A Comparative Lexical Study of Qur?anic Arabic

THE QUR'ANIC TEXT 49
vocabulary. Indeed, indigenous commentators and philologists had
already perceived the distinction between words retaining the same
meaning throughout the Qur'an and words acquiring different meanings
(wuguh and nazcfir) in certain passages. 104 Thus, for example, the
verb 'anita is classified under C2—'to fall into misfortune', E2—'to
commit a crime', and Fl—'to perish'. Moreover, an effort has been
made to adhere, as much as possible, to the Qur'anic meaning of
lexical items. It should be stressed that the classifications only reflect
the semantic fields of the items making up the lexical corpus in this
work and do not cover the whole lexicon of the Qur'an. The order
of the classifications is alphabetical and does not reflect any semantic
priority (e.g. C2, E2, Fl). The multiple classification approach
resulted in the 1,717 lexical items yielding a total of 2,256 classifications.
Table 1 below illustrates:
col. 1: semantic field
col. 2: number of lexical items
col. 3: percentage of the total
col. 4: the semantic fields by order of priority (descending order)
Table 1
1
Al
A2
A3
A4
Bl
B2
B3
B4
B5
B6
2
49
58
44
54
205
11
99
114
30
85
36
375
3
Versteegh 1997: 86-87.
2.17%
2.57%
1.95%
2.39%
9.08% - 5th.
0.49%
4.39%
5.05%
1.33%
3.77%
1.6%
16.63% - 3rd.
4.
C2
C3
F2
B3
F7
C4
B2
F4
Cl
B5
Fl
Gl
F5
E4