Little Green Footballs

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Monday, May 01, 2006

Chukles gets an ass-whooping!

This is a great post by General Cucumber at Action is Eloquence. Read it all. It's a classic.

Posted by Bobby Dazzler at 14:06

1 comment:

phleabo said...

That's not such a great post.

First, it's quite clear that not a single person involved in the entire discussion a native speaker of any particular local dialect of Arabic, let alone fluent in the literary dialect. This is acknowledged by General Cucumber, who seems to have the best understanding of the language itself of anyone involved. But basically, it's a bunch of people that don't really know what they're talking about arguing about a complicated subject.

Second, the post isn't perfect. The word Muslim does not, in fact, derive from the word for peace. The two words do share a root - /slm/ - which means something like "to surrender, to obey, to resign (oneself)". In Arabic, as with all Semitic languages, the lexical core of the word is the consonants, with various vowels giving individual words - so Islam is an abstract noun meaning "submission" and Muslim means "one who submits (to God's will)". The words for peace (salaam) and safety (salaamah) have the share the same consonantal root, too. Such single roots providing the basis for a variety of words which are of various (i.e., not always obvious) degrees of relation to one another is pervasive throughout the language.

My point is, etymology questions regarding a language one does not speak are always complicated, and there's particular oddities about how words are formed in Arabic which makes etymological analysis more involved.

And, finally, etymology isn't meaning. Use is meaning. We no longer think of the word hysteria as having anything to do with a woman's uterus; yet the origin of the term refers to the early belief that the disorder (which naturally only ever appears in women) was caused by a woman's uterus wandering around her body.

Cucumber does touch on topics related to use, but not convincingly or sufficiently. Check out this page on the various uses of the word Jihad. It's a complicated term, the meaning of which is generally collapsed to "holy war" in the western media, but which had significant depth.

5/01/2006 08:08:00 PM

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