Amund Bjørsnøs

Special fields

• Classical Arabic language and literature
• Arabic Philology and Linguistics
• The Arabic grammatical tradition
• Islamic sciences (Law, Exegesis, Prophetic traditions, Grammar and Rhetoric)
• Terminological systems and conceptual schemes in Medieval Arabic literature
• Greek-Arabic translation
• Arabic philosophy and logic
• Arabic Computing

Ongoing and planned research projects at Institutt for kulturstudier og orientalske språk

• PhD PROJECT 2008-2011:

Conceptual Transformations in Medieval Islamic Scientific Discourse: An Analysis of Technical Terminology and Metalanguage in the Uṣūl fī l-Naḥw by Ibn al-Sarrāǧ

This project proposes a close reading and analysis of one of the most influential texts in the Arabic grammatical tradition, the Uṣūl fī l-Naḥw (”The Fundamentals of Grammar”) by the Baghdadi grammarian Ibn al-Sarrāǧ, who died in 929 A.D. Through a detailed philological and contrastive analysis of the technical terminology and linguistic metalanguage in this text and in the earliest grammatical treatise (Sībawayhi, d. ca. 796) and contemporary scientific, philosophical and logical writings the project will explore the establishment of autonomous Islamic sciences in the period following a massive translation and appropriation of Greek philosophical and scientific literature in the Islamic world (8th to 11th Centuries A.D.).

Ibn al-Sarrāǧ was known in the Islamic tradition as the first author who integrated Greek logic in his description of the Arabic language, and a famous report presents him as a student of the philosopher al-Fārābī. The Uṣūl is unanimously recognized in recent secondary literature as crucial for an understanding of the history of Arabic grammar (ʿilm al-naḥw), one of the most important religious disciplines (al-ʿulūm al-šarʿiyya) in Medieval Islam, in fact it remains so today in many traditional institutions.

My project will be (1) the first large-scale study of Ibn al-Sarrāǧ’s important treatise. For various reasons (scholarly biases; no printed edition until recently; this edition is extremely unreliable) the work has never been seriously studied. The study will also be (2) the first systematic analysis of the Medieval Arab grammarians’ metalanguage (the rhetorical, stylistic, argumentative and demonstrative features of the text), using tools developed in modern linguistics (Text Linguistics and Functional Grammar) that have never – as far as I am aware of – been applied to any Medieval Arabic text, and certainly not to the works of the Arab grammarians. My thesis thus provides (3) a novel attempt to substantiate the appropriation of Greek scientific methods in the Islamic sciences by focusing on the structure of one particular text and its contextual relation with both the older, “indigenous” grammatical tradition and the new, “foreign” methods usually labeled “philosophy” (falsafa) and “logic” (manṭiq).

• MULTIDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH PROJECT:

The Oslo Arabic Seminar (OsAr). See project website here. The main current activity is a seminar on the Greek and Arabic texts of Aristotle's Categoriae, which will continue for several years, and treat all the texts of the Aristotelian Organon. Another seminar, dealing with the Arabic commentaries on Hadith-texts, will be arranged sometime in 2009.

Publications