Wiktionary:About Arabic


 * See also Category:Arabic language

We use all hamazāt and tāʔ marbūṭa (required reading)
أ and إ at the beginning of a word should or else never be written with plain ا, although words spelled this way can be entered as lemmas with used to redirect to the proper spelling. (This is a job, though.)

When to use initial أ/إ and when to use initial ا? A good test that appeals to native Arabic speakers' intuition here is to attempt to prefix to the word in question. Does the sound of the hamza remain, as with e.g. ? Then the word must be spelled with either أ or إ. Does the sound of the hamza disappear, as in ? Then the word must be spelled with a hamza-less ا.

However, intuition can't be universally relied upon, so the actual codified rules are laid out below. Most words require أ/إ, except the following:
 * 1) The definite article ال.
 * 2) The past tense, imperative, and verbal noun of all verbs whose past tense begins with a kasra in speech. Namely, this refers to all verbs in forms VII and higher, but excludes form IV verbal nouns (such as  and, as the past tense of Form IV begins with the sound of a fatḥa) and borrowed words such as , , and.
 * 3) Imperative verbs in Form I. Verbs of hamza-initial roots are tricky here, because the وَ-test above appears to show that they begin with a hamza; for example, . However, this is only because the prefix causes elision of the initial hamza-less ا, allowing the root's hamza to show itself. The unprefixed word is  and pronounced without the root's hamza due to Arabic's historical haplology of adjacent phonetic glottal stops.
 * 4) All other words that underlyingly start with a two-consonant cluster. This includes but is not limited to the nouns,  and.

Regarding tāʔ marbūṭa: if a word can have, the entry has to use it, not.

ʔiʕrāb – final short vowels and nunation (required reading)
We use the following system for deciding whether to include ʔiʕrāb (final, normally unpronounced short vowels and nunation, e.g. the third-person masculine singular past-tense ending -a or the indefinite nominative singular ending -un) in headwords, which generally follows Hans Wehr:
 * 1) Verbs are shown with full ʔiʕrāb, e.g.  and  rather than # and #.
 * 2) Triptote and diptote nouns, adjectives, and participles (those ending in -un and -u in the indefinite nominative singular, respectively) are normally shown without the ʔiʕrāb, e.g.,  rather than #, #.
 * 3) Duals and sound masculine and feminine plurals omit the ʔiʕrāb, e.g., , ,  rather than #, #, #, #.
 * 4) Other declension types include full ʔiʕrāb, e.g., , . Note that pages for words ending in -in such as  and  are found under e.g.  and  rather than # or #, although the latter may be created as non-lemma (construct state) forms; see the example for.

The same forms are copied into the declension and conjugation tables which automatically display full ʔiʕrāb. For participles and verbal nouns listed in conjugation tables the above rules about ommission of nunation apply. Usage examples may or may not include ʔiʕrāb, depending on how formal they are.

When is manual transliteration needed?
Primarily in the following situations:
 * 1) Whenever a word ending in ة occurs as other than the final word. In that case, the automatic transliteration will render the ending as (t); the manual transliteration should render it as either t or nothing, depending on whether it's in the construct state. Note that manual transliteration is not necessary when the ة is followed by ʔiʕrāb such as ; in such a case the ة will automatically be rendered as t. (Analogous considerations apply to the ending اة, which should be rendered either āt or āh in manual translit.)
 * 2) When a word is preceded by a clitic prefix such as,  or , so that the hyphen can be written. The automatic transliteration will also have problems with some prefixes followed by the definite article, e.g. , rendered as  without manual transliteration, and , which without manual transliteration is rendered , without any transliteration. Note that manual translit is not necessary in words beginning with the definite article, e.g. . Note also that as a special case, words with bi- + definite article are automatically handled correctly, e.g.  or.
 * 3) In borrowed words where written long vowels are pronounced short, e.g. ; where the vowels e, ē, o or ō occur, e.g. ; or where a letter has an unexpected pronunciation such as g, e.g..
 * 4) In the small number of native words not pronounced as spelled, mostly archaic spellings like, , ,.

How the romanization works and some guidelines to it
Arabic transliterations (that is, romanizations) are not words. Arabic entries should only be written in the Arabic script. Normally the transcriptions are automatically and correctly provided by the module ar-translit if you use the correct templates and enter the words with their Arabic vowel signs, but for details how this works:

The Wiktionary romanization system as well as the orthography for Arabic is based on the system found in Hans Wehr A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, 4th edition, with the following modifications:
 * 1) Hamza (ʔ) is always written at the beginning of a word, except when the word begins with an elidable hamza (hamzat al-qaṭʿ).
 * 2) -iyy-, -uww- are used in place of -īy-, -ūw-. This is because automatic transcriptions can be more easily done this way.
 * 3) -ay-, -aw- are used in place of -ai-, -au-.
 * 4) Words with the nisba ending ـِيّ are transcribed with -iyy instead of -ī.
 * 5) The third-person masculine singular object pronoun is always written -hu/-hi with a short vowel (Hans Wehr writes -hū/-hī following a short vowel, -hu/-hi following a long vowel). Again, even though the vowels are technically long as in, there is no way for programs to know this.

Other important points:
 * 1) ة gives a normally, but at in an ʔiḍāfa construction.
 * 2) اة gives āh normally, but āt in an ʔiḍāfa construction.
 * 3) Similarly, آة, as in e.g., gives ʔāh normally, but ʔāt in an ʔiḍāfa construction.
 * 4) Hamzas are always written ʔ regardless of which letter they sit on.
 * 5) Orthographic, silent و and ا occurring at the end of certain words are not transliterated. For example, the third-plural ending ـُوا is transliterated -ū, and the name عَمْرو is transliterated ʿamr in accordance with its pronunciation. (Note that the silence of these letters appears in the Arabic spelling, indicated by the lack of any diacritic over the previous letter when fully vocalized.)
 * 6) Assimilation and elision of the definite article is shown; hence al- may appear as ad-, aṭ-, etc. before a sun letter or as elided l-, d-, ṭ- etc. after a vowel and before a sun letter. (Assimilation and elision is also reflected in fully vocalized Arabic spelling.)
 * 7) The character - is used to separate articles and other clitics (e.g. bi-, wa-, al-, etc.). However, allāh and related forms of this word are written without the hyphen.
 * 8) Stress is not shown, since different dialects have widely varying stress systems and it conveys no distinction whatsoever in Standard Arabic.
 * 9) Capitalisation of proper nouns or beginnings of sentences is dispreferred, e.g.  is transliterated as “al-qāhira”, not “al-Qāhira”.

Rare letters

 * Letters with a limited usage, sometimes used in Arabic texts for words borrowed from other languages and not present in the first layer of Arabic keyboard layouts, may be used in Wiktionary entries according to the usage in the world and are transliterated as follows:


 * پ: p
 * ڤ, ڨ or ڥ: v
 * گ, گ or ݣ: g
 * چ: č
 * ژ: ž
 * ڢ: f
 * ڧ: q

How to welcome new users editing Arabic
may be placed on the talk page of new Arabic-speaking contributors.

I want to link words in other languages to Arabic words
The template should be used in the etymology section of entries in non-Arabic languages whose origin is derived from an Arabic word, and specifically  if the non-Arabic word is known to be directly from Arabic. For example, on the page for the English word djinn, the Etymology section may contain the following code:

Etymology
From. Which produces the following display:


 * From.

The template does the following things:
 * 1) It displays the name of the language of origin;
 * 2) It links to the Wikipedia article about Arabic; and
 * 3) Automatically categorizes the entry in the Category:English terms derived from Arabic  as well as in Category:English terms borrowed from Arabic if  is used.

This template also works for languages other than English if the first parameter is changed. So, for the Spanish word, the Etymology section contains the following code: From, from Biblical Latin , from , from Classical. Which produces the following display:


 * From, from Biblical Latin , from , from Classical.

and classifies the entry in Category:Spanish terms borrowed from Italian, Category:Spanish terms derived from Italian and Category:Spanish terms derived from Arabic.

I want to write اِشْتِقَاقَات
The templates, can and shall be used in Arabic entries. But in Arabic entries you also might like to use for words which Arabic hasn’t loaned but from earlier times if there is evidence for those words in other Semitic languages. Examples of both by and :

From.

Which produces the following display:


 * From.

From.

Which produces the following display:


 * From.

For internal Arabic derivations, that is the majority of lexical entries, provides a simple device to categorize terms assigned to certain roots and, via a sidebox, link index pages for the same roots, that have been imagined internally to afford the pattern by which the word has attained its morphological form.

If you intend to explicitly mention roots in etymologies, categorization of terms by roots and linking to root pages in running text will be covered by. It supports the following two syntaxes:

Belongs to the root.

Belongs to the root.

Both result in:


 * Belongs to the root.

If you use it outside of words which belong to the root, you are supposed to give 1, because else the page gets categorized as in Category:Arabic terms belonging to the root ك و ن. Conversely, to categorize but show nothing it uses 1.

But if you want to show something in the etymology section, you can use specific Arabic templates as found in Category:Arabic etymology templates to mark derivations by classical prefixes and suffixes. In cases of a specific template missing you can fall back to and.

How to show pronunciations
It is easy to add transcriptions in the. Just use  with the vocalized word (and the transcription in tr, if there is an irregular pronunciation).

This way:



It produces



How to add regional pronunciations
The template can be used to display pronunciations in the modern dialects of Arabic. See for example قابلة.

How to display headwords
Numerous templates are available for headwords. For nouns, should be used, or a more specific template like, ,. For verbs, use. For adjectives, use or. See Category:Arabic headword-line templates for more.

How to show inflections
For verb inflections, use. For noun inflections, use ;, and  are handy to show paired nouns. For adjective inflections, use. The template is used to show prepositions with bound pronouns. See for example ل and ب. That’s all. But you can regard Category:Arabic inflection-table templates for an overview.

How to add references to sources
If one feels the need to point to a page or an entry outside Wiktionary, there are the general templates, , available, for which you can regard their documentations with succeess. But they are too fiddly for sources one uses often. Thus Arabic has, as all languages covered by Wiktionary use to, templates for specific sources you might consult. They are listed on Category:Arabic reference templates and here the freedom is taken to describe their contents for users who are not familiar with what is available on the market.

What general dictionaries there are
In Arabic larger dictionaries are unavoidable to check vocalizations, plural forms, verbal nouns, for one naturally does not find all information one needs for an entry when one picks up a word. You usually only need to call the books by a short name and use the parameters page, pages, and entry or 1 (the first positional parameter) for a specific entry – if the entry referred to is different from the pagename.

There is the dictionary of as the standard for the modern literary Arabic language.



For Russian readers:



The online dictionary Al-Maʿānī is fairly comprehensive for Arabic-English:



Al-Maʿānī’s Arabic-Arabic comprehensivity appears largely feeded from the medieval lexica however. You can also check the bulk of nowadays: they are held accessible at Lisaan.net. But this at whole is not templatized because there is a whole lot of dictionaries in it and cryptic URLs. For now there is:



You might want to look into Abit Yaşar Koçak’s short treatise Handbook of Arabic Dictionaries from the year 2002 (Berlin: Hans Schiler) to get an overview what dictionaries there have been.

’s dictionary is thought to be the most complete one for Classical Arabic, translating the medieval Arabic dictionaries, but ends somewhere at the letter ق (¾ of the alphabet) and is somewhat hard to read for its—sometimes spurious—subtile distinctions and referrals to later or former entries.



The Lane is predeceded by Georg Freytag. This one is a clear read – if one reads Latin.



For words assumed to be current before his time one is lucky with ’s dictionary, but it does not sort all by roots and has an increased amount of misprintings:



Wahrmund’s dictionary is like the same as Steingass’s in structure and quality but in German:



For a collection different from Steingass and Wahrmund one can use, which is very similar to Freytag but glosses in French; in fact it seems to be a translation of Freytag though occasionally being more detailed in explanation and rarely including dialectal words.



In French the dictionary of is notable for being evidence-based, for perusing and referring to sources other than the classical dictionaries:



An even more notable, comprehensive attestation-based dictionary, par with, covers only the letters and :



Note that particular lexicographic studies in the series Beiträge zur Lexikographie des Klassischen Arabisch from the milieu of the WKAS are all digitized at the Bavarian academy of sciences.

The WKAS continued one publication which covered only seldom terms beginning with /.



Else it contains a history of Arabic dictionary projects at the end of the volume.

You can use the latest Arabic-Spanish dictionaries well too:



This milieu has also engendered some comprehensive attestation-based Andalusi Arabic dictionaries:





Worth a look are also reliable Yemeni Arabic dictionaries:



And if a word is in the Qurʾān, one can make points with the newest dictionary of Qurʾānic usage (it takes page, pages, entry):



And:



Perhaps one finds something about the frequency of a word in Buckwalter/Parkinson:



A source of a different kind also giving you a picture about frequency is Reverso Context. It can help you modulate the meanings you understand for terms you search by giving equivalent Arabic and English texts matching your search terms, and often it is also the fastest for finding out what words mean. It requires you to be logged in though to load more than a few rows, and with regard to the representativeness you should be wary of texts being gathered from subtitle databases, and of course it technically cannot be cited.

And there are also dictionaries dedicated to verbs which are templatized, the one by Nabil Osman is also frequency-based and takes pursuant to its actual ordering the parameters pages, page and Tafel.



How one can ascribe Arabic words to outside origins
The etymological treatment of the Arabic language is destitute. There is no etymological dictionary for Arabic; etymological studies are scattered across journals and isolated monographs of scope limited by author knowledge. Generally you have to apply your own reason and historical knowledge to determine how Arabic words or their meanings can be attributed.

What topical dictionaries there are
There is the specific field of names for entities in the flora and fauna. This topic is very obscure: It is already an accomplishment to ascribe to Arabic plant or animal names correct meanings if the words aren’t the most current ones – even the meanings given for plants and animal names used in the Qurʾān are often plainly wrong.

A systematic place to get plant names is. From him one can use:



There has been an extensive work on Arabia’s plants with the rare merit of combining botanical exactitude and correct transcription:



One may harvest plant names from the web by searching Arabic words together with taxonomic names, but one must be careful about combined terms that might have been specifically calqued for the purpose of writing Arabic – including, and particularly, plant titles on the Arabic Wikipedia. One must be convinced that plant names circulate not only by force of Wikipedia so they can be created.

A polyglot dictionary notable for botany and reprinted often is:



Worth a read for textiles is:



Cosmetics are comprehensively covered in



For animals and their parts there is:



There is a thick book that has narrowed down the weapon names of the oldest literature:



And there is a dissertation about bakery-related words:



And one can try for household items:



For clothing names:



There are some dictionaries of the administrative area; one might consult them because common usage as well as the general linguistic material might exhibit wild misperceptions about which words are used for specific legal concepts or which meanings terms current in specific administration areas have.



The vocabularies of the churches have been recorded in:



How to make things pretty when working with Arabic
Arabic text in an etymology or usage section should be surrounded with, or the link template , if it is not nested in any other template. Ideally the text should be written fully vocalized, in which case a transliteration will automatically be provided, but a transliteration can also be specified explicitly using tr.

For example, the code *Arabic: ,

or *Arabic: ,

produces the text:
 * Arabic: ,

Using the templates ensures that text written in Arabic script will display correctly on a wider range of computers and font problems will be bypassed, as well as that automatic transliteration will be provided in case of full Arabic vocalization.

In general, one does not need to write Arabic text untemplatized in the English Wiktionary. Either one has it in the headword or inflection templates or in or, or  if one does not need to link nor transliteration, as often in quotations or in image descriptions. The headword can use  and. For example the already adduced entry has the following:



It displays a nice picture with readable Arabic text:


 * Śluza Gdańska Głowa na Szkarpawie - panoramio.jpg

Here the picture of course uses  and not. The general rule for images illustrating lemmata is that they use. Browse to find images. You will most likely find fitting images there if it is possible to illustrate a word with a picture.

As you might find out by browsing Namespace, you can just prefix your queries in the English Wiktionary with  to be directed to Wikimedia Commons for any word you search – typically an English one, but you might search Arabic words to find more prototypical images for Arabic entries. You might also want to glean images from Wikimedia Commons systematically starting from c:Category:Arabic culture.

Monitoring devices applicable to Arabic entries
You can check Category:Arabic entry maintenance to find work for boring hours. You should definitely check into it if you are a native speaker of Arabic, for some of the categories touch points relating to exhaustion of experiential knowledge and references of editors.

You might like a watchlink for Recent changes to Arabic lemmas for ensuring the constant reliability of Wiktionary in Arabic entries.

See User:Erutuon/bad Arabic transliteration for transliterations that need to be corrected, derived from the XML dump.