Well, I got distracted and spent a few weeks studying
Sumerian, but I was able to get it out of my system and get back to Arabic.
ProgressI'm also back into the Polyglot Fitness Challenge after dropping it for many months. I went for a nice run in the rain this morning at high tide and got a beautiful view of the stormy water! I think the run was around a mile and a quarter, or around 2 km. I also did a few pushups and situps. That meets my goal of running twice a week. As I said in the thread, I've gone through several languages since initially setting a French-based goal, so I'm revising the language portion of my goal to just work on whatever language I happen to be working on at the time.
I'm up to 100% strength in Duolingo Arabic, and I only need to get a few more skills from level 4 to level 5 and I will have maxed out everything before the third of five checkpoints. But the first two checkpoints were very short, so I'm actually just over half way through the course.
Pimsleur is going a bit slowly but once I start dropping my daughter off at daycare every day I should be up to five lessons a week.
I've been procrastinating at night and before I realize it, it's too late to start an Assimil lesson. I'll need to start turning off electronics earlier. I'm also trying to finish
The House of Seven Gables. I started it almost a year ago and for whatever reason I stopped reading it around 5 chapters from the end, so I'm picking it back up. Sadly I don't think I've finished a single novel in the past year. I'll have to pick up the pace!
Fun FactsI just realized the other day that the Arabic word طيب
(ṭayyib) is related to the Hebrew word טוב
(tov) (both meaning "good"). It's more transparent in a Semiticist transliteration
ṭoḇ. They both come from the proto-Semitic root
*ṭāb. Knowing that these two words are related, I won't accidentally spell it with a ת instead of a ט because I'll remember that it's emphatic in Arabic!
There's also another fun fact that I was going to post a couple of weeks ago before getting sidetracked. In the Great Courses series on the Islamic Golden Age, they had an episode about the famous explorer إبن بطوطة
(Ibn Baṭṭūṭa). His name is actually a variation of a word I already know from an Arabic board book I got for myself and my daughter! The word بطة
baṭṭa means "duck", and بطوطة means "duckling", so
Ibn Baṭṭūṭa means "son of a duckling!" Here is a page from the book:
20210805_144813.jpg
Sadly, I haven't been able to find a book like this for the Hebrew alphabet, so my daughter actually knows the Arabic alphabet better. One time she was playing with a toy dreidel and she asked me what was written on it, so I told her "this is noon, this is sheen..." (these letters both have the same name in Arabic and Hebrew) and she asked me, "Where's meem?" The corresponding Hebrew letter is called "mem."
Anyway, apparently nobody knows how he got that nickname. I was also wondering what the difference was between "ibn" and "bin." I looked it up and believe that "ibn" is used when it's before a single name, but it's "bin" when it's in the middle of a name, so in the Wikipedia article about him, they give his full name as a bunch of names followed by "Bin Baṭṭūṭa". "Bin" is sometimes spelled "ben", which is exactly equivalent to the Hebrew בן. Another example, the name Moses Maimonedes is a Hellenized version of משה בן מימון
(Moshe ben Maimon), or in Arabic (which I believe was his native language), موسى بن ميمون
(Mūsā bin Maymūn).
Amusingly, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa was absolutely scandalized by all the topless women in Mali, yet he declared the Maldives to be a paradise because of how easy was is to marry and divorce women there, although he piously stayed at his limit of four wives at any given time.
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