Semitic linguistics geekery!
Monday, December 11th, 2006 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manProgress in teaching myself the Arabic alphabet is coming along much as expected, viz. suffering from a lack of dedication of time. I have, however, managed to stagger, after a considerable period of time, through the headline "عنان عنان يطالب واشنطن بمراعاة حقوق الانسان في حرب الارهاب" from the BBC Arabic News site, which, with the help of Links in a deliberately non-UTF-8 environment to check my answers (and occasionally cheat) with, I have rendered (ignoring emphatic consonants, and for ease of reading, rendering sīn with ס) as ענאן יטא לב ואשנטן במראעאת חק*וק אלָנסאן פ*י חרב אלָרהאב. (The first asterisked consonant I have no idea why it's that and not ת; the second doesn't match the form of פ in my cribsheet; or at least not on the site; it looks more like it in the font on the LJ webform...)
I'm rendering Arabic into Hebrew, if you're wondering, because it's closely related, both language and alphabet, and from experience trying to make head or tail of Hebrew rendered into the Latin alphabet, I expect this will pay dividends. Non-Hebrew readers will just have to bear with me.
Google Translate informs me the translation (not the same as the version on the English site) is "Annan calls on Washington to respect human rights in war on terror". Didja spot "Annan" and "Washington"? I have to confess I only spotted the former (the photo was a bit of a giveaway), partly because I'd mis-transcribed the latter due to attempting to manage from memory, and mistaking the sīn for a šīn.
And so to cognates. I wonder whether לב is the same as in Hebrew; I'm thinking in particular of the modern Hebrew phrase לשם לב. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
troo, do you speak Arabic?) The other possible-cognate that suggests itself is חרב; which in Hebrew means "sword".
Of course, possibly both of these are false cognates (in the way that, for example, German haben is not cognate to Latin habere but to capere. I need to learn more about the rules by which letters change between Hebrew and Arabic. I know, for example, that proto-Semitic ṯ became ש in Hebrew but ת in Arabic and Aramaic, hence שלוש vs. תלת, and another sound became צ in Hebrew and ע in Aramaic (and Arabic?), hence ארץ vs. ארעה; and Hebrew abhors nt and drops the n, hence בת vs. bint (and why the n reappears in the plural in Hebrew, when there's an intervening vowel); and I'm scrawling down some notes from the balashon blog as to which consonants tend to interchange within the development of the Hebrew language (כתר vs. עטרה, both meaning "crown", illustrates two examples), but I suspect I'm still missing most of the picture.
Crikey; this post took longer to type up than it did for me to transliterate the Arabic in the first place! ...And now, when I'm about to go to bed, I now remember what else I was going to do this evening. Drat! :o)
I'm rendering Arabic into Hebrew, if you're wondering, because it's closely related, both language and alphabet, and from experience trying to make head or tail of Hebrew rendered into the Latin alphabet, I expect this will pay dividends. Non-Hebrew readers will just have to bear with me.
Google Translate informs me the translation (not the same as the version on the English site) is "Annan calls on Washington to respect human rights in war on terror". Didja spot "Annan" and "Washington"? I have to confess I only spotted the former (the photo was a bit of a giveaway), partly because I'd mis-transcribed the latter due to attempting to manage from memory, and mistaking the sīn for a šīn.
And so to cognates. I wonder whether לב is the same as in Hebrew; I'm thinking in particular of the modern Hebrew phrase לשם לב. (
troo, do you speak Arabic?) The other possible-cognate that suggests itself is חרב; which in Hebrew means "sword". Of course, possibly both of these are false cognates (in the way that, for example, German haben is not cognate to Latin habere but to capere. I need to learn more about the rules by which letters change between Hebrew and Arabic. I know, for example, that proto-Semitic ṯ became ש in Hebrew but ת in Arabic and Aramaic, hence שלוש vs. תלת, and another sound became צ in Hebrew and ע in Aramaic (and Arabic?), hence ארץ vs. ארעה; and Hebrew abhors nt and drops the n, hence בת vs. bint (and why the n reappears in the plural in Hebrew, when there's an intervening vowel); and I'm scrawling down some notes from the balashon blog as to which consonants tend to interchange within the development of the Hebrew language (כתר vs. עטרה, both meaning "crown", illustrates two examples), but I suspect I'm still missing most of the picture.
Crikey; this post took longer to type up than it did for me to transliterate the Arabic in the first place! ...And now, when I'm about to go to bed, I now remember what else I was going to do this evening. Drat! :o)
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no subject
Date: 2006-12-12 09:33 am (UTC)Learned some literate Arabic in school many years ago, and promptly forgot it all.
I can try though...
Did you copy and paste the headline? because the first word (Anan) is there twice, so I was wondering where that came from.
If I eliminate the duplicate then I think you split the second word into two, because the cursive is not continual. It's a confusing element of Arabic - it's not cursive for the sake of a continual brush/pen stroke like English cursive is, but for the sake of aesthetics. That means it's יטאלב so your question about heart is void (don't know the answer either, sorry).
And חרב can mean both sword and destruction/ destroyed, and my instincts tell me that the later is the more possible common ground. Still don't know how it fits in that line... Time to get a good dictionary?
Here's a small point of interest for you:
I'm busy learning Dutch and the other day I found my favourite group of Dutch words:
Prut mud, ooze, sludge
Pruts trinket
Prutsen mess about, tinker
Pruttelen simmer, percolate
no subject
Date: 2006-12-12 09:54 am (UTC)Whoops; you're right. By the time I copied and pasted them the text had reverted to meaningless squiggles. I'm a long way short of being able to recognise letters on sight yet.
If I eliminate the duplicate then I think you split the second word into two, because the cursive is not continual.
You're right; I should have clicked through onto the article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/arabic/news/newsid_6170000/6170615.stm) where the text is larger and easier to make out intra-word spacing from inter-word.
It's a confusing element of Arabic - it's not cursive for the sake of a continual brush/pen stroke like English cursive is, but for the sake of aesthetics.
<nods> I'm beginning to pick this up.
And חרב can mean both sword and destruction/ destroyed, and my instincts tell me that the later is the more possible common ground.
It would seem to me that the two meanings are fairly obviously related (as in the English phrase "overran <place> with fire and the sword": "sword" is abstract here.
Still don't know how it fits in that line... Time to get a good dictionary?
Possibly. :o)
Here's a small point of interest for you:
I'm busy learning Dutch and the other day I found my favourite group of Dutch words:
[snip]
So what's the English cognates? :o)
no subject
Date: 2006-12-12 10:15 am (UTC)I'm not sure I follow your meaning of cognate (possibly because I've not encountered this word before, and all I have is a dictionary definition), but I think you can see how all of those meanings came out of "Prut" (perhaps not in the order I put them in, mind you).
no subject
Date: 2006-12-12 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-12 05:41 pm (UTC)