al-Ājurrūmiyya

3 ideas

1. Compounded, meaningful, conventional: defining speech

   Speech (kalām) is defined as an utterance that is compounded, meaningful, and made by convention (al-lafẓ al-murakkab al-mufīd bil-waḍʿ). Each term narrows what counts: speech must be composed of more than one element, must convey a complete benefit, and must carry its meaning by convention rather than by accident or nature. The composition can be implied, as in a command like qum, whose understood subject makes the single spoken word a composed statement.

2. Iʿrāb as change driven by governors

   Iʿrāb is the change in a word's ending caused by the different governing factors (ʿawāmil) that enter upon it, whether that change is spoken or only implied. On this view, case endings are not fixed properties of words. They are effects that record the word's syntactic relationship to whatever governs it, so reading the ending lets you reconstruct the sentence's structure.

3. Primary signs with systematic substitutes

   Each grammatical state has one default marker, such as ḍamma for rafʿ, fatḥa for naṣb, kasra for khafḍ, and sukūn for jazm. It also has an enumerated list of substitute markers for specific word classes, such as wāw in the sound masculine plural, alif in the dual, or deleting the nūn in the five verbs. The learner memorizes the norm, then a bounded list of exceptions, so an irregular surface becomes a predictable mapping of state to sign.

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