Aspects of medieval lexicography - Between Jonah IBN Janah's Kitab al-'usul and Joseph Kaspi's Šaršot Keseph

This article compares two medieval Hebrew dictionaries: Jonah ibn Janah's comprehensive Kitab al-'Usul, the first complete scientific dictionary of the Hebrew language (first half of the 11th century), and Joseph Kaspi's logical-philosophical Šaršot Keseph (1280-1345). One of the most significant issues in Kaspi's dictionary, which distinguishes it from that of Ibn Jana?, is his treatment of homonyms. Kaspi determined a rule that in his view, as derived from the theory of logic, it is impossible for a word to have a number of different meanings unrelated to the same root. Jonah ibn Janah, on the other hand, often offered a large number of meanings for a single root. This article discusses the treatment of homonyms by the two lexicographers and the different semantic interpretations that resulted. The goal of this article is to present the readers with the fascinating semantic and philological differences between the two aforementioned dictionaries and to thereby reveal the very different methodologies employed in Hebrew lexicography in the Middle Ages - the classic method that analyzes the lexicographic findings, and the one influenced by theoretical principles of logic that preceded the analysis of the lexicographic inventory.