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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 9h

Memo to scholars who need to write multilingual texts: emacs. Full stop.

sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 10h

What does “grammar” even mean? You can go with Chomsky, or Wittgenstein, or Priscillian, or Dionysius Thrax etc. My take: essentially meaningless.

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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 11h

I’ll note the distinction between regularities, rules, and norms.

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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 11h

In particular: Sībawayhi was the arch-rationalist. I don’t mean Cartesian rationalist. Far from it. He was very Socratic in his way: best *argument* wins. Very clear throughout the Kitāb: the way the Arabs speak is rationally defensible. By argumentation. Is that in Panini?

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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 11h

My suspicion is that Sībawayhi and Panini went down very different rabbit holes.

sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 12h

The only figure remotely like Sībawayhi, as far as I can tell, is Panini. Anybody read them both? Sībawayhi was resolutely focused on actual speech practice, going so far as to record in great detail many speech idiosyncrasies. Did Panini do this?

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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 12h

“[maybe Zayd] is going”, or “maybe it is Zayd that is going”. Ditto for إنَّ زيدا ذاهبٌ - not “indeed [Zayd is going] but “[Zayd indeed] is going”.

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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 12h

Conspicuously absent from Palmer’s “Mood and Modality” (2nd ed.): any account of “nominal modals” (for lack of a better term.) like Arabic لَيْتَ and لَعَلَّ etc. Which do NOT express “propositional attitude”! E.g. لعلّ زيدا ذاهبٌ should not be parsed as “maybe [Zayd is going]” but as…

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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 13h

I had read this as “this is the tall Zayd” (not the other Zayd, who isn’t tall). Now I’m not so sure.

sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 13h

I suppose LaTeX and XML are out of the question when dealing with publishers?

sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 13h

FR Palmer, “Mood and Modality”, 2nd edition: “Modality is concerned with the status of the *proposition* that describes the event.” (emph. added)

sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 14h

Updates to chapters 502-503 (phonology of pronominal suffixes) www.sibawayhi.org/updates-502-...

Updates: 502-503 (-hu, -hi, etc.)

Just uploaded revised revisions (tashkīl and color-coded smart typesetting only, no translation) of 502 هٰذَا بَاْبُ ثَبَاْتِ الْيَاْءِ وَالْوَاْوِ فِي الْهَاْءِ الَّتِي هِيَ عَلَاْمَةُ الْ

www.sibawayhi.org

sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 15h

Fair enough, I overstated.

sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 15h

Thanks! That had not occurred to me. It's plausible, I have to research it more in the Kitab. He does have a lot to say about various kinds of names.

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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 1d

Required reading: “The problem of Speech Genres” by Mikhail Bakhtin. If you haven’t read this you have no business talking about language. I’m looking at you, Noam!

sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 1d

Haven’t read this, but the obvious question is “why would you think language is in the business of ‘representing’ reality (whatever that is)”?

Institute of Art and Ideas @iai.tv · 1d

Language shapes how we think, remember, and reason. But does it help us to uncover the fundamental nature of reality? | https://iai.tv/video/how-words-warp-reality

Join Nick Enfield, as he explores why language excels at persuasion but falters at faithfully representing reality.

#langsky

How words warp reality

Language shapes how we think, remember, and reason. But does it help us to uncover the fundamental nature of reality? Join the author of Language vs. Reality and linguistic anthropologist, Nick Enfiel...

iai.tv

sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 1d

“Nothing we know of” - I wonder if that’s just a blind spot. Ie nobody has ever seen it because nobody has been looking for it. Take the vast ancient literature on Jewish law. Did they never discuss linguistic matters, one way or another?

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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 1d

I like the 2 column format: Akkadian on the left, English on the right. That’s what I’m doing with www.sibawayhi.org

Reading Sībawayhi

Reading the Kitāb of Sībawayhi

www.sibawayhi.org

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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 1d

Haha, no, I want 24/7 News Now delivered in flawless Akkadian!

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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 1d

Akkadian online! Do it, somebody!

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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 1d

True, especially with the internet! When I started Arabic 100 years ago it was almost impossible to actually hear spoken Arabic outside of class (in Chicago). I would literally have killed to get what is now easily available online!

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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 1d

Given that, I have mixed feelings about trying to show how they’re “the same”.

sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 1d

Agreed! But this gets down to very Deep Questions for which I see no answers. Are all languages “the same” in any non-trivial sense? I like to think each language is a rich unique… something. You can say things in Arabic that simply cannot be said in English, and vice-versa.

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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 1d

Point taken. Realis/irrealis is a useful concept. You can see it in Sībawayhi if you squint hard, but it’s clear he had so such concept explicitly. We cannot read it into the Kitāb without anachronizing. Even “how did he think about the subjunctive?” rigs the game, presupposing that there is such.

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sibawayhi.bsky.social @sibawayhi.bsky.social · 1d

“Twins are birds” sayeth the Nuer. (According to the anthropologist.) Is that really more opaque than “‘Horse’ is a noun”?

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