tomato tomato?

For most of the twentieth century, Arabs, Arab nationalists, and their Western devotees tended to substitute Arab for Middle Eastern histo...

100 best Arabic books

Courtesy Marginal Revolution , a link to M. Lynx Qualey's blog Arabic Literature in English, which has posted an annotated translation o...

the cheetah's counsel

Managed to get a copy online of A F L Beeston's Samples of Arabic Prose in its Historical Development (A Manual for English-speaking Stu...

SOAS Arabic course

A reader once wrote to ask: Do you really think learning Arabic will make people stop killing each other? I assure you this is wrong. I'...

Arabic dictionary

A reader contacted me recently in connection with the mooted list of Top 1000 Words in Literary and Philosophical Arabic. Those who have tac...

I know that Aha! moment

I felt a warm rush of gratitude to the speaker, a bespectacled doctor. It made no difference that he was Ayman al-Zawahri , Al Qaeda ’s No. ...

paperwork

It's 6.50 am. I got up at 6.02 to put more coal in the ovens before they went out. It's tricky because you have to leave the flu ope...

Impossible worlds

This time last year I tried out an Arabic puzzle on Mithridates -- a puzzle I was thinking of using in Your Name Here. I wrote a couple of ...

New Arabic Grammar

I've been glancing through Haywood and Nahmad's New Arabic Grammar. This really is a very useful book: it includes passages at the b...

aside

Before I forget -- have found this wonderful archive of recordings of spoken Arabic, covering dialects across the Arab world. It's the ...

The Best of Times

I bought an iMic Griffin off Ebay the other day. As I was leaving the apartment this morning I passed the Postlieferin on the stairs; she h...

Ausgeschlossen

Locked out for 2 days. Camped out at Ingrid's. Went to the Schlüsseldienst in Katzbachstraße at 10; he told me to come back in an hour. ...

The Ohrwurm

I'm in talks about talks with Mark Greif, an editor at n+1, about possible publication of the beginning of Your Name Here. I report this...

Verbs of vague application 2

Wright concludes the chapter as follows: §8: 18. Since the differentiation between a verb of specific application and one of vague applicati...

Verbs of vague application

I was going through papers looking for a story I wrote a long time ago. I came across a photocopy of Chapter 8 of Wright's Arabic Gramm...