KSUCCA: a key to exploring Arabic historical linguistics

Classical Arabic forms the basis of Arabic linguistic theory and it is well understood by the educated Arabic reader. It is different in many ways from Modern Standard Arabic which is more simplified in its lexical, syntactic, morphological, phraseological and semantic structure. King Saud University Corpus of Classical Arabic is a pioneering corpus of around 50 million words of Classical Arabic. It is initially constructed for the purpose of studying distributional lexical semantics of the Quran and Classical Arabic, however, it is designed in a general way making it also appropriate for other researches in Linguistics and Computational Linguistics. In this paper, we will briefly describe the structure of our corpus, and then we will demonstrate how it can be used to depict some aspect of Arabic language change between the classical and the modern periods.