In regard to the field of grammar, al-Farahidi held the realist views common among early Arab linguists yet rare among both later and modern times. Rather than holding the rules of grammar as he and his students described them to be absolute rules, al-Farahidi saw the Arabic language as the natural, instinctual speaking habits of the Bedouin; if the descriptions of scholars such as himself differed from how the Arabs of the desert naturally spoke, then the cause was a lack of knowledge on the scholar's part as the unspoken, unwritten natural speech of pure Arabs was the final determiner.[20] Al-Farahidi was distinguished, however, in his view that the Arabic alphabet included 29 letters rather than 28 and that each letter represented a fundamental characteristic of people or animals. His classification of 29 letters was due to his consideration of the combination of Lām and Alif as a separate third letter from the two individual parts.[21]