Linguistic Methods between the Evaluations of Modernists and the Standards of Linguistics

Abstract

Many Modernists focused on the linguistic methods that the Ancients followed in describing the Arabic systems. Therefore, the authorship was increased in this area and the review what linguists and grammarians wrote become the dominant feature of research and writings in the Arabic sciences in this era in both method and evaluation. The result of this review criticized the ancients’ methods, so many books and researches appeared that included a great criticism of the methods of studying Arabic. This abundance of criticism needs to be evaluated and reviewed, based on available standards of modern linguistics, which can have the final say in evaluating that criticism, because the absence of standards in that criticism made it not based on right foundations. The reasons of this, in my opinion, were:

1. The texts that wrote about the methodology and history of science among Ancients are few and scattered.
2. Many of those who wrote about the methods of the ancients were influenced by the linguists’ study of modern languages, and they measured one language against another.

This is the problem of the research: numerous criticisms were focused on the methods of linguists and grammarians without considering the standards and characteristics of Arabic; which requires reconsidering the evaluation of this research.