نامه فرهنگستان
سال سیزدهم شماره 2 (زمستان 1392)

Abu Muhammad Abd Allāh Ibn Ja‘far Ibn Durustōya Marzbān-e Farsi-e Fasā’i (Fasawi) (258-347 A.H.) was one of the great Arabic scholars who wrote in many different fields. But most of his writings were treatises on the Arabic syntax. His biography has been recorded in many biographies of Arabic scholars. In his biographies of the scholars of the Baṣra School of thought, Ibn-e-Nadīm attributes more than forty volumes to him, most of which reportedly remained unfinished. In the margins on the pages of his edition of Ibn-e-Nadīm’s Kitāb al-Fihrist, Ayman Fu’ād Sayyid cites the sources and references that report on Ibn Durustōya’s biography and works. From the forty volumes attributed to him, we are today left with only two titles: one is Kitāb al-kitāb which has so far been published twice, and the other is Tha‘lab’s Taṣḥīḥ al-faṣīḥ. Abu al-‘Abbās Yahyā bin Tha‘lab (Died:291 A.H.) was one of the Imams (leaders) at the Kufa school of thought and a scholar on syntax and philology. He was the author of Kitāb al-faṣīḥ, the book on which Ibn Durustōya wrote his treatise Taṣḥīḥ al-faṣīḥ. In this volume, Ibn Durustōya provides explanations on the lemmatized items in Tha‘lab’s book while he also refers to slang pronunciations of both the Arabic and Arabicized entries in that book. These citations indicate that the words in question, which are still in common use today, date back to the early post-Islamic centuries. The slang pronunciations of Arabicized words also fully conform to their original Persian pronunciations. Moreover, he cites the original Persian words and their pronunciations throughout his book; this is also of high importance for the history of the Persian language. The 1419/1998 edition of Taṣḥīḥ al-faṣīḥ’s published in Cairo was based on the manuscript available at Arif Hikmet Library in Madina and edited by Muḥammad Badawī Makhtūn with contributions by Ramaḍān ‘Abd al- Tawwāb. In what follows in this article, the materials on the Persian language as well as the Persian words and pronunciations reported in this work will be quoted following the page order of the edition used here. Before that, however, some more general points of interest will be raised. It must also be noted in passing that Ibn Durustōya came from Fasa in Fars Province, Iran; hence, some of the pronunciations he has reported belong to the dialects in his region of origin.

Each speaker’s linguistic and pragmatic competences represent his/her whole set of linguistic knowledge. Lexicographers have of long been striving to present this knowledge in a general dictionary for various prescriptive, descriptive, or educational purposes. Yet, they have succeeded in compiling dictionaries that represent only the speakers’ linguistic competence rather than their complete knowledge of the language. Thus, neither have lexicographers completely succeeded in their efforts to describe the language of interest, nor have dictionaries, as educational tools, presented all the linguistic knowledge and information that speakers need to know when they speak a language. Most lexicographers confess that lexicography will not be possible without due heed to the pragmatic aspects of the language. This is because communication among the users of a language necessarily requires the use of the language appropriate to the context and to the settings in which communication occurs. It is common experience that, as a result of failure on the speaker’s part to observe all the pragmatic constraints involved, many a sentence that are otherwise (phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, and semantically) grammatical fail to convey to the hearer (reader) the message that was originally meant by the speaker (writer). The present article will investigate the pragmatic information that need to be included in general dictionaries and will further explore the methods and limitations in recording such data.

The present article puts forth the following recommendations/suggestions for compiling bilingual dictionaries of Persian:1. Entries Compilers of bilingual dictionaries cannot but use the lexical items already collected in monolingual dictionaries. However, most monolingual dictionaries contain fake entries from the Dasātir Book as well as distorted, misspelled, dialectal, or fabricated entries plus entries with no true etymological origins. To ensure an archaic Persian word is attested in old texts, a number of electronic sources such as ‘Dorj’, ‘Geography of the Islamic World’, or ‘History of Islamic Iran’ can be consulted. These packages include many ancient Persian texts and are equipped with userfriendly search engines.2. Compounds (Subentry)Zgusta proposes a number of criteria for identifying multi-word lexical units. Most bilingual dictionaries of Persian fail to base their subentry selectionand lemmatization on these criteria.3. Location of the compoundsThe best way to place a compound is right under the headword entry of thatcompound.4. Subentries repeated in different placesIn bilingual dictionaries of Persian, most subentries have been repeated in two or more places since they were not originally placed under their headword entry. In most cases, different definitions (meanings) are given for these subentries repeated in different places.5. Compounds wrongly recorded In Persian dictionaries, compound verbs and phrasal verbs should be cited in their infinitive forms rather than in their conjugated forms.6. Sources for collecting lexical units Compilers of bilingual dictionaries of Persian should base their work on one or more authorized dictionaries and borrow entries and subentries from these authorized sources.7. Phonological transcription- In dictionaries which already provide phonological transcriptions, it will be redundant to use Arabic diacritics (such as shaddah, sukūn, restricted alif, fathah, dammah, kasrah).- In certain Latinate and some rare Persian words, a special sequence of a vowel followed by a consonant is observed that must be transcribed as -uvor -uw-.8. Separation and integration of homophones and homographs - Homophonous and homographic words that share no common roots should be included as independent entries.

This article investigates the criteria for including pictorial illustrations in dictionaries and their theoretical foundations, the number and details of illustrations used, appropriate locations where pictures should be inserted, and the diagnostics for pictorial materials required. For these purposes, the factors involved in using pictorial materials such as the target audience, the temporal setting of publication, whether the dictionary is monolingual or bilingual, and finally the method of using such materials are explored in three example dictionaries.