Jabal al-Lughat

Back in 2017, I published an article on " Clitic Doubling and Contact in Arabic " ( ZAL 66 , pp. 45-70), arguing that the various ...

A strong contender for the most obviously ridiculous etymology in Jeffery's The Foreign Vocabulary of The Quran is his attempt to deriv...

The Qur'ān is not intended as an account of events. Rather than being organised around narratives, it typically brings up apparently fa...

A long time ago, I posted some rather speculative musings on the minor mystery of the allegedly Ethiopic word qaswarah قسورة in the Qur...

So Taleb has jumped back on his hobbyhorse with yet another post on Lebanese not being Arabic ; see my previous posts Why "Levantine...

There is some debate over the original pronunciation of the "emphatic" consonants (Arabic ط ض ظ ص ق) in Semitic and more generally...

I've been reading two novels in Arabic lately. Frankenstein in Baghdad , by Ahmad Saadawi, reimagines Baghdad's descent into chaos ...

Most Berber varieties have borrowed the word for "raisin" from Arabic, eg Kabyle azbib , or use a compound "dried grapes...

Similarities between different languages are data. It's easy to come up with any of several wildly different measures of such similarit...

Everything I've been saying for the past 3 posts is basic textbook stuff, reflecting a stable consensus among Semitic historical linguis...

We've seen that historical linguists decide which languages share a more recent common ancestor on the basis of shared innovations (or t...

Last time , I promised to look at the " ratio of content ⊂ Arabic & ⊄ Aramaic ". To do that, we need two things: data on the ...

Following in a long tradition of people imagining that knowing a few languages or a bit of mathematics implies they already know linguistics...

From Morocco to Oman, there is a long tradition of imagining that the Berbers of North Africa and the Mehris of South Arabia speak the same ...

For most of the past decade, while first the rest of Iraq and then Syria (150,000 dead, 2.5 million refugees) have burned, Northern Iraq has...

My description of Khalaf's reading in the previous post applies to all readings transmitted from Ḥamzah ibn Ḥabīb al-Taymī of Kūfa: K...

(Warning: This post assumes some knowledge of Arabic, although you should be able to follow the argument even without it.) Everyone knows ...

In eastern Yemen and western Oman, there are spoken several South Arabian languages - Semitic, but more distantly related to Arabic than Ara...

In Kabyle, the word for "sing" is šnu . No other Berber language is known to have a similar word for sing (see Nait-Zerrad, s.v. ...

A long-standing tradition in North Africa, convincingly rejected by Ibn Khaldūn but perpetuated by poets and curricula alike, claims that so...