Phillip W Stokes

@t3lhwn Incidentally I ran into this discussion the other day where ʾAḥmad b. Ṣāliḥ's transmission of Warš appears to apply ʾimālah bayna bayn on nouns, but not on verbs (at least... when rāʾ precedes). The wording of ʾAḥmad b. Ṣāliḥ himself is pretty terse...

@TricycleRepair Thanks very much – it really means a lot!

@phillipwstokes Again, congratulations. I've spent the afternoon reading through it and it's a huge acheivement!

In a book chapter I wrote several years ago (and would def rephrase if written today) but was only published this year, I mention this in a list of desiderata for the study of Christian Arabic. Stokes' new book is a sort of dream-fulfillment in this regard.

My book is out! It's published open access in the Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures series, accessible here: openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647…

The earliest known Syriac inscription: 6 AD. Similar to Hebrew, Babylonian Jews called this script “Assyrian writing”. Two scripts emerged from this language: one from the School of Edessa & one from Nisibis. This language is endangered & could be extinct in 50 years.

An illustration of ‹ The poet Homer › (ʾŪmīrūš al-šāʿir) from a 13th cent. Arabic MS, likely drawn in Mosul.

A good case can be made that this is the earliest surviving example of written law as such. A development which, to my mind, may very well have led to the emergence of Judaism. In our modern world, it is common to assume that all collections of law are inherently prescriptive in nature. Today, a law code legislates how a society is to behave by prescribing specific rules and regulations. In a way, a society’s law code embodies for that society “the law” itself. Law writings in ancient Mesopotamia appear to have functioned in a very different way from this commonplace, modern-day conception. On the one hand, we know of over half a dozen extensive law collections such as the so-called “codes” of the Mesopotamian kings Hammurabi, Ur-Namma, and Lipit-Ishtar, and the ostensible “code” of the city of Eshnunna. On the other hand, we have thousands of law-practice documents that record how law was actually applied in various real-life situations. In many cases, these two sources of legal material do not coincide, with prices, fines, and penalties in the records of actual court cases often contradicting those set down in the law collections. Furthermore, the court records as a rule do not cite the law collections as their rationale for adjudication. Beginning in archaic Greece, written law began to function much more like our modern conception of “law”. Michael Gagarin has argued that the movement to enact written legislation which swept over Greek-speaking lands beginning around the middle of the seventh century BCE was so revolutionary that “it is legitimate to speak of the ‘invention’ of legislation in Greece” at this time. In a study published in 2006, Michael LeFebvre argued that in biblical sources that predate the Hellenistic era, the Mosaic Torah was conceptualized as a descriptive collection of laws and as “a preeminent description of Yahwistic ideals as practiced by Moses,” but it did not function as a prescriptive law code. He argued that this conception of the biblical “tôrāh of Moses” accords well with scholarly understandings of law collections elsewhere in the ancient Near East, especially in Mesopotamia. LeFebvre suggested that the Pentateuch was reconceptualized as prescriptive law only in the Hellenistic period. If, as seems likely to me, the Torah was adopted as the law of the land under the Hasmoneans in the 2nd century BCE, then this process should be credited to a large degree to Gagarin’s “‘invention’ of legislation in Greece”. As I’ve written about here recently, it would not be wrong to view Judaism as having emerged out of the crucible of Hellenism...

A fun video tour of ancient Allāh based heavily on #Safaitic inscriptions. & a new inscription on #OCIANA invoking Allāh to 'keep those who come after safe' Find more: ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions/2… For the inscriptions in the vid, see: doi.org/10.1093/jss/fg… youtu.be/8OV0_Pd-OAs

1/20 Mormonism (especially it's largest extant community, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) is in the final stages of developing the same problem that has cropped up in text-centered religious traditions for thousands of years: diglossia. x.com/ATrueMillennia…

@K_L_Phillips The Judaeo-Arabic looks to me like عناية, presumably "care, concern"

Part of a trilingual #Torah codex from the #CairoGenizah The yellow highlight is #Hebrew (Scripture) Green is #Aramaic (tradition) Blue is #JudaeoArabic (mother tongue) Red rectangle: word for 'your servants' in each language Yellow rectangle: word for 'my eye' in each language.

New Article: When did Faṣīḥ become Qabīḥ? Rehabilitating Classical phonological and morphological features And it's Open Access!: doi.org/10.1093/jss/fg… A short summary of the contents of this article 🧵

So my translations of al-Dani's Taysir is out! So what is this text about? It is a description of seven canonical reading traditions of the Quran authored by the Andalusi polymath ʾAbū ʿAmr ʿUṯmān b. Saʿīd al-Dānī (371/981–444/1053).

Link for blurb and description: openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647…

Cover for my forthcoming book is finalized and approved. Looking forward to sharing the published, open-access book in the near future!

PSA🧵 on misconceptions about the Arabo-Islamic preservation of Greek works: [1] The scale of the Arabic translation movement (ca. 8th-10th cent.) was massive; perhaps the largest in human history up that point. [2] Greek originals from the Islamic world do not survive ...

After the power outage during the interview last time, me and @GabrielSaidR decided to do another Live Q&A. So, of course, the first thing that happened was that my WiFi died, and then we got audio issues. After some editing it is now put back online! youtube.com/live/vkiji1eMG…

"New" Publication! This paper I presented in 2016, pretty sure I handed it in by 2017... but now it's finally out. I would have probably written it a bit different today, but it's still I think an interesting article with fun observations! 🧵

Navigating Neo-Assyrian corporate communication is not easy. Here is a helpful guide I put together.

While many threads have been written on how the letter ض was pronounced historically, I haven't seen many that explain exactly 'how' the sound change occurred in Arabic. Seeing as how it's the beginning of Ramaḍān, I figured this would be the perfect time to write such a🧵

1/10 🧵 Upto about AD800 (very roughly) many ordinary Christians in the Southern Levant ⬇️ spoke Aramaic as their first language, even though most would have had at least some Greek as well. This little Aramaic dialect is known today as #ChristianPalestinianAramaic.