The Scientific Council of the Doha Historical Dictionary of Arabic has held its third meeting on Thursday and Friday 15-16 May 2014 in Doha, with the attendance of the General Director of ACRPS Dr. Azmi Bishara, with an agenda including the third version of phase I of the bibliography extending to the end of the second Hijri century, the text corpus, the structure of lexical entries, and some organizational issues.
Dr. Ramzy Baalbaky, the head of the scientific council, inaugurated the meeting with a welcome speech thanking the members for their attendance and care, praising Dr. Dr. Azmi Bishara for his keen support to the Doha Historical Dictionary of Arabic, and mentioning the continuous coordination and communication between the executive board and the scientific council. He then passed the word to Dr. Dr. Azmi Bishara who stated that the project is now radiating and widening its circle of attraction through a widespread Arabic realization of its importance and appreciation to the courage of those who endeavored it. He called for adding more memberes to the scientific council in order to carry out the scientific tasks required by the project, and also for benefiting from the scientific capacities outside the the scientific council. He proclaimed that a number of experts from some Arabic countries will participate in the lexico-semantic analysis of the project, and that the organizational as well as the scientific work are both proceeding well.
Later, Dr. Azeddine Bouchikhi, the executive manager of the Doha Historical Dictionary of Arabic, made a concise presentation listing the achievements realized so far including:
- Crafting the third version of the bibliography – phase I covering the poems, books, speeches, dialogues, correspondances, comments, wills, proverbs, and wisdoms, in a documented and chronologically ordered format. The preparation of such material has considered the notes made by the members of the scientific council, the work of Dr. Hasan Al-Tayyan on specifying the optimal version of printed poetry collections, and the work of Dr. Ibrahim Bin Murad on assigning the death dates of some poets with unknown death dates.
- Building the third version of the text corpus – phase I according to the updated documents and documentation in the bibliography.
- Buidling a software platform for lexico-semantic analysis that provides the analyst with the capabilities of building the lexical entires of words and terms encountered in the text corpus, determining their contextual senses, and selecting their citations with the user and source of each.
- Experimenting with a software lemmatizer that links the Arabic roots to their derivatives according to the text corpus, and working on its development in order to respond to the needs of the dictionary.
Next, a detailed presentation on the third version of the bibliography – phase I has been made by the deputy executive manager Dr. Rachid Belhabib, where he explained the different phases the bibliography has undergone until it got into its current shape, he showed in detail the followed criteria esp. regarding the preparation of documents containing prose, and he also showed how the remarks made by the members of the scientific coumcil regarding these criteria have been taken into consideration.
Next to him, the deputy executive manager Dr. Muhammed Al-Obaidi presented an applied example on the experimental analysis of the root "Qaf Daad Yaa", where he emphasized the importance of lexico-semantic analysis, its steps, and then went through the lexical entries of this exemplar root pursuing their historical evolution. Dr. Al-Obaidi also discussed the most serious issues challenging the lexico-semantic analysis esp. the definition of meaning and the arrangement, and proposed the different possible arrangements of the lexical entries in the dictionary.
The discussions among the council members then led to a number of scientific decisions regarding the structure of the lexical entry, the arrangement of its internal elements, the determinants of lexical definitions, and the citations.
The council decided also to form a specialized committee for etymology, and agreed on the date of its fourth meeting and its agenda. The council finally praised the serious persistent work done by the executive board, and its achievements in that short time, after approximately one year of officially launching the Doha Historical Dictionary of Arabic on May 25th, 2013.