The history of Arabic lexicography and terminology

After the death of the Prophet Mohammad in 632 A.D., Moslem scholars were in need of understanding certain verses in the Holy Qur’an and some of the Prophet’s oral tradition and sayings. This need motivated a linguistic movement including grammar and lexicography.In the eighth century, Arabic linguists used to leave cities such as Basra and Kūfa for the desert to meet the Bedouins and record their “pure” language, which was not influenced by the non-Arabic-speaking, new converts to Islam who had settled in the cities.Based upon their manual corpus, those linguists produced several monographs or specialized vocabularies on various topics such as: men, horses, camels, houses, weapons, snakes, plants, etc., before they embarked upon compiling a full-fledged dictionary. One can safely say that terminology preceded lexicography in the history of Arabic linguistics.As Islam expanded from Gaul in Europe to Turkistan in just one century after the Prophet’s death and Arabic became the world’s language, Arabic dictionaries and terminologies, monolingual and bilingual, were compiled in various parts of the world.Through the ages, Arabic lexicography underwent quantitative and qualitative changes, notably in the following areas:

1. arrangements of entries: phonetically-based alphabetical arrangement with root permutation, normal alphabetical order with root permutation, rhyme order, thematic arrangement, ordinary alphabetical arrangement of roots, alphabetical arrangement of words, combinations of those arrangements, etc.;
2. arrangements of sub-entries;
3. arrangements of the senses of the entry word;
4. definitions of entries;
5. the inclusion of encyclopedic information.

Although Arabic speakers have produced about two thousand dictionaries of all sorts and varieties, there is not yet any dictionary that documents the historical changes in the Arabic language. In the twentieth century, there have been a few unsuccessful attempts to compile such a dictionary. However, at present, there are two hopeful projects using computerized text corpora: (1) the Federation of Arab Academies’ Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language in Cairo and (2) the Doha Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language in Qatar.

Published online: 29 January 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/hot.2.02alk