The semantic change in arabic words that are mentioned in the book of Silsilat al-Lisan

Abstract

Arabic language learners in the Turkish Republic are basically divided into two sections of students: the students of theology and the students of literature. Arabic language is, usually, taught to these two sections during a preparatory stage throughout a course of Arabic language which uses various books such as "Silsilat al-Lisan". However, as soon as the students finish their preparatory stage, they find themselves surrounded with classical Arabic texts, especially the students of theology, whose study focuses on Holly Quran and as-Sunnah among other many resources that need strong vocabulary inventory that students should acquire through the predatory stage. What students have learnt from modern vocabulary cannot help them in understanding the Classical Arabic texts. On the other hand, the Turkish language has borrowed a great number of Arabic words. It is worth mentioning that some words moved from Arabic to Turkish have changed their meanings to some certain words and expressions in Arabic, but this has resulted in some misunderstanding of meanings of the words by the Turkish students.

The importance of this study lies in that the book of "Silsilat al-Lisan" attracts the attention of the Arabic teachers who teach this book, so they can inform and notify Turkish students about the semantic change happened over the Arabic words throughout history or after their movement to Turkish to make it easier for the students to understand the Arabic texts in spite of the historical variety and make them avoid any misunderstanding that is related to the semantic change.

This study aims to investigate the semantic change of Arabic words in the Book of "Silsilat al-Lisan" and this general objective underlies some sub objectives that can be achieved by answering the questions of the study which are: 1. What is the semantic change? What are its reasons? What are its types? 2. What are the Arabic words that were included in the book of "Silsilat al-Lisan" and semantically changed inside the Arabic language or by the movement into the Turkish language?

In order to answer these questions, the study was divided into two parts: the theoretical part and the practical part. The theoretical part that depended on the inductive approach to the resources that tackled the issue of the semantic change to identify its meaning, reasons and styles. The study redressed some issues that were not in the resources and have been approved. The paper appended each reason and style with many clear examples.

As for the practical part, it was represented by making an induction to all the words semantically changed in the book of "Silsilat al-Lisan". This part was divided into two sections: the semantic change of the Arabic meaning of the Arabic words and the semantic change in the Arabic words moved into the Turkish language in the book of "Silsilat al-Lisan". Throughout the induction and collection process, the study depended on standards and approaches in order to narrow the words down and count them such as the process of approving nouns not verbs because Arabic language is a derivative language and knowing the indication of the noun makes recognizing the function of the verb an easy task. Also, the linguistic borrowing from Arabic to Turkish is usually a "nounal" one. Furthermore, the study was based on the lexical meaning of the word, which is common neither the rhetorical one nor using the private meaning that cannot be confined.

The study resulted that the reasons behind the semantic change are linguistic, social, psychological and cultural. Also, the semantic change of words can take many forms such as narrowing and widening. It counted 180 Arabic words mentioned in the Book of "Silsilat al-Lisan" that had undergone semantic changes. 140 of these words evolved in Arabic itself and 42 words were also evolved after their movement to Turkish. Finally, the study recommended doing many studies about this phenomenon to make it easier to understand classical Arabic and to avoid any misunderstanding.