المِيزان الصَّرْفي
al-mīzān al-ṣarfī
The morphological scale
Weighing a word against fāʾ–ʿayn–lām, so that its root letters and its added letters can be told apart at a glance.
- المِيزَانُ الصَّرْفِيُّal-mīzān al-ṣarfīThe morphological scale
- A measure built from the three letters fāʾ, ʿayn and lām, set against a word so that each of its letters is shown to be either a root letter or an addition.
The Arabs weigh words the way a jeweller weighs metal. The three letters of the verb faʿala stand for the three positions of a triliteral root: the fāʾ for the first letter, the ʿayn for the second, the lām for the third. Anything a word carries beyond its root letters is written into the measure as itself.
كَتَبَ ← فَعَلَ
اِسْتَغْفَرَ ← اِسْتَفْعَلَ
Why it matters
The measure is not a game. It is the instrument by which the lexicon is searched (a dictionary is arranged by roots, not by words as they appear), by which the meaning added by a pattern is recognised — istafʿala, for instance, commonly carries the sense of seeking — and by which the sound changes of the weak letters are explained.
Sources
- شذا العرف في فنّ الصرفShadhā al-ʿArf fī Fann al-Ṣarf
The standard modern primer of Ṣarf; the patterns and their names below follow its arrangement.
- ألفية ابن مالكAlfiyyat Ibn Mālik
In the glossary
Related entries
The noun that names the event itself, stripped of any time — the source the verb is derived from.
Read entryThe noun derived from the verb to name the one who does the act: kātib, the one writing.
Read entry