weekly poetry #5
An item for the reflection of those who haven’t yet seen it: a French interpretation (rendering, semi-translation, even?) of Lewis Carroll’s ‘nonsense’ poem Jabberwocky (which, by the way, I think makes a lot of sense on a very deep level). We can ask ourselves a lot of questions about the (im)possibility of translating words without [...]

a response to “the cosmopolitan tongue”
John McWhorter’s article “The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English” in World Affairs is a clear, cleverly written piece considering what the simultaneous growth of a global language and the death of many endangered languages imply, and what value preserving the vitality of such languages has. Nevertheless, in respect to the latter question, he leaves [...]

more advice of Zuhayr
Spurn not the mildest man on Earth: Who knows but someday you may need his aid? Cloth of soft texture is of greater worth than rougher stuff, when robes are to be made.   لا تَطَّرِح خامل الرجال فقد تَضْطَرّ يوماً الى ارادتِهِ فاللينُ في البُرْدِ مُحْتَقَرٌ خيرٌ منَ اليُبسِ عند حاجتِهِ   - Baha’ al-Din Zuhayr (translation: E.H. Palmer, The Poetical Works of [...]

comments on a Libyan descriptive grammar
A Short Reference Grammar of Eastern Libyan Arabic (Harrasowitz 1984) is lucid and thorough, giving many examples to explain grammatical constructions, and approaching Arabic grammar from a relatively unique point-of-view. In my opinion, it is an example of how to write a sensible grammar of spoken Arabic. Before discussing that, however, a few criticisms about [...]

on mohammedans and conversion
Sometimes, when you photocopy a journal article or book chapter, particularly when you’re scanning two facing pages of a book at once, you get the final page of the preceding article. This can’t be helped, but every now and then results in a lonely concluding paragraph of interesting material. Yesterday, I photocopied a short article from [...]