particles in their proper contexts, fully observing their relation to the things to which they pertain, according to the actual nature of those things. Although these meanings share a common element, that common element is an abstraction with no existence outside the mind; rather, the mind abstracts it, for they never used these particles without qualification.

The grammarians then saw that this shared meaning bore some resemblance to the physical objects the Arabs call “containers,” so they called it a “container.” This is a literal usage within a particular technical convention, not the language spoken by the Arabs and used in the Quran and hadith. The same applies to the rest of their terminology, such as verbal subject, object, circumstantial qualifier, adjective, specifying complement, inflectable and indeclinable forms, nominal subject, predicate, and the like.

For the Arabs make no distinction between nominal and verbal sentences when calling either a true or false statement (khabar). Nor do they call a single constituent that does not convey a complete meaning on its own a khabar. Thus, calling a single constituent—one of the sentence’s two essential components—a khabar (“predicate”), and restricting that designation to nominal rather than verbal sentences, indeed to the second component rather than the first, belongs to the grammarians’ vocabulary and technical usage, although there is between it