A Greek and Arab Lexicon (GALex): Materials for a Dictionary of the Medieval Translations from Greek into Arabic, fascicles 2 and 3.

• Author: Versteegh, Kees

Edited by GERHARD ENDRESS and DIMITRI GUTAS. Handbook of Oriental Studies, The Near and Middle East, vol. 11. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1994, 1995. Pp. 97223; pp. 225-320. HF1 80, $45.75 per fascicle.

In her review of the first fascicle of the lexicon under review here, Remke Kruk (1994) emphasizes the usefulness of this project for those who work on editions of translations from Greek into Arabic. The corpus used by the editors of the lexicon includes those Arabic translations of Greek texts for which the original Greek text has been preserved and whose edition contains a glossary. Most of the included texts deal with the natural sciences and medicine; logic is represented by only a few texts.

It is difficult to overestimate the value of this lexicographical collection. It is much more than just a list of equivalents of Greek words in Arabic translations. As a rule, the Arabic indigenous lexicographers did not include in their dictionaries words from the corpus of scientific and translated texts. They derived their lexicon mainly from the Qur an, poetry, and the idealized linguistic behavior of the Bedouin Arabs. In the present collection we find many terms not included in the usual dictionaries. To mention just a few examples from the second and third fascicle, the words uqhuwanun "white camomile, marjoram," usnatun "treemoss," muta allih "deified," are not found in the Lisan al- Arab, nor are such scientific nisbas as ta lifi, alami, or abstract terms such as ilahiyyatun. Other terms do appear in the classical dictionaries, but only in a general sense, e.g., mu addin, "transmitting," which in the translations is used specifically for the transmission of sound and smell.

The lexicon contains, however, much more. Some of the simpler lemmata provide us with lexical information that is not found anywhere else. There are, for instance, extensive lemmata dealing with grammatical and syntactic means that were used by the translators to translate the divergent structure of the Greek original: ida, illa, alladi. On these lemmata the compilers of the lexicon have expended a lot of work. The lemma on ida with its many examples of conditional clauses is a welcome addition to the materials used by Peled (1992) in his analysis of the conditional sentence in Classical Arabic, based on a corpus of mainly hadit and sira texts. What I found particularly interesting is the frequency of the construction fa- ida kana hada ala hada, used to translate both Greek ei...