Al-haraka baraka. A structural and variational analysis of medieval Arabic proverbs and sayings.

Abstract

The present book offers a variationist view on a set of medieval Arabic proverbs. The proverbs were collected from a historical electronic corpus of Arabic containing approx. 420 million words.

The resulting collection contains almost 400 proverbs. The analysis concentrates on structural and variationist properties of the set of proverbs and sayings.

In the appendix, a whole list of the proverbs is offered, including the most common types of variation. This is accompanied by information on their frequency, the first occurrence (century) and in some cases also the source of individual proverbs (the Quran, hadiths).

Keywords

• Arabic language
• proverbs and sayings
• structural and variational analysis
• historical corpus of Arabic