This essay uses the case of Russian, in its relation to other languages, to look at the ways in which the architects of internationalism in the aftermath of World War II established a new hegemony of world languages, responding to the challenge posed by the rise of Russian as a scientific and political language. What was initially a campaign by the Soviet delegation at UNESCO for one cause—recognition of the status of the Russian language within the organization—was turned (...) by other delegations into a campaign for a different cause—multilingualism. Rather than establishing Russian on a par with English and French, the Soviet intervention helped to create a new triumvirate of world languages—Russian, Spanish, and Arabic—as these were recognized by international organizations such as the United Nations and UNESCO. The case of the rise of Russian as a language of science and politics helps to underscore the complexities and the ambiguities involved in the negotiation of the language regime, in which political arguments were translated into technological choices, the diplomats’ problems were cast as a problem of communication, and the language in which political arguments were made oftentimes mattered as much as the arguments themselves. (shrink)

In the article, the author studies the Russian influence on the literary, philosophical and critical works of Mikhail Naimy, the world renowned figure in modern Arabic literature. His writings contributed to changing its topics, language and style. Numerous researchers have studied the impact of British, American and French cultures and literatures on the writings of Naimy and his colleagues from the Pen Association, the literary league founded in New York by several young Arab-American emigrants. Meanwhile, it was Russian (...) literature that had the most important impact on Naimy, especially at the earliest stages of his world formation. Scholars have only studied this influence superficially, or bring up specific Russian writers’ influence, without generalization of all the Russian factors. The current work shows how Naimy incorporates Russian viewpoints on critical social reform, anticlericalism and mysticism as well as Russian literary criticism into his works. The author sums up the previous researches, generalizes all the factors, and significantly deepens the materials of the previous researches. This paper has an important methodological value, as it identifies the typology and significance of cultural contacts between the East and the West. It also contributes to an important topic that has received renewed interest from the academy - Russian influences on the Arabic world in general and on Arabic literature in particular. (shrink)

The thesis deals with a section of the major philosophical summa by Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037), namely the Book of the Healing (Kitāb al-Šifāʾ). The summa is structured into four parts, devoted to Logic, Natural Philosophy, Mathematics and Metaphysics; the section at stake is Avicenna’s reworking of Porphyry’s Isagoge (Kitāb al-Madḫal, i.e. “Book of the Introduction”) opening the section of Logic of the Šifāʾ. The thesis is articulated into three main parts, namely (i) an edition of the Arabic (...) text of Avicenna’s Madḫal, (ii) an English translation and (iii) a systematic commentary; these three main parts are preceded by an Introduction (0) divided into two halves: (0a) a General Introduction focused on the doctrinal major innovations of the work and (0b) an Introduction to the Edition of the text, which offers a first comprehensive study of its direct and early indirect tradition and explains the criteria of the edition. (i) The only previous edition of Avicenna’s Madḫal was the one printed in Cairo in 1952 (then reprinted in Tehran in 1983 and in Beirut in 1993), based on ten manuscripts. The huge manuscript tradition of Avicenna’s Madḫal – and, more in general, of Avicenna’s Book of the Healing – is still a matter of investigation. According to the provisional results of the bibliographical research conducted in the present work, it can be estimated that the manuscript tradition of the Madḫal amounts to at least 119 certain witnesses and 14 possible additional witnesses (as explained in the Introduction to the edition, 0b). The text of the Cairo edition, far from being representative of the whole textual tradition, was reconstructed on the basis of ten manuscripts that were not selected on the basis of philological criteria and whose reciprocal stemmatic relations were not clear. Although a critical edition based on all the 119 certain witnesses of the work exceeds the scope of the present work, the edition provided in the thesis takes into account a larger number of manuscripts than the Cairo edition did and, most importantly, selects them by means of a preliminary collation made on portions of the text. The purpose of this preliminary collation is making the selection of the manuscripts employed less arbitrary and providing a reconstruction of their stemmatic relations (in the Introduction, 0b). Overall, 32 manuscripts among the 68 inspected were employed in the edition here proposed, 21 of which were systematically collated and 11 were eliminated as codices descripti. The present edition also assumes as a witness the twelfth-century Latin translation of the work, which is, at the present moment, among the earliest extant witnesses of the text. Hopefully, this editorial work allowed us to improve the text of the Cairo edition in a number of points that are crucial to the correct understanding of Avicenna’s argumentation. (ii) As this project started, complete translations of Avicenna’s Madḫal in modern languages were only available in Turkish and Russian. Chapters of the work had also been translated in other languages, but an English translation of the whole work was still a desideratum. A complete English translation is provided in the thesis, based on the newly-established Arabic text of the work and aiming at preserving the major possible consistency in rendering the relevant philosophical terms. As a complement to the translation, an apparatus of notes is offered to facilitate the immediate understanding of the text. (iii) The third section of the thesis consists in a systematic commentary on Avicenna’s Madḫal, which is meant to support a deeper understanding of the text in its entirety. The commentary deals with both historical and philosophical aspects; more in detail, it includes an analysis and an identification, when possible, of Avicenna’s sources, and underlines the points of major philosophical interest of the work, which are dealt in a more comprehensive manner in the General Introduction (0a). (shrink)

The article suggests specific grammatical features of some languages of the leading philosophical traditions of Eurasia, which can explain some of the differences in philo­sophical thinking that exist in these traditions. In particular, the use of Genetivus Objec­tivus in Sanskrit, New European, Latin and Arabic languages is considered, its possible correlation with the socio-practice of cultures in which these languages are dominant is analyzed. As a theoretical preamble, which allows not only to raise, but also to compre­hend the designated (...) problems, the author refers to the logical-semantic theory proposed by the Russian philosopher and arabist Andrei V. Smirnov (b. 1958), which deals with subject-predicate constructions in substantive and procedural logic, the problems of cor­relation of language and thinking, as well as the commensurability of the bases rationality in different philosophical cultures. Analyzing the peculiarities of the use of the so-called object genitive case (Genetivus Objectivus) in different linguistic traditions, the author comes to the conclusion that it is the grammar of a language that often determines the pe­culiarities of a person’s thinking, which in turn are reflected in the socio-practice of a par­ticular culture. Using the example of the Sanskrit fragment “Śrībhāṣya” by the Indian me­dieval philosopher Rāmānuja (XI–XII), in which the compound word (brahmajijñāsā) is proposed to be read as a combination of two nouns in the construction of Genetivus Ob­jectivus (brahmano jijñāsā) (with reference to the grammar of Pāṇini), the author of the article shows the peculiarity of Sanskrit-speaking thinking in comparison with New Euro­pean, Arabic and Latin languages. This feature is understood in the light of the defini­tions offered by philosophical traditions to understand the nature of God or the Absolute Principle. (shrink)

Ottoman Turkish or Ottoman –as a mumpsimus – is basically Turkish language, over time it has been substantially influenced by Arabic and Persian. Its alphabet is based on Arabic letters. It has borrowed letters from Persian as well. Its vocabulary is essentially Turkish; however, it has borrowed words from Arabic and Persian at a substantial level. Arabic language attracted attention in mosques because it was the language of the religion, and in madrasahs because (...) it was the language of science. As for Persian, it spread in Turkish states as the literary language and this lifted its effectiveness especially in Seljukian palaces. Arabic writing, which is the common writing form for both languages, became the writing form for virtually the entire Islamic world, and thus, Turks employed Arabic writing form to be able to write in their own languages. According to resources, the first written Turkish language grammar book is Muyassiratu’l-ulum by Bergamalı Kadri. Apart from this book, the earliest sources on Ottoman Turkish grammar and principles were started to be written after 1840. While writing activities about Ottoman Turkish grammar increased in late 19th and early 20th centuries, they have gained further acceleration nowadays. In fact, the statement about a generation who cannot read the grave stones of their ancestors has been influential. After providing education on Ottoman Turkish as a compulsory or elective course as part of high school syllabus by the Ministry of National Education, and due to the natural increase in the numbers of students in Theology and Literature Faculties of universities which are, nowadays, almost in every city, writing activities about Ottoman Turkish have become desirable and a sector has been formed in this field. Many researchers who teach this course started to write an Ottoman Turkish grammar book to use in their own lessons, and this caused the number of Ottoman Turkish publications to increase in the market. According to our findings, grammar books of Turkey Turkish were also written in foreign languages, in late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through writing Turkey Turkish grammar work in German, French, English, Italian, Latin, Hungarian, Russian and Greek, foreign authors aimed to teach Turkish to their own nations. Although all of these works were produced in order to contribute teaching of Ottoman Turkish, efforts to generate solutions for certain problematic issues became a lot more complicated. To illustrate, when case about kaaf (ك) letter, which is the subject of this study, is examined either in grammar books written after 1840s, or in the books written by contemporary researchers, two aspects are noteworthy. One of these is the change in the number of letters forming the alphabet, the other one is the classification and nomenclature regarding kaaf (ك) letter, which effects this number. That Ottoman Turkish consists of three languages and uses Arabic alphabet and vocabulary from three different languages resulted in problems like difference in the number of letters in the alphabet and problems in the articulation of certain letters. It has been determined that one of the reasons why the number of letters in the alphabet is different is directly letter kaaf and that there are problems in both articulation and classification of the letter kaaf used in Arabic, Persian and Turkish words. When the books written on Ottoman Turkish grammar starting from the 19th century until today are analysed, no studies have ever been done either about the changes in the numbers forming the alphabet, or about the classification and articulation problems of letter kaaf (ك) and about the solution offersed to these. In this article, by attracting attention to both the number of letters in the alphabet, and to the classification and articulation problems of letter kaaf (ك), findings regarding the solutions of these problems are presented. The study consists of three main chapters. In the first chapter, the function of various letters is presented and especially the effect of kaaf on the number of letters in Ottoman Turkish alphabet is elaborated and after the analyses, the number of letters is determined. In the second chapter, triplet, quartet and quintet classifications of letter kaaf are examined and its nomenclature and articulations are analysed. In the last chapter, problems about classification and articulation of kaaf are evaluated and a new classification is suggested. Yet, it is obvious that either this classification or the previous ones do not contribute to the question of which sound to use while pronouncing kaaf. Therefore, at the end of the study, some determinations have been made for solving the problem of kaaf’s articulation. (shrink)

Arabic was among the sciences that were widely taught along with religious sciences for reasons such as the fact that the basic sources of religion were in Arabic, the need to teach the language to non-Arabs in parallel with the expansion of borders, the spread of errors (lahn) in the language, Arabic being the dominant language in official correspondence and its use as a language of science. To ensure a better understanding of religious (...) texts, to present the lessons clearly and comprehensibly, to be a qualified preacher and orator, to bring evidence and justify ideas, and to be successful in debate and jadal also required a good command of Arabic. These reasons and needs paved the way for the formation and teaching of nahw as a branch of science; its teaching took place in places such as bādiye (desert), kuttāb, houses, masjids, mosques, bookstores, libraries, government offices, and madrasas. This study deals with the teaching of Arabic from the perspective of madrasas and focuses on the teaching of literary sciences in general, and the teaching of grammar in particular, by focusing on the Nizāmiyyah and Mustansiriyyah Madrasas. The aim of this study is to reveal that the Arabic language was taught in these madrasas both as preparation and support for religious sciences and as a separate field. In this context, the study aims to reveal in which centers the Arabic language was taught before the establishment of madrasas and how it continued. Nizāmiyyah Madrasas are the general name of the madrasas founded in Baghdad, the first of which was in Nîsâbûr, in 449-450/1057-1058 by the Great Seljuk vizier Nizāmulmulk (d. 485/1092). And the Mustansiriyya Madrasah was built between 625/1227-28 and 631/1233-34 by Abu Ca‘far Mansûr Mustansır-Billah (623-640/1212-1242), one of the caliphs of the Abbasid State (750-1258). In these madrasas, especially in the Nizāmiyyah Madrasas, religious sciences (such as Shāfi’ī jurisprudence, hadīth, Qur’ān and tafsīr), and among these, especially the sciences of fiqh (furu', usūl, ferā'īz, madhhab, and hilāf) were taught. Although in these madrasas did not have an independent nahw chair or a department devoted to nahw, it is understood from the sources that courses on nahw were given due to the need for it. However, it is understood from the sources that nahw was also taught in these madrasas. In fact, the endowment of the Baghdad Nizāmiyyah Madrasah clearly states that a teacher of grammar (nahw) will be hired for the teaching of grammar, and moreover, there are considerable scholars of grammar among the mudarris working here. It is also understood from the biographies of the students who studied in madrasas that the science of nahw was taught. However, it should be noted that these madrasas did not have an independent nahw chair or a department for nahw. Since the research focuses on a historical issue, it was handled with the technique of analyzing written documents. Accordingly, the data were obtained primarily from the main sources related to the period/madrasas; current research was also utilized, especially in the interpretation, comparison, inference, and justification of claims. (shrink)

This book explores the reaction of tenth-century Arab philosopher Abu Nasr Alfarabi to the logical works of Aristotle. From numerous short treatises the author develops a systematic and comprehensive topical survey of Alfara bi's logical writings. The book is divided into two major parts: language as a tool of logic and logic as a tool with which to analyze language. The first five chapters deal with Alfarabi's analysis of the meanings of various terms as they are used in (...) logic and philosophy. Alfarabi refutes the Arab grammarians who claimed that Arab logicians were building a language within a language and shows that the philosophical meanings of terms are in fact their most original and essential meanings. The final chapter deals with Alfarabi's analysis of certain aspects of the Arabic language and demonstrates that Arabic, like any natural language, conforms to universal logical structures of which natural languages are only a concrete expression. (shrink)

When one considers the extent and scientific and technical character of the work done in the field of communication in the past two or three decades, with a view to evolving a methodology of the social sciences there, one is struck by the impressive number and the no-less considerable diversity of factors which figure in this young, all-affecting discipline, recently freed from the hold of philosophy. Such is the case in all the social sciences and that, moreover, is why Lazarsfeld (...) rightly contends that in sociological matters it is a good idea to multiply the “partial inquiries” in order, one day, to combine them into one all-inclusive sociology. (shrink)

The aim was to investigate and assess the acceptance of virtual classes among Arabic language student teachers during and beyond covid-19. Quantitative research is carried out with the aim to assess the acceptance of virtual classes among Arabic language student teachers during and beyond covid-19. It uses a survey-based methodology to obtain data from the respondents. An online questionnaire was used to collect data via Facebook and WhatsApp groups. 450 questionnaire responses were received. They were 300 (...) males, and 150 females. Results indicated that the student behavioral intention to use educational technology is positively affected by perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use. PU, PEOU yielded a coefficient of multiple regression of 0. 450 and a multiple correlation square of 0. 435. This shows that 43.5% of the total variance in student behavioral intention to use educational technology is accounted for by the combination of PU, PEOU. Efforts to integrate educational technology into teacher education and Arabic language student teachers education programs are necessary. (shrink)

The first part of the book examines language as a tool of logic, and deals with Alfarabi's analysis of the meanings of various terms as they are used in logic and philosophy.

Background: Job satisfaction is largely associated with organizational aspects, including improved working environments, worker’s well-being and more effective performance. There are many definitions regarding job satisfaction in the existing scholarly literature: it can be expressed as a positive emotional state, a positive impact of job-related experiences on individuals, and employees’ perceptions regarding their jobs. Aims: No reliable scales in Arabic language to assess job satisfaction in the sports and physical education field exist.This study aimed to trans-culturally adapt and (...) validate the Pepe’s “Teacher Job Satisfaction Scale” 9 items (TJSS-9), creating the “Teacher of Physical Education Job Satisfaction Inventory” (TPEJSI) in Arabic language. This scale was administered to a Tunisian population of sports and physical education teachers and analyzed according to the Pepe’s theoretical model.. More in detail, this investigation systematically tested its factor structure, in terms of internal consistency/reliability, predictive validity, sensitivity and convergent validity. Methods: A total of 417 Tunisian teachers of sports and physical education participated voluntarily in this study. The sample comprised of 258 males and of 159 females. More in detail, 189 were teachers teaching in primary schools of physical education, 105 teaching in secondary schools, and 123 were university teachers. Both exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory (CFA) factor analyses were performed on random-split halves of the sample. Results: The three-dimensional alpha coefficients of the TPEJSI were all greater than 0.80: for satisfaction with colleagues, alpha was 0.865; for satisfaction with parents, alpha was 0.856 and for satisfaction with students alpha was 0.860. The CFA fit indices were satisfactory. Conclusions: Given the good EFA factor loadings, the CFA fit indices, the correlation matrix, the sensitivity analysis, the convergent validity and the excellent internal consistency, it can be concluded that the TPEJSI is a good psychometric tool that can be used to quantitatively assess the job satisfaction level among teachers of sports and physical education in the Arabic-speaking world. (shrink)

The issue of textual criticism/matn criticism in the Islamic world has started to be discussed, especially in modern times, when the issue of criticism of the holy books came to the fore in the West. However, when the history of Islamic sciences literature is examined, it is seen that the subject of criticism of hadith texts has been on the agenda of Muslims, even though it is not as central as isnad. One of the important pillars of the text-centered approach (...) as a method of hadith criticism is the Arabic language. In our study, it is aimed to determine the effect and the limits of the Arabic language in hadith criticism based on the text. While doing this, first of all, the discussions about the link between the language and criticism of the holy scriptures in the West will be discussed, and then the relationship between the hadith and the Arabic language will be revealed, especially in the context of istishhād and literature. Then, the place where the Arabic language stands as a method in the criticism of hadith texts will be determined and an evaluation will be made about its limits and possibilities. The evaluations about the limits and possibilities of the Arabic language will be discussed in terms of the narration of hadiths with meaning, the different approaches of linguists and schools, the conflicts between tribes, and the reliability of poetry as an istishhād method. In this study, particular examples obtained by examining Ibn Dureyd’s (d. 321/933) Jamhara al-luga ve Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Azherī’s (d. 370/980) Tahzīb al-Luga Abū Aḥmad al-ʿAskarī’s (d. 382/992) Taṣḥīfāt al-muḥaddiṯīn and al-Ḫaṭṭābī's (d. 388/998) Iṣlāḥ ġalaṭ al-muḥaddiṯīn and Ṣafadī’s (d. 764/1363) Taṣḥīḥ al-taṣḥīf wa-taḥrīr al-taḥrīf. In addition, the subject has been examined by taking into account other linguistic sources, basic hadith texts and hadith commenta-ries. In this way, the reflection of the subject in the hadith literature will be revealed and it will be tried to determine the place where the Arabic language stands in hadith criticism, taking into account the problems of the language itself. (shrink)

The volume starts with the paper of Lynn Maurice Ferguson Arnold, former Premier of South Australia and former Minister of Education of Australia, concerning the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life) that was held from 25 May to 25 November 1937 in Paris, France. The organization of the world exhibition had placed the Nazi German and the Soviet pavilions directly across from each other. Many papers are devoted (...) to the interpretation of this opposition. Arnold’s paper considers the differences in the two totalitarian states’ architectural and design discourse styles. Although each of them communicated a totalitarian language of purposes, permissions, and boundaries, they essentially differed in the styles of discourse represented by the architecture and design of their respective pavilions. They were opposites of each other and the liberal ideals they contested. The internationalist viewpoint reflecting the multi-ethnic mix of the USSR is contrasted to the ein Volk homogeneity represented in the German pavilion. The Soviet pavilion opted for a utopian future to be arrived at by “benign” leadership, whereas the German pavilion anchored itself in the myth of Teutonic history with the nostalgic pride protected by the swastika-bearing eagle. Jean-Yves Béziau is best known as a logician and founder of Universal Logic. However, in this paper, he poses a new philosophical question: why philosophical discourse does not use images? The paper begins with a general analysis of different types of philosophical discourses. Then, he focuses on why images have been and are still rejected in philosophical discourse. He explains various ways to use images in a fruitful way to develop philosophical thinking and discourse and illustrates his view by providing several examples. He concludes with a promising programmatic declaration about founding a new journal entitled World Journal of Pictorial Philosophy to stimulate the usage of images for developing philosophical thinking. Although complaints about the obscurity of many philosophers’ discourse are widespread, Tatiana Denisova, ex-professor of the Surgut University and a research associate of the University of the Aegean undertakes a positive attitude to this problem. She explains that the reasons for the obscurity of philosophical texts, the subsequent complexity in communicating philosophers’ meanings and their eventual incomplete understanding is not a sign of their inferiority. On the contrary, it is a sign of the fruitfulness of philosophical discourse, which can generate new meanings. Thus, the darkness of philosophical discourse is like the life-giving chaos, and the obscurity that it inevitably contains can be the keeper of implicit meanings and even their generator. Katarzyna Gan-Krzywoszyńska and Piotr Leśniewski, authors of a monograph on Polish philosopher Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890 – 1963), make a comparative analysis of his educational style with that of Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921 – 1997). The authors highlight that these scholars have distinctly different backgrounds. The former was an educator, philosopher and a leading advocate of critical pedagogy connected with the dialogical Latin-American tradition. The latter was a philosopher and logician, a notable representative of the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic with significant contributions to semantics, model theory and the philosophy of science. Despite their apparent difference, the authors identify some striking similarities regarding their attitudes towards education; notably, their approaches are essentially dialogical. Gilah Yelin Hirsch is a multidisciplinary artist who works as a painter, writer, curator, educator, and filmmaker. In her experiential paper, he explains how and why she uses four channels of communication in her creative expression: writing, painting, filmmaking, and teaching, as dialogic inquiry. She considers that these channels compose a continuum of discourse styles, each reaching a different facet of kaleidoscopic consciousness. She claims that her choice of medium is prompted by a need to communicate her insights profoundly. Thus, for instance, she created painted allegories to express narratives based on dreams and visions emerging from her subconscious. Art and healing is another Tibetan-rooted type of discourse practised by the author. Creating and observing a healing image produces a positive psychophysiological change in both the artist and the viewer. The discourse here is tripartite between creator, image, and viewer. Filmmaking is another type of discourse she practices between the filmmaker/artist as shaman or healer and the viewer as respondent or participant. These films are meant to be experienced frame by frame, physically and emotionally in both the body and mind. Jocelyn Ireson-Paine is a cartoonist and programmer. His paper offers an original attempt to use category theory in cartooning. Category theory is a branch of mathematics that provides concepts and methods to describe general abstract structures in terms of a labelled directed graph called category, whose nodes are called objects, and whose labelled directed edges are called arrows (or morphisms or transformations or mappings). The author explores different ways to define “style” in art using category theory and a relational view of art. Moreover, he examines how “translation” (transformation) between styles could be defined and reveals the difficulties of how it could be implemented in a computer using special software. Jens Lemanski is a philosopher who has revived research in Arthur Schopenhauer’s legacy by exploring his work on mathematical evidence, logic diagrams, and problems of semantics. In this paper, he advances a new approach to eristic as an art of protecting oneself from the one who deliberately violates norms of discourse ethics to win an argument. The author attributes the origins of this view to Schopenhauer, suggesting a new reading of his work. According to the author, eristic is a prohibitive technique that takes effect when the norms of discourse ethics are transgressed and violated. Thus, eristic is viewed as a discipline of Enlightenment philosophy and a correlate of discourse ethics. Roshdi Rashed is an authority on the history of Arabic mathematical sciences. Proceeding from Gilles-Gaston Granger’s definition of mathematical style, he studies the question of whether a mathematical work can be characterized by a single style or by a multitude of styles. This question is explored within the style of a single work, namely Menelaus’s Sphaerica, and through the study of the development of a single problem over time, namely the isoperimetric problem. He indicates Menelaus’s divergence from the Euclidean style of (plane and stereometric) geometry caused by the drop of the Parallel Postulate, which associated it with hyperbolic geometry. Hence, the author concludes that Menelaus’s Sphaerica incorporates the well-known Euclidean style with a variation of the non-Euclidean one. On the other hand, examining the isoperimetric problem reveals another interesting historical picture. A succession of different styles (cosmological, geometric, infinitesimalistic, style of the calculus of variations, of synthetic geometry) can be observed due to the transformation of the research object over time. Boris Shalyutin, a Russian social philosopher, and Ombudsman for Human Rights in the Kurgan Region, explores the origins of discourse in combination with the birth of society and law. He claims that legal discourse marks the historical emergence of discourse in general. Homo Juridicus generated Homo Sapiens, which have created new spheres of discourse, notably moral discourse and further philosophical, political, and scientific discourse. Petros Stefaneas, a logician, computer scientist and novelist, suggests an alternative to the traditional narratology approach for studying (interactive) social media discourse. He claims that style describes how the parts of a narrative are blended into a whole. The author relies upon Goguen’s and Harrel’s concept of style as a choice of blending principles and transfers to the study of the social media narratives elements from the methodology of studying Web-based collaborative search for mathematical proofs like those implemented within the Polymath project. The last paper belongs to Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, a linguist, language revivalist, and proponent of a model of the emergence of Israeli Hebrew, according to which Hebrew and Yiddish were the primary sources of Modern Hebrew. This paper explores the fascinating and multifaceted Yiddish language and its survival in Israeli. Yiddish is characterized by a unique style that embeds psycho-ostensive expressions throughout its discourse. The author highlights the cross-fertilization between Hebrew and Yiddish as it manifests itself in any aspect of the Israeli language. He claims that Yiddish survives beneath Israeli phonetics, phonology, discourse, syntax, semantics, lexis, and even morphology, although traditional and institutional linguists have been most reluctant to admit it. (shrink)

The article discusses the problem of the formation of philosophical prose in the Persian language. The first section presents a brief excursion into the history of philosophical prose in Persian and the stages of formation of modern Persian as a language of science and philosophy. In the Arab-Muslim philosophical tradition, representatives of various schools and trends contributed to the development of philosophical terminology in Farsi. The author dwells on the works of such philosophers as Ibn Sīnā, Nāṣir Khusraw, (...) Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, Aḥmad al-Ghazālī, ʼAbū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī and gives an overview of their works written in Persian. The second section poses the question whether the Persian language proved able to compete with the Arabic language in the field of science. The author examines the style of philosophical prose in Farsi, considering the causes of creation of Persian-language philosophical texts and defining their target audience. The article presents viewpoints of modern orientalist researchers as well as the views of medieval philosophers who wrote in Persian. We find that most philosophical texts in Persian were written for a public who had little or no knowledge of the Arabic language, yet wanted to get acquainted with current philosophical and religious doctrines, albeit in an abbreviated format. The conclusion summarizes and presents two positions regarding the necessity of writing philosophical prose in Persian. According to one point of view, Persian-language philosophical works helped people who did not speak Arabic to get acquainted with the concepts and views of contemporary philosophy. According to an alternative view, there was no special need to compose philosophical texts in Persian, because the corpus of Arabic philosophical terminology had already been formed, and these Arabic terms were widely and successfully used, while the new Persian philosophical vocabulary was difficult to understand. (shrink)

According to the majority of linguists, case markers at the end of a declinable word, which could be of vowel, letter or elision type, are indicators of meaning. In other words according to the general acceptance, the iʿrāb signs at the end of words help one to understand the function of a given word in a sentence. Knowing the functions of the words of a sentence in turn enables the sentence to be understood correctly. Although there are those who say (...) that iʿrāb signs at the end of the words do not have anything to do with the function of words in a sentence, and that they only function to facilitate the transition between words, this view was not accepted by the majority. For this reason, thisarticle examines the iʿrāb-meaning within the scope of the prevailing attitude of naḥw scholars and Quranic exegetes. The majority of linguists accept that iʿrāb is an indicator of meaning. For this reason, explanations of iʿrāb, which are frequently used in Quranic commentaries, are aimed at understanding the sentences in the verses more accurately. The fact that Abū al-Aswad al-Duʾalīput vowel marks on certain words of the Quran was to facilitate the correct reading of the Quran and prevent a wrong vowel mark from causing any misunderstanding. Therefore, the close relationship between iʿrāb and meaning is clearly emphasized in naḥw books. Although it is stated as a general rule that iʿrāb is key in desciphering the meaning, there are cases where this general rule does not hold. This happens when there is a discrepancy between an iʿrāb sign at the end of a givenword and its meaning. Such situations are considered by naḥw scholars as qurb al-jiwār. According to this exception, a word does not take the iʿrāb indicator appropriate to its position in sentence and instead takes the same iʿrāb indicator of the previous word so as to be in harmony with it. The purpose of this is to prevent any disruption to the phonetic flow of the sentence rather than to function as an indicator of meaning. In fact, this phonetic harmony is not only limited to the iʿrāb at the end of words. In order to ensure harmony within a word, changes can be made in morphology of the word in question. This stems from the importance Arabs attach to the harmony of both intra-word and inter-word vowels, despite its contradiction to the rules of morphology and syntax. As a matter of fact, this kind of reading provides a sense of cohesion in terms of both ease of pronunciation and correspondence. In this article, I claim that the iʿrāb signs is not always a sign that reveals the meanings in the verses of the Qurʾān. In the light of this view, some of the verses of the Qurʾān comprise case endings that are contrary to the meaning for the sake of phonetic harmony, just as is the case in the current usage in Arabic language. This situation shows that besides the literary arts related tomeaning, those which are related to phonetic arts also constitute important literary aspects of the Qurʾān. The approaches of the Qurʾānic commentators towards the verses in which this feature, which is expressed as qurb al-jiwār in Naḥw, is found differ from each other. On the basis of these different approaches, the relevant narrations, syntax school, etc. that the commentators have generally considered matters are included. In fact, given that they lead to no confusion, irregularities contrary to the established grammar rules are tolerated. For this reason, qurb al-jiwār is used in the absence of ambiguity even though it is contrary to iʿrāb al-naḥwī. Unlike the Basran Grammarians, who regard qurb al-jiwār as a mere use, the Kufan Grammarians made the issue a regular grammar rule and used it as the basis for the jussiveness of apodosis of conditional clauses. Although qurb al-jiwār is accepted as a usage both in the Arabic language and the Quran by the majority of grammarians, there are differences of opinion in terms of the place of its use. While there is no clarity on this subject among the early grammarians, according to the general of late naḥw scholars, the issue of qurb al-jiwār is reserved for noun-adjective, corroborating-corroborated and connective explanation. However, it is controversial whether or not the qurb al-jiwār can be used in connectives. While in the early periods when controversies arose for the first time, qurb al-jiwār was generally unacceptable, in later periods it started to became more widely accepted. Extrapolating a theoretical framework for the issue based on primary classical sources on Naḥw constitutes a core methodology used in this work. According to the theoretical framework thus put forward, the discussions about the verses that are the subject of the iʿrāb of vicinity in the primary tafsīr sources from the first period to the present have been examined from an analysis-semantic perspective. (shrink)

This paper presents a comprehensive Tag set as a fundamental component for developing an automated Word Class/part-of-speech (PoS) tagging system for the Arabic language. The aim is to develop a standard and comprehensive PoS tag set that based upon PoS classes and Arabic inflectional morphology useful for Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) developers to extract more linguistic information from it. The tag names in the developed tag set uses terminology from Arabic tradition grammar rather (...) than English grammar. The usability of the presented Tag set has been tested in manual tagging and built up a set of tagged text to serve as a goal corpus used to compare it with the results obtained from the tagger. The tagger has achieved an average accuracy of 90% using the developed detailed tag set. (shrink)

Arbitrary symbolism is a linguistic doctrine that predicts an orthogonal relationship between word forms and their corresponding meanings. Recent corpora analyses have demonstrated violations of arbitrary symbolism with respect to concreteness, a variable characterizing the sensorimotor salience of a word. In addition to qualitative semantic differences, abstract and concrete words are also marked by distinct morphophonological structures such as length and morphological complexity. Native English speakers show sensitivity to these markers in tasks such as auditory word recognition and naming. One (...) unanswered question is whether this violation of arbitrariness reflects an idiosyncratic property of the English lexicon or whether word concreteness is a marked phenomenon across other natural languages. We isolated concrete and abstract English nouns, and translated each into Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Mandarin, Hindi, Korean, Hebrew, and American Sign Language. We conducted offline acoustic analyses of abstract and concrete word length discrepancies across languages. In a separate experiment, native English speakers with no prior knowledge of these foreign languages judged concreteness of these nouns. Each naïve participant heard pre-recorded words presented in randomized blocks of three foreign languages following a brief listening exposure to a narrative sample from each respective language. Concrete and abstract words differed by length across five of eight languages, and prediction accuracy exceeded chance for four of eight languages. These results suggest that word concreteness is a marked phenomenon across several of the world's most widely spoken languages. We interpret these findings as supportive of an adaptive cognitive heuristic that allows listeners to exploit non-arbitrary mappings of word form to word meaning. (shrink)

As in all languages, there are various structures in the syntax in Arabic. Some of these structures are about phonetic and some are about syntax. In this study, the subject of iṭba‘, which takes place in the syntax structure form in Arabic, is discussed. First of all, the phenomenon of iṭba‘, which consists of bringing a second word to reinforce the first word in terms of meter and rhyme, has been examined in terms of its use in (...) class='Hi'>Arabic. The expression “Hasanun basanun” in Arabic can be given as an example of iṭba'. In this example, it can be said that the second word, basanun, was introduced to emphasize the word hasenun and also adds a phonetic form to the sentence. In this context, it is possible to say that the main benefit of iṭba‘ is decoration and reinforcement. This subject, which is discussed under the title of "reduplication" with various parts in Turkish, has not been mentioned in terms of Turkish language in the study. The classical period usages of iṭba‘ examples are mostly discussed. As a matter of fact, most of them are out of circulation in the modern period. However, it is possible to encounter this type of usage in literary texts. In Arabic, this subject has been handled with different titles such as iṭba‘, muhāzat, muzāwaja, izdiwāj. In this study, the subject was examined with the name iṭba‘. As a matter of fact, there are some differences between it and the others. For this reason, our study has been concluded by examining the semantic differences between the derivatives of iṭba‘ and determining the results. (shrink)

This paper argues that, given a simple [DP VP] sentence, the availability of a collective interpretation crucially depends on the syntactic and semantic properties of the subject DP, specifically the presence versus absence of a pluralizing function that makes the collective interpretation available. In support of my claim, I present Lebanese Arabic and Western Armenian examples in which an indefinite DP contains a cardinal numeral and there is no overt distributivity operator but the interpretation of the sentence is nevertheless (...) obligatorily distributive, regardless of the predicate. I show that neither a distributivity operator within the DP nor one on the predicate can explain this strictly distributive interpretation. Instead, I argue that in order to allow a collective interpretation, an indefinite DP must denote a quantifier over pluralities, a condition that is not always met in numeral-containing indefinite DPs. While the claims in this paper are based primarily on observations from Lebanese Arabic and Western Armenian, because both are morphologically rich languages, the fact that this constraint is operative in these two unrelated languages, in addition to striking similarities to the Russian gender system, suggest that it is an inherent property of DPs crosslinguistically. (shrink)

Medieval Arabic algebra is a good example of an artificial language.Yet despite its abstract, formal structure, its utility was restricted to problem solving. Geometry was the branch of mathematics used for expressing theories. While algebra was an art concerned with finding specific unknown numbers, geometry dealtwith generalmagnitudes.Algebra did possess the generosity needed to raise it to a more theoretical level—in the ninth century Abū Kāmil reinterpreted the algebraic unknown “thing” to prove a general result. But mathematicians had no (...) motive to rework their theories in algebraic form. Because it offered no advantage over geometry, algebra remained a practical art in both the Islamic world and in Europe until the scientific uphevals of the 17th–18th centuries. (shrink)

The Arab Spring led to a major transformation of political systems of the region’s most countries; an increase in the significance of radical Islam in the political life; a degradation of the security environment. In addition, changes in the region’s economy cannot be overlooked. The events connected with the Arab Spring gave the Russian Federation completely new challenges. The country has to yet again define the character of its relations with Muslim countries and adapt its foreign policy to the new (...) post-revolutionary reality. The Arab Spring also represents a challenge for Russia in its internal affairs. (shrink)

The focus of the article is the role of the Russian language in the world system of languages, the current status of the Russian language and the language policy measures that should be taken to preserve the Russian language and for the strengthening of its positions. The law ‘On the state language of the Russian Federation‘ adopted in 2005 should be supplemented by the list of grammar books and dictionaries of various types as listed in (...) the appendixes to the article. The main actions aimed at ensuring the effective functioning of the law ‘On the state language of the Russian Federation‘ are also enlisted in the article. (shrink)

In the latter part of the fifteenth century, a Jewish translator, working together with a Slavic amanuensis, translated into the East Slavic language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania three medieval Hebrew translations of Arabic philosophical texts: the Logical Terminology, a short work on logic attributed to Maimonides (but probably by a different medieval Jewish author); and two sections of the Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali's famous Intentions of the Philosophers. Highlighting the unexpected role played by Jewish translators as agents (...) of cultural transmission in the heady messianic atmosphere leading up to the year 1492, these texts drew the attention of the Orthodox Church authorities as being in the possession of the enlightened heretical sect known as the Judaizers, which had emerged in Novgorod and spread to Moscow. Reflecting three and even four layers of translation, Prof. Moshe Taube's new triple-language critical edition of the Logika of the Judaizers displays the Slavic texts alongside the Hebrew translations on which they are based and accompanies them with a modern English translation. In his comprehensive introduction and commentary, Taube surveys earlier scholarly efforts to identify the provenance and purport of the translations, discusses the linguistic and textological issues raised by these early Ruthenian texts, puts forward the likely dissimilar motivations of the Jewish translator and the Christians who commissioned the work, and reveals the translator's probable identity. The present publication, a long-awaited desideratum, will be of interest not only to historians of the Great Duchy of Lithuania and of the principality of Muscovy, but also to scholars of Jewish history and of the history of philosophy and science, as well as to linguists studying the history of the Belorussian, Ukrainian and Russian languages. (shrink)

This volume brings together studies in the domain of weak referentiality, the phenomenon that a definite or indefinite noun phrase lacks its usual referential force. Several papers investigate syntactic or semantic properties of indefinite noun phrases, such as modality, number neutrality, narrow scope, incorporation, predication, and case marking, and that in a range of languages (Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, German, Papiamentu, Russian). Other papers deal with weakly referential definite noun phrases in various languages (Basque, Dutch, English, French) involving scrambling, (...) modification, possession, and accessibility. The papers demonstrate a range of empirical methods and theoretical models. This volume will not only be of interest to researchers and students in syntax and semantics, but also in psycholinguistics and language typology. (shrink)

This volume presents a collection of papers dealing with the semantics, syntax and morphology of perfect constructions in several languages (e.g. Arabic, English, Bulgarian, German, Greek, Italian, and Russian). The volume has its origin in two workshops, one on the Perfect organized by the University of Thessaloniki in May 2000, and one on Participles organized by the University of Tübingen in April 2001. However, the book is independently structured and features a different set of contributors than did those events.

The problem of teaching and learning of Russian language and literature in schools with native language of teaching related to the implementation of the principle of dialogue between cultures. The article draws on the results of the survey of graduates of the two high schools of Kazan: School #2 with teaching in Tatar language and school #37 with teaching in Russian-language. The results of the survey are associated with the problems of bilingualism, multiculturalism and bimentality. Graduates (...) from Tatar language gymnasium are bilingual and fluent in Russian and Tatar languages. 97% of graduates of Tatar gymnasium speak, read and write free in their native language and 96% in Russian. Bilingualism acts in this case like one of the manifestations of inter-ethnic interaction, a particular manifestation of biculturalism. In the National School dialogue of cultures passes through a system of parallel study of both Russian and Tatar languages and literatures: the formation of a bicultural, bilingual, bimental personality able to perceive not only the native culture, but also other culture as the native is taking place. (shrink)

From 1993-96, artist Rainer Ganahl held six reading seminars with six different bibliographies in six different countries and entitled this public project; "IMPORTED -- A READING SEMINAR, Or How to Reinvent the Coffee Table: 25 Books for Instant Use." Imported -- A Reading Seminar is an extension of that project and gathers together a collection of texts with the common theme of import. For this volume, Ganahl invited a series of authors who have an intimate relation with each country he (...) visited to contribute texts or interviews addressing the consequences of exchange, globalization, nationalism, multinationalism, Orientalism, Eurocentrism, tourism, languages, theory, desires, identity, and politics from a variety of perspectives.The interview between Kojin Karatani and Sabu Kohso, included in this volume, addresses important economical and political aspects along with its instrumentality in the construction of nations and of race consciousness; Bill Arning's text demonstrates how the author came to understand through his experience as a curator that sexuality always has a specific cultural context; Coco Fusco deals with issues of prostitution in socialist countries now in the process of transition to capitalism; dealing with displacement of collective identities and their representation, Sami Naïr asks the question: What is it to be Arab? And Sylvere Lotringer: How can one become a foreigner in a foreign country. The resulting volume includes texts in English, Japanese, Russian, German, and French by nineteen different authors. Knowledge of a foreign language helps, but is not necessary. Along with those already mentioned included are texts by Julia Kristeva, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Zeigam Azizov, Lisa Adkins, Dan Bacalzo, Benjamin Buchloh, Karen Kelsky, Dana Leonard, Edward Soja, Victor Tupitsyn, Wulf Schmidt-Wulfen. (shrink)

Research in communication studies has suggested that Al-Jazeera produces different versions of news stories for different audiences. Yet, examining the linguistic means used to create these versions has remained under-researched. Drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model (1992) and Halliday’s Transitivity Model (1985), this study aims at exploring how Al-Jazeera Arabic (AJA) and Al-Jazeera English (AJE) discursively represented the participants involved in the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian conflict in headlines. The analysis of transitivity patterns in AJA and AJE headlines reveals both similar and (...) different representations of the conflict. Although they avoided negative labeling of the Russian government, both channels ascribed conflict escalation to it, highlighting civilians suffering and protesting. Nevertheless, while AJE emphasized the Ukrainian government vulnerability, AJA presented the conflict as a confrontation between two symmetrical forces. Similarities are attributed to organizational and social institutional forces, while differences result from different editorial policies and audience preferences. As discursive and social practices, the headlines contribute to shaping audience perceptions of the conflict, with AJA challenging the prevailing western narrative of the conflict while AJE reinforcing it. (shrink)

The work of Lakoff (1987), Lakoff and Kovecses (1987), and Kovecses (1990, 2000a, 2002) on anger situates it within the bounds of "PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF AN EMOTION STAND FOR THE EMOTION," thus implying a universal form of physiological embodiment for anger. The main contribution of this article is that anger in Tunisian Arabic (TA) shows many more dimensions of embodiment than physiological embodiment. Anger in TA comes as physiological embodiment, culturally specific embodiment, and culturally tainted embodiment. Similar to English, (...) physiological embodiment yields expressions of anger where the part of the body used for conceptualization is also actually physiologically affected. Culturally specific embodiment involves parts of the body that are culturally correlated with the emotion of anger. Culturally tainted embodiment uses animal behaviors and cultural ecological features to taint physiologically embodied anger expressions. These types of embodiment are shown to generally correlate physiology-based anger with metonymy, and culture-based anger with metaphor. (shrink)

The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the “People of the Book” in the Language of Islam. By Sidney H. Griffith. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Pp. xiii + 255. $29.95.

The reception of the rational sciences, scientific practice, discourse and methodology into Arabic Islamic society proceeded in several stages of exchange with the transmitters of Iranian, Christian-Aramaic and Byzantine-Greek learning. Translation and the acquisition of knowledge from the Hellenistic heritage went hand in hand with a continuous refinement of the methods of linguistic transposition and the creation of a standardized technical language in Arabic: terminology, rhetoric, and the genres of instruction. Demonstration more geometrico, first introduced by the (...) paradigmatic sciences-mathematics, astronomy, mechanics-and adopted by philosophers embracing the cosmology of Neoplatonism, was complemented and superseded by the methods of syllogistic demonstration. Faced with the establishment of philosophy as a demonstrative science, which claimed absolute and universal knowledge, even the hermeneuti. (shrink)

One way to understand the Qur’an is by translating the message using Pegon script and Nadhom media. One expert who uses the method to teach students is Ahmad Dimyati. The purpose of this research is to investigate Ahmad Dimyati’s works, and one of his works was the translation of the Qur’an using the Pegon script and Nadhom media in the context of Priangan, West Java, Indonesia. This research explores how the media aligns with the socio-cultural condition in which it becomes (...) the crucial point of the research. This research belongs to both textual and field studies since it involves observation and documentation data from Ahmad Dimyati’s manuscript, and interviews with Kyai and Ustadz at Pondok Pesantren Sukamiskin, West Java, Indonesia. In addition, this research uses historical and hermeneutic approaches. The historical approach found that the selection of Pegon scripts and Nadhom media involved the segmentation of readers. At the same time, the hermeneutic approach is used to understand the contents of the text. The data obtained were analysed descriptively. This research found that the translation did not change the original meaning and can bridge the gap between Arabic and Sundanese languages so that the students can better understand the content of the quoted verses of the Qur’an. The selection of Nadhom as a media to translate the Qur’an is accurate as shown in its function that supports the achievement of the goal being revealed in the Qur’an. Thus, the use of Pegon script and Nadhom media to translate the Qur’an can bridge the gap between Arabic and Sundanese languages.Contribution: This research contributes to transferring the Qur’an translation into another language, making it easier for the reader to understand the content. (shrink)