Technical terms in Arabic grammatical tradition and their everyday meanings te case of al- āl al-muqaddara

It has been long recognized that many expressions used by Arab grammarians display an ambiguity between their technical senses and the extralinguistic concepts in which they originate. This article addresses the problem stemming from the fact that adjectival attributes of technical terms can either modify the technical meanings of their heads or their everyday meanings. In a recent article on the term āl muqaddara, Levin argues that the adjective muqaddara, in the sense of “underlying”, modifes the technical meaning of the term āl, i.e. circumstantial qualifer. The present article shows that most medieval scholars apprehended the adjective muqaddara, in the sense of “expected, intended, decreed, etc.”, as modifying the everyday meaning of the term āl, viz. “state”. It also demonstrates the importance of texts outside grammars per se for the study of medieval grammatical terminology.