"Shortcomings in the Linguistic Approach Used for Dealing with Foreign Terms in the Contemporary Arabic Dictionaries."

Abstract

This study seeks to uncover the most important shortcomings and pitfalls made by the authors of contemporary Arabic lexicon dictionaries, especially the pioneering ones when dealing with foreign words either the Arabicized or the borrowed ones as revealed in their own dictionaries. Some of these words might be repeated or may only be found in one specific dictionary, which as a result led to some defects in the used linguistic approach. Such defects negatively affected the Arabic language in general and linguistics in particular. Therefore, there was a need to identify the most important shortcomings and mistakes whether made deliberately or non-deliberately. Among these shortcomings and mistakes are the following : mistakes or defects in grouping and ordering the entries of the foreign words, as well as finding out their etymology; mistakes in providing inventive explanations not mentioned before by famous Arab linguists; mistakes in using foreign words and considering them as if they were Arabic words  in terms of morphological derivation and inflection; deficiency in words’ definition and interpretation; finally, using a lot of religious words and terms which seems unnecessary.