On the morphology of the word tawriya according to al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363): Between Baṣrans and Kūfans

Abstract

The starting-point for this article is the statement made by al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363) that the Arabic word tawriya has the original form (aṣl) *wawriya, corresponding to the pattern (wazn) tafʿila, in which the first radical wāw has been replaced by the segment /t/. I aim to shed light on this derivation postulated by al-Ṣafadī by investigating the major sources of grammatical, morphological, and etymological studies which were then available to him. I analyse the sources chronologically to arrive at a better understanding of developments in morphology in the period from the first authors to al-Ṣafadī’s contemporaries. I show that al-Ṣafadī was influenced by the disquisitions of the two main schools of Arabic thought on grammar: those of Baṣra and Kūfa. He was influenced in particular regarding the question of how to attribute the patterns to some words like tawrāt, with the Baṣran grammarians positing that it is fawʿala, and those belonging to the Kūfa school maintaining that it is according to the pattern tafʿala. Moreover, and precisely because some scholars assume that tawriya and tawrāt have a common etymology, al-Ṣafadī postulates that, besides having the same root, they also share the same original form, meaning that both words underwent the same phonological and morphological mutations.