Summer school in historical sociolinguistics at Ghent University for "graduate students and young (at heart!) researchers":

Livestream with THE Prof. Ahmad Al-Jallad: Were the Arabs really pagans at the dawn of Islam? YouTube video by Exploring the Quran and the Bible

Livestream tomorrow on the burning questions of late antique Arabia’s religious history. Join here:

www.youtube.com/live/iJ4zsdI...

English Has Kanji YouTube video by Scripting Japan

KANJI!?!? In MY English? It's more likely than you think.

youtu.be/_gCyZI-Ettw?...

Evolves*

Maybe it's a bit like carcinisation. Eventually, everything involves into a Brabantian speaking crab.

Inks & Paints of the Islamic Golden Age Pre-order now for dispatch in May! A new and fully revised edition of my 2020 "Inks & Paints of the Middle East", with 12 extra pages.A handbook of materials and book arts technology of the medieval I...

In case you missed the Kickstarter, pre-orders are now open for this book, for dispatch starting in May (after I start fulfilling pledges).

payhip.com/b/W306o

Yeah that's up for discussion! It is notable that the bare vocative cannot combine with the definite article (yâ rasûlu, never ** yâ r-rasûlu; and even without yâ, just rasûlu)
Only with yâ-'ayyuhâ can it combine with the definite article

Wellicht wel, maar het is wel vaker dat we dingen van dertien eeuwen oud misschien even moeten herzien :-)

yā zaydu* without tanwīn in fact!

Descriptively, I think it would be better to think of this behaviour not as a bizarre application of nominative and accusative, but rather as a separate vocative case. like so.

Well it certainly doesn' t spark confidence that we can know whether any two words are related or not hahaha

I honestly have no idea without looking it up, which I'm refraining from for now :-)

Yes, linguistically of course a much less sensible distinction than "Quranic Arabic" is, due to the Hebrew bible having a multitude of authors from a multitude of periods, so treating it as a single linguistic unit is... fraught... but a corpus based definition is fine if we understand that!

Creating a sign language out of everything and everywhere Mariana Martins: Creating a sign language out of everything and everywhere - An example from the deaf people of Bissau

It was a great pleasure and a honor to act as the co-supervisor for Mariana Martins’ dissertation about the emergence of a new Sign Language in Guinea Bissau, for which she received the doctorate yesterday. The book is available open-access.🧵

www.lotpublications.nl/creating-a-s...

Oh hey you're in Leiden! I'm not at the defense, but if you're around for the coming days, I'd love to meet you in real life!

Public lecture on Thursday in Paris. I will deliver a lecture on the linguistic pre-history and history of the Mecca region, based on two seasons of epigraphic fieldwork carried out btwn '21-'22. Welcome.

Komt vaker voor dan je denkt in manuscripten van niet-Koranische teksten (of in ieder geval defectieve spellingen waar we een alif verwachten)! Alleen wordt dat vaak "verbeterd" in moderne text edities

Maybe, but then I would have to convince people that it is an interesting question!

I would say this orthodoxy is more-or-less inherited from the old orientalists who viewed the Arabic language ideology through their own (especially German) national language ideology, and as a result badly misunderstood and mischaracterised the medieval Arabic ones...

That being said, it often feels like I'm literally the only one in the field that finds this even a remotely interesting question, so I'm not very hopeful that research of this type is going to take off any time soon.

Like, 11th century Andalusi Classical Arabic is not the same thing as 11th century Baghdadi Classical Arabic.

Are the difference subtle and small? Sure! But they certainly exist.

Yeah, though the text corpora still need extremely extensive morphological and syntactic parsing for these questions to even start to be answerable I think... but I agree 100% that this is an extremely important question...

Besides period I think geography also plays a role...

Someone on Reddit asked me what the difference between "Quranic Arabic" and "Classical Arabic" is. It was fun to put my thoughts together on this (and the vexed question of what "Classical Arabic" even means. Perhaps others will find this of interest too.

‘Where did you learn to write Arabic?’: A Critical Analysis of Some Ḥadīths on the Origins and Spread of the Arabic Script Abstract. According to some ḥadīths, the art of writing Arabic in the pre-Islamic Hijaz was learned from the city of al-Ḥīra (the capital of the Lakhmid ki

A new article of mine was recently published by the Journal of Islamic Studies:

"‘Where did you learn to write Arabic?’: A Critical Analysis of Some Ḥadīths on the Origins and Spread of the Arabic Script"

academic.oup.com/jis/advance-...

Simplitic models of "canonization" and "anathemization" have a lot of trouble accounting for the fact that these figures continue to be major transmission paths of the readings that are considered canonical today.

And second he is quite a prominent (and broadly transmitted) paths of Khalaf's transmission from Hamzah.

Ibn Miqsam < Idris b. Abd al-Karim < Khalaf < Sulaym < Hamzah

First he appears in the transmission of Abu Amr:
Ibn Miqsam < al-Mu`addil < Abu al-Za`ra' < al-Duri < al-Yazidi < Abu Amr.

So what about the other "bad guy", Ibn Miqsam? Was he shunned and dropped from the transmission of the Quran, or did he also become a canonical transmitter among the ten canonical readers?

While he is not as prominent in the transmission paths as Ibn Shanabudh he indeed appears!

Qliffī! Save us!

Behold, a THAAD

Maybe later I'll add a list of "that other villain" as well, namely Ibn Miqsam who also has a role to play in the isnads.