still a young man.
The tenth-century biographers Ibn al-Nadim and Abu Bakr al-Zubaydi, and in the 13th-century Ibn Khallikan, attribute Sibawayh with contributions to the science of the Arabic language and linguistics that were unsurpassed by those of earlier and later times. He has been called the greatest of all Arabic linguists and one of the greatest linguists of all time in any language.