The Dictionary Maqāyīs Al-Luġah, By Ahmed Ibnu Fāris: A Book Review

Abstract

This article aims to shed light on one of the most prominent Arabic dictionaries, which took great care of the linguistic root and defining its general meaning, which was represented in the dictionary of Maqāyīs Al-Luġah "Standards of Language" by Ibnu Fāris, and what is the methodology of Ibnu Fāris in his dictionary. This study also gave a glimpse of what is contained in the dictionary of standards of language is one of linguistic ideas and phenomena that Ibnu Fāris used to define the general semantic roots and origins around which other meanings revolve. This study relied on the descriptive approach to describe the linguistic phenomena extracted from the dictionary of language standards as a selected material for describing the phenomenon in the view of Ibnu Fāris. Where this study showed that the dictionary of language standards contains many linguistic phenomena, the most important of which are the phenomena of derivation and blending, which include phonetic phenomena such as diphthong, substitution, and Rotation, and other semantic phenomena, such as the formation of new meanings as a result of the use of diacritical signs, movements, morphological scale, simile, and metaphor. And what contradicts these phenomena and these measurement tools is considered abnormal by Ibnu Fāris, and it is called the phenomenon of semantic anomaly. This study concluded that dictionaries are not isolated from linguistic phenomena, and that Ibnu Fāris relied on some phenomena to verify the validity of the roots and the validity of the meanings used in them, by measuring the meanings and finding the connection between those meanings. Otherwise they are considered abnormal from the semantic origin subject to this root, the matter which Ibnu Fāris was unique in the rooting of the science of Arabic lexical industry and tried to establish its rules, albeit indirectly.