Lexicography, the art and craft of dictionary-making, is as old as writing. Since its very early stages several thousands of years ago, it has helped to serve basically the every-day needs of written communication among individuals in communities speaking different languages or different varieties of the same language. Two general approaches are distinguished in the craft of dictionary-making: the semasiological and the onomasiological. The former is represented by usually-alphabetical dictionaries as such, i.e. their being inventories of the lexicon, while the latter is manifested in thesauruses. English and Arabic have made use of both approaches in the preparation of their dictionaries, each having a distinct aim ahead. Within the confines of each language, an approach may yield various trends as to, for instance, the arrangement of entries within a dictionary. The present paper aims at distinguishing the various trends in writing dictionaries in both English and Arabic. By so doing, it is hoped that the bases on which variation has relied are arrived at in order to provide the appropriate explanations of how and why differences have followed. To achieve this aim, an expository critical account of the approaches to the compilation of monolingual dictionaries in English and Arabic is presented; reference to bi-lingual dictionaries is going to be made appropriately, however. These trends, or schools, within each approach followed a certain system in compiling its representative dictionaries.
This paper investigates the collocational use of irreversible food binomials in the lexicons of English (UK) and Arabic (Iraq), their word-order motivations, cultural background, and how they compare. Data consisted in sixteen pairs in English, versus fifteen in Arabic. Data analysis has shown their word order is largely motivated by logical sequencing of precedence; the semantically bigger or better item comes first and the phonologically longer word goes last. These apply in a cline of decreasing functionality: logical form first, semantic importance second, phonological form last. In competition, the member higher in this cline wins first membership. While the entries in each list clearly reflect culturally preferred food meals in the UK
... Show MoreThis paper studies the demonstratives as deictic expressions in Standard Arabic and English by outlining their phonological, syntactic and semantic properties in the two languages. On the basis of the outcome of this outline, a contrastive study of the linguistic properties of this group of deictic expressions in the two languages is conducted next. The aim is to find out what generalizations could be made from the results of this contrastive study.
The present study examines the main points of differences in the subject of greetings between the English language and the Arabic language. From the review of the related literature on greetings in both languages, it is found that Arabic greeting formulas are more elaborate than the English greetings, because of the differences in the social customs and the Arabic traditions and the Arabic culture. It is also found that Arabic greetings carry a religious meaning basing on the Islamic principle of “the same or more so”, which might lead to untranslatable loopholes when rendered in English.
DBN Rashid, Rimak International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2020
The paper is concerned with a linguistic analysis of the blurbs, used in advertising English and Arabic novels. A blurb is an advertising persuasive text, written on the back cover of a book. Blurbs of selected novels are chosen as representative examples. The selected blurbs belong to two languages, Arabic and English. The paper aims at studying the linguistic features that are characteristic of blurbs as advertising texts and making a sort of comparison between English blurbs and Arabic ones. A linguistic analysis on four levels is presented. Blurbs are tackled from the point of view of four linguistic disciplines that are phonology, syntax, semantics and discourse analysis. A reference is made to the linguistic featu
... Show Moreفقدان الزوج يعد حدثًا يغير حياة النساء، مما يضطرهن إلى السباحة في عالم جديد مليء بالحزن والوحدة والشكوك. مع الوقت، تطورت طريقة تصوير الأرامل بشكل كبير تعكس التغييرات في الآراء والقيم الثقافية. تُمثل الأرامل تقليديًا بأنهن ضعيفات ومعتمدات في الأدب، مستندة إلى افتراض أنهن يفتقدن الدعم المالي بعد وفاة شركائهن. ومع ذلك، فإن هذا التصوير لا يعترف بتأثير الأرملة على الرفاهية والهوية الشخصية. يسعى هذا النص إلى
... Show MoreKnowledge of literature is an integral part of learning any spoken language. Learning literature expands the learner’s ability to understand the language studied. The field of literature is wide and cannot be limited to poems. It includes the etiquettes of a language and its environment, customs, and traditions etc. The Arabic language is among the languages with a centuries old history. It has achieved remarkable record accomplishments since the pre-Islamic era through to the present. This development is clear evidence of the great importance of literature in the revival of the Arabic language through different eras. As such, in Malaysia and other non-Arabic speaking countries, literature is taught in most schools, institutions and un
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