Identify and describe key milestones in the history of English and Arabic lexicography

The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies has published The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition from the 2nd/8th to the 12th/18th century by Ramzi Munir Baalbaki. The book reflects the great diversity in Arab lexical cataloguing in terms of subject matter, order of materials, authenticity and evidence and reveals the central status of high regard that lexical works have enjoyed in Arab and Islamic heritage. It indicates that Arabic lexicography emerged due to the efforts of the first linguists to study Arabic morphology, and the language of the Quran in particular, without foreign influence. The book consists of three parts and examines three historical periods respectively. Baalbaki first examines the early linguistic activity and the factors that led to the emergence of the first dictionaries, concluding with a discussion about the ideal model of Arabic presented by the early linguists. Baalbaki goes on to look at the role of standardized dictionaries and how they documented different categories of vocabulary, divided into the Quranic tradition, proverbs and other linguistic phenomena specific to Arabic. The third section details how dictionaries came to log vocabulary alone and goes into great detail about the various alphabetical arrangements, finishing up with a discussion of the most famous dictionaries and lexicographers.

Introduction (Reading only)

Two diverse, but related traditions

Grammar

Lexicography

Both disciplines immensely influential on Arabic culture

Progress in the study of lexicography has been relatively modest, with more focus on grammar

Preface

The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition offers itself rather as a delimitative elucidation of the corpus, a serial introduction to all the genres, forms and major individual works of Arabic lexicography, and a fruitful new beginning-point from which future research on the subject can proceed.

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The first chapter on “Early Lexicographical Activity.” shows how even before the second/eighth century, the divergence of vernacular Arabic discourse from the Qurʾānic paragon provided the first impetus for grammar and lexicography alike. This called for the codification of a linguistic standard, whose earliest sources (in addition to the Qurʾān itself) were the proverbial utterances and poetic Kunstsprache of Arabs living at a notional remove of time and/or space from polyethnic urban settlements. With morphology and syntax under the purview of grammar, it was lexicography’s job to arbitrate the semantic aspect of language, and to discriminate between the wheat of “authentic” Arabic lexemes and the chaff of latter-day speech habits (laḥn al-ʿamma) and borrowings from other languages (al-muʿarrab).

This exclusionary function was balanced by the inclusionary study of nawādir and gharīb—the uncommon words and expressions whose occurrence in the Qurʾān motivated the lexicographical enterprise to begin with. To describe it as a conservative enterprise would not quite be accurate, despite the lexicographers’ exclusive preference for archaic and traditional Bedouin discourse. Their job was to establish and patrol the boundaries of an idealized composite language that was practically no one’s native dialect. Arabic scholarship came into being through their labors, which are of vital present-day relevance to cultural poetics and global intellectual history, and in historiographical terms chapter 1 is the book’s strongest section.

(Reviewed by David Larsen, New York University)

Virtually impossible to separate between philological activity and interest in studying the Qur’ānic text

Link between everyday vocabulary and the later technical terminology of the traditional grammarians

Emergence and refinement of the system of vowels and diacritics are associated with early grammarians, starting with Abū al-Du’alī

Universally credited with being not only first to vocalize the text of the Qur’ān but also the first to lay the foundations of grammar

The Background of Linguistic Study

Qurʾānic readings (qirāʾāt) is another domain that reveals the link between

linguistic enquiry and the study of the Qurʾān, which the sources highlight.

Long string of pupils adopted and spread system

Later developed into independent sciences

Linguistically oriented sciences include qirā’āt, Ḥadīṯ, fiqh, tasfīr, luġa, naḥw

Misuse / corrupt reading inspired creation of discipline (‘ilm)

Shifts that took place in the language, mainly following the conquests, sharpened awareness of scholars for the need to preserve what they considered to be correct usage and to systematize the available material

The Background of Linguistic Study (continued)

In determining correct usage deemed to be free of laḥn, philologists resorted to the Bedouins as the most reliable source

Consistently described as fuṣaḥā on the grounds that their language is characterized by purity, clarity, precision and freedom from error

The Speech of the Bedouins

“Elegance” stems from the following

Far from “corrupting” presence of non-Arabs; the Bedouins were desert dwellers whose areas of residence were not only uninhabited by non-Arabs but also far from their “corrupting” presence. The accounts (aḫbār) suggest that this was of prime importance to the philologists and that the Bedouins themselves often boasted the fact that they did not intermingle with non-Arabs

Natural disposition (salīqa) as opposed to versed in linguistic sciences

Certain Bedouin poets went so far as to feign illiteracy to preserve their reputation

The Speech of the Bedouins (continued)

Adherence to dialectical usage and resistance to all attempts to persuade them to change; the philologists highlighted this trait because it provided firm theoretical grounds for their initiative for collecting data.

Use of an elevated form of Arabic, characterized by a high degree of precision in the choice of words, an astounding ability to generate rhyme, and an overwhelming disposition to use vocabulary of the ġarīb (strange):

The philologists were surely keen to demonstrate the superiority of Bedouin speech to any other variety, and they thus tried to surround it with a halo of purity and fluency.

In one of the least complicated statements, which hardly contains any ġarīb word, for example, an Aʿrābī speaks of a palm tree in the following fashion:

ḥamluhā ġiḏāʾ wa-saʿafuhā ḍiyāʾ wa-ǧiḏʿuhā bināʾ wa-karabuhā ṣilāʾ wa-līfuhā rišāʾ wa-ḫūṣuhā wiʿāʾ wa-qarwuhā ināʾ (Its produce [provides] nourishment, its branches light, its trunk building material, the stalk of its leaves heat [of fire], its fiber rope, its leaves vessels, and its bottom utensils).

Early philologists and grammarians sought to collect linguistic data from Bedouin informants

As the Bedouins realized they were in demand, many left the desert and joined cities

Counter-journey in which the A‘rāb brought their linguistic experience to the cities in which linguistic scholarship thrived, most notably Basra and Baghdad

The Collection of Data

Counter-journey of the Bedouin fuṣaḥā to the settled areas came at a price: some Bedouins were soon accused of losing their faṣāḥa due to time away from the desert

Became familiar with faulty usages, diminished eloquence

Collection of data was at its peak in the second half of the second/eighth century

With time, chain of transmitters between direct source person grew longer

Fabrication and forgery

The Collection of Data (continued)

In addition to trying to verify authenticity and guard against fabrication, also had to define time limits to reliable usage

Two of the four major sources pose no problem, the Qur’ān and prophetic Ḥadīṯ

Lexicographers might have assumed that even if Ḥadīṯ was not transmitted verbatim, change would primarily affect its structure

Time limits imposed on linguistic data solely apply to the other two sources of the philologists corpus, i.e. prose and poetry

The Epochs of Reliable Usage (‘Uṣῡr al-Iḥtiǧāǧ)

Prose is usually referred to by the expression kalām al-‘Arab

The corpus was open approximately until no later than the end of the second/eighth century in urban areas

Stricter criteria for admission of poetry

Temporal classification into Pre-Islamic, Islamic, and those described as muḫaḍramῡn

The Epochs of Reliable Usage (continued)

Interest in strange or uncommon usage was not restricted to prose and poetry; included the Qur’ān and Ḥadīṯ

Most content may be classified in the following areas:

Words rarely used in any of the four sources of linguistic data

Collections of synonyms, all or most of which are only rarely attested

Words pronounced differently in various dialects

Anomalous forms that are exceptions to generally applicable norm

Idiomatic expressions

Rare syntactic phenomena

The Role of Ġarīb

Criteria for labeling usage as ġarīb is not always clear

Use of poetry to understand Qur’ānic usage

The Role of Ġarīb (continued)

How to figure out relationship between collection of data and the actual compilation of lexica

Proposal by Aḥmad Amīn

First stage: philologists collected data from Bedouins

Second stage: classification of these words according to subject

Final stage: authors devised ways to arrange all Arabic words in a lexica

Seemingly logical sequence hardly corresponds to the chronology one infers from the sources

Can be safely concluded that data collection, authoring single-topic monographs, and compiling lexica represent concurrent activity

The Compilation of Lexica

Early lexica of both the mubawwab and the muǧannas focused more on rare, even obsolete words

Eventually, some authors became aware of need for lexica with focus on what is actually used

Ibn Durayd’s “Ǧamhara” included more common words but still had plenty of obscure terms

The Compilation of Lexica (continued)

Scholarly activity primarily focused on the study of Arabic grammar

In contrast, relatively modest progress in the study of lexicography

Question of foreign influence on Arabic lexicography

Insistence on foreign influence is totally unjustified

Most compelling evidence come from available early texts

Remarks on Contemporary Scholarship

Throughout long history of grammatical and lexicographical traditions, the two fields, visibly, had a complementary relationship

Remarks on Contemporary Scholarship (continued)