«Dites, mais ne dites pas»: le Taqwīm al-lisān d’Ibn al-Ǧawzī »

This note aims at a brief presentation of the Taqwīm al-Lisān, a relatively little known work of Ibn al-Ǧawzī (d. 597/1200) belonging to the genre laḥn al-ʿāmma. Among the several interesting features of this short treatise the most noteworthy is perhaps the relative originality of the linguistic phenomena described therein. In this paper the Taqwīm al-Lisān is set in the context of linguistic controversies which were a widespread practice among Arab philologists. The usefulness of this kind of literature in relation with the history of the Arabic language is also tentatively assesse