Depends on which variety of Levantine Arabic you’re interested in learning but Younes’s Arabiyyat Al-Naas is one I’ve seen used

I can share the syllabus and slides with you once they’re finalized if you’re interested :)

In the spring quarter starting in March, I’m going to be teaching a course on the sociolinguistics of Levantine Arabic that I designed myself.

I’m excited but also very nervous!

In Arabic, their names are the equivalent of المملكة الأردنية الهاشمية "Hashemite Jordanian Kingdom" and المملكة العربية السعودية "Saudi Arabian Kingdom."

Since the structure is the same in Arabic, we could've easily had the Kingdom of Hashemite Jordan or the Saudi Kingdom of Arabia.

The only two countries that are named after the people who rule them are the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Source: digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/seetz...

The last insult is Tarihj. Unfortunately, I can't figure out what this means. If anyone has any ideas, especially if you're Syrian from this region, let me know!

The second insult is كلب ابن الكلب kalb ǝbn ǝl-kalb 'dog son of a dog.' In Arabic, calling someone a 'dog' is never a good thing, and you can increase the severity of it by adding 'son of a dog' to include the person's father as well.

He mentions three of them: Aib ala schuirrbak, Kelp ibn el Kelb, and Tarihj.

The first is عيب على شواربك ʕayb ʕala šwērb-ak meaning 'shame on you (lit. your mustache).' The ‹i› in mustache schuirrbak likely reflects vowel raising: so šwērǝb not šwārǝb.

German text that describes Ulrich J. Seetzen's experience in Latmin, Syria, with key excerpt: Ich thue Alles, um meine Leute bey guter Laune zu erhalten; allein ihr Hass gegen die Franken muss ausserordentlich seyn, und ich muss beständig eine Menge Schimpfwörter hören. Indessen sind sie aber auch unter sich mit starken Worten nicht geizig, und daher verlieren ihre Schimpfwörte: Aib ala schuirrbak, Kelp ibn el Kelb, Tarihj u. s. w., vieles von ihrem Gehalte.

I came across a Middle East travel diary by a German traveler named Ulrich J. Seetzen. In April 1805, he visited a Syrian town called Laṭmīn where people hated "Franks" (aka Europeans) so he constantly had insults thrown at him.

Modern Arabic speakers may recognize them.

My roommate drinks Celsius energy drinks so I decided to have one and now I'm tweaking.

Moroccan Arabic consonant clusters are on another level

Sources:

Chicago Assyrian Dictionary
Hämeen-Anttila, J. A Sketch of Neo-Assyrian Grammar
Huehnergard, J. A Grammar of Akkadian
Leslau, W. Comparative Dictionary of Ge‘ez
von Soden, W. Akk. Handwörterbuch

Through cultural influence, the Aramaic word entered Arabic and then Ge‘ez ምስኪን mǝskin and then spread to other languages, including Persian مسكين meskin and Spanish mezquino.

So when Aramaic speakers first encountered the word, they must have heard it pronounced with the ‹s›-sound rather than the ‹š›-sound. And so it entered into Aramaic.

It’s during this period that Akkadian terms begin to enter Aramaic, so a very likely source of the Aramaic miskēnâ is the Neo-Assyrian language.

As it happens, in Neo-Assyrian, old Akkadian ‹š› and ‹s› switched pronunciation such that ‹š› became ̇‹s› and vice versa

The most consequential contact between Akkadian and Aramaic speakers took place during an approximately 400-year period from 1000 BCE to 600 BCE. During this period, the Neo-Assyrian Empire conquered the Aramaic-speaking polities of Syria, bringing the two populations into closer contact.

Akkadian is an umbrella term for a number of dialects that are attested over the course of 2000 years. During that timespan, the language naturally underwent many changes, and many of these changes are reflected in the written record.

We would therefore expect that Akkadian muškēnu would have entered Aramaic as miškēn or something similar, just as Akkadian šūzubu ‘to save’ enters Aramaic as šêzib. So why does Akkadian ‹š› show up as Aramaic ‹s› in this word? The answer lies in the historical development of Akkadian.

Akkadian ‹š› corresponds to Aramaic ‹s› only when it goes back to the Proto-Semitic consonant *s₂, which has been reconstructed as a lateral fricative /ɬ/. But the causative š goes back to a different sibilant *s₁, which is always realized as ‹š› in Aramaic.

This explanation is attractive because it’s based on an attested root, its morphology is clear, and the semantic change follows a logical progression. But there’s still problem with this account.

The verb šukēnu – based on its older attestations – can be parsed as a rare ŠD-stem of a root k-ʾ-n ‘to be firm, loyal’ (i.e. D-stem intensive coupled with Š-stem causative), in other words, ‘to cause to be loyal,’ with some semantic drift that eventually resulted in a reflexive verb.

In other words, Akk. muškēnu > Aram. miskēn- > Ar. miskīn and Ge. mǝskīn. Within Akkadian, muškēnu is derived from an irregular verb šukēnu (attested in Old Babylonian), which goes back to an older form that is attested in other dialects as šukaʾʾinu ‘to prostrate oneself.’

An Aramaic source would account for the Arabic /s/, as opposed to the Akkadian /š/, which was likely pronounced /ʃ/. Ge‘ez also has an /s/: ምስኪን mǝskin ‘poor, wretched, needy.' Leslau states that it too comes from Aramaic-Syriac and that it’s ultimately of Akkadian origin.

Aramaic is in fact the most probable immediate source of the Arabic form. The word is attested in multiple Aramaic dialects. For example, in the Targum Onqelos, a 2nd century CE Aramaic translation of the Torah, we find in Deuteronomy 15:11 מִסְכֵּנָא miskēnâ ‘destitute’

The Akkadian cognate/original was muškēnu, meaning something like ‘commoner, dependent, bondsman.’ In Arabic, it’s come to mean ‘poor, unfortunate’. This so happens to accord with the Aramaic cognate, which means ‘poor, modest.’

A brief history of an Arabic word مِسكين miskīn and its ancient Akkadian origin 🧵

reading about syrian arabic in sociolinguistic studies from pre-2011 is unbelievably depressing