Landmarks of the Language

A summary of a great dictionary of the Arabic language and its literature, compiled by the late Lebanese scholar and man of letters Najib Khalaf after thirty years of effort spent in research, investigation, and verification. Death overtook him before he could bring it out and publish it.

The Sader-Rihani presses have issued a summary of the introduction to this dictionary, which runs to sixty volumes in the format of the great dictionaries, a single volume of which comprises more than a thousand pages. The introduction to this dictionary alone comes to some four thousand pages, containing studies on the body of the language, the origins of words and their measures, and the philosophy of the letters and their composition.

A work such as this is truly an enormous, mighty undertaking, beyond the powers of the great academies. Of it Professor Abd al-Wahhab Azzam said, on the day the Arab Cultural Congress convened in Lebanon in 1947:

"For this treasure to remain unpublished is a crime."

And Khalil Mutran said to its author:
"You have not transported a dictionary — you have transported a mountain."

To bring out such a scholarly monument would be a great service to Arabism and to culture, and we call upon the great institutions of the Arab world to bring this noble idea into being.