What is the story of Lebanese surnames with ʔabi instead of ʔabu, like ʔabi raʕd? One would hope it's a trace of the genitive “ibn ʔabī raʕd” but that sounds too cool to be true and would imply those names are old as F. @quietstuff.bsky.social

Random notes on the language of al-Kitāb al-ʔaqdas, the Bahāʔi holy scripture, written in literary Arabic in the 2nd half of the 19th century. Ongoing 🧵. (1) nafs is treated as a masculine noun, even though it's feminine in Hebrew and typically in Arabic of course without having a feminine marker.

What are the best takes on the etymology of the Arabic prepositions ladā and ladun? Are they related in some fashion? Is Wiktionary's suggestion of a connection with ליד a possibility or a hallucination?

Is the gemination in Maltese smewwiet ('skies') regular? Is it a literary coinage or a genuine reflex? I wonder if the plural of 'sky' is attested in peripheral Arabic varieties. The only plural I know is samāwāt, which sounds too literary to me that I doubt it was native to my dialect.

The Wikipedia article on the Aramaic Uruk incantation links to the Polish city of Warka (Warkāʔ is the Arabic name of Uruk).

In Levantine Arabic, /w/ (originally 'and') developed this new function: bēt w ᵊštarayna lit. 'house [indefinite] and we bought' = 'we did buy a house [so it isn't a problem any longer]' Works with a definite noun too: əl–bēt w ᵊštaraynā́ lit. 'the house and we bought it' = 'we did buy the house'

what is the tl;dr explanation of the τ in Ἐλισάβετ seeing that it's from אֱלִישֶׁבַע, and is the /a/ etymological and if not then why is it there?

In Maṣlāwi Arabic (Mosul, Iraq), 'mulberry' is apparently tūθ, unlike literary Arabic tūt & other Iraqi dialects tukki. This /θ/ seems to reflect an Aramaic origin with spirantization <tūṯā, so the literary Ar form might perhaps be borrowed from sth else such as Persian or an older Aramaic branch?!

Were Valencia & Murcia pronounced with -ah in Andalusian Arabic? It seems they appear with -at (Balansiy-at- & Murciy-at-) in Classical Arabic poetry from the era. It'd be rather weird to do that with the modern Arabic pronunciation of Valencia in MSA.

Can someone provide a transcription of the lyrics of this NENA-song? It's easy to recognize the obvious cognates based on the Arabic translation, but I miss a lot as I don't know any NENA. The singer has an Iranian Assyrian background, is this the Urmia dialect or another? youtu.be/NdoXWy1EP-M?...

My 6yo niece (German monolingual with good passive Arabic understanding) produces the Levantine Ar feminine ending [e] as [ə], e.g. būmə ('owl') as in Ger. [ˈt͡siːɡə] ('goat'). Kinda funny because Lev Ar speakers do the opposite, saying [ˈt͡siːɡe] when speaking German.

Fun listening to native Dutch speakers butchering final n when speaking German...

I think this Egyptian speaker has pausal glottalization of -VC to -VʔC#, it can be heard in ṭamāṭeʔm# baṭāṭeʔs# ʔalwāʔn# lamūʔn# tōʔm# semseʔm# ħelwīʔn# (I hear it clearer in some than in others). This occurrence is also mentioned for western Syria on map N. 67 of Behnstedt's Sprachatlas von Syrien.

A Moroccan guy once told me he was going to ydīr ssardīn ('to cook sardines'), an odd form to me since it's definite despite not referring to any sardines we were both aware of (in my dialect it must be indefinite). I searched and found the same example (photo). Another instance I hear often is...

For some reason, OpenStreetMap shows the name of the Ethiopian Amhara region in Arabic script (it doesn't do it for countries where the official lang(s) aren't written in it), and it writes it أمحرة instead of typical modern Arabic أمهرة. I'd never realized...

How did šħāl ('how much?') end up as šʕāl in some Algerian dialects? I heard it in a famous Algerian song (that happens to be partially very difficult to understand for me), I saw it initially as شحال in the lyrics but I was hearing ʕ, then I found šʕāl attested in B & W.

Why is Nablus with /b/ in Arabic instead of /f/? Sounds a little surprising, I would've expected it to have entered the lexicon in the stage where foreign P's were still accommodated by Arabic's *p, like other place names.

Bkərrāma, village in Latakia countryside, I suppose the b might be the shortened remnant of the construct state of *bayt (shows up also in several Lebanese villages), folk etymology associates kərrāma with Arabic 'generosity' but the attested Aramaic form karrāmā means vintner.

How did Luxembourgish end up with its vowel of MAT ('with') unlike the related langs?

Fingerprint features of Ugaritic that set it apart from Canaanite, according to D. Sivan. A š-causative can be seen in a few verbs in dialectal Arabic btw: šaqlab ('to turn upside down'). Al-Jallad says these ARB verbs are loans (I assume from Aramaic, which has some?). ARM...

Why is NW Syria considered in „the periphery of the Amorite language area“ here? One can see why Babylonia is, as the Amorite rulers governed Akkadian speakers. But if the Amroites ruled an area including Aleppo, Ebla (after its destruction), Antioch, then who did they rule over?

Regardless of whether חֲמָת is originally a Semitic name or not, did the name enter Arabic before -at/-āt shifted to -ah/-āh? In dialectal Arabic it's always pronounced without /t/. If the /t/ (or the allophonic θ) had persisted in the name AND Arabic had undergone the shift,...

This sounds eerily similar to the BÐR/BZR ('to sow') roots which both exist in Classical Arabic. What if BZR and ZRʕ are indeed ultimately from Canaanite or a Canaanite-like language?

Somewhere in the back of my mind I was assuming Aleppo's name wasn't really Semitic despite its /ħ/ as it's rather northern & so damn old, but lately I looked at Wiki's etymology & it seems plausible it's the good old ĦLB root (nice parallel to LBNN if it referred to the color)?

Question to anyone in my bsky circle who studied some Akkadian: did you use Latin transcriptions only, or did you learn some cuneiform signs (if yes, about how many?)

Here are the locations where Ugaritic alphabetic texts were found, according to Daniel Sivan's 1996 book. (I'm assuming these are texts written in the Ugaritic abjad exclusively?) Were none of those tablets found before the discovery of the site of Ugarit itself?!

What were the Ugaritic scribes thinking when they'd insert Ugaritic words into their Akkadian texts? Did they expect the audience to understand somehow? Can you really do such a thing subconsciously? I'd imagine it's easier to come up with non-idiomatic calques or sth like that.

The current Arabic name of Ugarit's port (mīnt əl-bayḍa) preserves the archaic construction where definiteness is only marked on the adjective, not also on the modified noun. Note that mīnāʔ is m. in literary Ar, but should appear dialectally as mīne, which can be analyzed as...

Funny that the diphthongs were already contracted 3K+ years ago in Ugaritic but survive till the present day in a couple Arabic dialects.

Creative idea for internet linguistics trolls and nutjobs: use the fact that pomegranate is LRMN in Ugaritic to prove that Ugaritic is in fact Arabic with the Arabic definite article.

Sounds affectionate to call Ibiranu a son despite reprimanding him for not sending the gifts, or was it rather degrading? Also, *news flash*, this Akkadian tongue was really such a lingua franca, they were vassals of the Hittites &they'd receive a letter in Akkadian, not Hittite?

Any reasons to think some of the cuneiform tablets were meant to be „classified documents” or was the administrative bureaucracy not that advanced and the whole kingdom would find out?

Why would Ugarit's last king address the King of Alashiya as "my father"?

Sad letter to the pharaoh in Ugarit's last days.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems there's no freely accessible digital archive of Ugaritic tablets, which is so screwed up.

The Hurrians were also in Alalach and Qatna? I was under the impression that was too western for their Siedlungsgebiet.

How much linguistic material (+other artifacts) is buried under the archaeological layers of Aleppo, Mecca, etc. and will never be excavated?

3K+ years ago, some nerd in Ugarit was probably sitting down eating pomegranate or drinking wine while contemplating the differences between Ugaritic and Akkadian or figuring how to say something in Anatolian IE. Some things just never change.

I had no idea the kingdom of Yamḫad (centered around Aleppo) existed (&later Alalaḫ near Antioch, which used to be associated with it). If the rulers & much of the population were Amorite, &they were their own entities, why did they decide to inscribe the Statue of Idrimi...

Pet peeve of mine is seeing every introductory article about Ugarit claiming the current Arabic name is "Rās Šamra"; it's not called that, it's Rās iš-Šimra with the def article. Only French Wikipedia mentions the correct form (Šamra may exist but we actually say Šimra).

Such jussive in Classical Arabic must be introduced by li- or fal-, no? Is this Ugaritic way without an introducing particle the original way?

were Luwian and Hittite extremely intertwined wrt which was spoken where or was there a neat separation? is it possible to determine which of them dominated in a given place at a given time?

This caught my attention when I encountered it in the letter I posted yesterday, I didn't notice the grammatical case issue but I was surprised to see <y> in the construct state when e.g. the 1s nom. pronominal suffix -ī isn't marked orthographically at all.

This pʕn 'foot' thing in Ugaritic sounds so distinctive, whatever happened to pan-Sem rgl? Said to have related forms (with /m/) in Akkadian ('upper thigh') & Hebrew פעם which I only knew in the sense 'one time' but appears literally in Isaiah 37:25 ואחרב בכף פעמי כל יארי מצור

cf. www.jstor.org/stable/41661... as well as "Orthographie und Inhalt im ugaritischen Brief KTU 2.16" in Ugarit Forschungen 18,111-114

Trying to figure how to identify the Ugaritic letters on the tablet. Line 5 is supposed to be ˀugrt. tġrk, the top red rect seems to be 𐎜𐎂𐎗𐎚 (ˀugrt) then the yellow word divider. Line 6 is tšlmk. ˀumy, I assume the bottom red rect is 𐎚𐎌𐎍𐎎𐎋 even though the 2nd letter...

Same northwest-Semitic (Ugaritic + Hebrew) vs Arabic semantic distinction here, but with Ugaritic it has a nicer flavor to me as an Arabic speaker simply because it preserves the ġ. And why does Daniel Sivan say it's the only NWS tongue preserving it when early Hebrew did too?

Re ‘brother‘:

Apparently, 'my brother (nom.)' in Ugaritic was 𐎜𐎃𐎊 ủxy, reflecting ʔuxūya < ʔax-ū-ya instead of ʔax-ī. Very Neo-Arabic of Ugaritic (or very Ugaritic of Neo-Arabic).

any signs of non-native lang usage in the Akkadian texts from Ugarit?