marvelous quote aside, does anybody know why ‘Arab’ might have been borrowed into Syriac with initial aleph rather than ayin? my first thought is that Greek/Latin are at play, but the CAL notes that ʔarbāy with initial aleph appears only in *later* texts

terribly proud of Benito, and of this little bowl from my hometown (a millennium and a half ago!) i will note that, if i’m not mistaken, the Cañas site is currently underneath a Walmart.

this bit of text on the wall of the Old New Synagogue in Prague (of golem fame) sent me down a rabbit hole involving gematria, Hebrew calendrics and Bohemian Yiddish. a thread

@arabicproverbs.bsky.social, you might appreciate this fragment from the Papyrus Museum in Vienna

Today my translation of al-Dani's Taysir has come out! I hope to write a little bit more about this later, but for now here is a link. And it's Open Access! www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...

Uploaded:

i'm sure you've checked them out, but the excerpts from al-Zaǧǧālī and Alonso del Castillo's collections of proverbs in Corriente's 2013 Andalusi Arabic grammar are really fun yaʕṭí Alláh alfúl liman ma ʕíndu iḍrasáyn 'God gives beans to those who have no teeth'

the plot thickens!! Maltese has the voiced reflex żgħir /zɛjr/, while Andalusi has çogáyar /ṣuġayyar/. Heath reports a mixed distribution in Morocco, with /z/ more frequent in Jewish varieties.

MARIONETTE (A sonnet in amphibrachic tetrameter, which simultaneously employs rules of alliterative verse, alliterating on the first three beats of each line)

i am on vacation, which means that i'm looking at a new language to pick up the basics of. last summer i looked at a little Persian; this winter it's Classical Japanese !

how to not translate the Song of Songs.

one last thought while you guys humor me. Ibn Gabirol doesn’t actually say šəmāyim, but rather šáḥaq, ‘cloud; sky, heaven (by extension)‘, often used after šəmāyim to ramp up intensity, like in Isaiah 45:8. i think the rendering “the heavens” is pretty good as an archaic/poetic turn of phrase

i just read in Sáenz Badillos that the verb ḥ-m-d can mean ‘envy’ in Andalusi Hebrew poetry as well as it's more conventional meaning ‘desire, long for’: does the earth blossom because it envies the sky?

Egyptian Arabic idiom of the day: "to enter like the government" i.e. to barge in angrily دخل دخلة حكومة dakhal dakhlit ḥukūma

i've been mulling this translation over lately, now that I have returned to the awful Granadan winter, and i think it could stand to be reworked (or at least the last two verses) 1/

i'm very amused by this /gilutīn/ ‘guillotine‘ and /galatīn/ ‘gelatin’ near minimal pair from Cairene, carefully distinguished by plene vowel spellings

my home river is the Portugués, here depicted in 1888 by the impressionist painter Francisco Oller. the magnificent kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra) in the picture died in 2021, to much sorrow.

my hot take for parashat shemot: חֲתַ֥ן דָּמִ֖ים לַמּוּלֹֽת is glossing a Midianite (read: Arabic) word with the Hebrew translation. Nobody is a “bridegroom of blood,” it’s a blood-circumcision but she’s using a dialectal word for circumcision

finally, an Analects that feels legible!! (always meant to get into the Chinese classics; life and Arabic got in the way :P)

People will read old newspaper clippings

in my first Classical Arabic class, we had to translate an old joke about Khusraw and an old man planting a date tree. Khusraw asks the old man, "why would you plant a date tree in your old age, knowing you won't live to see it give fruit?"

youtu.be/ceOe0eOgYVA?... i've been talking about Puerto Rican Spanish, which means I have to pull out my favorite video in the world: this interview between Benicio del Toro and Puerto Rican basketball star Raymond Dalmau, who Benicio is fangirling over

youtu.be/ceOe0eOgYVA?... i've been talking about Puerto Rican Spanish, which means I have to pull out my favorite video in the world: this interview between Benicio del Toro and Puerto Rican basketball star Raymond Dalmau, who Benicio is fangirling over

oh shoot, is Levantine zġir, ‘small’, influenced by Aramaic? the voicing and deemphatization always seemed strange to me, but i'm not sure that the distribution works out. (Egyptian at least has ṣuġayyar)

but also there are like. eight of them. 90% of persian "verbs" are just maṣdar kardan/šudan

types of Persian word: very, very Indo-European (barādar, "brother"; sitāra, "star") inexplicable false cognate (bad, "bad"; mēz, "table") learnt it from an Indian takeout menu (murġ, "chicken"; gōšt, "meat")

Lo, Hrodulf the red-nosed reindeer – That beast didn’t have unshiny nostrils! Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in Anglo Saxon meter: allthingslinguistic.com/post/1359368...

"actually there are only two words for horses and it's equus and morin"

(Repost) POV: you've just started reading Genesis 1:2

this was prompted by "Fishing Alone in the Freezing River for Snow," attr. Fan Kuan 范寬 (c. 960 - c.1030): I was planning to use it to illustrate something else, then realized I would have to translate the poem as the caption for it to make any sense

But anyway the thing that has stuck with me about "April is the cruelest month" was something Suzanne Stetkevych pointed out once, which is that in premodern agricultural societies, planting had begun in April but winter stores were running out. So you had to starve while you used seed you could eat

The winter wrote, with ink of rain and showers and shining lightning pen and hand of cloud, a blue and purple letter upon the garden no craftsman in his cunning could devise. So, when the earth desired the heavens’ face, it wrought stars in the linen of its beds. — Solomon ibn Gabirol, tr. mine

realizing that my fuṣḥà is a little all over the place phonologically. i think it's mostly Moroccan (ج [ʒ], a fairly back final /a/), but these days i've had a little Egyptian bleeding in (madrása-type stress).

thought Hebrew qinnāmōn, "cinnamon", was a recent internationalism, but it turns out it's in the Pentateuch! the borrowing's the other way around: Greek κιννάμωμον is a borrowing from Canaanite (Herodotus says Phoenician, Klein says Hebrew).

1 Dec: Lk 2:1: وكان فى تلك الايام خرج امر من قبل قيصر اغسطس ان يعدل الدنيا كلها wa-kāna fī tilka l-ʔayyām ḫaraǧa min qibali Qayṣar ʔAġusṭus ʔamr ʔan yuʕaddala d-dunyā kulluhā 'In these days, a decree was issued by Emperor Augustus that [the number of people of]* the entire world should be measured'

“The orthographic principles followed, in seemingly haphazard permutation, in the writing of Pahlavi, besides the ideographic, include the phonetic (within the limits of the alphabet), the historical, the pseudohistorical, and others so indeterminable as scarcely to merit the name.” - DN Mackenzie

after the de gruyter and brill merger they should combine de gruyter serif and brill to a new font

happy World Linguistics Day from Granada, Spain !!

My uncle's copy of Sefer Yetzirah, acquired so from his friend, has the best inscription of this sort I've ever seen It goes as follows אסור ליקח בלי רשות. ואם תקח, אהפוך אותך לצפרדע.

fun fact: Turkish hoca, "teacher", Arabic xawāǧa, "Westerner" are all borrowings of the Persian xwāja, "lord, gentleman; eunuch" the Persian, Hindustani ojhā, "shaman", and Chinese héshàng "Buddhist monk", all come from the Prakrit word uvajjhāa, "teacher" (← Sanskrit upādhyāya)

Thanks google very useful

is there any variety of Arabic that handles relative clauses ("the man who went to Damascus") and content clauses ("i thought he was drunk") the same way? iirc the division between the two is fuzzy in Hebrew and Aramaic

Classical Arabic is great because you look up some noun like "tomato" and it's like "here is a verb meaning to be or become red and squishy, to be or become ketchupable, to be or become ambiguously fruit and vegetable"

tracked it down! this is from Strich and Jochnowitz's chapter in Brill's "Handbook of Jewish Languages" (ed. Kahn and Rubin, 2016)

16) the best historical pronunciation of Hebrew is the Provençal one, for the sheer audacity of its consonant shifts. sorry, I mean: fe beff hiftorical pronunfiasing of Hebrew iv fe Provençal wung, fokh fe seekh audafity of iff confonanf siff.

For that first verb, cf. Al-Idrīsī describing Gafsa: wa-ahluhā mutabarbirūna wa-aktharuhum yatakallamu bi-l-lughati l-laṭīniyy il-ifrīqiyy "And its people are Berberised, and most of them speak the African Latin language" lughat.blogspot.com/2007/07/berb...

cf. Ibn Šuhayd's "Elegy for Córdoba" (ما في الطلول من الأحبة مخبر), which has the stunning hemistich "tabarbarū wa-taġarrabū wa-tamaṣṣarū" (v. 7), three denominal verbs roughly translating to "they went into exile on the Barbary Coast, in Morocco and in Egypt"

This article contains the longest consonant cluster I've ever come across in a Semitic language other than Moroccan Arabic, from a Hebrew article written in 1897: hit-ašknz-u "they Germanised", a denominal verb from Ashkenaz (which, in this context, meant "Germany")

in some alternate reality King Alfred overboiled his bīeġelas