Maritime Terminology of the Saudi Arabian Red Sea Coast

Long ago, I looked up some Arabic words in the mainstream lexica, but I failed to find many of them. By the time, I noticed that most of researchers and second language learners have encountered this dilemma, because of the lack of appropriate resources. This situation was exacerbated by the fact that Arabic lexicographers concentrated their efforts mainly to document Classical Arabic, at the same time, they ignored a substantial body of words including material cultural terminology.§This book aims to understand this phenomenon by examining a sample of Red Sea maritime terminology to prove the lack of such terms in Arabic lexica. The author creates a model of approach to help modern researchers to understand the meanings of such non-documented terms. Investigating spoken maritime terms gives this book the strength of synchronic and diachronic studies because terms were analysed against Arabic lexica from the classical ages until modern times.§The book also aims to raise the awareness about this novel area of linguistic studies especially in the Red Sea region. No studies were conducted to investigate and document such endangered corpus, which is vanishing by the death of old sailors and fishermen, who used these terms in the days of sail and before the oil boom of 1960s. Therefore, something should be done to save this rich linguistic heritage, and this study could be the beginning.