More on “Arabic Linguistic Terminology in Pedro de Alcalá”

Abstract

Summary The main purpose of this paper is to analyze Spanish linguistic terms and their translations into Arabic in Pedro de Alcalá’s (c.1455–post 1505) Vocabulista arauiga en letra castellana, the first printed missionary Spanish–Arabic dictionary, which appeared together with his Arte para ligeramente saber la lengua arauiga (1505). In 1981 William Cowan published a list of Arabic grammatical and linguistic terms in the grammatical treatise (Arte). As will be demonstrated in the present study, Pedro de Alcalá’s dictionary is an even more important source for the study of Arabic linguistic terms as they circulated among ‘the wise alfaquis’ – the informants of Pedro de Alcalá – in Andalusia and Granada after the Conquest of 1492. In general, Pedro de Alcalá follows the Vocabulario español-latino (c.1495) composed by Antonio de Nebrija (1441/44–1520), but it is obvious that he added a number of linguistic terms in his Vocabulista not found in Nebrija’s work. The Arabic terms have a long history and had been developed for the Arabic language. These terms are analyzed in detail. Some of them are obviously erroneous, others are correct, and often the Arabic technical terms do not correspond (entirely) to the Spanish source entries, since technical terms in both languages have been developed for the description of different languages. This paper contributes to the historiography of descriptive linguistics in early modern Spain and particularly highlights which strategies Pedro de Alcalá followed when translating Graeco-Latin concepts into Arabic.