Genre Dictionary | ||
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Similar Lisan Al‑Arab, Al Ketab, Tahdhib al‑Ahkam, Kitāb al‑Fihrist, Tafsir al‑Mizan | ||
Kitab al-'Ayn, written by Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, was the first ever dictionary for the Arabic language. Ayn is the deepest letter in Arabic, though it also means a water source in the desert. It was titled "the source" because the goal of its author was to clarify those words which composed the original or source Arabic vocabulary.
Contents
The dictionary was not arranged alphabetically per the Semitic alphabets but rather by phonetics, following the pattern of pronunciation of the Arabic alphabet from the deepest letter of the throat ﻉ (Ayin) to the last letter pronounced by the lips, that being م (Mem). Due to ayin's position as the innermost letter to emerge from the throat, he viewed its origins deep down in the throat as a sign that it was the first sound, the essential sound, the voice and a representation of the self.
Contents
In the introduction to the book, al-Farahidi briefly describes the phonetic structure of Arabic. The dictionary was divided into twenty-six books, one book for each letter except for the weak letters which were all contained in a single book; each book was then divided into chapters depending on the number of radicals in linguistic roots, with those roots containing weak radicals coming toward the end. Finally in these chapters, the roots are dealt with anagrammatically with all possible anagrams based on the root radicals also being defined. In the introduction of the first volume, he explained the rules of phonotactics for Arabic roots as well as describing each consonant based on its production and specific point of articulation, noting common distributional characteristics among the letters. Al-Farahidi's goal was not to collect every word in the Arabic language, but rather every root from which further vocabulary is derived.
Al-Farahidi identified the consonants with collective terms based on the source of production:
History
While initially in the libraries of the Tahirid dynasty, the book was finally returned to and sold commercially in Basra seventy years after al-Farahidi had died. The bookseller, from northeast Persia, reached Basra in 862 or 863CE and sold the book for fifty dinars. Even after this initial sale, the work was rare due to a lack of copies though much of the Middle Ages; it was first rediscovered in modern times by Lebanese-Iraqi monk Anastas Al-Karmali in 1914. It was introduced in Al-Andalus, however, in 914 or 915 CE. In the modern era, the book has been printed by Maktabah Al Hilal, having been reviewed by Dr. Mahdi al Makhzūmi and Dr. Ibrāhim Al Samirā'ì in eight volumes.
All lexicographical efforts in Arabic have been based on al-Farahidi's dictionary, and it is said that al-Farahidi's Kitab al-Ayn did for lexicography what his student Sibaway's al-Kitab did for grammar. Historically, a handful of rival Arab lexicographers questioned the attribution of the book to al-Farahidi, though modern scholarship has attributed this to jealousy in the part of later linguists who have found themselves in al-Farahidi's shadow. The work caused later controversy as well. Ibn Duraid, who wrote the second comprehensive Arabic dictionary ever, was accused by his contemporary Niftawayh of simply plagiarizing al-Farahidi's work.
Methodology
Al-Farahidi tried to rationalize the empirical practice of lexicography in al-Ayn, explicitly referring to the calculation of arrangements and combinations in order to exhaustively enumerate all words in Arabic. According to al-Farahidi's theory, what is known as the Arabic language is merely the phonetically realized part of the entire possible language. The various combinations of roots are reckoned by al-Farahidi by the arrangement r to r with 1 < r ≤ 5, which is the possible language; the possible language, however, is limited by the rules of phonological compatibility among the phonemes of the roots. By applying this limit to the possible language, al-Farahidi theorized that the actual language could be extracted and thus the lexis of Arabic could be recorded.
Al-Farahidi began his extraction of the actual language from the possible language based on the phonological limit by calculating the nonrepetitive number of combinations of Arabic roots, taken as r to r with r = 2 - 5. He then took that along with the number of permutations for each r group; he finally calculated Arn = r! (nr) with n being the number of letters in the Semitic alphabet. Al-Farahidi's theory and calculation are now found in the writings of most lexicographers.