Learn Arabic

In case you could not think of enough good reasons to learn Arabic, here are some more.

Actually the decline in emphasis on foreign language learning in higher education over the last decade has been alarming.

A Great Agraphon

The agrapha are sayings attributed to Jesus that were not recorded in the four gospels. This agraphon is clever and witty and Jesus probably never said it, but it is funny nonetheless. It is attributed to Jesus by the Muslim intellectual al-Ghazali:

Jesus (peace upon him) said: "Even though I managed to raise the dead, I have never been able to cure an idiot!"

(in Bradley J. Cook, Classical Foundations of Islamic Educational Thought [Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2010], 103)

Parents and teachers can sometimes relate.

The Interconnected Ancient World II: A Tally of Bricks

When the Mormon pioneers entered Utah, life was anything but easy, and they had to make due with whatever they had available. One pioneer told Orson Hyde, “I labored hard under the pangs of hunger to put up a little adobie cabin and prepare to live, and at the same time my wife and children, pale with want, were ranging the hills and benches to find thistles and roots to eat, which we boiled in the milk of the remaining cows the wolves had not eaten.”[1] Sun dried mud brick, adobe, was the preferred building material. It was even suggested that the Salt Lake Temple be built “of the stone that is got in the Red Bute Kanyon, or of adobies, or of the best stone we can find in these mountains.”[2]

The term adobe is particularly associated with the southwestern United States, and came from the region of Mexico and Central America. Though mud brick is common in the southwest from prehistoric times, the origin of the term is Spanish, adobe.

The Spanish term, however, is not native to Spanish and first appears in the thirteenth century, when Spain was part of Fatimid Spain. It comes from Arabic, al-ṭūb “bricks.”[3]

The Arabic word, in turn, is not Semitic but borrowed from Coptic, tōbe “brick.”

The Coptic term derives from earlier Egyptian ḏb.t “brick” and goes all the way back to the beginning of Egyptian history. The bricks themselves began to be used in the Naqada I period,[4] and were used for most forms of non-monumental architecture throughout Egyptian history. In Exodus, the main building material was mud brick (Exodus 1:14; 5:7-19).

Both the Children of Israel before their Exodus and the Mormon pioneers after their Exodus built their dwellings of the same material and used the same word for it.

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[1] Orson Hyde, 24 September 1853, Journal of Discourses, 2:114.

[2] Heber C. Kimball, 9 October 1852, Journal of Discourses, 1:160.

[3] Hans Wehr, Arabic-English Dictionary (), 571.

[4] Dieter Arnold, The Encyclopedia of Ancient Egyptian Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 34.

Reading the Gospel of Judas XI: Lycopolitan again

One of the interesting features of some Lycopolitan documents is the use of the djandje (ϫ) where Sahidic and other dialects have a chi (ⲭ). The two letters look strikingly similar, the only difference being the line underneath the djandje. One could easily expect that perhaps the scribe had a quirky way of not picking up his pen when making the letter. That, however, would be a mistake.

Way back in the Twenty-first Dynasty, almost a millennium and a half before most Lycopolitan manuscripts were written, the Egyptian language began to lose the distinction between its g, k, and q. This can be seen in the misspellings that appear then and become more frequent with time. The interchange between these letters becomes common in Demotic.

Be that as it may, it does not explain the interchange between the djandje (ϫ), which usually has a sound more like the English j, and the chi (ⲭ), which is a variation of the g/k/q sound.

Modern Egyptian Arabic, however, has precisely that confusion. The letter that most Arabic dialects pronounce as a j is pronounced in the Cairo area as a g. This dialectical feature is more widespread than just Cairo, but is more likely to disappear the further south one goes.

Lycopolitan's use of a djandje for a chi may be early evidence of this sound shift. They are writing a j (ϫ) for a k/g (ⲭ), because they pronounce the j sound as a g. This is also evident in Bohairic, a northern dialect, which writes ⲛϫⲓ for Sahidic ⲛϭⲓ. The spelling may be different but the pronunciation was likely the same.