My friend The Liberal Avenger alerted me to this story, which seems to be making ripples in the blogosphere. It seems that Burger King (in the UK) has recalled some prepackaged ice cream cones, because the swirly-confection picture on the label looks a lot like the Arabic word allah, and people were complaining about this. [...]
Here’s something I’ve been meaning to link to: a cool post from the always-excellent Jabal al-Lughat on the Alfiyyat ibn Maalik, a 1002-line poem (rhyme, or verse, being, of course, a mnemonic device, among other things) that was intended to help students remember some of the details of the grammar of Classical Arabic. It was [...]
I’m passing on this sample of Meccan dialect, which I encountered over the weekend in Versteegh’s The Arabic Language (a little “beach reading”). It’s both interesting (because it’s a sample of a fairly obscure Arabic dialect) and amusing (although it does reinforce some cross-cultural gender stereotypes). 1. hāda kān wāḥid riĝĝāl wu-hāda r-riĝĝāl nassāy marra [...]
Michael Reagan has written an amazingly ill-informed and extremely stupid column, which appeared today on David Horowitz’s site. He starts out from a position of misinformation and proceeds to make a complete fool of himself: The San Bernadino, California, high school district is now discussing the implementation of Ebonics – the street language of young [...]
The best thing about working late is getting to listen to the lunatic ravings of Michael Savage on the radio on my way home. Tonight he had some guest, whose name I didn’t catch, who was telling Savage all about the perfidy and evil of Saudi Arabia. The guest made a mistake, though, in his [...]
At Languagehat, I found a link to a lexicon of Arabic loanwords in Spanish. Cool stuff.
Jesse Taylor at Pandagon has made a very good point about “strict interpretation of the Constitution,” and it’s not a political point but a linguistic one. If the “original intent” movement demands a “plain English” requirement of constitutional interpretation based on today’s English, which Sowell seems to be contending in his rejection of the movement [...]
A post at Language Log discusses what seems to be an urban legend about “Al-Qaeda.” Former British foreign secretary Robin Cook writes: Al-Qaida, literally “the database”, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. This is simply false, even [...]
The information I found at Jabal al-Lughat (see earlier post) fascinated me to the point that I decided to have a crack at my own translation of the statement. My Arabic is so scanty that I don’t pretend to have anything of genuine value to add to the discussion, but this is some interesting stuff [...]
Jabal al-Lughat has some interesting things to say about the statement issued by the group claiming responsibility for the London terror attacks. The group, which calls itself Qa’idat al-Jihad in Europe, posted a statement that uses some interesting language: The first interesting thing about this statement is the bizarre phrasing of its opening: والصلاة والسلام [...]
