al-Bari fi al-Lugha
- Author died
- 356 AH
- Editions
- Maktabat al-Nahdah
Al-Bari fi al-Lugha (The Preeminent in Lexicography) is a major Arabic dictionary compiled by the philologist Abu Ali al-Qali (288–356 AH / 901–967 CE) in Cordoba, designed as an expanded and refined realization of early phonetic lexicography .
Composition and Scope
Following his arrival in al-Andalus in 330 AH during the reign of the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Rahman al-Nasir, al-Qali composed the work under the patronage of the heir and future caliph al-Hakam II . When an unverified manuscript of Kitab al-Ayn reached al-Andalus, the Umayyad court commissioned a group of scholars, including al-Qali, to collate and verify it; having confirmed its attribution to al-Khalil ibn Ahmad, al-Qali drew extensively upon it, citing al-Khalil directly by name . Al-Qali intended to encompass the lexicon comprehensively, surpassing Kitab al-Ayn by approximately four hundred folios and around 5,685 lexical entries .
Biographical sources report varied estimates for the work's immense size: Yaqut al-Hamawi states that it comprised three thousand folios, while other reports, including those recorded by al-Safadi and al-Maqqari, estimate it at around five thousand folios, and Abu Muhammad Ibn al-Arabi described it as containing one hundred volumes . A further account notes that it was divided into 164 fascicles (ajza') . Al-Qali died before completing its final revision .
Although later bibliographer Hajji Khalifa erroneously cataloged it under the title al-Bari fi Gharib al-Hadith as a distinct work, scholarship establishes that al-Qali authored only one book bearing this name, with its full title recorded as al-Bari fi Gharib al-Lugha al-Arabiyya .
Method and Structure
The dictionary broadly adopts the phonetic and anagrammatical framework established in Kitab al-Ayn, classifying lexical roots according to point of articulation and morphological length into biliteral, triliteral, quadriliteral, and quinquiliteral categories . However, al-Qali introduced several methodological adaptations:
- Phonetic Sequence: He diverged slightly from al-Khalil's phonetic ordering, arranging the radical letters as follows: h (هـ), h (ح), kh (خ), q (ق), k (ك), dad (ض), j (ج), sh (ش), l (ل), r (ر), n (ن), t (ط), t (ت), s (ص), z (ز), s (س), za (ظ), dhal (ذ), tha (ث), f (ف), b (ب), m (م), w (و), hamza (أ), y (ي) .
- Section Terminology: He renamed the weak and multiconsonantal category (al-lafif) as al-hawashi or al-awshab, and designated the doubled biliteral roots as "the biliteral in script and triliteral in reality" (al-thuna'i fi al-khatt wa-l-thulathi fi al-haqiqa) .
- Editorial Emendations: He preceded each root entry with material transmitted through his own chains of authority, integrated previously omitted roots (muhmal), identified anonymous poetic attestations (shawahid), and completed truncated verses found in earlier compilations .
Reception and Surviving Manuscripts
Al-Bari received high acclaim among Andalusian philologists. Al-Qali's foremost disciple, Abu Bakr al-Zubaydi, praised it, stating: "We know of no earlier scholar who composed anything like it" . Al-Zubaydi subsequently composed a supplement highlighting its additions to the earlier lexicon, titled Kitab al-Mustadrak min al-ziyada fi kitab al-Bari ala kitab al-Ayn .
The complete text has not survived intact. Incomplete manuscript portions are preserved in the British Library (MS Or. 9811) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (MS 4235) . An edition of the surviving fragments was published in London in 1931 by the orientalist A. S. Fulton . A subsequent critical edition of the extant portion was prepared by Hashim al-Ta'an as a master's thesis at the University of Baghdad (1972) and published in Beirut in 1975 .
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