Linguistic Criticism in Lexicons of the Fourth Hijri Century

Author Name: Amer Baheer Asmeer Al-Hiyali

It has been established that most of those who wrote about linguistic criticism among Arabs in the early centuries did not address linguistic criticism in Arabic lexicons. For this reason, this book came to fill this gap and study linguistic criticism within the scope of the Arabic lexicon. My choice of lexicons from the fourth Hijri century was not random but a conscious and studied choice: because I found that the common concern of their authors was to verify the correct usage of words and to purify the language.

This study is divided into an introduction and four chapters. In the introduction, I focused on the impact of lexicons on the language purification movement. In the first chapter, I discussed the reference of this criticism, represented by attitudes, individuals, and books. The second chapter was dedicated to the terminology of linguistic criticism, which I divided into two groups: terms for acceptance and others for rejection. Then, in the third chapter, I discussed the criteria for correctness and error. As for the fourth chapter, I discussed issues of linguistic criticism, which are: criticism of the elite, criticism of the public, evaluation of Arabic dialects, and preference between them. The importance of this book lies in it being a virgin topic that has not been addressed – to the best of my knowledge – with such comprehensiveness and specialization. One of the characteristics of my work in it is that the critical material in the lexicons was directed to expressive fields other than poetry, while the attention of ancient critics had focused on poetry more than anything else.