Sacred Phonology

The artistically fruitful intersection between geometry and mysticism has a fairly well-established label: "sacred geometry". Phonology and mysticism have historically intersected in a similar, but perhaps less familiar, way.

The notion of "place of articulation" predates modern linguistics by millennia, as is obvious from the order of the Indic alphabets. In the Arabic context, while it was first developed by early linguists such as al-Farahidi and Sibawayh, it is probably most commonly studied in the context of Qur'anic recitation, where it provides a cross-check on the pronunciation of consonants. The number of places of articulation used is rather larger than in the Western tradition, allowing a more linear ordering of the consonants, as follows: chest (long vowels ā ī ū), lower throat (glottal ʔ h), mid throat (pharyngeal/epiglottal ʕ ħ), high throat (uvular fricatives x ɣ), back tongue (uvular stop q), velar (k), mid-tongue (palatal/postalveolar j š y), back lateral (ḍ), front lateral (l), apico-alveolar (n), front tongue (r), apico-dental (ṭ d t), sibilants (ṣ s z), interdentals (ð̣ θ ð), labiodentals (f), bilabials (b m w). (I have used odd terminology for some positions in an attempt to reflect divisions not usually made by Western linguists.)

This ordering of consonants by place of articulation, familiar to any religious specialist of the period, gave Ibn Arabi a structure onto which he could map his vision of the cosmic order (see Appendix II of the link). The throat is the seat of the intellective world, ie universal underlying principles; the back of the mouth is the higher realm of imagination; the mouth proper is the celestial spheres, followed in front by the elemental globes; finally, the "progeny", or classes of beings, are at the gap between the teeth and lips. In short, the more contingent something is, the higher up the vocal tract - just as sounds originate at its bottom with air expelled from the lungs, are shaped as they pass through the vocal tract, to finally emerge from the mouth.

The metaphor is reasonably effective as it stands; but its one-dimensionality is somewhat unsatisfactory. Most consonants reflect combinations of articulatory gestures, rather than being elementary movements. For instance, the difference between d and n, for instance, lies not primarily (if at all) in the place of articulation, but rather in whether or not air is allowed to flow out of the nose, and the difference between t and d lies in how the vocal chords are held. Wouldn't it be nicer to have a symbolism for consonants that allowed for compositionality? What would Ibn Arabi have done with Element Theory, for instance?

Ibn Hazm again, and Cypriot Arabic

I just found a full translation online of the fifth chapter of Ibn Hazm's 11th-century work Iħkām fī Uṣūl al-Aħkām, discussed previously - a chapter remarkable for anticipating the ideas of a language instinct and of conlanging, and for clearly stating the relationship between Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. Enjoy! The Origins of Language: Divine Providence or Human Codification.

Not long before Ibn Hazm's time, some Arabic-speaking Maronites fled the Levant for Cyprus. In the village of Kormakiti, they have kept their language up to the present. YouTube being what it is, you can hear some on a program called Sanna (ie لساننا - our language) - go straight to 2:40, 5:00, 7:04 to hear the language itself. (Ignore the video's ill-informed claims that this is descended from Aramaic, by the way.) If you speak Greek, there are even lessons at Hki Fi Sanna. This is far more incomprehensible to me than any mainstream Arabic dialect I've ever heard, including the Levantine Arabic from which it presumably derives - a remarkable case study in how much isolation from related varieties speeds up language differentiation.

Return of the Thousand Verses

I decided to inflict upon my readers my attempt to translate the first 15 lines of Alfiyyat Ibn Mālik, a medieval poem summarising Arabic grammar which I described some time ago. The original may have been written more for mnemonic than artistic purposes, but at least it takes fewer liberties with the metre... For best results, I recommend using an alliterative residulator.

Muḥammad, who is the son of Mālik, says:
My Lord God, the best master, I praise,
Praying for the Prophet, the Chosen One,
And his noble relatives every one.
And I seek God's help in a thousand-line
Poem in which grammar's basics are outlined,
Simplifying the hardest, concisely distilled,
And offering gifts, with a promise fulfilled,
Bringing contentment without any misery
Surpassing the thousand-liner of Ibn Mu`ṭī
Which previously took first position,
Deserving my praise and recognition;
And abundant gifts may God decree
In the Afterlife's stages for him and me!
A meaningful utterance is a sentence, like “Stand up, [birds]!”,
And nouns, and verbs, and particles are words
(The singular is word), and speech has general sense -
And “word” may also be used to mean “sentence”.
By genitive, indefinite, vocative, and “the”
And predication the noun is seen clearly;
By the t of fa`al-ta¹ and 'ata-t², and the y of if`al-ī³,
And the n of 'aqbil-anna⁴, known the verb will be;
Apart from them is the particle, like hal⁵ and fī⁶ and lam⁷.
A verb in the imperfect follows lam, like yašam.
Distinguish verbs' perfect by t, and recognise
By n the imperative verb, if imperatives arise.
And if in the imperative n has no place to dwell,
It's a noun, such as for instance ṣah⁹ and ḥayyahal¹⁰.

1. you did
2. she came
3. do! (f.)
4. approach!
5. question marker
6. in
7. not (past)
9. ssh!
10. over here!

Original text:

قال محمد هو ابن مالك * أحمد ربي الله خير مالك
مصليا على الرسول المصطفى * وآله المستكملين الشرفا
وأستعين الله في ألفيه * مقاصد النحو بها محويه
تقرّب الأقصى بلفظ موجز * وتبسط البذل بوعد منجز
وتقتضي رضا بغير سخط * فائقة ألفية ابن معطي
وهو بسبق حائز تفضيلا * مستوجب ثنائي الجميلا
والله يقضي بهبات وافره * لي وله في درجات الآخره
كلامنا لفظ مفيد كاستقم * واسم وفعل ثم حرف الكلم
واحده كلمة والقول عم * وكلمة بها كلام قد يؤم
بالجر والتنوين والندا وأل * ومسند للاسم تمييز حصل
بتا فعلت وأنت ويا افعلي * ونون أقبلنّ فعل ينجلي
سواهما الحرف كهل وفي ولم * فعل مضارع يلي لم كيشم
وماضي الأفعال بالتا مز، وسم * بالنون فعل أمر إن أمر فُهم
والأمر إن لم يك للنون محل * فيه هو اسم نحو صه وحيّهل

Sumerian grammatical texts

Sumerian Grammatical Texts available online! The title is a misnomer - most of the texts given are early Sumerian-Akkadian lexica arranged by topic, or just plain Sumerian texts - but there are other interesting things, such as a phonetically organised syllabary (vowel order: u-a-i), and a series called "ana ittišu" (p. 30) with some rather paradigm-looking stuff, such as:

Sumerian	Akkadian, English
ùr	sûnu, lap, bosom
ùr-bi	sûn-šu, his bosom
ùr-bi-šú	ana sûni-šu, upon his bosom
ùr-bi-šú in-gar	ana sûni-šu iškun, he placed upon his bosom

which I guess offer a clue about the teaching methods used. These tablets were used to teach young Akkadian-speaking would-be scribes Sumerian, long after Sumerian itself had become extinct.

West African grammars in Arabic script

I want to see this talk by Hiroyuki Eto Nikolai Dobonravine (though I'm not likely to be in Dublin for it):

Arabic and Arabic-script writing tradition in West Africa dates back to the 12th century AD, if not earlier. Local scholars were familiar with the linguistic ideas which formed part of Islamic education. Arabic grammars and dictionaries were popular in the region. The interest in the study of Arabic resulted in the development of local Arabic and bilingual vocabularies, sometimes written in verse, as well as some works on Arabic grammar. A few versified vocabularies and grammars of West African languages were also composed. Almost all of them were written in Arabic and used Arabic linguistic terminology.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries several works were written in West African languages using Arabic script. One such work, "Littafen nahwowin Hausance" ("The book of Hausa grammar"), is analysed in the paper. The work demonstrates a special approach to the parts of speech in Hausa (the verb deprived of the "person-aspect complex" is seen as a noun, although it may be used independently in the Imperative). This is a larger work of traditional lexicography, with notes on folk etymology, pragmatic rules, grammatical gender and possessive pronouns in Hausa.

The shift from Arabic to Roman script and the decline in the use of Arabic did not lead to the disappearance of the earlier linguistic tradition. New grammatical works and vocabularies in Arabic script (including a Fula-French vocabulary in Arabic script) were published. All these writings have been largely ignored by the linguists working at the universities in West Africa and abroad.

A comparative linguist of the thirteenth century

I've been reading Empires of the Word recently, a quite enjoyable and informative history of the world's main languages; it skimps on Arabic to an almost absurd extent, but makes up for this by a truly excellent chapter on Sanskrit. Anyway, one surprise it provides is that, in addition to his better known poetic activities, Dante also wrote a treatise about language, De vulgari eloquentia, in which he comments on the nature of language change, specifically attempting to explain how Latin could have gradually changed into the Romance languages, a concept which his audience apparently found hard to accept:

Nor should what we say appear any more strange than to see a young person grown up, whom we do not see grow up; for what moves gradually is not at all to be recognized by us, and the longer something needs for its change to be recognized the more stable we think it is. So we are not surprised if the opinion of men, who are little distant from brutes, is that a given city has existed always with the same language, since the change in language of a city happens gradually only over a very long succession of time, and the life of men is also, by its very nature, very short. Therefore if over one people the language changes, as has been said, successively over time, and can in no way stand still, it is necessary that it should vary in various ways quite separately from what remains constant, just as customs and dress vary in various ways... (p. 321, Empires of the Word; original available elsewhere)

It's easy to forget just how difficult even the basics of historical linguistics must once have seemed, but texts like these help.

Incidentally, I hope to reestablish my website sometime soon - can anyone recommend a good free/very cheap website hosting service other than Geocities?

Ibn Hazm on conlanging (and other stuff)

Having established the divine origin of language to his own satisfaction, Ibn Hazm goes on to discuss the vexed question of what language Adam spoke, and concludes - sensibly enough - that there is no way to be certain. However, he figures it must have been "the most complete of all languages, and the most clearly expressive, and the least ambiguous, and the most concise, and the one with the most various names for all various nameable things in the world" since, having been bestowed by God directly, it must naturally have been the most perfect.

He also decides that it almost surely must have been the ancestor of all modern languages, because it was not inconceivable but extremely improbable that anyone would have decided to waste so much time and effort as to "invent a new language, which would be an enormous effort for no reason; such meddling would not be undertaken by any intelligent person... [its inventor would be] a person busying himself with what does not benefit him and neglecting what concerns him", and even if this did happen, it was even less likely that the inventor would be in a position to impose his language on any community. He specifically considers the "Esperanto" case of a multilingual kingdom adopting a common lingua franca, and argues that "it would be easier for him [the king] to make them learn one of those languages that they used to speak, or his own language; this would be easier and more plausible than the invention of a new language afresh."

He concludes by tersely stating that "Some people imagine that their own language is the best of all languages; this is meaningless" and justifying it theologically and logically.

I like this guy. Makes me wonder what other early linguists had to say...

Ibn Hazm on language endangerment and the origin of language

I've been reading more of chapter 4 of the 11th-century work Ihkam Ibn Hazm - "On how languages come into being, whether by (divine) construction or establishment of convention" - and it's great. I found his description of how a language becomes endangered particularly compelling:

So when a community's state is destroyed, and their enemy gains power over them, and they are kept busy with fear and need and ignominy and serving their foes, then the death of their spirits is guaranteed - and that may cause their language to disappear, and their lineages and history to be forgotten, and their sciences to perish. This is both observed in reality and deduced through a priori reasoning. (Arabic begins: وأما من تلفت دولتهم...)‍

The main topic of the chapter is, of course, the origin of language. He argues that language must have been taught to man by God, because he argues that the three other possibilities that he considers - mutual agreement on a convention, instinct, or the influence of geography - are logically impossible. His argument on instinct is the most interesting: if language were an instinct, then we would all speak the same language. Chomsky, of course, inverts this: since language is an instinct, we all do speak the same language (modulo trivial details of vocabulary and parameters.) On mutual agreement, he notes that it is impossible that a languageless community could agree on a language; how would they have explained to each other what each word was supposed to mean? The idea that each place causes its inhabitants to speak a particular language - advanced as an explanation for linguistic diversity - he rejects as absurd, since any one place can, and generally does, have a variety of languages spoken in it.

I plan to describe more of the chapter later - his comments on conlanging are particularly amusing...

A comparative linguist of the 11th century

Ibn Hazm (994-1064) was a polymathic intellectual of Cordoba, equally well-known for his poetry and his religious commentary. Less well-known are his opinions on Semitic linguistics, which turn out to have been rather impressive. In the quote below, he demonstrates a clearer understanding of the process of historical change than Ibn Quraysh, who seems to have seen the mutual similarities as as resulting as much or more from intermixture than from common ancestry, although both ultimately succumb to the temptation of explaining linguistic family trees in terms of religiously given genealogies. As near as I can translate it off the cuff, he said:

...What we have settled on and determined to be certain is that Syriac and Hebrew and Arabic - that is the language of Mudar and Rabia (ie Arabic as we know it), not the language of Himyar (ie Old South Arabian) - are one language that changed with the migrations of its people, so that it was ground up... For, when a town's people live near another people, their language changes in a manner clear to anyone who considers the issue, and we find that the masses have changed the pronunciation of Arabic significantly, to the point that it is so distant from the original as to be like a different language, so we find them saying `iinab for `inab (grape), and 'asTuuT for sawT (whip), and thalathdaa for thalaathatu danaaniir (three dinars), and when a Berber becomes Arabized and wants to say shajarah (tree) he says sajarah, and when a Galician becomes Arabized he replaces `ayn and Haa with haa, so he says muhammad when he means to say muHammad, and such things are frequent. So whoever ponders on Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac will become certain that their difference is of the type we have described, through changes in people's pronunciation through the passage of time and the difference of countries and the bordering of other nations, and that they are in origin a single language. Having established that, Syriac is the ancestor of both Arabic and Hebrew, and to be more precise, the first to speak this Arabic was Ishmael, upon him be peace, for it is the language of his sons, and Hebrew is the language of Isaac and his sons, and Syriac is without doubt the language of Abraham, blessings and peace be upon him and upon our prophet. (Ihkam Ibn Hazm; see Wikisource for original text, beginning الذي وقفنا عليه وعلمناه يقينا أن السريانية والعبرانية والعربية...)

My attention was originally drawn to this remarkable quote by an article by Ahmad Shahlan, in a rather strange Libyan book fusing pan-Arab nationalism with Semitic philology, at-Tanawwu` wal-Wahdah fi l-lahajaati l-`uruubiyyati l-qadiimati, which probably merits a post in its own right at some point.

Oldest African dictionaries

Some time ago, I came across a web page characterizing a dictionary of Kenzi Nubian dating from 1635 as "the oldest dictionary of an African language". Much as I appreciate their work in getting this very interesting material online, that claim is out by at least 500 years, if not 1000.

The oldest arguable dictionary of an African language that I am aware of so far is the Greek-Coptic Glossary of Dioscorus of Aphrodito, which apparently* dates back to the 6th century. Ibn al-'Assal's Arabic-Coptic sullam muqaffa, written in the 1200s, can quite unhesitatingly be described as a dictionary; following a then-current Arabic tradition, it was arranged alphabetically from the last letter of the word backwards (so, for instance, "apple" would be close to "people" but far from "apricot".) This arrangement was meant to aid in the composition of rhymed prose and verse. Other examples, many arranged semantically, are given by the Encyclopedia of Islam article Sullam (literally "ladder"). In Ethiopia, traditional Geez-Amharic lexicons are titled Sawasew, or "ladders"; I thus assume they are of Coptic inspiration, though I haven't been able to find any detail about when they started to be written.

After Coptic, the next oldest is an Arabic-Berber lexicon written in 1145, containing some two thousand words. Its writer, Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Ja'far al-Qaysi, better known as Ibn Tunart, was born in Qalaat Bani Hammad (modern Algeria) and wrote the work in Fez (Morocco) - a second little-known Algerian medieval linguist to add to my list after Ibn Quraysh! The book contains some paradigms and verbs, but consists principally of a list of Arabic nouns with Berber equivalents or glosses, arranged by semantic field; it inspired several later Moroccan lexica. Nico van den Boogert is working on republishing it.

What other African dictionaries predate Carradori's? I don't know, but I can hazard some guesses - Geez, Swahili, Kanuri, and Nubian itself would certainly be worth checking.

* According to Adel Y. Sidarus, “Coptic Lexicography in the Middle Age, The Coptic Arabic Scalae,” in The Future of Coptic Studies ed. R. McL. Wilson (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978), 123

A comparative linguist of the 10th century

Yehudah ibn Quraysh was a rabbi of the late ninth/early tenth century from Tahert (modern Tiaret, in Algeria.) Shocked to hear that the Jews of Fez in Morocco were neglecting the study of the Targum (an Aramaic translation of the Bible), he wrote a letter to them intended to establish that they could not and should not get by on the Hebrew alone - because other languages, especially Aramaic and Arabic, are essential in elucidating the Hebrew. In the process, he casually noted most of the correct sound correspondences between Hebrew and Arabic, and ended up writing what amounts to an extensive comparative dictionary of the three languages, even throwing in 9 Berber comparisons and 5 Latin ones at the end. He definitely hedges his bets on the cause of this obvious similarity between the three languages, but seems to come surprisingly close to the correct explanation - common descent - at times... something to bear in mind next time you read about Sir William Jones having founded comparative linguistics in 1798.

Here is what he had to say about it, as far as I can translate it:

I then resolved to put together this book for people with understanding, so that they should know that Syriac [Aramaic] expressions are scattered throughout the whole of the Holy Tongue in the Bible, and Arabic is mixed with it, and occasionally bits of Ajami [Latin] and Berber - and principally Arabic in particular, for in it we have found many of its strangest expressions to be pure Hebrew, to the point that there is no difference between the Hebrew and the Arabic except the interchange of ṣād and ḍād, and gīmel and jīm, and ṭet and đ̣ā', and `ay(i)n and ghayn, and ḥā' and khā', and zāy and dhāl. The reason for this similarity and the cause of this intermixture was their close neighboring in the land and their genealogical closeness, since Terah the father of Abraham was Syrian, and Laban was Syrian. Ishmael and Kedar were Arabized from the Time of Division, the time of the confounding [of tongues] at Babel, and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob (peace be upon them) retained the Holy Tongue from the original Adam. The language became similar through intermixture*, just as in every land adjoining a land of a different language we see intermixture of certain expressions between them and the spread of language from one to another; and this is the cause of the similarities we have found between Hebrew and Arabic...

The original was written in classical Arabic using the Hebrew script; I retranscribe it into Arabic script here:

فرأيت عند ذلك أن أؤلِّف هذا الكتاب لأهل الفطن وذوي الألباب، فيعلمو أن جميع לשון קדש (لغة القداسة: العبرانية) الحاصل في المقرأ (الكتب المقدسة) قد انتثرت فيه ألفاظ سريانية واختلطت به لغة عربية وتشذذت فيه حروف عجمية وبربرية ولا سيما العربية خاصة فإن فيها كثير من غريب ألفاظها وجدناه عبرانيا محضا، حتى لا يكون بين العبراني والعربي في ذلك من الاختلاف إلا ما بين ابتدال الصاد والضاد، والجيمل (حرف عبراني: ڱ) والجيم، والطِت (حرف عبراني: ط) والظاء، والعين والغين، والحاء والخاء، والزاي والذال. وإنما كانت العلة في هذا التشابه والسبب في هذا الامتزاج قرب المجاورة في البلاد والمقاربة في النسب لأن תֶרח (تِرَحْ) أبو אברהם (ابراهيم) كان سريانيا وלבן (لابان: حمو يعقوب) سريانيا. وكان ישמעאל (اسماعيل) وקדָר (قيدار) مستعرب من דוֹר הפלגה (زمان الاختلاف)، زمان البلبلة في בבל (بابل)، وאברהם (ابراهيم) وיצחק (إسحاق) وיעקב (يعقوب) عليهم السلام متمسكين بـלשון קדש (لغة القداسة: العبرانية) من אדם הראשון (آدم الأول). فتشابهت اللغة من قبل الممازجة، كما نشاهد في كل بلد مجاور لبلد مخالف للغته من امتزاج بعض الألفاظ بينهم واستعارة اللسان بعضهن من بعض، فهذا سبب ما وجدناه من تشابه العبراني بالعربي...

(Source: D. Becker, Ha-Risala shel Yehudah ben Quraysh, Tel Aviv University Press, Tel Aviv 1984.)

* I previously mistranslated this, having misread qibal as qabl.

Update: Read more at http://lameen.googlepages.com/ibn-quraysh.html.

Poetic grammars

Grammars come in many flavors nowadays - Chomskyan, functionalist, structuralist... However, grammars in verse are something you don't see too often nowadays, so I was recently pleased to come across the ''Alfiyyat Ibn Mâlik'', a 1002-line poem describing Arabic grammar; as it says in line 3:

وأستعين الله في ألفية * مقاصد النحو بها محوية

Wa-'asta`înu llâha fî 'alfiyyah * maqâsidu nnahwi bihâ mahwiyyah

And I seek God's help in a thousand-line
Poem in which grammar's basics are outlined

It was written in the 13th century by one Muhammad Ibn Mâlik, a native of Jaen in Spain who emigrated to Syria. The poem was memorized in order to aid the student in recalling the more obscure details of Arabic grammar (strictly prescriptive, of course...) Unfortunately, the poem proved somewhat obscure to prospective students, prompting the writing of commentaries on it, such as Sharh Ibn `Aqîl, in which each verse or group of verses was explained in greater detail. As a sample of the style, I present verse 229:

ويرفع الفاعلَ فعلٌ أُضمرا * كمثل "زيدٌ" في جواب "من قرا"؟

Wa-yarfa`u lfâ`ila fa`lun 'udmirâ * kamithli "zaydun" fî jawâbi "man qarâ?"

And an implicit verb makes its subject nominative
Like "Zayd-NOM" in answer to "Who read?"

(Ie, the subject of a verb implied by context but not actually present in the sentence at hand takes the nominative.) I wonder what parallels exist in other grammatical traditions.

Incidentally, I'm back from Algeria now, and plan to report on more linguistic tidbits - as well as more luggi, on- or off-topic - shortly; I'm also starting at SOAS soon.