yowza. tonight i took stock of my inbox from harvard library (yay, alumna status!) and realised, i can't pass up this opportunity to list my book choices! i have a rather extreme case of bibliophilia, so i'll try not to make you all sleepy-sleepy and just keep my comments to a minimum.
thackston's introduction to koranic & classical arabic
. i'm starting by mentioning a book i actually own because, well, it's sort of crucial to getting more out of the other books i'm reading. besides, i'm desperately trying to hack my way through it alone. i'm familiar with arabic writing from farsi (persian), though the sounds are alien as hell to any in farsi. this book seems quite nice, but then again i also have similar works on classical syriac and akkadian. when i was younger, i always wanted to raise a child who spoke akkadian as a first language. anyway, i'm distracted: i recommend, with provisos - only for the strong-throated who already know what an 3ayn and emphatic consonants are. (i remember my first workbook's instructions on how to say an 3ayn properly in arabic: "imitate the sound a camel makes upon waking in the morning." darling, i thought, if i knew what that sounded like, i'd probably already speak a language that had an 3ayn in it.)
*khazzoom's flying camel: essays on identity by women of north african and middle eastern jewish heritage. i've mentioned loolwa khazzoom a lot recently; i intend to shift this to the purchased shelf as soon as i have T3H L3WT. meanwhile, i am loving the library copy. recommend to all.
* sadiqi's Women, Gender and Language in Morocco (Women & Gender: The Middle East and the Islamic World 1). totally recommend. fatima sadiqi is the bomb, and this work deals with the exceedingly complex social/class/ethnic worlds of morocco and moroccan women, including berberophone, francophone & maghrebin-arabophone issues and social inequality. in 1997, she made quite a name for herself when she published the much-needed linguistic pornography text, Grammaire du Berbère. (clearly this earlier work is for those of us who are francophone or marginally so - comme moi.)
* hetzron's The Semitic Languages (Routledge Language Family Descriptions). the routledge series are expensive, so get them at the li-berry unless you are a deadly serious linguist-cum-bibliophile, but they are each remarkable compendious works that cover the basics for the common to the rare. this one starts with eblaite and works its way methodically through classical languages (akkadian, ge'ez, hebrew, aramaic, old south arabian, arabic) and then hits you with a sudden left hook with its unprecedented coverage of the totally underserviced modern languages - the omani/yemeni south arabian languages, the modern jewish and christian dialects of aramaic, and the ethiopic and omotic languages, all of which get short - or no - schrift in other works. recommend as a remarkable intro to the varieties of semitic speech and ethnic communities.
* in a change of pace, i turn to rouach's 'Imma, ou, Rites, coutumes et croyances chez la femme juive en Afrique du Nord (Collection Judaïsme en terre d'Islam), which again is for the francophones amongst us. in english, the title would be 'imma, or rites, traditional clothing & beliefs of female jews of north africa. good photos, interesting text, in french. amazing photos, even though they are in black & white and few in number.
* in another startling change of pace, i give you a book published in 1952 what doesn't even have an ISBN. the book is abu' l-mundhir hishâm ibn mu7ammad ibn al sâ'ib ibn bishr al kalbi's kitâb al-a9nâm, translated by the lebanese scholar nabih amin faris as the book of idols. ibn al-kalbi, as he is known by his friends, died in 821 CE (206 AH) and was a scholar of great erudition who wrote about the pre-islamic period of arabia, what is sometimes called "al-jâhilîyah" or "time of ignorance". this got him into much trouble even though he was simply documenting the same kind of information that students of ahadith were - oral culture, particularly about religious themes, preserved from one generation to another as was the tradition in pre-/periliterate times. he just chose to write about pre-islamic religious practices rather than about islam proper. the book of idols is one source of the infamous satanic verses incident that rushdie mentioned in his work of the same name. ibn al-kalbi is considered a very reliable narrator by ancient muslim arab scholars, some of whom thence support the probability that his narrative of the satanic verses incident is accurate, so i wanted to read the original story and its surrounding material. probably unpopular, but appears to be available for free online on some stupid anti-islamic site. i haven't proofed their work for errors. linky to psycho christian site's online version here.
zoom, zoom. there are many more books on my shelf, so for now, chew the fat i've provided: we've got more later on arabic dialects, afrasian linguistics, berber phonetics and syntax, and the dialect geography of syria-palestine from 1000-586 BCE. i'll be back tomorrow with more, more, more!
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