Elementary Arabic Grammar - Al-Ajroumiya - Al-Ajurrûmiya - (Ibn Ajurrüm) Bilingual text: French-Arabic with annotations

The Ajurrûmiya is an Arabic grammar book which essentially deals with syntax, in other words, the relationships that exist between the different syntactic functions. Although this booklet is intended for elementary school students, it nevertheless requires some explanation. This is why, after having translated it into French, we have enriched it with explanatory notes and examples of illustration in order to make it easier to understand.

For the sake of educational simplification, Arabic grammar books intended for French speakers are generally presented according to the principles of traditional French grammar, which is dependent on Western linguistic theories. There is, however, a traditional Arabic grammar dependent on the linguistic theories of Arabic grammarians; a normative grammar more than a thousand years old taught in the schools of the various Arab-Muslim countries.

In France, except for works intended for learning the Arabic language, there is, to date, no book devoted solely to normative Arabic grammar that has been delivered to the general public. To remedy this, we deemed it appropriate to translate a work on normative Arabic grammar. We opted for "al-Ajurrûmiya", a book composed by the grammarian Ibn Ajurrûm.

In this booklet, Ibn Ajurrûm exposes the elementary rules of the grammar according to the theories and the traditional method of the Arabic grammarians.

If the grammar is the description of all the principles of organization of the language (morphology, syntax and semantics), in the Ajurrûmiya, it is essentially a question of the syntax; in other words, existing relationships between syntactic elements (or functions).

Our translation is accompanied by the voweled Arabic text and some explanatory notes because it is not easy for an uninitiated reader to immediately grasp the Arabic grammatical thought.