Tarikh al-Turath al-Arabi li Sezgin - al-Lugha

Tarikh al-Turath al-Arabi: al-Lugha (History of Arabic Heritage: Lexicography) is the volume dedicated to Arabic philology and lexicography within the bio-bibliographical reference work Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums by the Turkish scholar Fuad Sezgin (d. 1439 AH / 2018 CE) Tarikh al-Turath al-Arabi…+1.

Composition and Publication History

The original draft of the volume was completed in 1964 and was initially intended to be published alongside poetry and grammar as the second volume of the broader work Tarikh al-Turath al-Arabi…. While printing the first volume, Sezgin decided to broaden the scope of his project and postponed the publication of this material until completing the volumes on the natural sciences, which were closely connected to his lectures at the institute for the history of natural sciences in Frankfurt Tarikh al-Turath al-Arabi…+1. Due to printing and financial constraints, the lexicographical section was subsequently separated from the volume devoted to grammar Tarikh al-Turath al-Arabi….

Sezgin signed his preface to the volume in Frankfurt on 13 July 1982 Tarikh al-Turath al-Arabi…. His research assistant, Dr. Neubauer, assisted in revising the manuscript and supervising the printing, with financial support provided by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) along with contributions from Sezgin's wife Tarikh al-Turath al-Arabi…. Manuscript microfilms for the work were facilitated by scholars including Muammar Ulker, director of the Suleymaniye Library in Istanbul, and Dr. Husni Sabh, president of the Arab Language Academy in Damascus Tarikh al-Turath al-Arabi…. The Arabic translation was published by Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University as Volume 8 of the series al-Maktaba al-Islamiyya.

Scope, Structure, and Method

The volume catalogues Arabic linguistic and lexicographical writings from their beginnings up to approximately 430 AH al-Maktaba al-Islamiyya. It opens with an introductory survey tracing the history and state of Arabic lexicographical research in the East and West, including early Arabic–Latin dictionaries produced in Europe such as the anonymous twelfth-century Glossarium Latino-Arabicum, the thirteenth-century Vocabulista in Arabico, and Antonius Giggeius's 1632 Milan publication Thesaurus linguae arabicae, which was based predominantly on al-Fayruzabadi's al-Qamus al-Muhit Tarikh al-Turath al-Arabi….

For each Arabic philologist and lexicographer, the work provides biographical notices, primary and secondary reference sources, titles of extant and lost works, and detailed cataloguing of surviving manuscripts across world libraries, recording physical conditions, leaf counts, dates of transcription, and library shelfmarks, as well as published editions Ilm al-Lugha al-Arabiya.