Abstract
This paper is primarily concerned with the early Arab Linguists' approach to the study
of speech sounds. In particular, attention is being drawn to methods of description
employed by early Arab linguists at both the phonetic and phonological levels of its
analysis. It has been demonstrated that the phonetic categories established for the
description of Arabic consonants as well as the phonological categories of sound
compatibility / non-compatibility are in many ways paralleled to modern phonetic
analysis.