Abstrakt
Following water representations in classical Arabic texts is this research main interest, as water signifiers convey memorable experience models within the cultural domain, depending upon the intrinsic interaction between the physical, the mental and the cultural, to represent and think about Nature/Water. In this study, Water is not a mere natural phenomenon, neither an external reality; it is a cultural object.
Culture is embedded in a semiotic network, and the notion of representation focus on man's use of language. As we are immersed in the space of language in the semiotic network, that produces meaning, and within the cultural code, we study the relation between language and culture to fathom the history of water signifiers, as we live within culture and culture lives within us.
This study of Arabic texts reflects the semiotic representations of water element, the concepts, attitudes and the value system these 'texts' imply are codified in watery diction and water imagery. We followed water representations from the iconic and ritual to the figurative: the historical mythical that precipitated deep from the Sumerian and Babylonian Creation, Flood, Fertility, Star sand meteorology myths, to the metaphoric and symbolic in the holly texts: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and rhetorical style of its expressing nature's position.
We contemplated in dictionaries the signifiers of water aspects: how signification originated from contiguity and associations among semantic fields and how this enriches water semantics. Yet, idioms, proverbs, dream interpretation also have thick descriptions and symbolic connotations.
The figurative structures in these texts in addition to literary texts: prose and poetry, resonate mythopoetic imagination. As poetic imagination awakens refreshes and revitalizes the inner images hidden in words, phenomenological perspective supported contemplating the organic nature of materialized images to grasp the moment and the point the human soul and the spirit of water meet.
In addition to the ambivalent nature of water, its flowing, transitory, pliable, drowning, swallowing, absorbing, mixing, putrefying, regenerating, fertilizing, purifying and curing, reflecting knowledge and wisdom, etc.