, even though these are matters of choice and have their own correspondences. Thus, some of these things suit people in one place and time but do not suit people in another time. People choose things in winter and in cold countries that they do not choose in summer and in hot countries, yet in each case there is a correspondence motivating their choice. In hot weather, they choose light foods and fruit that are easy to digest, because their insides are cold and their digestive faculties weak. In winter and in cold countries, they choose heavier foods instead, because the digestive heat within them is strong; or because winter is a time when the interiors of inanimate things, animals, trees, and other things grow warm while their exteriors grow cold. This is because the air grows cold in winter, and like is drawn to like: cold is drawn towards the air, leaving the interiors warm. In hot weather, the air grows warm, drawing heat towards it and leaving the interiors cold. Springs are therefore cold in summer because the earth’s interior is cold, and grow warm in winter because the earth’s interior is warm.
The point here is that it is not ‘Abbād ibn Sulaymān alone, but many people—indeed, most discerning scholars of Arabic and rhetoric—who affirm a correspondence between expressions and meanings. They divide derivation into three types:
Minor derivation: two words share the same root letters in the same order, as in ‘ilm (knowledge), ‘ālim (one who knows), and ‘alīm (very knowledgeable).
The second is intermediate derivation: the two words share the same root letters, but not in the same order