Marijn van Putten

A letter-sized handout titled "How to Play Hard and Have Fun in '68". The principles are: 1. Go in boots and all. The campaign will be shorter than you think. Make stuff happen now. Don’t wait, pull the trigger. 2. Dig the other characters. Dial in on the other player characters, pay attention to their narrative, and get your own character involved. Be their fan, or be their foil. 3. Make the GM sweat. Think of the game like a physics toy, and push the levers you have as hard as you can, just to see what happens. Rattle the cage, jump out the window, don’t look down. Move so fast the GM can’t keep up. 4. Sell the punches. Always choose the bigger reaction. Let your character be changed by the world and by the other characters. Let them be upset, emotional, irrational. 5. Fuck around and find out. If your character dies, they can come back as an echo. If they have to retire, you can always make a new character. The crew cannot be stopped. Act first and think later, make bad decisions, let the chips fall where they may. 6: Learn to stop worrying and love consequences. Most rolls are going to have consequences. Wouldn’t it be boring to succeed all the time? Embrace consequences, and create consequences, then roll them up in a giant ball of chaos and surf on top.

Blades '68: Player Principles handout.

I agree that all of these authors defended this idea, but none of them honestly come even close to defining it, or giving any examples of what would make up the koine compared to, say, non-poetic koine Arabic... (except perhaps Corriente). :-(

I like Thackston quite a lot for Classical Arabic!

It just strikes me as an ill-defined term. What makes it a koine? What makes it poetic? How is it different from Arabic that *isn't* poetic koine?

17) The "poetic koine" of Arabic is not a thing. It doesn't exist.

Because Semitic does not like superheavy syllables. Same reason that you get Arabic lam yakun with a short vowel but lam yakûnû!

16) Spicy take incoming: The chronic lack of familiarity with actual Arabic historical writing and orthography, relying on modern text editions instead, has led to an enormous and disastrous misunderstanding of the linguistic history of Arabic and has led Middle Arabic studies completely astray.

15) Contrary to popular belief (and I think Wikipedia), Razihit likewise is without a doubt a dialect of Arabic. But an extremely exotic one, even by Yemeni standards. It might count as a primary branch from Proto-Arabic.

14) Contrary to Wikipedia, Faifi is without a doubt a dialect of Arabic, and (by Yemeni standards) not even such an exotic one. Pretty run of the mill Tihami-type Arabic.

13) the length alternation of the final vowel in tadkhirah versus tadkhîr is a remnant of a pre-proto-Arabic time when the feminine ending was still -t (*tadkhîr-t- > *tadhkir-t- > *tadhkir-at-).

Martin when I told him there are 26 verses in the Hebrew Bible that contain all letters of the alphabet: 🤯
me when Martin told me there's 26 generations from Adam to Moses: 🤯
המבין יבין

Stuff like:
قال لهم موسى
قال موسى لقومه

12) The very weird and rare ifʕawlala verb stem in Arabic looks like it might be the BCuDF verb stems in Berber. Both have very stative/intransitive meanings, neither is very naturally derivable from more basic verb stems.

That's right!

11) The syncopated form for the tens as in tisʕata ʕšara in some of the Quranic readings (rather than tisʕata ʕašara) might be the more archaic form. It's well attested in 7th century papyri, and is more difficult to explain than the "normal" one (archaic heterogeneity).

But because the people who pronounce it correctly (Indian subcontinent mostly) receive a lot of racist abuse for having the more original pronunciation, I like to be a bit more provocative to give the racists the middle finger :-)

You're right of course :-)

10) The special 'count plurals' found in some modern dialects, such as t-ašhor "# of months" are a direct leftover of the Arabic paucal plurals, a feature that is barely productive in the Quran, and loses essentially all productivity in medieval Classical Arabic.

9) It is true that the modern dialects don't descend from Classical Arabic. While dialectologists often say this, they often still argue as if Classical Arabic is the "proto-Arabic", or want to project back features that clearly *could* be derived from Classical Arabic, and miss those that cannot.

8) Quranic vocalised manuscripts using the coloured dot system, I think, is the only script in the world where the colour of the ink is actually important for phonetic distinctions.

7) When the medieval grammarians say something is shâdhdh this not mean "bad", "wrong" or "ungrammatical" as it is all too often understood by people reading the grammarians in isolations. Things can be shâdhdh and 3arabiyy jayyid at the same time.

6) Doing research on Modern Standard Arabic as if it is a native variety of anyone is extremely bizarre and has frequently lead to very strange results and silly descriptions of the phonology, syntax and morphology of "Arabic" (not specified).

5) The age-old question as to whether emphasis is velarised or pharyngealised is resolved by realising the answer is neither. I am pretty sure it's uvularized. Though in some dialects I'm sure pharyngealised is a thing too.

4) Arabic has a form of the "pronominalregel". Prepositional phrases occur between the verb and the subject and/or object in a sentence when the preposition has a pronominal suffix, while it follows those when the preposition is followed by a noun that it governs. This is very poorly described.

3) The third person masculine singular pronominal suffix is not -hu/-hi with a short vowel most of the time, so this is a bad transcription. Grammarians only accepted as valid that it is long in all environments, or it is *only* short after heavy syllables. But long -hū/-hī after **SHORT** vowels.

3) The third person masculine singular pronominal suffix is not -hu/-hi with a short vowel most of the time, so this is a bad transcription. Grammarians only accepted as valid that it is long in all environments, or it is *only* short after heavy syllables. But long -hū/-hī after long vowels.

2) In Classical Arabic, the feminine ending was pronounced /-ah/ in pause, and it still clearly is in Quranic recitation, and rhyme confirms that this is the correct pronunciation. Transcribing it as <-a> for the Quran is wrong, possibly also for (non-modern) Classical Arabic.

This was a terrible idea.
1) The ض was definitely a voiced pharyngealized lateral fricative in the description of Classical Arabic by the medieval grammarians. The widespread pronunciation as a stop in Quranic recitation is really just wrong.

One like, one Arabic linguistics opinion

Disco Elysium!