Corso di laurea magistrale in
Lingue dell'Asia e dell'Africa
per la comunicazione e la cooperazione internazionale

Arabo I, II, III annualità or equivalent level. Fair knowledge and skills in English.

Developing student's learning skills and ability to make appropriate methodological judgments and choices when accessing the written literary production in Arabic, with particular reference to its diachronic dimension.

Knowledge and understanding of Arabic technical literature, with particular reference to lexicography.

Translation skills, i.e., applying knowledge and understanding, as illustrated immediately above, in the process of translation from Classical Arabic into Italian (Classical Arabic being intended as the Arabic variety that represents a diachronically preceding phase of Modern Standard Arabic).

The course lasts a total of 54 academic hours. Teaching is organized in the form of traditional lessons. The teaching approach is based on the philological method, which focuses both on the written texts in which the language variety under consideration is attested to, as well as on their sociohistorical context and chronological succession (i.e., their historical development).

The exam programme consists of the textual corpus examined during this course as well as on some selected secondary sources related to it (see Recommended texts and bibliography). Learning will be assessed through a compulsory oral exam, which is organized into two parts: firstly, an interview based on the course topics, with the aim of assessing students' learning skills and ability to make appropriate methodological judgments concerning the course topics; secondly, a translation from Classical Arabic into Italian of some passages drawn from the aforesaid texts, with the aim of assessing students' ability to apply their knowledge and understanding related to Classical Arabic.

Attendance to the native speaker's lectures is not mandatory but strongly recommended. Students are kindly requested to contact the native-speaker lecturer for further information concerning his lecture programme and the related exam modalities.

This course covers several interrelated topics of Arabic lexicography, namely etymology, protohistory and genealogy. It examines these topics as dealt with in the lexicographical literature in Classical Arabic, which can be subdivided into two main genres: onomasiological and semasiological dictionaries. However, further texts of lexicographical character are also taken into account whenever relevant. This course focuses on the dictionary lemmata that explain the meanings of ethnonyms (e.g., Arabs) or eponyms (e.g., Ya'rub), as it is precisely in this kind of lemmata that etymological, protohistorical and genealogical matters manifest themselves clearly. 

Exam-related:

- primary source material drawn from lexicographical works written in Classical Arabic, in the form of excerpts, and available on the teacher's download page Materiale Didattico;

- theoretical background material, available on the teacher's download page Materiale Didattico.