Dictionary Of Modern Written Arabic
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The ''Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic'' is an
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...
-English
dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies ...
compiled by
Hans Wehr Hans Bodo Gerhardt Wehr (; 5 July 1909, Leipzig24 May 1981, Münster) was a German Arabist. A professor at the University of Münster from 1957–1974, he published the ''Arabisches Wörterbuch'' (1952), which was later published in an Engl ...
and edited by
J Milton Cowan J Milton Cowan (February 22, 1907 – December 20, 1993) 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 nei ...
. First published in 1961 by Otto Harrassowitz in
Wiesbaden Wiesbaden () is a city in central western Germany and the capital of the state of Hesse. , it had 290,955 inhabitants, plus approximately 21,000 United States citizens (mostly associated with the United States Army). The Wiesbaden urban area ...
, Germany, it was an enlarged and revised English version of Wehr's German ''Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart'' ("Arabic dictionary for the contemporary written language") (1952) and its ''Supplement'' (1959). The Arabic-German dictionary was completed in 1945, but not published until 1952. Writing in the 1960s, a critic commented, "Of all the dictionaries of modern written Arabic, the work n question... is the best." It remains the most widely used Arabic-English dictionary. 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". Hans Wehr was a member of the
National Socialist Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Na ...
(Nazi) Party and argued that the Nazi government should ally with the Arabs against England and France. The Arabic-German dictionary project was funded by the Nazi government, which intended to use it to translate
Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...
's ''
Mein Kampf (; ''My Struggle'' or ''My Battle'') is a 1925 autobiographical manifesto by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler. The work describes the process by which Hitler became antisemitic and outlines his political ideology and future plans for Germ ...
'' into Arabic. Despite this, at least one Jewish scholar, Hedwig Klein, contributed to the dictionary. Besides English speakers, the dictionary is also very popular among Arabic language learners in Japan.


Collation

The dictionary arranges its entries according to the traditional
Arabic root The roots of verbs and most nouns in the Semitic languages are characterized as a sequence of consonants or " radicals" (hence the term consonantal root). Such abstract consonantal roots are used in the formation of actual words by adding the vowel ...
order. Foreign words are listed in straight alphabetical order by the letters of the word. Arabicized
loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because th ...
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:Wehr, XIII *the perfect of the basic stem (stem I) *vowels of the imperfect of stem I *''maṣādir'' (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 (for specific details, see
Hans Wehr transliteration The Hans Wehr transliteration system is a system for transliteration of the Arabic alphabet into the Latin alphabet used in the Hans Wehr dictionary (1952; in English 1961). The system was modified somewhat in the English editions. It is printe ...
) are provided for the past tense of the basic verb form, for the vowel of the imperfect tense, and for all nouns and particles, but they are not provided for verb forms of the derived stems, except for any irregular forms, the rare XI to XV stems, and the quadriliteral roots. The morphology of the derived stems II-X is regular and is given in Wehr's "Introduction". Other
parts of speech In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are ass ...
such as nouns are fully given transcriptions. Foreign words are transliterated according to pronunciation, for which Arab students at the
University of Münster The University of Münster (german: Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, WWU) is a public university, public research university located in the city of Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. With more than 43,000 students and over ...
were consulted.Wehr, XII This means that the sounds , , , , , , , and , 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. Examples would be مانجو ''mangō'' 'mango fruit/tree' and كوري ''kōrī'' 'Korean'. As for the Arabic orthography used, word-initial glottal stops or ''
hamza Hamza ( ar, همزة ') () is a letter in the Arabic alphabet, representing the glottal stop . Hamza is not one of the 28 "full" letters and owes its existence to historical inconsistencies in the standard writing system. It is derived from ...
'' (i.e. the vs. vs. distinction) are not written either in the Arabic of the entries or in the transliteration. For example, (transliterated ''akala'', "to eat", from the root ''ʼ k l''), which has an initial ''hamzat al-qaṭʽ'', and (''ibn'' "son", from the root ''b-n''), which does not have an initial ''hamzat al-qaṭʽ'', are both written without a hamza represented in either the Arabic or the transliteration. In transliteration systems such as
DIN 31635 DIN 31635 is a Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) standard for the transliteration of the Arabic alphabet adopted in 1982. It is based on the rules of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (DMG) as modified by the International Orientalist ...
, the first would be transliterated as ''ʼakala'', with an apostrophe representing hamza, and the second as ''ibn'', without an apostrophe. Hamzas in the middle and end of words, however, are written, as in ''maʼkal'' "food". Word-final ''yā’'' (''-y'' or ''-ī'') and ''
alif maqṣūra Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Hebrew , Aramaic , Syriac , Arabic ʾ and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez . These lette ...
'' (''-ā'') are not distinguished in the Arabic: they are both written as , without dots (an
Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...
ian custom). They are, however, distinguished in the transliteration: for example, ("to double") and ("bending") are both written as , but the first is transliterated as ''ṯanā'' and the second as ''ṯany''.


Editions

Shortly after the publication of the first German version in 1952, the Committee on Language Programs of the American Council of Learned Societies recognized its excellence and sought to publish an English version. The publication of the English edition was financed by the
American Council of Learned Societies American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...
, the Arabian-American Oil Company, and
Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
. The English version of the Wehr dictionary is commonly available in two editions. The so-called 3rd edition was printed by Otto Harrassowitz in
Wiesbaden Wiesbaden () is a city in central western Germany and the capital of the state of Hesse. , it had 290,955 inhabitants, plus approximately 21,000 United States citizens (mostly associated with the United States Army). The Wiesbaden urban area ...
,
Hesse Hesse (, , ) or Hessia (, ; german: Hessen ), officially the State of Hessen (german: links=no, Land Hessen), is a States of Germany, state in Germany. Its capital city is Wiesbaden, and the largest urban area is Frankfurt. Two other major histor ...
, in 1961 (reprinted in 1966, 1971) under the title ''A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic: Arabic–English'', as well as by Spoken Language Services, Inc. of
Ithaca, New York Ithaca is a city in the Finger Lakes region of New York, United States. Situated on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake, Ithaca is the seat of Tompkins County and the largest community in the Ithaca metropolitan statistical area. It is named a ...
, in 1976, under the somewhat different title ''Arabic–English Dictionary: The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, Edited by J M. Cowan''. Librairie du Liban in
Lebanon Lebanon ( , ar, لُبْنَان, translit=lubnān, ), officially the Republic of Lebanon () or the Lebanese Republic, is a country in Western Asia. It is located between Syria to the north and east and Israel to the south, while Cyprus li ...
has printed it since 1980, and it is widely available in the Middle East (). The 4th edition (pictured above), which is considerably amended and enlarged (1301 pages compared to 1110 in the 3rd edition), was published in 1979. Harrassowitz published an improved English translation of the 4th edition of the Arabic-German dictionary with over 13,000 additional entries, approx. 26,000 words with approx. 20 words per page. It was published in 1994 by Spoken Language Services, Inc. of Ithaca, New York, and is usually available in the United States as a compact "student" paperback (). In 2019, a two-volume version also started being offered. The 5th edition available in German, published by Harrassowitz's publishing house in 1985, also in the city of Wiesbaden, under the title ''Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart: Arabisch–Deutsch, unter Mitwirkung von Lorenz Kropfitsch neu bearbeitet und erweitert'' (). It has 1452 pages of dictionary entries. The 6th edition in German was published by Harrassowitz in December 2020, which was significantly expanded and comprehensively edited by Lorenz Kropfitsch. This edition was created that only has the basic set of lexemes in common with the previous edition. The Arabist and lexicographer Dr. Lorenz Kropfitsch, who taught Arabic at the FTSK Germersheim for decades, passed away on January 5, 2020 at the age of 73.


See also

*
Classical Arabic Classical Arabic ( ar, links=no, ٱلْعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ, al-ʿarabīyah al-fuṣḥā) or Quranic Arabic is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notab ...
* Academy of the Arabic Language *
Arabic phonology While many languages have numerous dialects that differ in phonology, the contemporary spoken Arabic language is more properly described as a varieties of Arabic, continuum of varieties. This article deals primarily with Modern Standard Arabic ...
*
Romanization of Arabic The romanization of Arabic is the systematic rendering of written and spoken Arabic in the Latin script. Romanized Arabic is used for various purposes, among them transcription of names and titles, cataloging Arabic language works, language ed ...
* Help:IPA/Arabic *
Varieties of Arabic The varieties (or dialects or vernacular languages) of Arabic, a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family originating in the Arabian Peninsula, are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. There are considerable variati ...


Notes

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References

* Irwin, Robert (2006). ''For Lust of Knowing''. London: Allen Lane. *Sa'id, Majed F. (1962)
"Review of ''A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic by Hans Wehr, J Milton Cowan''"
''Language'' 38 (3): 328-330. (Available online through
JSTOR JSTOR (; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library founded in 1995 in New York City. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of j ...
) *Wehr, Hans (1976). "Introduction", in Hans Wehr & J M. Cowan ''Arabic–English Dictionary'', pp. vii–xv. Ithaca, N.Y.: Spoken Language Services. *Haywood, John
Reviewed Work: A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (Arabic-English) by Hans Wehr, J. Milton Cowan
Die Welt Des Islams, vol. 20, no. 3/4, 1980, pp. 246–248. 1961 non-fiction books Arabic dictionaries English bilingual dictionaries Translation dictionaries Harrassowitz Verlag books