Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ √LḤN seems to be an exclusively Ar root, not attested elsewhere in Sem nor outside of it.
▪ The basic meaning of Ar √LḤN is probably *‘to deviate (from the normal), modulate, modify’. While an interpretation of this ‘deviation’ in a positive sense seems to be quite old (↗laḥn ‘melody’), the negative sense is believed to have become prevalent after the early Arab conquests only, when the language came to be normed and standardized by the grammarians (*‘deviation from the normal > abnormal way of speaking, modulation in language > to make grammatical mistakes, blunders’).
▪ In the sense of ‘bad, incorrect Arabic, gibberish; grammatical mistake, blunder’ (WKAS), the vn. laḥn became one of the antonyms of ↗ʔiʕrāb and ↗faṣāḥaẗ.
▪ For laḥn as one of the many so-called ʔaḍdād (words that can take contradictory meanings) cf. individual entry on ↗laḥn.

hist

▪ eC7 laḥn (deviation, crookedness, twisting) Q 47:30 wa-la-taʕrifanna-hum fī laḥni ’l-qawli ‘but you will know them by [the] twisting of [their] speech’
▪ For ClassAr laḥana, WKAS gives: ‘to speak bad, incorrect Arabic, to talk gibberish, to make (a) grammatical error(s); †to drop a hint (li- to), give (li¬- s.o.) a veiled hint’.
▪ Fück1950 finds the earliest attestation for the meaning ‘to speak ungrammatical Arabic’ in a verse by an unknown poet from c. 630 CE.¹

1. layta ’l-ʔamīru ʔaṭāʕa-nī fa-šafaytu-hū / min kulli man yukfī ’l-qaṣīda wa-yalḥanu ‘if only the emir had followed my advice (lit., obeyed me), so I had cured him / from (the contact with) all those (poetasters) who make incorrect rhymes and mistakes in their speech’, quoted in Fück1950: 135.

cogn

–

disc

▪ In ClassAr, laḥn is sometimes identified with ↗luġaẗ. According to Ayoub, this comes »from an archaic meaning of laḥn prior to the setting up of a linguistic norm. […] With the implementation of the norm, laḥn, which in its pre-classical acceptation meant a detour of speech in a positive sense [my emphasis—S.G.], came to express a negative ‘deviation’, a speech error.« Thus, in classical usage luġaẗ »represents legitimate linguistic variation, prior to the ‘corruption of the language’ that according to the sources appeared in the 1st century A.H.«, while laḥn came to mean »illegitimate linguistic change, “the diverging [in speech] from the correct form” (Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān 4013), as a result of ‘corruption of the language’.« This shift of meaning from a positive to a negative sense was accompanied by a transfer of the field of reference from the spoken to the written. Originally, in the pre-classical use of the term, »laḥn seems to have denoted the wrong use of language in speaking, since it is linked to voice and sound.« Later, however, it came to refer to mistakes in the written language, demonstrating the status acquired over nearly a century by the ʕarabiyya as a literary language, essentially linked to writing.«¹
▪ Ayoub’s description matches that of Fück1950 who also believed that the preponderance of the value ‘grammatical mistake’ which in ClassAr overgrew most of the others (except ‘melody’), can be explained as a phenomenon of the period of futūḥ, when the Arabs conquered the territories of non-Arabic-speaking peoples and the knowledge of Arabic became a precondition of being accepted into the elites of the new ‘Islamicate’ society; in this period, Fück says, Arabs were confronted, for the first time on a larger scale, with groups of people trying to speak and write Arabic but still making a number of mistakes.
▪ Some lexicographers counted laḥn with its values a. al-ḫaṭaʔ, b. al-tawriyaẗ, and c. al-fiṭnaẗ among the words that can take contradictory meanings (ʔaḍdād).²

1. Georgine Ayoub, art. “Laḥn”, in: EALL. 2. Fück, ibid. – Cf. also Muḥ. Ḥus. ʔĀl Yāsīn, Ṯalāṯaẗ nuṣūṣ fī ’l-ʔaḍdād, [n.p.]: distributed by ʕĀlam al-Kutub, 1996: 18. – This idea has made its way even into Kazimirski’s dictionary, where we find, among the many values of laḥn, also these two: »4. Faute de prononciation, barbarisme, cacophonie, et 5. contr. Prononciation fort agréable et belle, belle accentuation des mots.«

west

–

deriv

► ʔalḥana, vb. IV, 1 = laḥana; 2 to mispronounce, esp. while reading the Koran aloud: Š-stem, caus. (of the original *‘to deviate’, i.e., lit. *‘to make deviate, sc. from correct pronunciation’), or denom. from laḥn.
► ^BP#3656laḥn, pl. ʔalḥān, luḥūn, n., 1 ↗laḥn; 2 grammatical mistake, solecism, barbarism: vn. I.
► malḥūn, adj., 1 incorrect, ungrammatical (language); 2 (maġr.) poetry in colloquial language: PP I. – Cf. also an earlier value, as given by Kazimirski: ^†‘agréable à l’oreille, mélodieux’, from ↗laḥn in the sense of ^†‘pleasant modulation, melody, tune’.

For other values attached to the same root, cf. ↗laḥn, ↗laḥin, and, for the whole picture, ↗LḤN.

Permanent link

http://www2.hf.uio.no/common/apps/permlink/permlink.php?app=polyglotta&context=record&uid=da5237ed-06ff-11ee-937a-005056a97067

Choose languages

Choose images, etc.

Choose languages

Choose display