Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic is an Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

-English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

dictionary

Dictionary

A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon...

compiled by Hans Wehr

Hans Wehr

Hans Wehr was a German Arabist. A professor at the University of Münster from 1957-1974, he published the Arabisches Wörterbuch , which was later published in an English edition as A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, edited by J Milton Cowan. For the dictionary Wehr created a transliteration...

and edited by J Milton Cowan

J Milton Cowan

J Milton Cowan was an American linguist.Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Cowan was the son of a butcher, who, hesitating between the first names James and John when the boy was born, decided to give him neither but to let the boy make the choice himself when he grew up...

.

First published in 1961 by Otto Harrassowitz in Wiesbaden

Wiesbaden

Wiesbaden is a city in southwest Germany and the capital of the federal state of Hesse. It has about 275,400 inhabitants, plus approximately 10,000 United States citizens...

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, it was an enlarged and revised English version of Wehr's German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart ("Arabic dictionary for the contemporary written language") (1952) and its Supplement (1959). Writing in the 1960s, a critic comments, "Of all the dictionaries of modern written Arabic

Literary Arabic

Modern Standard Arabic , Standard Arabic, or Literary Arabic is the standard and literary variety of Arabic used in writing and in most formal speech....

, the work [in question] ... is the best."

The work is compiled on descriptive principles: only words and expressions that are attested in context are included. "It was chiefly based on combing modern works of Arabic literature for lexical items, rather than culling them from medieval Arabic dictionaries, which was what Lane had done in the nineteenth century".

Collation

The dictionary arranges its entries according to the traditional Arabic root

Triliteral

The roots of verbs and most nouns in the Semitic languages are characterized as a sequence of consonants or "radicals"...

order. Foreign words are listed in straight alphabetical order by the letters of the word. Arabicized loanword

Loanword

A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...

s, if they can clearly fit under some root, are entered both ways, often with the root entry giving reference to the alphabetical listing.

Under a given root, lexical data are, whenever they exist, arranged in the following sequence:

the perfect of the basic stem (stem I)
vowels of the imperfect of stem I
maṣdars (verbal nouns) of stem I
finite derived stem verb forms, indicated by Roman numerals

Nominal forms then follow according to their length (including those verbal nouns and participles which merit separate listings). This ordering means that forms derived from the same verb stem (i.e. closely related finite verb forms, verbal nouns, and participles) are not always grouped together (as is done in some other Arabic dictionaries). The dictionary does not usually give concrete example forms of finite derived stem verbs, so that the user must refer to the introduction in order to know the pattern associated with each of the stem numbers ("II" through "X") and reconstruct such verb forms based solely on the stem number and the abstract consonantal root.

Transcription and orthography

Transcriptions

Hans Wehr transliteration

The Hans Wehr transliteration system is a methodology for transliteration of the Arabic alphabet, used in the Hans Wehr dictionary, with some changes enacted to the system between two editions of the dictionary. The transliteration system uses no digraphs. It is always displayed in the italic style...

are not provided for verb forms of the derived stems, except for:

any irregularities
the rare XI to XV stems
those of the quadriliteral roots

However, the morphology of the derived stems II-X are already shown in Wehr's "Introduction".

Foreign words are transliterated according to pronunciation, for which Arab students at the University of Münster

University of Münster

The University of Münster is a public university located in the city of Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. The WWU is part of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, a society of Germany's leading research universities...

have been consulted. This means that the sounds [e], [eː], [ə], [o], [oː], [ɡ], [v], and [p], which are used in Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation among well-educated and careful speakers, but cannot be easily represented in standard Arabic script (even with full vowel diacritics), can be unambiguously indicated.

As to orthography, word-initial glottal stops or hamza (i.e. the ا vs. أ vs. إ distinction) are not shown. Word-final yā ي and ى are also not distinguished (which is, incidentally, an Egypt

Egypt

Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

ian custom).‎ The pronunciation transcriptions make it possible to work out when ي and ى should be written according to orthographic norms which distinguish the two (though not when word-initial hamza should be used).

Editions

The English version of the Hans Wehr dictionary is currently available in two editions. The so-called third printing from 1960 under the title A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic – Arabic-English, printed in Lebanon by Librarie du Liban since 1980, is widely available in the Middle East. (ISBN 0-97950-001-8) The fourth edition (pictured above), considerably enlarged (1301 pages compared to 1110 in the third printing) and amended, was published in 1994 by Spoken Language Services, Inc. of Ithaca, NY. (ISBN 0-87950-003-4). There is a more recent German edition available (5th edition).

Collation

Transcription and orthography

Editions

See also