Federico Corriente Córdoba Books

A detailed scientific description of the Andalusi Arabic dialect bundle did not exist until recent times, although the correct understanding of some of its texts bears heavily on many momentous conclusions drawn by contemporary scholars about the extent and depth of cultural interaction between the Arabs and the West. After many years of work on the grammar of this variety of Neo-Arabic, and having produced accurate editions of its materials, the author now undertakes the task of establishing its lexicon, both synchronically and diachronically, by listing words and idioms and trying to provide the etyma of most items. This volume will be useful to students of Arabic dialectology and also to those concerned with any kind of literature produced in Al-Andalus, as well as to Romance scholars who may find the solution to many an etymological riddle here.

Lexical borrowing is the living proof of impact of languages and cultures on each other, even when there are ethnical or ideological differences darkening or preventing acknowledgment of these facts, not only by common people, but even by established scholars unable nevertheless to free themselves from feelings current in their milieus. This circumstance has not helped much with a thorough and minute evaluation of the impact of Arabic and related loanwords during the Middle Ages on the languages of Western Europe, although almost everybody knows that the so-called Arabo-Islamic culture, which is a handy and common misnomer, owes little to the Arabian Peninsula and even less to Islam as a religion, being a blend of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Iranian, Indian and Greek-Latin heritages. A deeper acquaintance with those loanwords and semantic calques, obtainable from a reference work like this dictionary, will cast new light on the merits of civilisation in Islamic lands, in which illustrated princes learned how to separate ideology from science and power, following the way away from the Dark Ages towards Renaissance and Enlightenment.

Detailed accounts of the lexical constituent of any language, to which the grammatical array of rules is added in order to produce correct utterances, are a must in applied linguistic description, as only they allow the thorough retrieval of information contained therein. In the case of ‘dead’ languages or dialects, works of this nature are even more necessary, as there is no possibility of elliciting information from natives. This is the case of Andalusi Arabic, practised in the Iberian Peninsula between the eighth and seventeenth centuries and a vehicle of an interesting folk literature, in prose and poetry, as well as of some legal deeds and personal letters with historical allusions of great value. These materials have been surveyed since the nineteenth and mainly during the twentieth century; however, the interest for such studies appears to have abated in recent decades, while a definitive assessment of their contribution to linguistics, literature and history has not yet been produced. Therefore, this dictionary will be helpful to scholars working on those fields from both the viewpoints of Western European and Western Islamic studies.

Andalusi Arabic is not only the Arabic dialect of which we have the earliest relatively extensive records providing basic information for the study of mainly, though not exclusively, Western Neo-Arabic, but also the spoken language of the Southern and for centuries most advanced half of the Iberian Peninsula, which had a considerable impact, most often not sufficiently gauged and surveyed by Western scholars, on the development of all kinds of Medieval and Modern culture and science. The present manual describes the different grammatical levels of this language, phonemics, morphology and syntax, in addition to the main features of its mixed lexicon and provides some text samples of diverse periods and locations, plus the usual indices and technical data. As the fourth survey of this nature by the same author since 1977, prompted by awareness of a certain lack of interest in a subject which was by no means exhausted and fully mastered, it contains the results of several decades of untiring endeavours and minute analysis of facts detected not only in Arabic records, but also hidden in the rich array of related witnesses hidden in the Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula.

Volume 1 of the Encyclopédie Linguistique d’Al-Andalus deals with the phonology, morphology and syntax of Andalusi Arabic as well as the principal traits of its vocabulary, comparing Andalusi Arabic with the varieties of Arabic spoken in Morocco and Libya. The volume examines the Arabic, Berber and Romance influence on this dialect and presents both a selection of texts from different periods and an extensive bibliography.