Sul presente nelle grammatiche copto-arabe

On the present tense in Copto-Arabic grammars · The present paper addresses the question of how and why Copto-Arabic grammarians (i.e., the authors of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century grammars of Coptic in Arabic) did not adequately identify the simplest and “unmarked” verbal form of the Coptic language, namely the indicative present. In particular, in these grammars, Coptic circumstantial forms are often classified as present tense forms, and present tense forms are often ignored or misinterpreted. It will be shown that one of the working methods of the Copto-Arabic grammarians was to start with a comparison between the Coptic text of the Scriptures and its already available Arabic translations, and from there to try to infer what corresponded to what, sometimes without having a complete knowledge of the Coptic structures encountered. This consequently engendered the risk of attributing pertinence to features that actually belong to the context in which the forms appear, or of treating some Coptic and Arabic constructions as equivalent whereas, from a morphosyntactic perspective, they are not. The article also shows that the Copto-Arabic grammatical tradition, in several respects, failed to give rise to a progressive increase in knowledge. Old errors resurfaced in new texts, and correct analyses could happen to be rejected as fallacious.