Diccionarios bilingües de lenguas semíticas

Abstract

Bilingual dictionaries of Semitic languages, especially those dedicated to the Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic languages, have left a deep mark over time in Spanish-speaking universities. This is partly due to the long tradition of bilingual lexicography in the Spanish-speaking world. Socio-religious contact, especially historically, between speakers of Spanish and speakers of Semitic languages is another factor. The dictionaries of the various Semitic languages played a relevant role in disciplines such as biblical and Islamic studies, in Hebrew-Aramaic and Arabic respectively, and also in the historiographic field, as in the case of Al-Andalus and even of the Ancient Near East. The lexicographer's work has been especially fruitful and productive, for example, in the religious initiatives, but also in works for teaching and research. In recent decades we have the best Arabic-Spanish and Spanish-Arabic bilingual dictionaries as described in the study, also having a huge impact on the study of Semitic lexicography in Spanish and its interesting applications in the field of studies of etymologies, historical linguistics and dialectology. Future developments in this lexicographical field must take into account the progress made in recent years. These advances, which are really considerable in Spanish, make it possible to compile a series of specialized dictionaries on various fields: jurisprudence, medicine, botany, etc. With them, inter alia, we will be able to reconstruct in the near future the processes of knowledge transfer carried out throughout the Middle Ages, and even during the Renaissance, from Arabic to Latin and then to European languages. Another aspect of great relevance is the development of digital humanities in their various applications, including lexical ones. In this sense, the technological possibilities for designing and building lexical tools or for compiling dictionaries, both with communicative purposes, are certainly attractive, as well as necessary nowadays. One example is its application in translation tools, spectacularly useful and worthwhile. In this sense, the construction of terminology search engines, both direct and inverse, in bilingual dictionaries will be an invaluable aid.