WEEK 9: SUMMARY AND REFLECTION ON LEXICOGRAPHY

SUMMARY ON LEXICOGRAPHY from afiqah rosa khadijah awatif

REFLECTION ON LEXICOGRAPHY

Lexicography concerns with the editing, compiling, writing or making of a dictionary or also known as the principles and practices of dictionary making and linguist whose specific expertise in writing dictionaries is known as Lexicographer. There are two related fields; which are Practical lexicography which deals with art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries and Theoretical lexicography which involves with the scholarly discipline of analyzing and describing the semantic, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships within the lexicon (vocabulary) of a language. Lexicography is very important as it uses corpora to come out with dictionaries as well as grammar books. This is related to the previous part of our lesson where we learned about corpus linguistics and we knew that Lexicography is actually one of many linguistics branches that make use of corpus. 

We deduce that corpus linguistics play a vital role in producing dictionaries and grammar books as linguists must choose the most appropriate data from the corpus that reflect the most current, reliable, and relevant information for the production. We infer that dictionaries and grammar books are essential in language learning as learners must have referred to dictionaries for their vocabulary building and grammar books for the rules of the new language they are learning. As language evolves, dictionaries and grammar books also must be up to date so that learners will catch up with the progress of the language as well and use the language learned appropriately. We believe that Lexicography is an important field of study as it leads to the improvement of currently available dictionaries and creation of new dictionaries which is crucial for language learning as bilingualism or multilingualism are a common phenomenon nowadays. Development of new dictionaries in many other languages will be enormous assist for learners to learn new languages.    

Today, Islamic studies are taught and learnt through the medium of English language in addition to Arabic language. This gives opportunity for many Muslims that could not understand Arabic well but fluent in English instead to master Islamic studies as well. This can be seen in International Islamic University Malaysia where it offers Islamic Revealed Knowledge courses in English. The problem lies where certain Islamic terms are translated or being Romanized but the meaning given in dictionaries does not reflect Islamic canon at all. As English dictionaries are mostly produced by non-Muslims, there are a lot of misinterpretations of Islamic terms or certain words are given bias connotations. 

For example, halal in Islam means any actions, things, food and drinks that are permissible by Allah (s.w.t). However, Oxford Dictionary (2005) defines halal as meat from an animal that has been killed according to Muslim law and Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2008) describes halal as meat from an animal that has been killed in the way that is demanded by Islamic law, or someone who sells this meat. This shows that these dictionaries just define halal in term of meat, contrast with Islam which includes everything whether it is an action, food, drinks and anything. We feel that Muslims should engage in dictionary making as many Islamic words need correct interpretation that connote the Islamic values and increase the credibility of Islamic English. 

References

Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. (3^rd Ed.). (2008). Cambridge University Press: New York

Oxford Dictionary. (2^nd Ed.). (2005). Oxford University Press: New York