Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic (Richard Slade Harrell Arabic Series) [Paperback]

D. R. Woodhead (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1991 | ISBN-10: 0878402810 | ISBN-13: 978-0878402816 | Edition: 2nd

A reference of Baghdad colloquial Arabic, this volume serves as a comprehensive dictionary for American English speakers. The some 11,200 entries are ordered according to the traditional Arabic root system.

Product Details

• Paperback: 524 pages
• Publisher: Georgetown Univ Pr; 2nd edition (January 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0878402810
• ISBN-13: 978-0878402816
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,724,470 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good dialect dictionary of the Iraqi dialect, January 4, 2004

By 

J. E. S. Leake "sailor and scholar" (Offshore, Persian Gulf) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic (Richard Slade Harrell Arabic Series) (Paperback)

Like all similar dictionaries, this is a dialect dictionary and is a guide to the vocabulary of the informal spoken language, not the written language. If you need a guide to the written language, buy Hans Wehr's Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic instead. Dialect dictionaries are, like this one, normally written in romanized form, as the Arabic script is of little use for pronunciation, especially where vowel qualities and stress are concerned.

Examples:

English ... Written Arabic ... Iraqi Arabic
'book' ... /kitaab/ written <ktb> ... /kitaab/
'dog' ... /kalb/ written <klb> ... /chalb/
'with' ... /ma9a/ written <m9> ... /ma9/ or /wiiya/
'there is' ... (no word in written Arabic) ... /aakuu/

As you can see, some words are the same and could easily be written in Arabic script (/kitaab/), some have letters peculiar to Iraqi (<ch> and <g>), some words are different from written Arabic words (/wiiya/) and some words simply don't have written Arabic forms (/aakuu/). I agree that it would be convenient to have the written Arabic words as well but it would have been a lot of extra work (Van Ess in his now very out-of-date teaching book "The Spoken Arabic of Iraq" does so, and properly doesn't try to force spoken to fit the written Arabic but gives the written forms in Arabic script with vowel marks and the Iraqi colloquial in romanized form, which is a boon to anyone who's studied written Arabic at all).

5 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars For those who plan to be illiterate, buy this dictionary., March 16, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic (Richard Slade Harrell Arabic Series) (Paperback)

As a linguistics student who is also a serious student of Arabic, I disliked the lack of Arabic script. The work is written entirely in English; you're guided with only a few new letters representing sounds that English doesn't have.

While pronunciation guidelines of any kind are helpful, these are only phonemes (individual sounds), not prosodical information (the 'musicality' of sentences), which is just as important if you're only learning to speak. If so, you're better off buying tapes or audio CDs. Print media assist better for learning literacy - but this book won't help you learn that. Badly planned.