Semantic Fields between Al-Khwārazmī and Al- Jorjānī Ibrahim Abdel-Moaty Metwaly

This study highlights the ways of dealing with the semantic fields of the scientific terms in Arabic heritage in two different and important books that are dedicated to scientific terms: Mafātīḥ Al-῾olūm by Al-Khwārazmī, and Al-Ta῾rifāt by Al- Jorjānī.
The researcher uses the descriptive approach to reveal the similarities and differences between the two books in defining the terms.
It was clear that Al-Khwārazmī was interested in categorizing the terms based on their semantic fields, as he divided each term into two articles: the first is for Al-Shari’a and other Arabic sciences, the second is for foreign sciences. Then, he discusses in detail the chapters and parts that the two articles include. Moreover, he focused, in the introduction of his book, on clarifying that the term’s meaning differs when it shifts from a semantic field to another and he provided some examples to clarify this point.
Al- Jorjānī’s approach was different from Al-Khwārazmī’s approach, as most of the terms mentioned in his book, Al-Ta῾rifāt, belong to theoretical sciences. He was not concerned with the semantic fields of all the terms, but he only cared about ordering them alphabetically. Therefore, we rarely see the names of the semantic fields in the book.
Al- Jorjānī was mostly concerned with Islamic terms, other sciences and disciplines, such as philosophy, logic, speech and psychology, and the Arabic language terms respectively.