Kitab al-'Ayn

Al-Farahidi introduces the dictionary with an outline of the phonetics of Arabic. The format he adopted for the dictionary consisted of twenty-six books, a book for every letter, with weak letters combined as a single book; the number of chapters of each book accords with the number of radicals, The introduction to volume I contains the phonotactic rules of the Arabic root system, where consonants are classified according to properties of vocalisation, point of articulation, and common distributional characteristics. Al-Farahidi groups consonants according to their vocalisation characteristics: • From the throat: Ayn, Hāʾ, Khāʾ, Ḥāʾ, Ghayn • From the soft palate: Kāf, Qāf • From the palate: Ṣād, Ḍād, Jīm • From the teeth and tip of the tongue: Shīn, Sīn, Zāy • From the prepalate: Ṭāʾ, Tāʾ, Dāl • From the gums: Ẓāʾ, Thāʾ, Ḏāl • From the apex of the tongue: Lām, Nūn, Rāʾ • From the lips: Fāʾ, Bāʾ, Mīm • From the palate with the emission of air: Yāʾ, Wāw, ʾAlif, Hamzah ==History==

Al-Farahidi's manuscript, originally held in a library of the Tahirid dynasty, was returned to Basra in 862, or 863CE, seventy years after his death, when a northeast Persian bookseller sold it for fifty dinars. Some few copies were made available for commercial sale, although the work remained rare through much of the Middle Ages and despite being in circulation in al-Andalus in 914/915CE, it was not until its discovery by the Iraqi priest and friar Anastase-Marie al-Karmali in 1914 that it was reintroduced into the West. In the modern era, the book has been printed by Maktabah Al Hilal, having been reviewed by Dr. Mahdi al Makhzūmi and Dr. Ibrāhim Al Samirā'ì in eight volumes. The dictionary (alphabetically arranged) is available in Arabic in a four volume edition published in 2003 by Dar al-Kitab al-'Alamiyya () and available online. All subsequent lexicographic works in Arabic are based on al-Farahidi's dictionary, and it is said that al-Farahidi's Kitab al-Ayn did for lexicography what his student Sibawayh's al-Kitab () did for grammar. though modern scholarship has attributed this to jealousy in the part of later linguists who have found themselves in al-Farahidi's shadow. The work caused later controversy as well. Ibn Duraid, who wrote the second comprehensive Arabic dictionary ever, was accused by his contemporary Niftawayh of simply plagiarizing al-Farahidi's work. ==Methodology==

Al-Farahidi tried to rationalize the empirical practice of lexicography in al-Ayn, explicitly referring to the calculation of arrangements and combinations in order to exhaustively enumerate all words in Arabic. According to al-Farahidi's theory, what is known as the Arabic language is merely the phonetically realized part of the entire possible language. The various combinations of roots are reckoned by al-Farahidi by the arrangement r to r with 1 rn = r! (nr) with n being the number of letters in the Semitic alphabet. Al-Farahidi's theory and calculation are now found in the writings of most lexicographers. ==Citations==