This is a Chapter Where the ʔalifāt [A]s tumālu ‘are Inclined’

7.0 The chapters dealing with ʔimālah ‘inclination’ comprise a small section of ʔal-Kitāb ‘the book’ of Sībawayh. They include chapters 477–82 in Derenbourg's enumeration (1885), that is, six chapters out of a massive book that is 571 chapters long. The value of this special phonetic topic is that it is a coherent treatment of a prevalent phenomenon in classical Arabic. ʔimālah was operative across dialectal boundaries in a variety of guises that may have baffled many analysts. What Sībawayh accomplished was to produce an overview of the inventory of observed changes of the inclined ʔalifāt [A]s, [ā]s becoming [ē]s, for the most part, stating the conditions under which ʔimālah took place. He showed it to be a regular, if an optional, process. He showed that, as a process, ʔimālah was far from haphazard; it occurred in certain contexts and was alternatively set off or prevented by specific triggers or blocks. What also fascinates an observer is that different dialects took advantage of this process in different ways; some applied it to certain classes of words, while others did not. But no matter what the predilection of the users might have been, within or across dialectal boundaries, the controlling contextual triggers did not vary or shift from dialect to dialect but remained constant. Irrespective of the dialect, if ʔimālah were to take place it would take place in the same contexts.