"Ikfa" in Arabic poetry : a phonological perspective

Abstract EN

-This paper deals with rhyme violations (‘ikfS’) in old Arabic Poetry.

It presents what critics and prosodists said about this phenomenon; It shows that they generally defined ‘ikfa’ as irregular alteration in the consonantal rhyme of the same poem, and that they condemned it as a fault in rhyme.

They also insisted that ‘ikf§’ could occur only among sounds of the same or close place(s) of articulation, or sounds of very similar orthographic configurations.

This paper studies ‘ikfa’ within a modern phonological perspective and shows that phonetic features other than place of articulation (e.g., voicing and manner of articulation), as well as abstract relations among sounds (which orthographic representation actually cannot reveal) are also responsible for the poets’ use of ‘ikfa’.