Lexical Index to al-Farrā’’s Maʽānī l-Qur’ān

This paper presents the outlines of a computer-based linguistic and history of linguistics project the author started in 1988/89 at the University of Oxford. The principal aim of the project is to make an Arabic text available in a specially prepared computerized form for further analysis. The chosen corpus is al-Farrā’’s Maʽānī l-Qur’ān written shortly before the death of the author in the 810s. The whole text of the 1955-1972 Cairo edition, amounting to 1207 pages and more than a quarter of a million words in three volumes, was put into the VAX computer of the Oxford Computing Centre. A special transliteration used by Alan Jones was used for the input which, on the one hand permits the use of the Oxford Concordance Programme (OCP) in the analysis of the text, and, on the other hand, if there is a desire to see the result of any analysis in print, it can be reconverted into Arabic.