Pre-Islamic Arabic and Greek! The #Safaitic abecedary we posted earlier this week was far more interesting than originally thought. A close re-reading of the stone revealed the entire Safaitic alphabet in the Greek letter order! See the study here: www.academia.edu/144853577/Al...

Taking suggestions 👇

A short thread on onomastics in Numidian inscriptions (eastern script). Indexes of names in eastern Numidian inscriptions (Chabot 1940, Rebuffat 2018) provide us with an almost ridiculous number of different names. I wondered if this is correct, or if this is due to the messiness of the corpus.

Sanskrit/Tibetan/Tangut quote of the day: Bodhicaryāvatāra 6.10 (ed. Solonin 2025 www.academia.edu/144598049/Bo...)

The Quran displays various arrangements of mysterious, disconnected letters. The magico-sacred aspect of the alphabet stretches far into the pre-Islamic past. This Safaitic text begins with a prayer to Allāt followed by a partial abecedary. Find more: ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions...

Whenever you find yourself annoyed at someone spelling إن شاء الله as إنشاء الله, just remember people have been doing that at least since 1156 AH/1753 CE (the date of this manuscript of the al-Dani's Taysir).

hahaha jk jk... unless?

#Incredible ! There is good evidence that Greek literacy was relatively widespread among the ancient Arabs east of Ḥawrān. Here, our #Safaitic author partially writes out the Safaitic letters in the Greek order, omitting vowels! Find more on #OCIANA: ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions...

You'd think that Microsoft Word, being a Word processor would, you know, be able to process words. But my god, feed it anything more than 5000 words, and it just absolutely shits the bed.

Another reason to study Sībawayh: Not only are his linguistic descriptions completely alien to a western paradigm, but *also* what he actually describes as Arabic is extremely worth actually studying. It's much broader than the strict norms of Classical Arabic western scholars usually assume.

It's a busy month: join me on Nov. 18, the UNESCO International Day of #IslamicArt, for an in-depth talk about "Kufi" as defining a self-contained early tradition of Arabic calligraphy. For Islamic Art Week 2025, I've prepared a brand new, exhaustive (& kickass) presentation that will take us from…

the origin of the term "Kufi", to the formation of the script, examples of its many faces, its particularities, its decline, ending with samples of my own artworks and artist books. There will be plenty of time for…

@sibawayhi.bsky.social Just read your blogpost here. YES! That's it. I had no idea Carter misunderstood this 🤦‍♂️. In his section on the harmony of the pronoun -hû, uses another strategy: /marartu bihî qabl#/, /marartu bihû qabl/, witih qabl protecting the -hî/-hû. www.sibawayhi.org/as-you-see-o...

Near East X Midwest podcast - The fall and rise of comparative Semitic linguistics | a conversation with Prof. Na'ama Pat-El. Listen in: youtu.be/vPUhcfPrLqM

De eerste recensie van 'Woord voor woord' is binnen - en daar ben ik heel gelukkig mee! José Vandekerckhove, auteur, taalkundige en lector aan de KU Leuven, noemt het een aantrekkelijk boek voor een breed publiek, met 'mooie en inzichtelijke infographics': www.netdidned.be/publicaties/...

Some further thought about BNS in Numidian inscriptions The term is mostly interpreted as “his stone”, but Rössler suggests that “his wife” would be better (unbeknownst to him, it even could make sense etymologically) Personally, I find this unexpected for a grave stone, but that is irrelevant.

New Blog Post on the Najdi demonstrative hāḏī phdnix.wordpress.com/2025/10/28/w...

Not the "e macron letter" I was looking for, thanks though

An Ayt Hdiddu Text (Bynon) Maš da ttinin mddn adday da tsawal tslmya ž tmẓy ns ž wr ssin mddn mayd ttini: hat aynnaɣ ayd yžan da tsawal d lmalayša "But people say when a baby is speaking in its early days and people do not know what it is saying: "Look at what it's doing, it's speaking with Angels!"

Yet another blogpost in my ongoing series Making Sense of Šāḏḏ: The Written and the Oral. We explore the unusual reading Q2:33 ʾambiʾhim which is no longer canonical, but its discussion gives us great insight into the pre-Ibn Mujahid written sources. phdnix.wordpress.com/2025/10/21/m...

We need help. My wife is suffering from daily intense pain and insurance won't fully cover the procedure and the hospital is demanding up front payment. www.gofundme.com/f/help-amber...

New #OpenAccess paper on what 'first', 'second', 'third' tell us about the #Semitic family tree, including new evidence for Aramaeo-Canaanite! Note that unfortunately, the names of Ethiopian scholars have been metathesized, something that will hopefully be remedied before the final print version. 🐦🐦

#New on #OCIANA - from the cosmopolitan world of ancient Arabia: ʾAkzam son of Ġawṯ, of the people of Rm (Rome?), records being driven away from the road (𝑠𝑎𝑏𝑖̄𝑙!) by the tribe of Thamūd, mentioned in the Quran! From near ʿarʿar عرعر KSA. Find more: ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions...

This is a detail of a braided pattern decoration in a Christian Arabic codex from the 9th/10th century CE (Sinai Ar. 461, f. 25br). I only recently noticed that the scribe used five differently coloured inks for this. It's just stunning how vibrant they still are after more than a millennium.

Great interview of Dr. Charles Häberl on Mandaïc and other forms of Aramaïc and his work on them. youtu.be/UJLZBMGxjZ4?...

SNK having a wall in a popup shop dedicated to an instakill

I've published a new blogpost on the question of what "shâdhdh" of Qira'at mean. You can read it here: phdnix.wordpress.com/2025/10/17/m...

In recent months I’ve been very busy exploring the concept of šāḏḏ within the literature of Quranic Reading Traditions. This term is frequently translated as “non-canonical”, and thus the šāḏḏ readings are “non-canonical readings”.

Zaterdag is mijn boek 'Woord voor woord: de verleden tijd van taal' officieel gelanceerd op het Taalfeest. Twee quizwinnaars en vele tientallen kopers gingen naar huis met een exemplaar. Intussen landt het boek ook al op de deurmatten. Ik ben heel benieuwd wat de lezers ervan zullen vinden.

I've written about the life and just some of the achievements of my former classmate Andy West aka 魏安, Ando, and BabelStone @babelstone.co.uk www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

A really interesting observation of Ibn Qutaybah (d. 276/889) in his ʾadab al-kātib. Commenting on why balā, matā and ʾannā are spelled with yāʾ he said: "because the ʾimālah (i.e. balē, matē, ʾannē) for these is better and more eloquent than tafḫīm (balā, matā, ʾannā)"

Tot grote frustratie van Onze Taal en mij heeft de drukker 'Woord voor woord' nog steeds niet geleverd. Vandaag is het niet de feestelijke dag waar ik op hoopte. In het thema van 'niet' deel ik daarom een nieuwe preview. Waar komt het woord 'niet' vandaan? En wat is de grote ontkenningscyclus? 1/

This chapter has now been out for more than six months and thus magically becomes #OpenAccess: scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/...

This chapter has now been out for more than six months and thus magically becomes #OpenAccess:

Certain epichoric Greek alphabets wrote ξ (x) as 𐌇𐌔 (hs). Pinyin vs. Wades-Giles has been going on far longer than anyone could’ve imagined.

It always bothered me that šuʿbah read yihiddī (< transguttural harmony *yahiddī < metathesis assimilation *yahtadī) but not the parallel yiḫiṣṣimūna (where yaḫiṣṣimūna is reported instead)... But turns out there's a marginal path that reports it, even in Ibn al-Jazari!

I just met my own book. We're getting on very well.

Now available on Wordpress! phdnix.wordpress.com

The Qira'ah Shadhdhah of Flügel `an Hafs `an `Asim strikes once again. (Q17:64, Hafs has rajilika, all other readers have rajlika)

After almost 19 years of blogging, tomorrow my Typepad blog will be shut down. I've made a backup.... hopefully I can find some way to import it into another blog system (Typepad is shutting down). phoenixblog.typepad.com

some incoherent thoughts about Numidian BNS. in funerary inscriptions in the eastern script (the one we can read), the term BNS appears about 228 times, making it the most frequent word in the corpus. The literature normally interprets it as BN-S "his/her stone" with the Amazigh 3S suffix -s.

By @koutchoukalimar.bsky.social

Think I've just had my first encounter with LLM-fabricated language data. Some Indonesian paper mill journal just published a paper containing completely fabricated Siwi data, citing me as the source. (It could have been made up by a human, but it looks like what you get when you ask ChatGPT.)

Forthcoming: Soqotra, Mahra, and Dhofar Studies in Modern South Arabian Languages and Oral Literatures. A Volume in Honor of Vitaly Naumkin brill.com/display/titl...

Oct 23-Dec 4: My Square Kufic course returns, over 6 online sessions during which we'll work with all sorts of grids derived from the basic square. Featuring my strong (and correct😜) opinions about this script and the dreaded Wall of Shame. 2/2 www.arabbritishcentre.org.uk/whatson/squa...

I have two online events coming up next month, one talk and one course! Oct 16: An online talk version of my Abjad Numerals workshop, where I'll cover their history & how to use them. We'll do live exercises to properly integrate this ancient system. 1/2 www.arabbritishcentre.org.uk/whatson/when...

Updated alignment chart: What counts as a #conlang?

In the reading of the reader al-ʾAʿmaš (d. 148) already on verse 5 of al-Fātiḥah he recites something that no canonical reader does: he reads nistaʿīnu rather than nAstaʿīnu. This is what Sibṭ al-Ḫayyāṭ (d. 541), but this is absent in other descriptions, what's going on? 🧵

Throwback to the time in 2018 I searched for a quote and Google rickroll'd me with something that was missing *six* of my search times.