Sibuyeh

Sibuyeh who was born in 760 AD in the Fars Province of Iran, and died in Shiraz in Iran in 796/797 was an influential linguist and grammarian of the Arabic language. Sibuyeh was a nickname given to him by his mother, meaning “The scent of apples.” Though not Arab, he was the first to write on Arabic grammar and the first to explain it from a non-Arabic perspective.

He traveled to Basra and studied extensively with famous scholars and grammarians, writing his famous scholarly work “al-Kitab.” Al-Kitab was the first book ever written on Arabic grammar and it seems to have been the first published book in Arabic in the form of prose rather than poetry, setting the standard for explaining Arabic grammatical structure. Sibuyeh would travel through towns and villages, sitting with locals and recording their poetry and oral history in an attempt to gather evidence for each argument made in his book.
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Though he died at the young age of 34, his book, al-Kitab, became one of the greatest books on Arabic grammar to have ever been written in history, so much in fact that it was called “The Quran of Grammar.” Since Sibuyeh’s death, subsequent scholars of Arabic grammar have often been compared to him.

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​​Sources:

• ​Good Manner. "Sibawayh (The Scent of Apples). Nov 2012.
• Encyclopedia Iranica. "Arabic Language. iv. Arabic Literature in Iran."
•  Wikipedia. "Sibawayh." CC BY-SA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibawayh