Historical background

Linguists have been collecting and analyzing slips of the tongue at least as far back as the eighth century CE when the Arab linguist Al-Ki-sa'i wrote his book Errors of the populace (Anwar 1979). As Anwar (1979, 1981) points out, more than a hundred books on speech errors written by Arab grammarians have been published since that seminal work, many during the important medieval period of Arabic linguistic studies.

Although a number of these medieval studies have prescriptivist intent, using the term ‘error’ primarily in reference to wrong usage by non-native speakers of Arabic or speakers of nonstandard dialects, the grammarians also recorded, analyzed and classified a wide variety of slips of the tongue, i.e. ‘unintentional linguistic innovation(s)’ (Sturtevant 1947) or ‘involuntary deviation(s) in performance from the speaker's current phonological, grammatical or lexical intention(s)’ (Boomer & Laver 1968), as is being done by linguists today. Like Paul (1886, 1919), Sturtevant (1917), Jespersen (1922) and Meringer (1908), many of the medieval Arab studies were motivated by an interest in speech errors as a possible cause of historical change; others attempted to provide phonetic and phonological explanations in terms of assimilatory factors and/or the interface between phonological and morphological processes. Anticipations, deletions, and insertions of linguistic units were noted in studies conducted over eleven centuries ago.