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Due to the rapid expansion of Islam in the 8th century, many people learned Arabic as a lingua franca. For this reason, the earliest grammatical treatises on Arabic are often written by non-native speakers.
The earliest grammarian who is known to us is Abd Allh ibn Abi Isq (died 535/ 6).
The efforts of three generations of grammarians culminated in the book of the Persian scholar Sibwayhi (ca. 760– 793).
Traditionally, the grammatical sciences are divided into four branches:
Arabic has 28 consonantal phonemes (including two semi-vowels), expressed by the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet. In dialects, usually not all 28 phonemes are realized, so that for these speakers, some homophones are disambiguated only orthographically. Arabic has six vowel phonemes (three short vowels and three long vowels); they appear as various allophones, depending on the preceding consonant. Short vowels are not usually represented in written language, although they may be indicated with diacritics. (See: Arabic alphabet.)
List of phonemes as transliterated in this article:
The consonants include a so-called "emphatic" series ṣ, ḍ, ṭ, ẓ, q peculiar to semitic. The voiceless sounds ṣ, ṭ, q have clear equivalents in other semitic languages, while it is not clear whether the voiced emphatic consonants are an Arabic innovation. Arabic has a tendency towards affrication. The affricates ǧ, f clearly go back to occlusives g, p, while the affricates ṯ, ḏ (corresponding to English thorn, eth) may be either old affricates or an Arabic innovation.
The syllable structure of Arabic is such that there may be clusters of two, but not of three consecutive consonants. A cluster of two consonants at the beginning of an utterance will be preceded by an auxiliary vowel (alif al-waṣl).
The Arabic noun can take one of three states of definiteness: definite, indefinite or construct state. The definite state is marked by the article al-. The indefinite state is marked by an ending -n (nunation). The construct state is unmarked and occurs in the first member of a genitive construction.
The article (adātu-t-taʿrif) al- is indeclinable and expresses definite state of a noun of any gender and number. The initial vowel is volatile in the sense that it disappears in sandhi (hamzatu-l-waṣl), the article becoming mere -l- (although the alif is retained in orthography in any case for clarity).
Also, the l is assimilated to a number of consonants (dentals and sibilants), so that in these cases, the article in pronunciation is expressed only by geminating the initial consonant of the noun (while in orthography, the writing alif lam is retained, and the gemination may be expressed by putting šadda on the following letter).
The consonants causing assimilation (trivially including l) are: t, ṯ, d, ḏ, r, z, s, š, ṣ, ḍ, ṭ, ẓ, l, n. These 14 letters are called 'solar letters' (ḥuruf šamsiyyat), while the remaining 14 are called 'lunar letters' (ḥuruf qamariyyat).
An Arabic noun can take three cases: nominative, genitive and accusative, and three numbers: singular, dual and plural. Normally, nouns take the ending -u(n) in the nominative, -i(n) in the genitive and -a(n) in the accusative.
The plural of a noun is formed by a suffix in some cases (sound plurals), but frequently, the vowel structure of a word is changed to form the plural (broken plurals). There are a number of patterns of how this is done. Some words take several plurals. There could be traces of broken plurals in other semitic languages, but nowhere are they as widespread as in Arabic.
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