A Research Guide to Middle Eastern Studies: Language Resources

Dictionaries

Ejtaal (Arabic Almanac)

An online database of over 30 Arabic dictionaries, including the golden standards like Hans Wehr, Lane's Lexicon, and Steingass,  to Quranic dictionaries, and some regional ones that include Arabic-to-French, Arabic-to Urdu, and many others. The interface itself is clunky and visually dated, but its info is unsurpassed. You can hide results from dictionaries that don't you don't find useful, which is also a plus.

Glossarium Græco-Arabicum

Makes available the files of a lexical project, intended to open up the lexicon of the mediæval Arabic translations from the Greek. It contains images of the file cards (ca. 80,000) which have not yet been published in the analytical reference dictionary A Greek and Arabic Lexicon (Leiden: Brill, 1992ff.), and comprises Arabic roots from the letter jîm to the end of the Arabic alphabet. The database provides search facilities for Greek words, Arabic words and roots, as well as the authors and titles of the source texts.

Print Grammars at Penn

Karen Ryding's Arabic grammar

The most comprehensive grammar for Modern Arabic, but be aware that Classical Arabic has tons of exceptions. For Classical, see...

Thackston's Intro to Koranic and Classical Arabic 

An elementary-level grammar of standard classical Arabic, the literary norm of the Arabic language.

Online Resources

Quranic Arabic Corpus

An annotated linguistic resource which shows the Arabic grammar, syntax, and morphology for each word in the Holy Quran. The corpus provides three levels of analysis: morphological annotation, a syntactic treebank, and a semantic ontology.

Perseus Arabic Collection 

Buckwalter Arabic Wordlist, various Quran translations, Salmoné Advanced Learners' Arabic-English Dictionary

Quranic Translitation Search Engine 

Spell it out as it sounds. From Islamicity.

Dictionaries

Steingass' Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary

Steingass, Francis Joseph. A comprehensive Persian-English dictionary, including the Arabic words and phrases to be met with in Persian literature. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1892.

Dekhoda Dictionary

The largest comprehensive Persian dictionary ever published, comprising 16 volumes, from Tehran University Press

Vazehyab 

A collection of Persian dictionaries, including Persian lexicons, dictionaries for various dialects, and several bilingual dictionaries (English-Persian, Arabic-Persian, Persian-English, and Persian-Arabic).

Grammars

Thackston's Introduction to Persian

Thackston, W. M. An Introduction to Persian. Rev. 4th ed. Bethesda, MD: Ibex Publishers, 2009.

Online Sources

Dar al-Masnavi

Dar-al-masnavi.org provides translations of and information about the Masnavi and Divan of Rumi.

Ganjoor

A searchable database of written works by the major authors of Persian Literature up until the 20th c., including short bios of each author.

Dictionaries

Osmanlıca Sözlükler (Searchable selection of Ottoman dictionaries)

Osmanlıca-Türkçe Sözlük

Kubbealti Lugati

Seslisözluk (Online English, Turkish, and Multilingual dictionary with 20+ million words and idioms).

LexiQamus 

An Ottoman word-solver for illegible script, which runs all possibilities through 16 different Ottoman dictionaries, including Redhouse and Şemseddin Sami among many others. Lexiqamus will also give alternate possibilities for missing dots and voweling one finds in many pre-modern manuscripts. Penn patrons have unlimited access when using a Penn proxy or computer on campus.

Meninski's Lexicon Arabico-Persico-Turcicum
A historical dictionary that is useful for early modernists and Ottomanists in particular. Definitions in Latin.

Meninski, Franciszek, 1623-1698. Thesaurus linguarum orientalium Turcicae-Arabicae-Persicae =Lexicon Turcico-Arabico-Persico / Franciscus a Mesgnien Meninski ; mit einer Einleitung und mit einem turkischen Wortindex von Stanislaw Stachowski ; sowie einem Vorwort von Mehmet Olmez. Istanbul: Simurg, 2000.
6 volumes.

Grammars

Lewis’ Turkish Grammar

Lewis, Geoffrey L. Turkish Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.

Other resources

Ottoman Text Edition Project, Ottoman Text Archive Project, Ottoman Historical Dictionary

“A cooperative international project employing computer technology and the resources of the World Wide Web to make transcribed Ottoman texts and resources for understanding Ottoman texts broadly accessible to international audiences...jointly sponsored by the University of Washington in Seattle and Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.”

Paleography

General Intro to Arabo-Persian Script Paleography

• Course on paleography by Jan Just Witkahm 

• "Scripts." In D François Déroche, et al. Islamic Codicology: an Introduction to the Study of Manuscripts in Arabic Script (London : Al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2006): 205-224. 

• "Scripts and hands," "Letterforms (allographs)," and the articles for the various scripts i.e. "Naskh script," "Nasta’liq script," "Ruqʻah script," etc. In Adam Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers, Leiden: Brill, 2009 

• Sijpesteijn, Petra. "Palaeography." In Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, Ed. Kees Versteegh (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2008): vol. 3, 513-524 

Arabic

• Grohmann, Adolf. Arabische Paläographie, I Teil. Wien: H. Böhlau, 1967. 

• ———. Arabische Paläographie, II Teil, Das Schriftwesen, die Lapidarschrift. Wien : Hermann Böhlaus Nachf., 1971. (Hatcher Graduate AS 142 .V662 v.94 pt.2)

• "K̲h̲aṭṭ" In Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition (EI2)

Persian

• Reading Nasta'liq. Hanaway, William L. and Brian Spooner. Reading Nasta'liq: Persian and Urdu Hands from 1500 to the Present. Second and revised edition. Costa Mesa, CA : Mazda Publishers Inc., 2007 

Ottoman

• Osmanlı Vesikalarını Okumaya GirişEminoğlu, Mehmet. Osmanlı Vesikalarını Okumaya Giriş. İlâveli 2. baskı. Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1992.
• LexiQamus An Ottoman word-solver for illegible script, which runs all possibilities through 16 different Ottoman dictionaries. Lexiqamus will also give alternate possibilities for missing dots and voweling one finds in many pre-modern manuscripts. Penn patrons have unlimited access when using a Penn proxy or computer on campus.

Epigraphy

• Thesaurus d'epigraphie islamique This large database contains records and photographs of inscriptions produced across the Islamic world until the year 1000 AH. Created by the Max van Berchem Foundation. Requires registration for use.
• Database of Ottoman Inscriptions (DOI) A searchable digital database comprising information about, as well as transliterations and pictures of, all the Turkish, Arabic and Persian architectural inscriptions created in the Ottoman lands during Ottoman times. 
• Monumental Inscriptions of Historic Cairo "The initial aim of this project was to photograph, transcribe and translate the unpublished inscriptions in pre-1800 monuments in Cairo. In addition it was hoped to record those inscriptions, published or not, most in danger of disappearing because of their fragile state of conservation. First of all, it may be asked, why the cut-off point of 1800? The main reason for this was the realization that the anticipated budget and projected time for the project would simply have become too great if, for instance, the inscriptions of 19th century monuments were added to it. The period also coincided with the demise of direct Ottoman rule."

Transliteration Tables (linked below)

Consistency is everything. Find out the preferred method of transliteration for your course, publisher, or advisor and stick with it. Below are links to the transliteration styles most often used by Middle Eastern scholars.

• ALA / Library of Congress Transliteration Tables (comprehensive language list)
• IJMES (International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies) Transliteration Table
• IE (Encyclopaedia Iranica) Transliteration Guide

Penn has cataloged its holdings in Arabic script since 1994. Unicode support makes it possible for users to search and display library catalog records in Arabic script.

Arabic-script fields are created for the following searchable entities:

• Author/Editor

• Title/Alternate titles

• Series Title

• Place of Publication/Publisher

Library of Congress Subject Headings are not translated into non-Roman scripts, although personal or corporate names used as subjects may sometimes be retrievable. For comprehensive results, it may be necessary to perform the search twice; once in the non-Roman script, and the second in transliteration.

To be able to take full advantage of searching and displaying in non-Roman scripts, your Internet browser will have to be configured for display using a Unicode-compatible font. To be able to search, your operating system will have to be capable of typing Arabic.

Arabic script cataloging exists for materials in the following languages

• Arabic

• Persian

• Ottoman Turkish

• Urdu

Books in other Arabic-script languages, e.g. Kurdish, Pushto and Turkic languages written are best searched in transliterated format. Scripts will continue to be added to these records as time and capacity develop.

TIPS FOR SEARCHING IN ARABIC:

• Omit the initial definite article الـ when searching for titles and names of persons for example:
  وصول إلى نهاية الأصول 
  NOT
  الوصول إلى نهاية الأصول

• The zero-width non-joiner nim fasilah (used in Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Kurdish) can be input by typing Alt+0157 on your computer's numeric keypad.

Language Resources for:

• Arabic 

• Persian

• Turkish

• Paleography and Epigraphy 

• Transliteration Guides

• Searching the Library Catalog in Arabic Script