Talk:خ ت م

Is form III real?

This article lists form III for this root, but neither Lane nor Wehr gives it. Should it really be here? Alarichall (talk) 18:32, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

@Alarichall: Wehr is a Modern Standard Arabic dictionary and hence only gives forms encountered in texts or confirmed with informants beginning from the 20th century, unless it borrows from older dictionaries for a perceived need of completion.

Lane is an overly picky translation of a limited selection of manuscripts of medieval Arabic dictionaries, in the beginning intending to exclude rarer forms and roots to append them in a volume which never appeared; you find an afterview of his dictionary at the end of Ullmann, Manfred (1959–2009) Wörterbuch der klassischen arabischen Sprache (in German), Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, pages 2463–2466, which you know how to get.

While it may be tedious to check the medieval Arabic dictionaries the whole lot of which is now available on a click and a Persian tradition of which the original page creator presumably used, to transfer an unsectionalized and often erratic verbiage into modern Western concepts and terms, the whole lot of the Arabic dictionaries has been translated reasonably succinct in Freytag, Georg (1830–1837) “خ ت م”, in Lexicon arabico-latinum praesertim ex Djeuharii Firuzabadiique et aliorum Arabum operibus adhibitis Golii quoque et aliorum libris confectum‎^[1] (in Latin), Halle: C. A. Schwetschke, and then again in Kazimirski, Albin de Biberstein (1860) “خ ت م”, in Dictionnaire arabe-français contenant toutes les racines de la langue arabe, leurs dérivés, tant dans l’idiome vulgaire que dans l’idiome littéral, ainsi que les dialectes d’Alger et de Maroc‎^[2] (in French), Paris: Maisonneuve et C^ie, to this day affording much higher profit and preferment in the exposure of the Arabic wordhoard. In other words Lane is overrated in the English-speaking world, though his glosses be exploitable, for both Modern and Classical Arabic you have to rely on two German works, the Freytag and the Wehr which has gotten an internet-age reedition in 2020, or as you see I like to look in Corriente, Federico, Pereira, Christophe, Vicente, Angeles, editors (2017), Dictionnaire du faisceau dialectal arabe andalou. Perspectives phraséologiques et étymologiques (in French), Berlin: De Gruyter, →ISBN which is an underrated dictionary of all attestations of Andalusian usage, and there are perhaps other French works which I had the luxury to ignore and are listed in its bibliography and that of Behnstedt, Peter, Woidich, Manfred (2010) Wortatlas der arabischen Dialekte – Band I: Mensch, Natur, Fauna und Flora (Handbook of Oriental Studies – Handbuch der Orientalistik; 100) (in German), Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, →DOI, →ISBN.

But I affirm with positive knowledge that you are shortcutting Arabic studies with these two English dictionary translations. The actual scientific findings will be somewhere between the lines of an overall view of the translations. (Unlike Wikipedia, Wiktionary loves synthesis to achieve internal and external consistency, so it is licit to try—it was always unlikely to us how Wikipedia has a principle of things being sourced by English-language material.) Fay Freak (talk) 02:28, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks ever so much for this guidance, Fay Freak! Wiktionary is fortunate to have such helpful editors. (And thanks for the edits on this article.) You're right that I've been too reliant on Anglophone sources; I shall adapt my working henceforth :-) (Though I am also wary of how 'ghost words' that don't really exist can get into dictionaries and then keep being repeated by lexicographers; my understanding is that Wehr made a big effort to get rid of forms cited in classical sources that don't really exist in MSA.) Alarichall (talk) 14:54, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

@Alarichall: This is true about the Wehr dictionary but they surely could not always resist taking over information from mostly Freytag, due to ambiguity of the script (when you don’t know the prefix conjugation vowel of the base stem, or don’t even know whether it is form I, form II or form IV, or perhaps you find a verbal noun and add a now only theoretical base stem, or find a broken plural and somehow need to lemmatize it and take the old suggestion), but it nonetheless has met overall satisfactory completion of its mission. The 2020 edition should naturally have been double-checked even more but I have not tried it yet.

People in the Anglophone-Orientalist Digital-Native Twitter bubble might complain about the lack about etymological dictionaries or attestation-based dictionaries but in {{R:xaa:ELA|II}} there is at least one rough one you all academics can access, apart from the fact that we are on the ting here on Wiktionary, I know your position about making use of Wikipedia, and if any one of those people added some dozens of occurrences he encountered and cited the interesting articles he is reading for some etymologies we would be much farther here, so don’t miss an opportunity to scold futile arguments on the internet!

Whereas, only after recognizing what is available, one should be concerned about the primary sources of the Corriente circle, of course the end goal of studies, being distributed only obscurely and neither via digital libraries nor even available on the market. Bloody Mary’s invention of “copyright”, devised to stunt reformation efforts (there is a two-volume book in German demonstrating the pernicious effects and original and continuous ill intent of copyright published ten years ago, Geschichte und Wesen des Urheberrechts, I have to tell you for the informational fundaments of your already found convictions, since presumably no one has done so), has erased the later two thirds of the twentieth century from current consciousness, the most productive decades of science (before people have been distracted by addictive activities in multimedia).

Generally the ghost word problem is also conceptualized in an Anglocentric fashion: I have not discerned any problem of manaman making up wordlists like, for the most eye-striking instances, genders and unattested phobias (so easy to make in English, but not anymore even in the other Germanic languages or not so fast in any other European language), but, while Armenian has a similar result for different reasons than English, in Arabic the situation is not the lack of words but wrong specification, people transmitting the material faithfully but nonetheless inaccurately and sloppily.

This vacuum of primary material has only occasionally has been circumvented by Google Books’s help as on شُلُنْبَر (šulunbar), but you see the grand English conspiracy of the millennium, readily taken over and extended by various fascists (1934 Goebbels extended the copyright term from 30 to 50 as the first country, 1965 it went from 50 to 70 in Germany as the first country again, and the world followed suit as if there were no favouritism, too few had the experience to understand the implications of these information distribution rules and the voice to counter this regulatory capture), slanting the picture of this language, which could have been as well represented as English, due to comparable length of history and speaker count.

With some experience in the vocabulary you are wary for تَصْحِيف (taṣḥīf): there are deformations of real words, and the medieval lexicographers, already, did a lot of guesswork in words they did not understand, like قُطْرُب (quṭrub) where I had to fix the ridiculous English Wikipedia article citing the glosses of medieval dictionaries which are approximations to be used with caution, and of course if plant names are described references are also followed too credulously — I think I have done for them the best job so far on Wiktionary —, and for anatomy or pathology the like, Wehr failed to define كَلَف (kalaf) as I have shown by the quote there and Talk:كلف, while on the other and hand the Wehr dictionary has missed words used currently no less than anciently like إِنْفَحَة (ʔinfaḥa) just because of generalist outlook.

Corriente & Co. and Ullmann were at least aware of the taṣḥīf situation. In the former you can make some conclusions about the likelihood of correctness if you see that a word is only added from a single location (as thought aloud on خوشه), and the latter has been very explicit and knowledgeable in his treatises about where something is attested and letters are exchanged, and definitely cleared thereby some confusions as in the example on بَخَعَ (baḵaʕa) (who would have informed you rightly about this verb, had you ever encountered it?). As already hinted, he has made in his lifetime a complete classical Arabic dictionary for ك (k) and ل (l) (so we know how much work Wiktionary seeks, half a lifetime of a college of thirty full-time people?), and there are treatises lingering in the deep web.

This is all not to deny that for a majority of vocabulary mentioned in medieval sources we are in want of uses, due to the digitization situation, but to show how differently demonstrable or verisimile ghost words look (for the bulk the question where it can be found used is open). There is this peculiar fact that Arabic printing (notwithstanding a few unsuccessful Ottoman attempts in the 18th century) was only kickstarted when Napoléon conquered Egypt, and over the course of the 19th century there are only editions of mainstream Arabic (and Persian etc.) stuff in both the Near East and the West, while the philologically interesting uninteresting mass is found in editions within the time still under copyright and not properly searchable, so we do the old method of linearly reading and occasionaly citing printed works, or sometimes one could avail oneself by religious corpora or this papyrus database or now another Graeco-Arabic one, but often I was restricted to lazily copy mainstream works passed around the interwebs (in such terrible formats) like Avicenna or Ibn al-Bayṭār to quote a plant-name, you know the ting. The internet is not coming to its potential, only through subversion. Fay Freak (talk) 17:29, 6 January 2022 (UTC)