Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani

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Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani

Died 1078

Linguist

Early Life . Little is known of the life of Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani, who appears to have spent his entire life in his native city of Gurgan in Iran at the southeastern corner of the Caspian Sea. His only known teacher was Abu al-Husayn Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Farisi, whose uncle Abu ‘Ali al-Farisi (900–987) was a well-known grammarian who was from Iran and lived in Baghdad.

Major Works . Al-Jurjani wrote a large number of scholarly works, including popular manuals and detailed commentaries on Arabic grammar, as well as monographs on etymology, prosody, and the inimitability of the Qur’an. He also compiled an anthology of poetry. His main works are Dalail al-ijaz (The Proofs of the Inimitability [of the Qur’an]) and Asrar al-balaghah (The Secrets of Eloquence), which earned him renown as one of the most important thinkers of the Muslim world. In these works he developed a complete linguistic theory which goes far beyond anything achieved in earlier classical times by Greeks, Indians, or Muslims and anticipates many modern discourses in linguistics. In striving to prove that God’s word in the Qur’an cannot be imitated, al-Jurjani went beyond classical ideas of meaning and vocabulary, in which eloquence is usually explained as a function of word choice. Rather, he asserted, eloquence is vested in the construction of the linguistic elements into coherent patterns governed by rhetorical rules that are extensions of the rules of grammar. He also explored and compared the construction of language and the formulation of thought. Like modern linguists, he emphasized that language is a system of relations governed by the two facts that linguistic signs are arbitrary and that language is conventional. Thus, individual words can have importance only when they are embedded in syntactic structures. That is, only sentences—not single words—truly generate meaning. Any change in the surface structure of a sentence inevitably changes its meaning as well. Thus, exact translation is impossible. Similarly, each image, or figurative language, is not just an ornament but is a separate act of linguistic creation whose expression of meaning is unique. This conclusion was not widely held until the late twentieth century. Elaborating further, al-Jurjani shows that metaphor is not transference of a word into another meaning, but rather an intermediate usage that retains its original meaning as well and thus exists in a tension of double meaning. This idea anticipated the work of I. A. Richards on metaphor in the twentieth century. Thus al-Jurjani established a more sophisticated and nuanced way of analyzing language and rhetorical phenomena than anyone who preceded him.