The lexicon making in modern linguistics (Bendaoud Abderrahim)

 

Introduction

A person, however knowledgeable and cultured he/she may be, cannot encompass language as a whole; because language is a wide field from which every man got his share. This chunk dwindles and develops depending on the person’s schooling. There are so many times when we come across words whose meaning is particularly unknown to us; we often encounter as well words which we are ignorant of its right morphology, and sometimes we have some words that are barely distinguishable in terms of connotation; which impels us to make sure of its derivation and accuracy. Well, the best way to that is probably to look at them in a lexicon. These lexicons which have become a cultured requirement, hardly achieved by the commitment to the linguistic aspect, but through focusing on various requirements needed by divers sciences including religious, cultural, economic and social aspects; for the sake of comprehending words’ connotations in its divers contexts.

Linguists didn’t hesitate to make dictionaries, and work hard in order to accumulate the terms of languages, put them in order with their meaning and derivations.       

The Arab writer’s writing movement was based on the material they collected in the Desert in the second century A.H “A great deal of linguists left the Desert, and each one of them began to accumulate language from the sons of the Arab tribes, and the first linguistic fieldwork is attributed to the Arab Peninsula. Many Bedouins noticed the curiosity and the interest of linguists to acquire language from them, thus they immigrated to the southern Iraq where linguistics flourished in Basra and Kufa, and they began to sell the linguistic material they had possessed to any linguist who desired it. The process of collecting language wasn’t an attempt to record all the terms which the Arab tribes knew. However, the linguists’ criterion to choose the tribes and the narrators were basically the record of the classical language away from the non-standard one.”  

The sheer attention of linguists was on the collection of language from the tribes of Qais and Tamim, Assad , Hazeel and some of the tribes of the Kenana tribe and of Taya.

The Arab linguists motive behind writing those lexicons was to preserve Arabic from loss and to serve the religious text as well, Ibn Khaldun said: “[...] and the corruption continues to obscure and mix up the lexicons till the corruption got to themes of words, and thus a lot of Arab’s speech was used inappropriately with a slight inclination to the accent of Arabised one in terms of their terminology  that is different from the classical Arabic. Therefore , it was needed to preserve the themes through writing for fear of lessons and what comes out of it due to being ignorant of Koran and the Prophetic saying (Hadith).

A great deal of linguists Imam strove to put an end to this and started to record; Khalil ibn Ahmed Alfarahid was one of the first pioneers. He published the book of ‘Al Ayen’ literarily translated as “The Eye” in which he compounded……. “  

As a result they had been able to put this huge output in huge number of verbal lexicons, and thus the movement became refreshed, activated and developed by them. The Hebrews whose lexicon studies didn’t flourish only after the emergence of Islam “the Hebraic lexicons didn’t appear in its exact meaning only since the tenth century A.D by Sa'dia ibn Yusuf al-Fayoumi (820-942 AD), author of the first dictionary in the history of the Hebrew language.

Until the beginning of the sixties, the making of lexicons remained experimental; which is not based on a true scientific method, but on the scientific experience lexicons’ makers acquired in the last centuries. With the developing of modern linguistics, in general, and lexicology in particular, the effects in bilingual or multilingual lexicons began to emerge towards setting scientific and objective foundations based on the results of researches conducted in various fields modern linguistic course.

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