Books and manuscripts of The Bakken

philosophical and scientific studies, with medicine especially well represented, but the work's usefulness will not be limited to these areas. Endress and Gutas have registered every word in most of the texts they have included; their Lexicon is thus not only a dictionary of technical and scientific vocabulary, but covers ordinary discourse and literary language as well. In this regard it is very significant that many Greek words have been found which, viewed within the context of the Arabic translation movement, prove to bear meanings either unattested or poorly attested in the standard lexica of Liddell and Scott for Classical Greek and Lampe for Patristic usage. It must also be stressed that this work is of great importance to the fixing of Greek texts and their Arabic translations. The editors have frequently found cases where readings in the published editions of both Greek and Arabic texts can be emended or improved; these cases are clearly indicated in the main body of the Lexicon, and are listed separately in Parts D (Greek variants) and E (Arabic). Endress and Gutas stress the provisional and incomplete character of their enterprise. The absence of a word or meaning from the finished Lexicon, for example, will not mean that such a word or meaning appears nowhere in any extant source, and the range of usage for a given word attested in the work may not be exhaustive. On the other hand, the editors are perhaps overly modest. The first fascicle of 96 pages extends to the Arabic root '-kh-r, i.e. through about the first one per cent of the potential range of Arabic vocabulary. One of course cannot take this calculation too literally, but it does serve to indicate the enormous scale of the project as envisaged. While completeness may be desirable in principle, its achievement is not always practicable in terms of the available materials, or even a worthwhile end in terms of the time, labour, and resources required to attain it. Those who do not expect to benefit from a work completable in a hundred years will welcome the editors' sound judgement in the conception of this work, as well as appreciate the keen insight, solid scholarship, and hard work evident throughout it. There can be no doubt that their Greek and Arabic Lexicon will prove to be an authoritative reference aid indispensable to Graeco-Arabic studies, and extremely valuable in numerous adjacent fields …