Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi was born in Oman in 718 CE and grew up in Basra, then a center of linguistic scholarship, devoting himself to learning and famously preferring poverty to accepting gifts from rulers.
He invented the science of Arabic prosody ('ilm al-'arud) by observing the rhythmic patterns of Arabic poetry, establishing its fifteen meters and rules, and began compiling 'Kitab al-Ayn', the first dictionary to organize Arabic vocabulary by a systematic phonetic order.
Legacy
Among al-Khalil's students was the grammarian Sibawayh, author of the seminal 'al-Kitab'. The system of prosody he founded is still taught today essentially unchanged in its original rules.
