Tammam Hassan

Education and career

Tammam Hassan (Arabic: تمام حسان) was born in 1918 in the Upper Egyptian village of ElKarank and died on 11 October 2011 in Cairo. In 1929 Hassan completed memorizing the Qur’an which is considered a highly regarded educational sign. The following year Hassan moved to Cairo to attend Al-Azhar primary-school institute. He graduated from Al-Azhar high-school institute in 1939. Hassan attended Dar Al-Ulom College where he majored in Arabic Language and graduated in 1943 with an associate degree. He then continued to study education and psychology at Dar Al-Ulom College, graduating in 1945 (first honor award) with his teaching license. The following year he moved to London to learn English and finish his graduate studies. Hassan graduated from the University College London (UCL) in1949 with his master in phonetics. His graduate thesis topic was The Phonetics of "ElKarank" Dialect (Upper Egypt). Hassan graduated in 1952 from the University College of London with his Ph.D. in phonetics. His dissertation was titled, The Phonetics and Phonology of Aden Arabic (South Arabia). Following the completion of his studies, Hassan traveled to Aden for six months to record the local dialect. The phonological model which he followed was prosodic analysis associated with the British linguists J.R.Firth.

Hassan began his career as a teacher of Arabic at a high school in Cairo in 1945. The following year he became a teaching assistant in Arabic, at Dar Al-Ulom College in Cairo. He maintained this position until traveling to London to continue his studies. In 1952 Hassan became an associate professor of Oriental and Semitic Linguistic Studies. He published his first major work in 1955, Language Research Methods, an introductory work which established the use of descriptive method to analyze Fusha, classical Arabic. In 1956 Hassan became a volunteer officer in the Egyptian army during the British, French, and Israeli attack against Egypt. After the war in 1957, Hassan received a delegation for two months at the University of Michigan as part of the Fulbright Program. While in Michigan, he was trained to use modern devices for phonetics labs. He brought equipment with him to Egypt where he established the phonetics lab at the University of Cairo (Alarif, 2002).

Hassan continued to enrich his career by becoming a cultural attaché at the Egyptian Embassy to Lagos, Nigeria for five years where he linked the educational relations between the private Islamic educational organizations and Egypt. As a result of his connections to the Embassy, Hassan brought many Egyptian teachers to teach in Nigeria. While still in Nigeria in 1964, Hassan was promoted to full professor. The following year he returned to Egypt where he was appointed as the Chair of Arabic Syntax and morphology department and also as the Vice Dean of Dar Al-Ulom College. In 1967 Hassan became a professor at the University of Khartoum for three years, where he established the department of Linguistic Studies. 1972 was an important and busy year for Hassan. He became the Dean of Dar Al-Ulom College where he was the general secretary of the Arabic language committee which is part of the highest council for the Egyptian universities. In the same year Hassan founded the Egyptian Linguistics Assembly.

A new era began for Hassan in 1973 as professor at Mohammed V University in Morocco where he lived for six years. During the 80s Hassan finally settled down a bit and became a professor at the Arabic for Non Native Speakers Institute, Umm al-Qura University in Mecca, Saudi Arabia for 16 years. There he founded the Educational Linguistics Department that teaches students to work as Arabic teachers for non native speakers. In 1996 Hassan returned to Egypt to be an emeritus professor at Dar Al-Ulom College where he is still active in the linguistic field in many ways.

Major contributions to Arabic linguistics

Tammam Hassan revolutionized the field of modern Arabic linguistics. After studying under Firth as part of the London School, Hassan became the first linguist to study the phonetics and the phonology systems of Arabic based on modern linguistic methods. This work resulted in his influential text, Language Research Methods. Hassan was also the first Arab linguist to study the root morphology of Arabic words based on the main sounds of a given word rather than the gerund or the past tense form which had been the tradition of his predecessors. Hassan also established a theory on the Arabic dictionary based on vocabulary correlations. He was the first to categorize the Arabic parts of speech into seven parts rather than three which is the common traditional system of Arabic. Basically he used the function of the entities within the context to establish this system in his book, Arabic: its Meaning and Syntax. Hassan was also the first linguist who decided to analyze the Arabic verb tense in two dimensions: syntactic tense and contextual tense, evidence of Firth’s influence on Hassan’s work. As these revolutionary linguistics concepts show, Hassan is deserving of the title of pioneer of modern Arabic linguistics.

Major life work

In 1973 Hassan published Arabic: its Meaning and Syntax, which is considered to be his life major work and the extraction of his intellectual life. It is mainly about using descriptive structuralist methodology to study a human language, especially Arabic. He includes all his theories about how Arabic should be studied away from the "complexity" of the traditional methodology. The book’s argumentation is based on the theoretical level of linguistics, a level associated with all other fields of linguistics like applied linguistics. Hassan thinks that Arabic and its research should be available, not only to scholars but also to regular readers of Arabic. This shows that even if this book is theoretically oriented, it is meant to have a real life connection between speakers of a given language, Arabic, and the language itself. Arabic: its Meaning and Syntax has been referred to as "The Book" after The Book by Sebawah, who is the most famous Arabic linguist of all time. Hassan’s book has been a subject for countless graduate studies whether criticizing or supporting. Some say that the book is the most comprehensive way that Arabic should be studied; others say that the book is just a western descriptive attempt that carries no news on Arabic.

Hassan divides the book into eight sections. In the introduction Hassan states why he wrote the book. He tried to find a modern way to study Arabic, rather than a modern Arabic. He wanted to make the Arabic linguistics studies to "satisfy" the progress that linguistics in general has approached utilizing all related fields of study that affected language somehow: psychology, philosophy, literature, etc. In first section, Speech and Language, he distinguishes between these two entities based on the nature of each: Speech is function, behavior, movement, heard & read, and individual. Whereas Language is boundaries of the speech function, standards of the speech behavior, system, understood, and collective.

In the second section, Phonetics, he basically creates some "reforms" on the rational way of studying the Arabic sounds. He argues that studying sounds is the main gate to studying any language because sounds seem to be most important, i.e. spoken language vs. written language, because they are more deeply engaged in human, social life. The third section covers phonology. In his fourth section Morphology, he outlines his major work in classifying the Arabic parts of speech into seven parts instead of three in regard to their function within the context. Hassan calls this the functional meaning of the same structure. In the fifth section, syntax, Hassan spends the majority of the section explaining the verb tense. He developed his theory of the two tenses for the same structure of a verb: morphological tense and the contextual tense. The sixth section, contextual theory, Hassan studies how context affects the analysis of a language on all levels. In the seventh section, dictionary, he argues that dictionaries are lists rather than systems. He demonstrates how the denotation changes into connotation according to the use, and how that affects dictionaries. In the final section, semantics, he argues that language is a social phenomenon whose semantics is a result of synthesizing different elements like the dictionary meaning, the functional meaning, the social meaning. He adds to this the function of the individual when performing and the purpose of performing according to the occasion; this occasion matter is an Arabic linguistic theory more than it is European. Over all, the semantics of the language is part of its social aspect (Hassan, 1983).

Translations

Among Tammam Hassan’s many contributions as a linguist are his translations of the following works into Arabic:
1975 How Greek science passed to the Arabs by De Lacy O’Leary
1958 The Scientific Effect on Society by Bertrand Arthur William Russell
1959 Language and Society by Morris Lewis
1997 Arabic Thought and its place in History by De Lacy O’Leary
1998 Text, Discourse, and Function by Robert de Beaugrande
According to professor Alarif, the choices Hassan made on these works were conscious and purposely made. These books have enriched the Arabic library, especially in that they are involved with how others look at Arabs. In addition, they carry the argument that all of the fields related to these works: philosophy, history, sociology, etc., are all related to language and should be analyzed (Alarif, personal communication, 2009).

Influential figures

There were a number of thinkers that influenced Hassan. Based on the email from Professor Alarif, one of Hassan’s students, four linguists stood out as the most influential (2009). Ibrahim Anis, Hassan’s professor at Dar AlUloum College, was the first linguistic influence on Hassan. Anis inspired to Hassan to begin his studies in linguistics and recommended that after earning his teaching license in 1945, he should enter a teaching assistant program at University College of London in order to study with Firth. John Rupert Firth, founder of the London School and head of the Department of General Linguistics at University College of London, was the primary influence on Hassan’s career as a linguist. Hassan studied under and worked with Firth at the University College London for six years. While there, he worked under Firth in phonetics, and wrote his master’s dissertation on the phonetics of his home town, ElKarank (Upper Egypt). His Ph.D. work was with the Yemen dialect of Arabic.

As a student of Firth, Hassan was exposed to many of his new ideas about linguistics and how to approach its study. Polysystematism was one such idea. David Crystal describes the idea of polysystematism in this way: "the patterns of language that appear at a particular level of description cannot be explained using a single analytic system. Different systems may need to be set up at different places, in order to handle the range of contrasts involved" (Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language). This would help him deal with the intricacies of describing the tense and aspect system of Arabic later in his career. Another main concept Firth put forth in his lectures and writings was the idea that context of situation should be taken into account when it comes to linguistic analysis. To analyze Arabic would be impossible without involving its context, since context and pragmatics play a huge role in even choosing which words to infer to complete a sentence logically. Firth was a structuralist, but not in the American sense, which diverged from its European roots. He was a structuralist because he believed language to be a system of parts or units that are completely dependent on one another and defined by their relationship to the other parts. In fact, the techniques of structural analysis were later carried over to the analysis of meanings, paving the way for a structurally oriented theory of semantics" (Encyclopedia of Language: Structuralism). His structuralism included a functional view, regarding the meaning of an utterance as dependent on its goals for communication and the context in which it is spoken.

Ferdinand de Saussure is regarded by many as the ‘Father of Linguistics’, so it might seem obvious that he would have an influence on Hassan. Saussure was one of the four names mentioned by his students when asked about his influences, and it is clear that Hassan drew from his work on the idea of the ‘langue’ versus the ‘parole’ as he laid out the basic principles for his main work, Arabic: Its Syntax & Meaning. Hassan saw in Saussure important fundamental precepts about how to think about the study of language. He wanted to bring those precepts to the study of Arabic.

Although Hassan was a structuralist who insisted on including the context in analysis of language, Noam Chomsky, who has worked toward a theory that would exclude meaning and include only correct grammar for his ‘Generative Grammar’ theory, had a reportedly profound impact on Hassan. He became familiar with Chomsky’s work while teaching in Morocco during the 70s. Morocco is a philosophical environment where intellectuals can study freely. This setting allowed Hassan to become engaged in many debates about linguistics and read specifically about Chomsky.

Over the course of his travels and long career, Hassan influenced countless students and colleagues. Professor Alarif mentioned some key names of colleagues at Dar AlUloum who were influenced by Hassan’s work. These scholars adopted Hassan’s linguistic theories and taught on that basis. Ali Alnajdi Nasif, Atiya Alsawalhi, Abdulrahman Ayuop, and Mohammed Alsa’ran are Tammam’s colleagues who affected his work by supporting his studies. All of them are major writers and thinkers in the linguistics field in Egypt. (Alarif, personal communication, 2009).

Awards

There have been many appreciation awards given to Hassan though that they were little in comparison with what he has done. Some of his most prestigious awards include:

Clearly, none of those awards were provided in Egypt, Hassan’s home country. Some feel that Hassan has been overlooked for certain awards and honors due to the fact that he was not concerned about fame. Throughout his career he focused on researching, working with books, and educating his students. Another contributing factor might be his involvement in intellectual fights, especially in Egypt. Hassan justifies this with saying that in Egypt, personal connections, concessions, and hypocrisy play a role in subjects like such awards (Abdulfattah, 2007).