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An introductory guide for students of Arabic language, Arabic historical linguistics and Arabic sociolinguistics New for this edition Additional chapters on the structure of Arabic, bilingualism and Arabic pidgins and creoles A full explanation of the use of conventional Arabic transcription and IPA characters An updated bibliography All chapters have been revised and updated in light of recent research Concentrating on the difference between the two types of Arabic - the classical standard language and the dialects - Kees Versteegh charts the history and development of the Arabic language from its earliest beginnings to modern times. The reader is given a solid grounding in the structure of the language, its historical context and its use in various literary and non-literary genres, as well as an understanding of the role of Arabic as a cultural, religious and political world language. Key Features Covers all aspects of the history of Arabic, the Arabic linguistic tradition, Arabic dialects, sociolinguistics and Arabic as a world language Makes links between linguistic history and cultural history Emphasises the role of contacts between Arabic and other languages

This article presents a linguistic analysis of the \"Muqaddimat Al-Adab\", a 12th-century dictionary by Mahmud Zamakhshari that reflects the Kipchak language and its historical and cultural aspects. The article aims to study the construction, semantics, phonetic, and morphological features of each word in the dictionary. It also provides information about the life, relations, socio-economic development, and culture of the nomadic people of that period based on the vocabulary, phrases, and sentences in the dictionary. The article shows that the vocabulary of the \"Muqaddimat Al-Adab\" is composed of generalized lexemes that are closely related to the Kazakh language. Overall, it is concluded that the results of the linguistic analysis can be of practical importance in compiling the semantic dictionary of Turkish words. At last, the article suggests that the dictionary is a valuable source for Turkic studies and historical linguistics.

Kuwaiti maritime proverbs are often misinterpreted by non-native speakers due to cultural references and metaphors. This study aimed to analyse these proverbs from a semantic, rather than a folkloristic, perspective. It is the first to examine and conceptualise Kuwaiti maritime proverbs using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) system of componential semantics, as outlined in the works of Wierzbicka and Goddard. Five maritime proverbs were analysed using simple words to express more complex meanings, with explanations built using the five-part semantic template for English and Malay proverbs proposed by Goddard (2009, 2014). A communicative translation strategy was used to translate the proverbs into English. Data for analysis were collected from three specialised dictionaries on Kuwaiti proverbs and six related to Kuwaiti maritime history and culture. The analysis revealed common themes, such as the importance of cooperation, resilience, and the unpredictability of the sea. For example, the Kuwaiti proverb ‘Two captains sank the ship’ underscores the dangers of having multiple leaders in a single endeavour, which can yield counterproductive outcomes due to a lack of coordination and singular vision. NSM helped clarify such cultural nuances, reducing misunderstanding by explicating meanings. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of Kuwaiti maritime proverbs and their cultural significance, offering a valuable tool for cross-cultural communication. The findings also highlight the challenges in pairing proverbs from different languages, posing issues in both dictionaries and second-language learning environments.

This article examines the chapter on īhām (literary amphiboly) in Ḥadāʾiq al-Siḥr by Rashīd Vaṭvāṭ (d. 1182). Ḥadāʾiq , a treatise on stylistics with Persian and Arabic examples, is the oldest extant document to define īhām . Vaṭvāṭ's definition of īhām sheds light on the mechanism and function of this literary technique. This article argues that īhām , according to Vaṭvāṭ, operates through the creation of semantic fields and defamiliarization. Previous scholars who examined this chapter of Ḥadāʾiq , oblivious to this point, have made a number of misinterpretations. However, by analyzing the name he prefers for this figure of speech, the definition he gives, and the examples he cites to explain it, this article demonstrates that Vaṭvāṭ had this function of defamiliarization in mind.

The aim of this study is a comparative analysis of the role of semantics in the linguistic theory of four grammatical traditions, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic. If one compares the organization of linguistic theory in various grammatical traditions, it soon turns out that there are marked differences in the way they define the place of 'semantics' within the theory. In some traditions, semantics is formally excluded from linguistic theory, and linguists do not express any opinion as to the relationship between syntactic and semantic analysis. In other traditions, the whole basis of linguistic theory is semantically orientated, and syntactic features are always analysed as correlates of a semantic structure. However, even in those traditions, in which semantics falls explicitly or implicitly outside the scope of linguistics, there may be factors forcing linguists to occupy themselves with the semantic dimension of language. One important factor seems to be the presence of a corpus of revealed/sacred texts: the necessity to formulate hermeneutic rules for the interpretation of this corpus brings semantics in through the back door.

This study investigates the concept of substitution in Arabic, its history, the reasons for its emergence, its prevalence, and the environment of its occurrence as it revealed by Ibn Manzur in his great dictionary “Qamos Lisan Al-Arab” (Dictionary of Arabs Tongue). The methodology adopted is descriptive and analytical. It is based on investigating the use of substitution by ancient Arabs in the tribes’ dialects. The data was extracted from chapters 3 and 4 of the Lisan Al-Arab dictionary. The study's findings revealed that substitution is not limited to specific Arab regions but has become a linguistic phenomenon even among Arabs living in cities. Most scholars consider the most important reason for the emergence of substitution to be the linguistic variation among dialects; however, Arabic dialects are well-established in that substitution is a variable occurrence that takes place according to the human tendency to reduce articulatory effort. The study also revealed that the reasons behind substitution include the similarity of sound production in the manner or place of articulation.

Multiple varieties of Arabic attest a definite noun + adjective syntagm in which only the adjective is marked morphologically with the article, e.g., Lebanese bēt iz-zġīr “the small house”. The feminine ending *-ah is everywhere realized -(v)t, e.g., Baghdadi sint il-māḍye “last year”. Most have assumed that it was originally appositional, and re-analysed as a construct, prompted perhaps by the loss of case (Hopkins 1984; Pat-El 2017). A few scholars (Reckendorf 1921; Retsö 2009) have argued that this syntagm was originally construct. In this article I draw on relevant Arabic data, including parallels with dialectal tanwīn, as well as comparative Semitic evidence, to argue that this syntagm is, diachronically and synchronically, one of apposition and not annexation. I propose that the feminine -at here represents a retention of proto-Arabic *-at, which was protected by the close relationship between a noun and following attribute. I conclude with a discussion of historical and comparative implications.

This paper presents a historical Arabic corpus named HAC. At this early embryonic stage of the project, we report about the design, the architecture and some of the experiments which we have conducted on HAC. The corpus, and accordingly the search results, will be represented using a primary XML exchange format. This will serve as an intermediate exchange tool within the project and will allow the user to process the results offline using some external tools. HAC. is made up of Classical Arabic texts that cover 1600 years of language use; the Quranic text, Modern Standard Arabic texts, as well as a variety of monolingual Arabic dictionaries. The development of this historical corpus assists linguists and Arabic language learners to effectively explore, understand, and discover interesting knowledge hidden in millions of instances of language use. We used techniques from the field of natural language processing to process the data and a graph-based representation for the corpus. We provided researchers with an export facility to render further linguistic analysis possible.

The study of the history of the development of medical and pharmaceutical science, which includes the principles of health care and disease prevention, and the study of terms belonging to these fields, which have undergone a great evolution to modern times, are crucial and topical for modern time. It is clear from research that the East has a great role in the development of modern medicine and pharmacology. Mutual study of medical terms used in medicine and pharmacology by Azerbaijanis and Arabs might help to study this area. The article deals with the history of medicine in Azerbaijan and the Arabia. Furthermore, in addition to giving examples of medical terms related to pharmacology in both languages, the lexical and semantic meanings of some of these terms were explained. The author concludes that the mutual study of medical terms used in both languages might make useful contributions to the science of pharmacology.