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.
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.
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: morphologicalannotation, a syntactictreebank, and a semanticontology.
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.
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).
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, 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.
“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.”
"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)
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
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
