Plural Patterns in Arabic in the Thought of Muḥammad Ḥusayn Āl Yāsīn: A Critical Study in Renewal and Simplification

Abstract

This study offers a critical examination of Dr. Muḥammad Ḥusayn Āl Yāsīn's article "Ṣiyagh al-Jumūʿ fī al-ʿArabiyya" (Plural Patterns in Arabic), published in Majallat al-Risāla al-Islāmiyya (no. 152, vol. 16, 1403 AH / 1982 CE) and reprinted as the fourth study in his book Abḥāth fī Tārīkh al-ʿArabiyya wa-Maṣādirihā (pp. 73-82). Rather than merely summarizing his position, the study evaluates his work against the standard he set for himself: Āl Yāsīn explicitly stated that his motive for writing was that plural patterns lay "scattered across the sources, such that the learner cannot readily access them," and his remedy was to gather them in one place. The study's central problem is therefore: does gathering constitute pedagogical simplification (taysīr) in any methodologically meaningful sense, or does it merely relocate the dispersal from the sources to the page? Employing a descriptive-analytical-critical comparative method, the study analyses the internal structure of his article and weighs it against Ibn Jinnī's explanatory (taʿlīl) method, Tammām Ḥassān's form-meaning correlation, and the positions of Sībawayh, Ramaḍān ʿAbd al-Tawwāb and Fāḍil al-Sāmarrāʾī. It concludes that Āl Yāsīn produced a useful survey encompassing chapters neglected by pedagogical morphology manuals — plural-of-plural, plurals of loanwords, and biliteral nouns — but that he opened with a bold diachronic claim regarding the late stabilization of plural patterns which he never operationalized in the body of the work; that his acute observation, "identity of pattern does not entail identity of plural," merited a full explanatory theory yet was left undeveloped; and that, according to the operational definition of taysīr adopted here, what he achieved is a simplification of access and arrangement rather than a reduction of the memorization burden. The study further proposes an alternative model of simplification, which remains hypothetical and requires statistical verification rather than being presented as an established result.