A Greek and Arabic Lexicon: Materials for a Dictionary of the Medieval Translations from Greek into Arabic.

AuthorKruk, Remke

Edited by Gerhard Endress and Dimitri Gutas. Handbuch der Orientalistik, 1. Abteilung: Der Nahe und der Mittlere Osten, Bd. 11. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1992. Pp. 96 + 20 (Parts B-F). HF1. 40, $23.

Specialists in the field of Graeco-Arabic studies will not have to be convinced of the need for a dictionary such as the one now embarked on by Endress and Gutas. Scholars who have edited texts, and who know by experience the difficulties in this particular area, will welcome this new tool with enthusiasm. For their particular purposes the information provided in the existing dictionaries is insufficient; thus their usual practice is to supply this information by drawing upon glossaries included in other editions--a tedious and time-consuming job. Moreover, regrettably few editions are provided with Arabic-Greek glossaries, and not all of those available can be used for this particular purpose. To be absolutely sure of a particular Greek/Arabic correspondence one needs to check the context; glossaries that fail to include details such as page and line reference are thus of little avail.

Let me refer to personal experience. The team of scholars in my own department, which is at present working on the critical edition of the medieval Arabic and Latin translations of Aristotle's zoological works, are already making frequent use of the fascicle now published, and hope for a speedy progression of the Lexicon. But it is not only to the needs of this highly specialized class of users that the Lexicon intends to cater. To get an idea of the issues on which this dictionary has information to offer, one only has to read Endress' article on the development of the Arabic philosophical and scientific terminology and idiom in the Grundriss der arabischen Philologie, vol. 3, suppl. (Wiesbaden, 1992), 3-23. To name but two of the issues: tricky questions such as the authorship of translations (which were frequently simply attributed by copyists/booksellers to the most famous, i.e., most salable, translator) can be answered only when sufficient lexicological material is available for comparison; for exact knowledge of the technical vocabulary and idiom of the sciences that developed from the Graeco-Arabic translations one frequently needs to go back to the medieval translations, since in fields other than the exact sciences this vocabulary was seldom consistent.

Intended to benefit by the Lexicon are Greek scholars as well as Arabists, those who focus on the contents...

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