The Spoken and Written Language According to Arab Scholars of Prosody A Modern Phonetic Study

Abstract

This study attempts to shed light on an obscure area of Arab prosody, namely, the reliance of Arab scholars on prosody, on a lot of the terminology of prosody and its artistic creativity, on written language rather than uttered language. In general, researchers have considered the uttered language as the core issue in prosodic studies. Therefore, the study tries to verify its basic hypothesis by examining old and modern (current) prosodic texts. They were distributed among various prosodic cores, the most prominent of which were prosody background, term and concept coining, explanatory prosodic, rhyme rules and other similar cores. The examination of the above mentioned cores brought about the findings of the study: in spite of the fact that Arab scholars of prosody adopted a special phonetic transcription of their own, in which they considered the harmony of the uttered texts with written ones, they were biased in favour of the uttered. However, in the other areas of the study they were completely biased in favour of the written language.