A Descriptive and Analytical Study of the Impact of Ibn Fāris — the Linguist — on the Dictionaries of al-Ṣaghānī: al-ʿAbāb al-Zākher and al-Lubāb al-Fākher

Abstract

In the name of Allah, and all praise is due to Him. May peace and blessings be upon the Messenger of Allah, his family, his companions, and those who follow them. To proceed:

Ibn Fāris is renowned for his theory of semantic derivation in Arabic, whereby he traced numerous words back to a single underlying meaning—or occasionally to multiple related semantic roots—through careful etymological analysis grounded in meaning rather than merely in form. He also developed a distinct approach to words composed of more than three root letters. In such cases, he often interpreted them as results of lexical blending—that is, formed from the fusion of two or more distinct words. When such a compositional origin could not be established, he would instead analyze the word as stemming from a triliteral root, identifying the additional letters as non-root elements, and interpreting the word's semantic core after removing those affixes.

This section of the study examines what al-Ṣaghānī transmitted from Ibn Fāris in this domain, highlighting numerous examples of words that Ibn Fāris regarded as containing one or more extra letters. These examples demonstrate the clear influence of his semantic root theory on al-Ṣaghānī’s lexicographical work in al-ʿAbbāb al-Zākhir.