Word, World and Lexicon:
The Case of the Arabic Names of the Lion
Friday, February 23
7:30 pm
CUNY Graduate Center
Room 4406
The Case of the Arabic Names of the Lion
Friday, February 23
7:30 pm
CUNY Graduate Center
Room 4406
The project of lexicography is to catalogue the semantic
resources of language. In so doing, it serves a collateral function of
classifying the contents of the world—especially where thematic organization
(and not alphabetic order) is its structuring principle, as is the case with
much of Arabic lexicography in its seminal Early Abbasid period (9th-10th
centuries CE). The severally-repeated feat of cataloguing all the Arabic
epithets and names for lion is the
occasion for my talk about applications of pre-modern lexicography in cultural
studies, with
special focus on the disciplinary margins where natural history and language
science overlap, and the semiotics of the lion in patterns of interspecies interaction.
David Larsen is a scholar and translator of Classical Arabic
texts. Last year, his translation of the Names
of the Lion by Ibn Khālawayh (d. 980 CE) was released in a new edition by
Wave Books. His Ph.D. in Comparative Literature is from U.C. Berkeley, and he
is currently a Clinical Professor of Liberal Studies at NYU. His translation
blog may be consulted at http://paintedlantern.blogspot.com/.
