al-Salāmu ‘alaykum wa rahmatullāh, As seen previously, the Arabic language is very precise in its lexical references owing to its rich vocabulary. Often a single concept may be taken – such as love, infancy, bravery etc – and different words found corresponding to the subtle differences in the degrees of that concept. And perhaps this …
al-Salāmu ‘alaykum wa rahmatullāh, There is a rhetorical device in Arabic known as al-istikhbaar الاستخبار, which literally means ‘to seek information’; in practical form, it is to ask a question and seek to know the answer. Yet there is a fine line between the essence istikhbaar and the clothes of the interrogative (al-istifhaam – …
al-Salāmu ‘alaykum wa rahmatullāh, I thought that my previous entry on Ishtiqaaq marked the end of the linguists’ theories on this phenomenon, but it turns out there is more. Rather than looking at the roots as individual units, some scholars of Arabic viewed them according to their articulation points (makhaarij) or phonological characteristics (sifaat), and …
al-Salāmu ‘alaykum wa rahmatullāh, In continuing the theme of derivation, a third form was noticed among the linguists, commonly known as al-Ishtiqaaq al-Akbar [1] (‘The Greatest Derivation’). One angle of this theory is that it went one step further and even claimed, in the presence of certain conditions, there was a link between the common …
al-Salāmu ‘alaykum wa rahmatullāh, The last post on Ishtiqaaq saw how the scholars of Arabic agreed that words derived from the same [usually triliteral] root share a common meaning among them. A number of great classical scholars of Arabic such as al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Faraaheedee, Abu ‘Ali al-Faarisi, and his student Ibn Jinni, understood this …
al-Salāmu ‘alaykum wa rahmatullāh, One of phenomena that is immediately noticed among learners of Arabic is that its lexicon resembles a tree wherein some words are built on and branch out from others that usually take the form of tri-consonantal roots. This etymological phenomenon in Arabic is known as al-Ishtiqaaq and there are various theories …
al-Salāmu ‘alaykum wa rahmatullāh, Arabic often has the ability to convey a very precise meaning using a single world, due to the richness and breadth of its vocabulary. In line with this, scholars of the language would often compile lexicons based on concepts shared between words rather than alphabetically, and thus the thesaurus genre in …
al-Salāmu ‘alaykum wa rahmatullāh, One of the issues encountered when translating any text into another language is the extent to which dynamic or formal equivalence should be retained in the translation. One of the levels of connotation lost in translation relates to the semantic function of a word’s morphology, and this is especially true when …
al-Salāmu ‘alaykum wa rahmatullāh, Many languages of the world contain words that reflect certain concepts that are hard to capture by a single word in any other language. One example is the word ‘ilunga’ in the Tshiluba language, which means ‘a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate …
al-Salāmu ‘alaykum wa rahmatullāh, The opposite end of the ishtiraak phenomenon in which a single word has many shades of meaning, is that of al-taraaduf الترادف – synonyms – where many words share the same meaning. There has been much debate among the linguists over whether there actually are complete synonyms in Arabic, or whether …
