Hittite Dictionary

“Did you know that 3500 years ago when Hittites said watar it meant the same as our English word water?” teases a display at Chicago’s  Oriental Institute.

It continues:

English and Hittite both belong to the Indo-European language family, of which Hittite is the oldest known member. This means that they share grammar and words: watar = English water. The Hittites lived in ancient Anatolia, which is now modern Turkey. Between 1650 and 1200 BC they were one of the great powers of the ancient Near East alongside Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia. There are over 30,000 Hittite texts comprising laws, letters, annals, hymns and prayers, oracles and omens, myths, scenarios for religious celebrations and rituals, and even ancient dictionaries.

The Hittite dictionary project has been going since 1976. It has already been in print (I have seen a used three-volume set priced at $20 per volume).  The Chicago Hittite Dictionary is also free online (it downloads a Java application file first).

Other language projects at the Oriental Institute have not been so successful, at least yet. The oldest project, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, began in 1921, and is said to be nearly complete with 20 volumes so far. A project to supplement a 1954 glossary of Demotic Egyptian is also still underway; plans call for a hard copy and a CD-ROM as a final product.


Of course there are rumors the dictionary is already available in the members’ library upstairs.

John and Jesus in Arabic

Do Arab Christians and Moslems have different names for the same biblical personages?

I remember a Jordanian Moslem from the town where Herod had his palace (the one where the Baptist was beheaded) telling me the name for John was Yohanna.

Bible:

Checking the account of John the Baptist in an Arabic Bible we find in Matthew 3:1 the name used is يُوحَنَّا Yohanna. Jesus, from Matthew 1:1 is يَسُوعَ Yasua.  While we’re there let’s get from Matthew 1:16 the names of Mary مَرْيَمَ (Mariyam) and Josephيُوسُفَ  (Yousef), parents of Jesus. In the same verse there is also the word for Christ الْمَسِيحَ –Maseeya.

But in Arabic there is more than one Mariyam and more than one Yousef. Aaron, brother of Moses had a sister Miriam the prophetess. In Exodus 15:20 she is called مَرْيَمُ Miriam, same as the mother of Jesus. Joseph يُوسُفَ (Yousef) who was sold into slavery in Egypt (Genesis 39:2), the same as the carpenter Joseph. There is also more than one Jesus, the name Joshua يَشُوعُ (Yashua) (son of Nun and aide to Moses) being cognate (?) with Jesus, but not spelled the same here in Numbers 11:28.  But isn’t s/sh a shiboleth somewhere in the Bible?*

Koran:

On to the Koran. First, Jesus. Koran 3:45 has the names Jesus عِيسَى (Issa),  Maryيَٰمَرْيَمُ (Mariyam) and Messiah ٱلْمَسِيحُ (messeeya) . A few passages further on (3:39), John the Baptist is called بِيَحْيَىٰ Yahya. Apparently Joseph the carpenter doesn’t rate a mention in the Koran, but Joseph who was sold into slavery to Egypt has his own book of the Koran where he is called يوسف Yousef, or in the fully voweled classical Koran version يُوسُفَ.

And in Spanish (from the same Bible portal as the Arabic):

John the Baptist-Juan el Bautista

Jesus-Jesús

Mary-María

Joseph-José (The Egyptian Joseph is also José.)

Joshua (son of Nun, Moses’ aide)=Josué (hijo de Nun, asistente de Moisés)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*Judges 12:5-6:

⁵ The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the Gileadites asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” ⁶ they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’ ” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.

The Hebrew for “messiah” appears to be מָשִׁ֫יחַ transliteration: mashiach, phonetic spelling: (maw-shee’-akh).

Reading Talmud

Daf yomi is a world wide systematic reading of the Talmud, a page a day, which can be completed in a seven year cycle.  The end of the reading cycle is celebrated public ceremonies called Siyum HaShas. Unfortunately the Daf yomi program looks pretty formidable, like one would need a lot of prior knowledge to navigate the readings. Not for me, at least not yet.

I would love to study another language; Hebrew would help me with my Arabic, and might provide me with interesting insights about the Old Testament portion of my own religious tradition as well.  On my latest summer vacation trip, I couldn’t resist a copy of Learn to Write the Hebrew Script–it looks like such fun, but when will I have time to read it?

I’m currently back to reading Joyce’s Ulysses; after a rocky start and some diversions–the writing style initially appeared incoherent and requires a whole different system of reading–it suddenly started to unfold like a film with a voiceover narrative, and I’m well into the second chapter.

After that maybe Markham’s West with the Night,  a copy having been bequeathed to me by an old friend on my summer peregrinations. Said Ernest Hemingway (according to the back of the cover),

I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer’s log book.  As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer.  I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen.  But [she ] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people’s stories, are absolutely true…. I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book.

Free Language Learning Resources

Want to learn some out of the way language like Urdu,  Brazilian Portuguese, or even Arabic or Hebrew? Trying to google those resources is haphazard at best, and often you just end up with some unsatisfying YouTube videos meant for proselytizing.  But here is a more systematic list of university-based online resources, the Master List of Free Language Learning Resources.

I had trouble with the podcasts at first.  All the links just seemed to redirect me to a download for iTunes, a 74 MB program that I really don’t want.  It kept redirecting me even after I installed the program, then suddenly it started working and offered to open the application with, you guessed it, iTunes (but not any of my other players).  (In retrospect, I would go straight to the Apple website instead of downloading it from an unknown site–who knows what else rode in with it. Note to self: run spybot and ad-aware…)

Scrolling down further on the page, you can find more accessible links to more online learning.  If you scroll to “Open University” under the “Free College Courses” heading, there are more links to resources, but hard to find as the given link is broken. A little googling though comes up with the page for Modern Languages (French, Spanish, German, and business English). If you dig even deeper, the same website offers Getting started on Classical Greek and Getting started on Classical Latin. I think I could have a lot of fun here.

Useful Links

I can never find these when I want them.

TV shows

Firefly (a space western) wikipedia|episodes|Chinese language phrases (mostly Mandarin) from show (LHers say real Chinese people can’t understand these)
Firefly first five episodes
La Femme Nikita episodes (starring Peta Wilson)
The Prisoner free online (Patrick McGoohan)

Bible portals

Today’s New International Version
Revised Standard Version
Arabic translation (Bible Gateway)
Q Bible (Hebrew & English)
Parallel translations (commentary and cross references)
Codex Sinaiticus (earliest known Bible–in Greek)
Bible Gateway (a dozen English versions including TNIV but not RSV, plus languages including Arabic but not Greek or Hebrew)

Koran portals

Al-Tafsir (Jordan)
Shakir (U. of Virginia)
Shakir (U. of Michigan)
Yusuf Ali, Pickthal, Shakir (U. of Southern California)
Online Quran Project (60 trans. + Arabic)
Ayat al-Kursi (Throne Verse) [2:255] Tutorial
Open Quran (9 reciters + Arabic text)
“Wahhabi” translation
Koran Today (side by side comparison of translators Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Zohurul Hoque, T.J. Irving, T.U. Hilali & M. Khan, M. Pickthall, and M.S. Shakir)
(For prayer times)
mosque: Bridgeview
mosque: Adams (DC)

Dictionaries

Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
OneLook (1024 dictionaries)
Memidex dictionary and thesaurus
Webster’s New World College Dictionary

Language Dictionaries

Arabic: new library, so far several translations of Koran and a users dictionary.
Danish: modern danish dictionary, pronunciation guide, historical dictionary of danish
English: Middle English
Hindi from Slovarus.info
Mongolian, from Slovarus.info (via LH)
Mongolian (from read)
Norwegian Bokmåls- og nynorskordboka i felles søkevindu
Norwegian Nynorsk – Grunnmanuskriptet, based on field work in the early 20th century (the book was never published, maybe because of the great depression, maybe because of a political backlash, I don’t really know), but intended to finally be printed on paper for the national jubilee in 2014.
Sanskrit, from Slovarus.info
Scots language (not Gaelic)

Language

General:
Survival Phrases
Mojibake online decoder (for non-standard character sets in Cyrillic, etc.–then put result into Google Translate)
Master list of free language learning resources (including Arabic)
The Open University (podcasts) (British)  French, German, Spanish, business English

By language:
Chinese–language phrases (mostly Mandarin) from Firefly TV series (it is said that real chinese people cannot understnad these)
Chinese grammar sample (from Bathrobe)
English (15th to 19th c)
Greek (classical)–Getting started tutorial
Hebrew dictionary with 2 hour reading tutorial
Hebrew dictionary, keyboard, and translate tool
Latin (classical)–Getting started
Thai mp3 downloads (webmaster in jail, download fast?)

Computer downloads for new computer setup

Portable Firefox (for flash drives)
100 plugins from Mycroft Project (Urban Dictionary)
FoxLingo toolbar
American English spellcheck dictionary
Irfanview image editor
Zoombrowser EX (camera)
Zoombrowser EX (But where’s the install file? Can’t find it on Vista.)  Sure Canon gives you a disk, and they are said to be very proprietary about their software, but what are you supposed to do if you have a netbook with no CD player? Do they really think someone would want to use the program if they didn’t already have a Canon camera? Something to think about when it comes time to upgrade the camera.
Zoombrowser Canon A560 (and others) update from Canon (must have EX installed first)
Ad-aware
Spybot Search and Destroy
Bitdefender
(AVG now with annoying popups and demands for system restarts)
Canon printer utility
Quicktime and iTunes download
iTunes 64 bit Vista download
Realplayer download
How to enable Arabic on Vista: Start button->Control Panel->Classic View; select Regional and Language Options->Formats tab (set format to language i.e. “Arabic Egypt”); Location Tab (make location match setting for current format “Egypt”);  go to Keyboards and Languages tab-> click on “Change Keyboards”
Picasa 3 Image editor for photos

Jordan

The Jordan Times
Jordan news RSS feeds
Petra News Agency

Middle East

Asharq Al-Awsat (London)
Search for world newspapers by country
James Zogby on Huffington Post (archives on Washington Watch)

Audio (see also Language)

music:
Giovanni
Holst, Planets
NPR Music (click live concerts for Neko Case)

Platforms and Tracks

In some countries trains are designated by “platform”. But, as you can see, in Chicago several different trains can leave from the same “platform” and directions to trains are given by “track” number. In this short video (0:32), you can hear an announcement of an arriving train that says in part, ” “arriving track number one please stay behind the yellow line ’til the train comes to a complete stop… Indiana, the South Shore… now arriving track four…”

In the underground “pedway” that has been gradually expanding under the city, directions are marked to various “tracks”:

At Millenneum Station, Tracks 8 and 9 are accessible from the same platform.  The area between tracks 9 and 10 (Sign: “This Platform Closed”) is referred to as a “platform” even though it isn’t elevated. Tracks 10 and 11 are also accessed from the same platform; here a train is waiting on Track 11.

At the Van Buren Street Station, again two tracks are accessible from the same platform. The first picture is Platform 2 taken from Platform 1, with Tracks 1 and 2 in between. The second photo looks towards the Loop. From left to right, Platform 1, Track 1, Track 2, Platform 2, Track 3. The third photo is looking outbound. From left to right you can see Track 3, Platform 2, Track 2, Track 1, and Platform 1.

Finally, a remote station with only inbound and outbound commuter tracks, and freight tracks on the side. The first picture is looking inbound, the second is of the same two platforms and two commuter tracks looking outbound.

Is the Al-Kitaab Arabic language textbook anti-Israel?

A book I once used for Arabic language study, Al-Kitaab, is in the midst of a political controversy.

Matthew Iglesias over at the Atlantic has been following the issues surrounding the Washington Post’s op-ed about the Arabic language textbook. I found out about it through ArabLing, which I found on the blogroll of Jabal al-Lughat, which I found a link to in a post about some esoteric point in Koranic Arabic from LanguageHat, which I keep meaning to take off of my feedreader since I always end up getting engrossed in it and spend too much time following the links. Apparently someone was offended because the maps in the textbook didn’t identify Israel as an “Arabic speaking” country.

Well, one picture is worth a thousand words, so I offer here some pictures of the maps and pages in question. Israel and Palestine are both all over the maps in question. The images here have been resized for faster page loading, but if anyone really wants to do a save to examine them closer, they should all be in a resolution large enough to read. (1) The first group of images is from the second edition of Al-Kitaab Part One published in 2004. (2) The next group is from an older version of the same text, the first edition of Al-Kitaab Part One published in 1995 and the companion workbook for the alphabet, Alif Baa, from the same year. As you will see, they changed the maps a little bit. Both versions list Israel in their glossary, and I throw that in too. Then I throw in a page from (3) Elementary Modern Standard Arabic, a text completely without illustrations which was the standard Arabic language text before the publication of Al-Kitaab. Oh, and the before and after picture of the “old” and “new” (4) Maha, since she has somehow gotten in the middle of the controversy for alleged whining.

1. The latest edition of Al-Kitaab:

2) First edition of Al-Kitaab and the companion wordbook Alif Baa:

3) Elementary Modern Standard Arabic, the previous standard Arabic text:

4) The old Maha; the new Maha with laptop:

Okay, what do I see?

First of all I consider monitoring textbooks for anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic bias to be a valid exercise. Monitoring for anti-Arab bias as well. I have seen translations of textbooks that shocked, but did not surprise me. In particular, it does not strike me as particularly honest to claim some other group is thinking something bad or wanting something bad or has evil motivations. The only way you can know someone’s motivations is by what they do and what they say. I also think the standard for, say a sixth grade text is different from the standard for a university text, which Al-Kitaab is, and has more leeway for political viewpoints instead of bare facts.

While the old Al-Kitaab textbook lists only Palestinian as a nationality, the old workbook shows Palestine/Israel together geographically. This is continued in the new textbook. Both old and new versions list Israel in the glossary. If the book was one of those “Israel-does-not-exist” advocates, which is pretty rare anymore, they would not print the name “Israel” in the text as an exercise and in the glossary. I would like to see the nationality “Israeli” written in Arabic. The Arabs I know refer to Israelis as “Yahood”–Jews–which I don’t think is either accurate or promoting the values I would like to see promoted. It would be nice to have an alternative word to inject into conversation.

Teaching about culture is a valid and necessary part of any language instruction.  When we come to the “How old are you?” lesson in my English classes, I always talk about “good questions” and “bad questions,” and when it is appropriate to ask someone’s age.  Students need to know that.  In many parts of the Arab world it is not wise to say the word “Israel” in public.  In my opinion the book does not go far enough in explaining these cultural cues, but I suppose like language, culture is also in flux and it will depend on who you ask.

The Al-Kitaab series is far, far better than the old chestnut Elementary Modern Standard Arabic. The one pictured here was published in 1999, but has been in continuous copyright since 1968.  It doesn’t have so much as one picture.  The page shown above is a story about a tourist trip to Lebanon. Those days are long gone.

As far as Maha, a lot of language texts use a Dick, Jane, and Sally character to try to generate interest for the language.  The Jordanian Petra English language series has a “TV Presenter” (yes, it was written by a Brit) and also a boy named Marwin who whines a lot about food he doesn’t like.  Marwin is quite useful for learning negatives. I didn’t connect with either Maha. The second Maha reminds me of some urban Arabs I once worked with who we nicknamed Gucci and Channel, for the range of their interests and professional capabilities. At least she covers her arms down to the wrist.  The first Maha seems to be showing a lot of skin from the elbow to the wrist. In my experience this is maybe marginally okay in the city when the temperature is over 100, but definitely not okay in the country.

My real beef with the series, and with Arabic language textbooks in general, is that they only teach Modern Standard Arabic–”foos-ha”.  No one in the world actually speaks Modern Standard Arabic.  It is an artificial language–a construct.  Probably someone was hoping for some Arab Unity, but of course they got some Arab nationalism instead. Now the language has snob appeal and some countries will only print newspapers in that language, forbidding even common words like yalla (“let’s go”) from being printed in advertisements. If someone would print a serious textbook in Colloquial Levantine Arabic, which is what they speak from Syria to Saudi Arabia to Palestine to Iraq, I would buy it. Unfortunately the Arab concept of language acquisition consists of presenting charts of those awful conjugations and what they call “vocabs”–lists of out-of-context words with unfathomable meanings.

~~~~~~~~~~

Note: This post has been sitting in my “drafts” since last summer. I’m only dusting it off now because my beloved LanguageHat blog is currently experiencing technical difficulties and I have not had my Linguistics Chew Toy fix for today. I will have it even if I have to write it myself.

Since in the post I also complain about the lack of colloquial Arabic resources, let me also reprint a subsequent comment from LH himself after a similar lament on a thread there. So any LHers who might also peek in here from time to time can get one of the Hat’s past Oracles as well:

There’s an excellent Reference Grammar of Syrian Arabic by Mark W. Cowell if you can find it (I got it at the French & Spanish Book Shop in Rockefeller Center in 1991, but it was published in 1964), and an equally excellent Dictionary of Syrian Arabic: English-Arabic by Karl Stowasser and Moukhtar Ani; Routledge has a short but useful Colloquial Arabic (Levantine).

Decoding Russian Spam and Mojibake

Just overnight, 50 new spam comments have appeared in my spam filter. Out of those, 25 were in the Russian language and the others were all in English, although 2 or 3 of those had Russian addresses. Russian spam seems to be increasing exponentially at the same time that I’m getting bored with it.

For a while I was letting a few through on one thread.  From this I was able to determine that the Russian word блог is blog, Спасибо is thank you, сексапил is seksapil (sex appeal?), and finally from a comment on another post, I was terribly excited to find out that  гавнокоментов (спама), is the word for orgavnokomentov (spam).

Translation is simple enough. Just highlight, copy, and paste it in the box of a machine translation tool like Google Translate or Foxlingo, and hit the “translate” button to see a quick approximation.  If you like to play with languages a lot, you can even install the Firefox language toolbar.

Once in a while a bit of Russian spam turns up that’s completely unintelligible. In the WordPress spam filter this comes across as a series of question marks and can’t be decoded, but in some formats it has distinguishing symbols and can be decoded.  Here is an example from another website:

Ñïàñèáî çà ñòàòüþ.. Àêòóàëüíî ìíå ñåé÷àñ.. Âçÿëà ñåáå åùå ïåðå÷èòàòü.

This is called mojibake and is what happens when your software can’t decode non-standard character sets in Cyrillic, etc. For this you need a decoder, like:

http://www.online-decoder.com

which  tells us this is written in ISO 8859-15=>windows1251 and yields the following Cyrillic characters:

Спасибо за статью.. Актуально мне сейчас.. Взяла себе еще перечитать

The Cyrillic characters can now be translated with your preferred system.  In Google Translate this gives:

Thanks for the article .. News to me now .. Took another reread.

In all fairness I would have to say that not all the Russian spam has been useless. So far I have discovered a very amusing Russian horoscope (http://www.astrogoro.ru/) page,  a blog about herbs: Lechimsya herbs–recipes and tips for travolecheniyu (http://fiter.ru/)and one for Therapeutic nutrition: all about a healthy diet (http://leched.ru/), and this one with interesting pictures of presumably Russian buildings Stroyblog: blog on construction and real estate (http://topsstroy.ru/), all brought by the same one or two spam bots and none with any comments.  If this is someone’s business plan, I sure can’t figure it out, but I’m not about to give them any links either.

Note: Within five minutes of publishing, this post was published in an English language, Russia-based splog, a blog created solely of content ripped off of other posts, without crediting the original. Maybe that’s the business plan, that the material from their blogs is scraped.

From Russia with Spam

A few weeks ago I peeked in my spam filter and saw a bunch of foreign language spam all in Russian. Why me?  I had posted some comments on a blog with Russian language excerpts–maybe that was it.  So I posted another comment and asked if everyone else was getting a lot of Russian spam.  No, they all get spam, they said, but in different languages, not just  Russian.

For some time now I have been translating the Russian bon mots with the help of Google Translate, and if I like them I set them free onto the blog with their links neutered. For some reason they like my post E-Arabs; nothing could be more off-topic–it’s about blogging in the Middle East.

Now, just overnight, there are 38 new spam comments, 16 of them in Russian. The screenshot  on the right shows a bunch of them in my spam filter with the identifying information blocked out. (click to enlarge)  Several of them have the identical message, although with different user names. Looking closer, most of those different user names come from the same IP address. So quite a few of those messages are from the same person, or at least the same building.  Most of the messages are obviously spam but a few of them look like legitimate blogs.

The most interesting message so far has been from a Russian horoscope website that gave me a very interesting prediction for January and February:

The cluster of planets in the house of extreme situations, said that the Twins will find SuperDuper way to celebrate the beginning of the year, almost two months, Venus gives them a powerful seksapil and, of course, an unforgettable adventure.

I had forgotten all about the prediction, until a few days ago someone named HP left a series of amazing comments on a thread that resonated so strongly I instinctively typed “HP, marry me.”  Oh dear, what did I do?

Now there is no one on earth more cautious about internet strangers or for that matter more paranoid than I am,  and I certainly have ample experience in detecting and deflecting mere booty calls, but could this be more than a fun intellectual romp though the blogosphere?  Perhaps my “seksapil”– this does mean “sex appeal”, doesn’t it?–is not in myself but in my stars, and a true adventure is about to unfold.  Let’s hope this gets interesting.

IPA

The International Phonetic System is a system of phonetic notation used to represent sounds in spoken language. Since I don’t have these memorized, and I’m tired of googling it, I hereby create a new sidebar button to the wikipedia article that seems most useful for looking them up.

This page has sounds you can listen to if you have your computer set up to play files with the .ogg extension.