Thursday, July 31, 2008

Wudu

Ordered by the Creator,Wudu to clean and protect.Ablution of the body and soulto condition and correct.Hands are washed 5 times a dayalong with arms and face and headears and feet are also cleanedto allow our sins be shed.And when we've wiped our unhappiness clear,we feel the mercy of Gods way.And know that we are only helping ourselves,when we bow our heads to pray.This action of sheer glory,

Some surprising language links

Sorry about the infrequent posting, everyone - I've been burying myself in transcribing a few of my field recordings. There's plenty of interesting stuff on them: what to sing to encourage locusts to go away, how to make tea the proper Saharan way, tickling rhymes for kids... So naturally today I'll post a potentially linguistically interesting audio link: Library of Congress: American Memory Sound Recordings. This has a bunch of interviews with ex-slaves from the 1930s, which I understand from reading John McWhorter's Defining Creole have revolutionised Creolists' ideas about the history of African-American English. A popular theory had argued that during the era of slavery African-Americans spoke a creole English much like the ones in the Caribbean; these recordings, which show a speech not too different from today, turned out to pose a severe challenge to this view. It also has an Omaha pow-wow and late 1930's Californian folk music in a surprising number of languages, including Armenian, Finnish, and Gaelic. Look around.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Good Father

One good father can do more than 100 schoolmasters.Persian proverb

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Words

The wound of words is worse than the wound of swords.Arab Proverb

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Corrosion of the Heart

Hadhrat Abu Hurairah (رضى الله تعالى عنه) narrates that Rasulullah (sallallahu صلى الله عليه وسلم) said: When the Mu’min sins, a black spot forms on his heart. If he makes istighfaar and taubah, the black mark is removed and his heart is purified. If he increases his sin, the black mark increases. This is the corrosion of the heart spoken of by Allah Ta’ala (in the Qur’an)[Ahmad, Tirmizi, Ibn

Friday, July 18, 2008

و الشعراء و الصور

هذه مجموعة مدونات ناطقة باللغة العربية رصدناها مؤخرا.

نبدأ بمدونة - مشيئة - و هي مدونة رائعة فعلا للشاعر العراقي المغترب في السويد سعد الياسري
مدونة متمكنة لغويا و تحتوي على نماذج من شعر الياسري اضافة الى نسق المدونات الطبيعي, يتحدث عن السياسة و الفن و الأدب, يقول معرفا بنفسه:

حين تسرّبت من رحم أمّي – دون مشورتي طبعًا - ؛ خرجتُ مغلّفًا بكيس , و ما زالت أمّي تظنّ بأنّها نبوءة , و أنّي سأبلغ ما لم يبلغه الأوائل ولا الأواخر . حديث الكيس هذا متواتر في عائلتنا حتّى أنّ أبي قال عنه ( حديث حسن بسند لا بأس به ) . في المستشفى ؛ حيث ولدت بالقاهرة الجميلة والمزدحمة , تطوّعن الممرضات لتسميتي , فكانت الأسماء تتراوح قيمتها وثيمتها بين القومجية والإسلاموية نظرًا للمدّ السائد وقتذاك, حتى حسم أبي النزاع و أسماني " سعدًأ ..* أنا الآن في العقد الثالث من عمري , و قد قضيت نصفه أو يزيد خارج العراق , و حين أفكّر بالانتماء فلا تعنيني – حتمًا – خطوط الطول والعرض , إنّما الفكرة التي يغرسها الوطن في مخيّلة أبنائه , و العراق غرس في مخيّلتي قصيدةً لا تموت و حنينًا لا ينساق بسهولة إلى وصلة الردح الوطني . أنا رجل بلا وطن , و وطني – الجغرافي على الأقل – يحترق و يسكرُ بدمه العاقّون من أبنائه , بولاءات ناقصة


ننتقل الى مدونة سما اللامي, عراقية من ميسان تسكن الإمارات حاليا, تكتب في مدونة قهوةع المفرق,يغلب على مدونتها النسق الشعري.

من المدونات الشعرية الأخرى مدونة الشاعر حبيب السامر, ومدونة الشاعر رياض البكري.

و بعيدا عن الشعر, تحكي لنا سوالف خاتون بالعراقية العامية آخر مغامراتها بأسلوب خفيف (و ذلك أمر يفهم من روابط المدونين التي تضعهم على صحفتها من شلش العراقي الى مدونة الياسري - بلد المليون مولدة) بينما يبوح الصحفي أبو الحسن بكل ما يجول بخاطره على مدونة أبو الحسن: السياسة و المجتمع,

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Failure

Many students succumb to such drastic measures. Some students work and study extremely hard but fail. Due to failure, they sink into such depression that they feel they have to take or inject themselves with drugs, tranquilizers, etc. for sleep. Why ?…Because they failed.If a person did not make Tadbeer, i.e. did not make a serious and concerted effort and thereafter fails, then he must blame

Monday, July 14, 2008

IKLAN

أَوَلاَ يَعْلَمُونَ أَنَّ اللّهَ يَعْلَمُ مَا يُسِرُّونَ وَمَا يُعْلِنُونَ

Apakah mereka tidak mengetahui bahwa Allah mengetahui segala apa yang mereka sembunyikan (dalam hati mereka) dan apa yang mereka iklankan (dengan ucapan mereka) (QS 2:77).

Kata yu’linuun, terambil dari kata علن – ‘alana, lalu mendapat tambahan alif menjadi أعلن – a’lana.

Jika wazan ini kita teruskan:

أَعْلَنَ – يُعْلِنُ – إِعْلَانَ : a’lana – yu’linu – i’laan, artinya mengumumkan/memberitahukan/menyatakan (to declare)

Bentuk إعلان – i’laan, diserap kedalam bahasa Indonesia menjadi IKLAN. Jadi (mungkin) hakekatnya sebuah IKLAN adalah sebuah pemberituan.

Demikian one word, kali ini.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Our New TESOL/TEFL Program in Italy


Due to the voracious demand for English teaching jobs in Northern Italy. We have just opened a new school based in Genoa Italy. Genoa is a port city that is only a few hours from the Italian/French border along what is known as the Italian Riviera. Not far from the bustling metropolis of Milan and the smaller romantic towns of Cinque Terre, Portofino and Santa Margarita, Genoa makes the perfect location for a training center and a strategic base for finding jobs all over Northern Italy.



The Language House helps its graduates secure jobs all over Italy with special emphasis in the north seeing as the demand is so great. Come and join us!

Saturday, July 12, 2008

How not to make an official Amazigh webpage

As I just learned from a comment on Awal nu Shawi, Algeria's High Commission for Amazighity, the government body set up in 1995 in response to the demands of Amazigh (Berber) activists for cultural recognition, finally has a webpage. I wish I could even manage to be surprised that the site is written exclusively in French - the only Tamazight present is in the title, and they don't have even a single word in Arabic - or that the content is meager and largely bureaucratic. How is it that our next door neighbour Morocco - with a rather less militant Amazigh movement and a rather smaller budget - can manage a beautiful, trilingual, fairly content-rich website like IRCAM for its equivalent body (and put the page up much earlier, at that), while Algeria's own HCA can't even be bothered to translate its website into a single Algerian language? Can you imagine going to the Academy of the Arabic Language site, say, and finding the whole page in French? A site like this makes it seem like its producers are interested neither in promoting the development of Tamazight nor in communicating with the majority of Algerians who read Arabic better than French. The Amazigh movement in Algeria is frequently accused of being just a Trojan horse for the promotion of French language and culture; you would think the HCA would take more trouble to avoid seeming to confirm this accusation.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Informative Iraqi Blogs

Mosul is a fine Iraqi city that has gifted writers. They usually write about important things that we often would want to cherish. One recent informative blog I have encountered is Mosul4All, which gives us background about a student's experiences in medical school. It's quite a personal take on things and that makes it very unique to some of us.

We just hope more bloggers will be encouraged to write. It's way of expression of our love for our dear Iraq.


work at home news zacquisha awryt home tips hairstyles and nails healthtalk

One word, two masters: demonstrative agreement with addressee

In Qur'anic Arabic (this is hardly ever applied in Modern Standard), at least in presentative contexts, the word "that" agrees in number and gender not only with the noun it refers to, but also with the addressee. (A YouTube video lecture on this by some shaykh is available for Arabic-speakers.) "That" is morphologically composed of two elements. The first bit agrees with the referent:

đā-li-masculine singular
ti-l-feminine singular
đāni-masculine dual
tāni-feminine dual
'ulā'i-masculine/feminine animate plural


The second bit agrees with the addressee:
-kamasculine/feminine singular
-kumāmasculine/feminine dual
-kummasculine plural
-kunnafeminine animate plural


(In modern standard Arabic, only -ka is normally used here; even in Qur'anic contexts, the other forms' usage seems to be limited.)

Thus in Surat Yusuf, verse 32, Pharaoh's wife, addressing her women friends, says:
فَذَلِكُنَّ الَّذِي لُمْتُنَّنِي فِيهِ
fa-đālikunna llađī lumtunnanī fīhi
That is the man about whom you blamed me!

Then in verse 37, Yūsuf/Joseph, addressing his two cellmates, says:
ذَلِكُمَا مِمَّا عَلَّمَنِي رَبِّي
đālikumā mimmā `allamanī rabbī
That is (part) of what my Lord has taught me.

Likewise, in Surat al-A`rāf 22, God tells Adam and Eve:
أَلَمْ أَنْهَكُمَا عَن تِلْكُمَا الشَّجَرَةِ
'a-lam 'anhākumā `an tilkumā ššajarati?
Did I not forbid you from that tree?

It's not hard to come up with a story for how this grammatical phenomenon could have emerged: li in Arabic means "to" or "for", and the endings it takes are (with one exception) the same as those above, so it could easily have either conveyed a presentative meaning (compare English expressions like "That's London for you!") or, less probably in this case, indicated proximity to the addressee ("Get me that book next to you"). But I have a question for all you wonderful readers who have gotten this far: do you know of any other language that does something like this?

Monday, July 7, 2008

One Year, Already

One year ago to the day, MamaDuck and I headed for Abu Dhabi Airport and left the Sandlands. We have not been back, and really have no intention of returning. There's not much we miss about the place - although I haven't had a decent curry since we left. We do miss our friends though.

All things considered, I think leaving was the best thing to do. I just wish we'd done it a few years sooner.

Friday, July 4, 2008

The Berbers of southern Egypt

Checking through the 11th-century geographer al-Bakri for information on the linguistic history of Siwa, I was not surprised to see that he says the Siwans were Berber, and not very surprised to see that the people of Bahariya at the time were Arabs and Copts, and those of Farafra Copts alone. I was a bit more surprised, though, when a little further down the page he says that some of the people of Dakhla and Kharja, in southern Egypt (map), were Lawāta Berbers:

وهذا واح الداخلة كثير الأنهار والعمارات... ومن هذا الواح إلى الواحين الخارجين ثلاث مراحل وهو آخر بلاد الإسلام... وفي بغض الواحات قبائل من لواتة


It kind of fits with an observation made by several Nubian specialists (I read it in an article by Bechhaus-Gerst) that Nubian - specifically Nobiin, in fact, not the Nubian languages of Kordofan or Darfur - seems to contain Berber loanwords; the easiest to remember, and most convincing, of these is "water", aman (which in other Nubian languages is something completely different, along the lines of essi.) If a dictionary of the Arabic dialects of these oases ever comes out, it would be very interesting to check it for Berber loanwords.

On a more romantic note, al-Bakri also warns those travelling into the desolate lands west of these oases that they will find "great sands... full of palm trees and springs, with no civilisation nor companions, where the murmuring of the jinn is heard unceasingly."

Iraqi Insights


"I have an American passport and a Sunni name. It has been suggested to me not to dream of stepping a foot inside Baghdad for at least another fifty years. I haven't seen Baghad or Iraq since I was two years old."

so begins Mona, who is apparently interested in what You (myself included) have to say.

Iraqi Insights is an open forum for Iraqis of all generations and locations to gather and share perspectives.

Mona continues:
"The idea for this site is that I will post something...a question, a thought, a quote, an article, every now and then...and I hope to illicit your responses through the "comment" function.

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than ''politicians'' think.

We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.

Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
-Michel Foucault"

So, welcome, Mona, to the Iraqi blogodrome, hope you enjoy your stay here with us, and.. i dont know what else to say!

for YOU readers, why dont you run along now and share your thoughts and opinion with everyone :)

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Azaan in Newborn Baby's Ears

It is narrated on the authority of Abu Rafi (Radiallahu Anhu) that the Prophet (Sallallahu Alaihi Wa Sallam) called out the Azaan in the ear of his grandson Hasan Bin Ali (Radiallahu Anhuma) when Sayyidah Faatimah (Radiallahu Anha) gave birth to him.(Abu Dawood, Tirmizi )Alhumdulillah I was able to act upon this sunnah with the recent arrival of our baby son. Please remember us all in your

Amir al-Magamee3, Zaid

Zaid is a 21-years-old Chemical Engineer who maintains a blog, Road to Inner Me, where he talks about soccer, college and other things he finds interesting.

All the following blogs are Arabic.

Amir al-Magamee'a, a resident doctor in Kut, and the well-known writer from Kitabat.com has created his own blog to gather some of his writings that tackle heavy politics with heavy language.

Another Kitabat.com writer with his own blog is the serious Ali al-Hamdani.

Abu Hasooni is a seldom-blogging, secular man from Basrah.

Hadeel is a newborn atheist born in 1989, she writes about her difficulties of living in a Muslim society as a woman on her blog.