« The President and Fuel Efficiency Standards
Main
The ABC Meme »
April 29, 2006
Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon Free Online
Yesterday I made a great discovery. Perhaps everyone who is even remotely interested has already made this discovery but it was sure new to me. Edward William Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon is available free online and for a nominal charge, it is also available on a DVD complete with a search engine. And in addition to the complete eight volume lexicon there is also a very useful online tool that lets you search for a word in Lane's Lexicon by root.
Those of you who have attempted to read my posts on Ugaritc or Akkadian texts or the PDF files I often write in support of those posts will know that I occasionally cite Arabic words. When working with a language where a given word is not well understood or is the only example of the word in the literature it is helpful to reflect on the meaning of cognate words in other languages. In the case of Ugaritc in particular (and on occasion Hebrew also) one can often learn a lot from a word's Arabic cognate. I have an Arabic dictionary within arm's reach of the keyboard on which I am typing this post. The problem is that this dictionary suffers from a problem of intention. It is intended to assist in reading Modern Arabic. But like all languages, modern Arabic contains lots of things that one would not find in its classical dialect and the classical dialect has things that are no longer in the modern language. So before I can be comfortable in citing an Arabic cognate in support of an interpretation of an Ugariitc word, I want to look at the Arabic word in its classical context. And that is exactly what Lane's Lexicon allows me to do. The only problem is that the closest copy of Lane's Lexicon was, until yesterday afternoon, about two miles away. Now it is the internet way.
I believe that the most recent edition of Lane was published in 1968 but it is really much older. Lane himself died in 1876 before the complete first edition could be published. But his first volume was published in 1863. There may be more recent classical Arabic dictionaries but I believe that there will never be a greater classical Arabic dictionary than Edward William Lane Arabic-English Lexicon, Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1963-. One interesting detail about Lane's Lexicon, it is much more detailed and complete from aleph to qof than for the remainder of the Arabic alphabet. The reason, Lane died.
This discovery may not reduce the number of trips I take to the library but it will sure increase the number of Arabic cognates I checkout.
A technical note: The volume files are huge (Volume 1, the smallest, is 372.3 Mbytes) and their server is rather slow. So unless you have a lot of time and disk space don't download the whole thing. The individual pages, at about 1 Kbyte, come much faster and the root reference engine points to the individual pages. So unless you are really a power user, the lexicon is best used on line.
Posted by Duane Smith at April 29, 2006 11:03 AM | Read more on Ugarit |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1673
Comments
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
Send me an email if it is important.