The formal approach of ʔal-Khalīl to Arabic lexicography

Abstract

The Oxford English Dictionary has become the model for dictionary making. Elsewhere, however, there are other and older traditions of dictionary making. The one that is of interest here is the Arab tradition. ?al-Khalīl ?ibn ?aħmad ?al-Farāhīdī, (719–791 A.D.), is the father of this lexical tradition. He envisioned an original and a formal description of Arabic. This was not a syntactico-morphological analysis, but a lexical analysis. It is the first complete lexicon of Arabic written on a formal basis. It is original in design and conception. It is not a mere alphabetical listing of all the words of Arabic, but an accounting for the underlying skeletal structures of Arabic, based on their phonetic features, that are realized in the derivations according to the permitted measures of the language. The dictionary is constructed, in a systematic way, on the premise that the underlying forms have a limited number of skeletal structures on a range of two to five radicals per root. For example, [k, t, b] as a possible structure would have the permutations [k, b, t], [t, k, b], [t, b, k], etc. Though the lexicon is constructed on the principle of the permutability of the radicals within the roots, not all permutations are permitted in Arabic.