الحرف عند ابن جني ماهيته وطريقة تكوّنه

Abstract

Before Ibn Jinni, Arab linguists dealt with the sounds of the Arabic language, called them the letters, arranged them, and identified their characteristics and articulation. Despite their different views on the arrangement of sounds, their number, the places of their pronunciation and the number of their articulations. Their descriptive studies indicated their analytical thinking and exceptional experimental ability. But the convincing study that proves that letters are expressive sounds was made clear only by Ibn Jinni, where he defined the term linguistic sound that the modernists mean (phoneme), and dealt with the ways of its formation. So he gained the advantage of precedence in his accurate scientific interpretation, which believes that the (A) is the origin of the letters, and that the letter is formed from cutting a smooth, naive sound.

 Perhaps what Ibn Jinni and the ancients before him dealt with were not understood properly, especially for those who saw that the letter is the written symbol of the sound or the visual image of the linguistic sound; Which made the letter go out of  being a phonetic material, and considered it a written work that can be seen by sight.