Hackneyed

Hi fans. Here we are in sunny Hackney, east Lahndahn, where we've been staying with our son since we arrived. We're having a grand ole time with sunshine, rain, more sunshine, real live haraminals at the City Farm, and lots of other stuff. Will do a proper post eventually - this is just a quickie from an Internet Caff to let you know we arrived OK.

And thanks for all the luvverly comments on the previous post.

Topik 22: KKT I, dan KKT II

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim

Kita telah menyelesaikan bentuk KKT I. Dan dampak dari KKT I itu yaitu lahirnya pola DSK. Kita review sedikit ya.

KKT I, yaitu bentuk Kata Kerja Turunan I. Bentuk ini didapat dengan menambahkah Alif didepan. Contoh yang sering kita bawa adalah:

KKD (Kata Kerja Dasar): nazala, artinya turun. KKT I nya adalah anzala, artinya menurunkan. Perhatikan:

KKD نزل - nazala: turun
KKT I أنزل - anzala: menurunkan

Fungsi dari KKT I ini adalah membuat kata yang tidak perlu objek menjadi perlu objek. Ingat kembali, kata "turun" adalah kata kerja tidak perlu objek. "Saya turun". Tapi kata "menurunkan" perlu objek. "Saya menurunkan buku, dari rak dilantai 2". Kata "buku" adalah objek dari kata "menurunkan".

Kita flash-back lagi, bentuk KKT I ini dalam bentuk kata kerja lampau (KKL), sedangkan bentuk kata kerja sedang (KKS) nya berpola DSK.

Contohnya:
KKT I, bentuk KKL: أنزل - anzala: dia (telah) menurunkan
KKT I, bentuk KKS: ينزل - yunzilu : dia (sedang) menurunkan --> Pola DSK

Sekarang fokus kita adalah KKT II, yaitu bentuk Kata Kerja Turunan jenis ke dua.

KKT II

Bentuk ini adalah bentuk yang secara fungsi hampir sama dengan KKT I, yaitu menjadikan kata kerja yang tidak perlu objek menjadi objek. Contohnya di Al-Quran surat 2 ayat 97, yaitu kata nazzala, yang artinya sama dengan anzala yaitu menurunkan.

Jadi kata أنزل - anzala: menurunkan, dalam bentuk KKT I, bisa juga نزّل - nazzala: menurunkan, dalam bentuk KKT II.

Artinya sama, sama-sama menurunkan (sesuatu).

Demikianlah telah kita bahas sepintas bentuk KKT II. Ingat KKT II ini dibentuk dengan cukup mudah, yaitu, kata kerja dasar (KKD) 3 huruf, maka huruf kedua di tasydid.

Insya Allah akan kita lanjutkan topik ini...

Berberised Afro-Latin speakers in Gafsa

One reader of my last post asked how late Latin (or some descendant thereof) continued to be spoken in North Africa. The answer is, pretty late: the latest attestation I came across on short notice seems to be in the major medieval geographer Al-Idrisi (12th century) who, describing Gafsa in southern Tunisia, notes that:

وأهلها متبربرون وأكثرهم يتكلّم باللسان اللطيني الإفريقي.
Its inhabitants are Berberised, and most of them speak the African Latin tongue.

He even gives one word of their dialect:

ولها في وسطها العين المسماة بالطرميد.
In the middle of the town is a spring called the ṭarmīd (perhaps to be related to Latin thermae).

One interesting thing to note about this statement is that he said that the town was Berberised - in other words, that, in the very century when the Banū Hilāl were rapidly spreading through Tunisia and Libya (a subject he has fairly harsh things to say about), Berber culture was prestigious enough to be adopted by members of other cultures, in particular the remaining Roman or Romanised towns, in the area. Gafsa, of course, speaks Arabic now, but several nearby villages still spoke Berber in the 1800s, and two, Sened and Majoura, well into the 1900s.

Altering Your Head to Fit a Cap?!

by Usama MahmoodOur honourable Shaykh was sitting once in the masjid and sitting near by was a child. Shaykh, in a playful manner, took off the cap of the child’s head and asked the child if he would let him keep it. Shaykh then addressed the gathering: “This cap can not fit my head because of its size and the size of my head.He then said “Deen is like the head of person and the cap is us. Deen

Chenanith b'Libya - in the 11th century AD?

Anyone interested in North African languages who doesn't speak Dutch should immediately check out Bulbul's posting on Latino-Punic. The Phoenicians brought their language with them to North Africa when they founded Carthage and other cities. Carthage was destroyed, of course, but many other cities continued to speak Phoenician for longer; however, like Arabic in more recent times, it changed a lot under Berber influence, and this later dialect is usually called Punic. This language was spoken by St. Augustine, who quotes a number of Phoenician words, such as salus (< shalu:sh < shalo:sh < shala:sh < thala:th) "three", in his works. In eastern Libya, as it happens, Punic continued to be written even after the Phoenician alphabet was forgotten; this body of inscriptions, using the Latin alphabet to write Punic, is called (logically enough) Latino-Punic, and a comprehensive database of such inscriptions is available from Leiden. Recently, as Bulbul points out, a thesis was submitted at Leiden on Latino-Punic and its Linguistic Environment; I would love to read it.

The twist in this tale is that Phoenician may have survived into the 11th century AD! Al-Bakri (whom I've mentioned before) enigmatically says of the inhabitants of Sirt in Libya that:

لهم كلام يراطنون به ليس بعربي ولا عجمي ولا بربري ولا قبطي ولا يعرفه غيرهم
‍They have a speech in which they jabber which is neither Arabic nor Ajami (by which he probably means Latin but might mean Persian) nor Berber nor Coptic, which no one but them knows.

The location (in eastern Tripolitania) is about right for it to be Punic, and if it were Greek you would expect him to know, considering he cites (more or less correctly) the Greek etymology of طرابلس (Tripoli) in the next page. So was Punic still spoken in the 11th century? Your guess is as good as mine, but it looks plausible.

Salud, Euros y amor. Y el tiempo para gozarlos*

*Health, money and love. And the time in which to enjoy them.

The movers are coming today, and DEWA will be disconnecting the electricity. So I don't know when I'll get back online.

But thanks to all of you for reading my blog - it's been a blast! Of course I'll still be blogging from Europe, and I might start a new blog or rename this one. Or both. Damn, it's tough being a Libran.

Adios Amigos.

Galileo's sociolinguistics and free software

Just came across an interesting quote from a law professor in the free software movement on Europe's shift away from diglossia:

[W]ith the name Galileo Galilei, we associate two of the most important cultural responses to the quandary of possessed physics.

The first is an insistence upon freedom from censorship, that is "e pur si muove" -- determination to prohibit the ownership of physics by an entity rich enough and powerful enough to define its physics as the only permissible physics, the only available physics, for most ordinary people. And second, the first significant attempt in the history of the West to write scientific literature at the state of the art in a vernacular language, accessible to everyone.

Galileo Galilei's decision to publish in Italian is as important as his decision to risk confrontation with the Church, for what it says about the fundamental pillars of free science in the history of the West. Not merely, in other words, an insistence upon the freedom of ideas to work their will in skilled hands, but a determination that the ideas which motivate the world, which explain its behavior and which render it controllable, should be universally accessible to people regardless of their ability to acquire enough social surplus to have Latin.

I'm not sure whether the details of his account are accurate, but this has always been one of the strongest arguments against diglossia. The availability of universal free education goes a long way to mitigating the problem; but it's still not cost-free, since all the time devoted to learning the high language is time that could have been devoted to learning something else. (Of course, there are also practical issues regarding the quality of teaching provided - but that's another story.)