Marijn van Putten

Almost certainly *Dāwūd. Medieval Classical Arabic orthography avoids writing two waws in a row for some reason (spelled the same in the Quran)

Oxford dating be like "We'd like to invite you to give a talk during Week -2 of Hogfather term."

"takubbanit n tukksa n lmelḥ i waman n yilel Bgayet"

Interesting that they went for a puristic neologism for "sea" (ilel instead of lebḥeṛ), but not for "salt" (lmelḥ instead of tisent).

Just here to celebrate that you wrote "madīnatih" and not the ugly but very common "madīnatihi" even when using pausal spelling. :D

As a little treat for you, here's an #ArabicBible Advent calendar 🧵. Every day I'll post a verse from the Christmas story from one of the oldest Arabic Gospel lectionaries, Sinai ar. 72, dated 897 CE (and a few other texts in between). [2nd attempt, I won't be offended if you point out my nonsense.]

Incidentally I'm always struck by how different ejectives can sound in different places. Like... I recognise what this lady is doing is not voiced, voiceless or aspirated... but I'm not sure I would've recognised as an ejective, haha.

It's probably worth adding that this expressions has a rather more common application than Dutch "Joost mag het weten" which I'm not sure I've ever said myself (and is very informal), while aLLâhu 'a3lam is a perfectly legitimate way of "resolving" a bunch of competing opinions in Islamic sciences.

Die ken ik, maar is wel echt niet in mijn eigen spreektaal.

(beat me to it)

If you don’t know, then who knows in your language?
For Dutch, we say ‘Joost mag het weten’ (Joost may know it), where Makhuwa says ‘Nluku tantsuwela’ (God is the one who knows).
What do you say?

Arabic: aLLâhu 'a3lam "God is most-knowing" or more colloquially: "God knows best".

Amazing!

An important 'time out' by a very clear thinker. Much of what Shoemaker claims about the Hijaz on the eve of Islam is conclusively disproved by material evidence, which grows by the year. I have a surprise, too, from my last survey mission (May 2025) between Taif-Mecca and Medina

shorturl.at/8IG8f

Not sure if we did, but I do know word-initial *f of course shifts to /h/ in Spanish (retained on the Canary Islands and eventually lost (everywhere?) on the mainland). But there's quite a number of cases of hypercorrect spellings of borrowed /h/ written with /f/ it seems.

More Numidian mysteries!

Most Numidian stelae have at least two lines or (à la limite) one line containing several words. Only in one cemetery do we find a series of really short inscriptions (Mechta el Maza, near Bouchegouf, Guelma province, Algeria), esp. RIL 1085-1092.

But…

Missed opportunity for a rhyming solition: "a dictionary of non-classical vocables in the spoken arabic of lebanese locals"

Irish not beating the allegations of secretly being Semitic.

Their soul, obviously :-)

Hahah, yeah. 😅

I was told today that apparently doctors advice against blowing your nose, because there's a danger of infection in your I don't know what you call it, voorhoofdholtes.

So... maybe you should tell yourself that all of us dutchies are just being very careful to not have infectiones like that?!

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...

I like al-Ikhlas!

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).

graphic of rpgs to blow up a parliament to. (which don't quite meet the criteria of incitement to violence) pictured are The Dee Sanction, Spire, Wreck the Halls, and Brinkwood

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...

Well at least the author instructions of those journals don't say they accept .TeX files...