Alexander Jabbari
@yakabikaj
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Professor of sundry Persianate things. Tweeting about philology (Persian, Urdu, Semitic), language, literature, history, Muslim and Jewish stuff, Marxism
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Joined November 2012
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My article "Remembering the Persianate in the Modern Novel" is out in PMLA, part of a wonderful special section on Persianate lit edited by
@PDabashi
I show how traces of the Persianate linger in the English novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah & Persian novels from Iran. Link below 👇
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US media: "it's antisemitic to claim Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing!"
Israeli government: "we are currently carrying out ethnic cleansing."
"We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba," says Avi Dichter, Israel's Minister for Agriculture and former head of Shin Bet.
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The best April Fool's Day prank I ever pulled in my life was when I taught at Université Paris Nanterre and gave my English students a pop quiz: asked them to "analyze a poem" and handed out copies of Jabberwocky. 1/2
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As they started to panic I pretended to get mad and said "you've had all the way from the start of the year until today to prepare for this, what's the date?"
-"uhh, April 1st?"
-"Poisson d'avril!"
Then their utter panic melted into laughter. Delicious. I'll never top it. 2/2
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The Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi's story about eating honey in a Circassian village is the most insane thing you'll read today
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Right-wing Zionists: we must turn Gaza into a parking lot
Liberal Zionists: we must turn Gaza into a parking lot for electric vehicles :)
liberal zionism will have you saying absolutely insane things like "moderate settlement"
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We need Shazam but for a language you're eavesdropping on and can't identify
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In Chinese, Allah is rendered as 真主, literally "the True Master".
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English spine design: (not even the same height)
Arabic spine design: you are like a little baby. watch this
Horribly inconsistent spine design you say? The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (or, in one case, The Cambridge [BLANK] of the Works of Immanuel Kant) would like a word.
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This extremely cool video features rappers from all 31 provinces of Iran, with many regional dialects and languages represented. A thread on the video and on the politics of language in Iran. 1/
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My best friend is learning Chinese and my favorite thing to do is guess how you say various things in the language
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@MacaesBruno
I don't think this is true at all. On the contrary, American cultural power has greater reach globally now than it ever has in history—despite the contraction of American political and economic hegemony
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This simple sentence has tortured my thoughts for days now.
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Just putting some em dashes here—on Twitter—where no editor can take them away.
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My book has a cover! The Making of Persianate Modernity is coming out with Cambridge University Press, May 2023.
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Twitter is great because it's allowed me to connect with so many academics that I admire, and then debase myself in front of them
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1931 woodblock print of Delhi's Jama Masjid by Japanese artist Yoshida Hiroshi
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It really doesn't matter if English speakers say "eye-rack" for Iraq or "eye-ran" for Iran. It's perfectly fine to use the English pronunciations of foreign countries’ names when speaking English. I can't believe this is controversial.
What language opinion gets you this reaction?
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Jewish cantor of Iraqi origin singing the Shema prayer in the maqam (musical mode) of Hijaz, the same mode Muslims use for the adhan.
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It's insane that Google's OCR is capable of this for handwritten Arabic
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Cats are Muslim, when they meow you should respond with ‘alaykum as-salaam
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Beautiful Qur'anic calligraphy by the Algerian master Muhammad bin al-Qasim al-Qundusi
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#Etymology
of the day: English syrup, sorbet, & sherbet; French sirop; Spanish jarabe; Portuguese xarope; Dutch stroop (as in stroopwafel); German Sirup - in fact, the word for "syrup" in nearly all European languages - are all derived from Arabic شراب sharāb "drink".
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You've seen English logos made to look like fake Arabic script... but have you ever seen a Persian logo made to look like Latin script? (Bonjour café, central Tehran)
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I don't know who needs to hear this but you should memorize some poetry
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If your new year's resolution was to learn a language, here's how to do it. 🧵
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Me as a baby undergrad arguing with Homi Bhabha. I still think he exemplifies the uselessness of much of postcolonial theory: his "premises preclude the very bases of political action" (as Aijaz Ahmad put it). No surprise, then, that it's so easily repurposed by colonialists (👇)
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English
#etymology
of the day: serendipity, from Persian سرندیپ sarandīp 'Ceylon/Sri Lanka'. Coined by Horace Walpole in 1754 based on Persian story The 3 Princes of Serendip who were “always making discoveries, by accidents & sagacity, of things...they were not in quest of”. 1/4
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We know a lot about Persian influence on Urdu. What about Urdu influence on Persian? In my latest article in Iranian Studies I explore Persian translations from Urdu, arguing that Urdu texts played an important role for Iranian & Afghan modernizers. Link to free download below 👇
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It rules that in Urdu a simple mathematical phrase like سو فیصد sau fī sad "one hundred percent" combines three lexical bases: sau "hundred" (Indic), fī "in" (Arabic), sad "hundred" (Persian)
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In English we sometimes say "…anyway…" to signal we're done talking or want to move on to another topic.
In Persian this can be signalled with hālā (lit. "now…")
How is this done in other languages?
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Engels to Marx, on learning Persian: "absolute child's play"
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Sufi devotional in praise of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in the beautiful Somali pentatonic scale. Arabic with English subtitles.
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Arabic for novels, Persian for poetry, Urdu for short stories
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"Man is a drop of blood and a thousand anxieties"
"İnsan yek katre-i hûn est û hezâr endîşe"
*
İnsan, bir damla kan ve binlerce endişeden (düşünceden) ibarettir.
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Once I bought a pair of gloves on the street in Paris. I started speaking Arabic and the seller responded in kind. I asked where he's from.
-"Bangladesh, and you?"
-"Iran"
Then we both started laughing, wondering why we two non-Arabs were speaking Arabic to each other
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My book 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘔𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺 comes out March 31. Please ask your library to order a copy! A 20% discount is available with the code TMPM2023.
Table of contents, preview, and link in the next tweets 👇
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Iskandar (Alexander the Great) kills a dragon by feeding it cow-hides stuffed with poison and oil. Shahnamah manuscript, Isfahan, 1614.
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Arabic
#etymology
of the day: صراط ṣirāṭ "way, path"—as in «اهدنا الصراط المستقيم» "guide us to the straight path", is from Latin strāta "paved road" (by way of Syriac ܐܣܛܪܛ esṭrāṭ).
This makes it cognate with English "street", which is also borrowed from Latin!
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Thinking about the time I made the mistake of ordering a Turkish coffee in Glendale and the waiter said "ALL OF OUR COFFEE IS ARMENIAN"
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Forget indigeneity. It's a distraction.
Israel has no right to subject Palestinians to occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. These are crimes regardless of whether you think Palestinians or Israelis are indigenous.
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The absolute dumbest people on earth, with the most dangerous ideas, are building massive followings on podcasts and social media
The response of academics (when they're even aware) is to tweet something like "you're reifying discursive binaries" at them
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South Asian visual media's frequent use of whirling dervishes in Turkish dress as the ultimate symbol of Sufi devotion can be connected to what the late Shamsur Rahman Faruqi called "a loss of self-confidence, or a surge of self-hatred" in 19th c. India.
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Tenured professor Abdulkader Sinno at Indiana University has been suspended without due process for "alleged mistakes in the filing of a room reservation" for a Palestine solidarity student group. This is madness.
Those of us who care about civil liberties, democracy, and human rights must act locally while thinking globally, writes Jeffrey C. Isaac. We must work where we live to defend colleagues and students who are being punished for their advocacy.
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1/The national currency of Oman, the Omani rial, is divided into baisa (بيسة), a Hindi/Urdu loan (पैसा پیسہ paisā) which goes back to Sanskrit. A thread on this far-flung word spread all over the Indian Ocean world, from Myanmar to Mauritius and nearly everywhere in between.
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English: when pigs fly
Arabic: في المشمش when apricots bloom (a pun on mish "not" which sounds like mishmish "apricot")
Arabic: لما ينور الملح when salt blossoms
Persian: وقت گل نی when reeds bloom
Hebrew: כשלסבתא יהיו גלגלים when grandma will have wheels
what else?
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Ok this
#etymology
is just wild!
English typhoon, from Portuguese tufão, from Arabic ṭūfān "storm", from Aramaic ܛܘܦܢܐ / טוֹפָנָא ṭōpānā or Syriac ܛܲܘܦܵܢܵܐ ṭawpānā , from Chinese 大風 lit. "big wind" (cf. Hakka thai-fûng).
See the next tweet 👇 for other possibilities
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I think I know Arabic until the prose text I'm reading cites some poetry...
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New writing system (yeni yazı) proposed for Turkish in 1914. Each letter was to be written separately, with only one form.
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I asked ChatGPT to imagine Marjorie Taylor Greene as a Democrat and this is what it came up with
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Beautiful Islamic posters produced at the Karimov Brothers Printing House, Kazan, ca. 1911.
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Beautiful depiction of Surat al-Fil by contemporary Iranian miniaturist Ardeshir Mojarad Takestani
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Me carrying the burden of knowing all the words that come from Persian
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Just read Kevin Reinhart's "Lived Islam" (Cambridge UP, 2020). It makes elegant use of concepts from linguistics in order to make sense of the unity and diversity of Islam. Thought I'd share some of my notes here. 1/
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@Autodidation
His translator Robert Dankoff casts doubt on other anecdotes but says "I am inclined to believe the one about the hairy honey of the animist Circassians"
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Why is India declaring Persian one of its classical languages? How has Persian featured into modern national identities in India and Iran, and what does it have to do with relations between them? Read my book to find out.
India To Include Persian As One Of 9 Classical Languages: S Jaishankar
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Arabic musical system of maqām (melodic modes), beautifully explained by singing about each mode in that mode.
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Of all the calendars that govern my life (Gregorian, Iranian, Islamic, Hebrew), the only one that feels real is the academic calendar :(
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I have addressed this point so many times but they never stop
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I love Persian, but not because I'm Iranian. I reject the idea that Iran has a special claim to the language. Persian belongs to the world.
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The Persian Language Center at Shahid Chamran University of Ahwaz holds free online Persian language courses for beginner, intermediate, and advanced students. Participants receive a certificate after successful completion of the course.
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English
#etymology
of the day: sequin, from French sequin, from Italian zecchino (a Venetian gold coin), from Zecca (the medieval Venetian mint), from Arabic سكة sikka "coin".
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Some people don't know Persian and are not even trying to learn. I find this extremely rude.
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The first illustrated Urdu edition of Firdawsi's Shahnamah. Translated by Munshi Mulchand. Lucknow: Naval Kishore, 1872.
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Lacking any positive vision or platform, the Dems’ strategy is blackmail: Trump would be even worse. That is likely true at home. But as Biden aids and abets Israel’s ever-expanding genocidal war, some will genuinely wonder how Trump’s foreign policy could possibly be worse.
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Here with English subtitles
In an interview, Israel's agriculture minister described the current displacement and persecution of Palestinians in Gaza as “the Nakba of Gaza 2023”.
The Nakba refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands to make way for the creation of Israel in 1948
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In this day and age there is no excuse for not knowing Persian
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Āsh (rhymes with 'posh') is a kind of thick soup which is a staple of Iranian cuisine. Below are some Persian expressions about āsh 👇
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It's so satisfying that Sanskrit पूर्णिमा pūrṇimā "full moon" is perfectly cognate with Persian پرماه purmāh, meaning the same
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@moshik_temkin
Meanwhile the German state is charging Jews (many of them Israelis) with "antisemitism" for criticizing Israel
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Slavs 🤝 Iranians
loving dill
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It rules that English "vomit", Sanskrit वमति vámati, and Lithuanian vémti are all related and mean basically the same thing. They're reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European root *wemh₁- "to vomit". Persian بیمار bīmār "sick" is another cognate.
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RIP Roy Mottahedeh (1940-2024), an absolute giant in scholarship on Iran and Islam.
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Reading classical Arabic lit: I know every word in this sentence but still have no idea what's going on
Reading Arabic newspapers: even if I don't know all the words I can still get the meaning because it just feels like translated English
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French
#etymology
of the day: ken "to fuck", shortened from kéni, verlan slang for niquer, from Arabic نيك nīk "fuck".
In verlan, the syllables of a word are reversed, as in the word verlan itself, from [a] l'envers "backwards".
French twitter losing its mind right now because they translated the Barbie poster literally and accidentally made a pun that reads ‘She knows how to do everything. He just knows how to f*ck.’
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A pair of words I love in Persian are طفیلی tufaylī (parasite, uninvited guest) and قفیلی qufaylī (an uninvited guest sponging off another uninvited guest). Very specific vocabulary for party-crashers.
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Saffron vending machine. Mashhad, Iran
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According to a hadith, when Pharaoh was drowning he tried to repent and the angel Gabriel stuffed mud in his mouth to prevent him.
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It's always fun when items' names reflect trade routes. In Hindi/Urdu corn 🌽 is called "Mecca", but in the Arabic
of Mecca it's called "Ethiopia". Some German dialects call it "Turkish" whereas in Turkish it's called "Egypt"; in Maltese, "Roman wheat", in Swahili "Indian". 1/2
The Tajik Persian word for corn, ҷуворимакка (juvorimakka), is derived from جواری (juvāri) meaning 'sorghum' and مکه (makka) meaning 'corn,' both likely borrowed from Indo-Aryan languages (for ex, Urdu uses مکئی (makayi) for corn and جوار (juvār/javār) for sorghum), while
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Original Turkish here:
Evliya Çelebi'nin en çılgın hikâyelerinden birisini
@yakabikaj
paylaşmış. İngilizcesi de çok güzel ve eğlenceli ama orijinal metindeki renkliliği yansıtmaktan bir hayli uzak. Bir Çerkesin Evliya'ya bol bol kasık kılı ihtivâ eden bal yedirmesini Seyâhatnâme'den okuyalım:
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Quick thread 🧵 with my 10 favorite online resources for reading Arabic
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Arabic غريب gharīb means "strange"→"stranger, foreigner".
In Persian it acquired the additional sense of "poor" (stranger→penniless traveler→poor).
This sense is maintained in Georgian ღარიბი gharibi "poor", Hindi/Urdu ग़रीब / غریب ġharīb "poor", Turkish garip "miserable".
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Malay: only a jeweler (jauhari, from Arabic jawharī, itself from Persian gōhar "gem") recognizes a precious stone (manikam, from Sanskrit māṇikya "ruby" via Tamil māṇikkam).
In other words: game recognize game
Cf. Hafiz: "only a jeweler knows the value of an incomparable gem"
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Arabic is sometimes called "the language of ḍād", referring to the letter ض , famously difficult for non-Arabs to pronounce. But the way this letter is uttered today—even in Qur'an recitation—differs from its historic pronunciation. Learn more in this incredibly erudite video 👇
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Begging historians not to do amateur philology. This is completely wrong!
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The Muslim name Sibghatullah is so beautiful. It means "dyed the color of God" and comes from Qur'an 2:138.
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Dick Davis reads his translation of a ghazal by Hafez, "I See No Love in Anyone" (یاری اندر کس نمیبینیم یاران را چه شد). I love this one.
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Looking forward to talking about my book with
@hzsiddiqui
next week on Zoom - open to the public!
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English
#etymology
of the day: cushy, from Persian خوشی khushī "happiness, pleasantness" (probably via Hindustani), from khush "pleasant", from Middle Persian khwash.
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