"Gistradagis" is a Gothic word, attested once, that perfectly corresponds to English 'yesterday' – except that it means 'tomorrow'.
Old Norse is flexible with this word too ('í gær' means 'yesterday/tomorrow'), perhaps due to a common stage when it came to refer to a day on either side of today.
Correct, it's done a couple more times throughout the manuscript, which I get to look at about once a year during my Islamic manuscripts summer school class!
#TIL "the LORD of Hosts" (𐡉𐡄𐡄 𐡑𐡁𐡀𐡕, [yh]h ṣbʾt) is attested as a divine name on an #Aramaic ostracon from Elephantine. (First line, starting with the second 𐡄.)
Where are we getting these pictures from? :D
What's the "more or less" about? My Spanish is pretty poor, is there something awkward about grammatically in this context?
Fixed again (more or less).
You can read my translation of the Taysir (and confirm yourself that this variant indeed is *not* in the Taysir).
www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...
Interestingly, even though the Taysir purportedly transmits from al-'Akhfash (tilawatan) and al-Taghlibi (riwayatan), al-Dani neglects to mention these variants attributed to (among others) al-Taghlibi's transmission even though he does mention it in his big book!
Despite this overwhelming evidence (literally from the Horse's mouth) that this was Ibn Dhakwan's practice, his student al-'Akhfash did not transmit that, and "the common practice" (al-ʿamal) follows al-'Akhfash's transmission.
An interesting report from al-Dani's Jami`: Basically every transmitter of Ibn Dhakwan reported and even Ibn Dhakwan's own book say explicitly that Q51:60 and Q83:31 break with the general rule, and have an unharmonized -humu pronoun rather than his regular -himu.
Diving deeper made me realise something more widespread and more profound was going on than a simple "mistake" by al-Dani.
You can download my Taysir translation for free here:
www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...
This article is actually a topic I happened onto as I was preparing my translation of the Taysir (published with @openbookpublish.bsky.social). As I was translating the text, I ran into the many places where the Taysir cited transmitters of Abu Amr other than the "canonical" ones.
"They do not ??? them, they do not fast for him, they do not feed [the poor] for him"
wel-ten yesmeṯri, wel_fell-as etẓumun, wel_fell-as esseččen
New Open Access article: Finding Dūrī: Communal Transmission of Abū ʿAmr among the People of ʿIrāq
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The proofs still had the title's pun working in Spanish, but between final proofs and publication someone who didn't get it, changed it. :-(
al-qantara.revistas.csic.es/index.php/al...
"Is it okay to fast before the moon-seeing, or not?"
"Ma yeggur wuẓum qbel teẓra n uyur, neɣ min?"
ah yes, the RaSnBaSt
A cover page that says 'The Katabasis Book Nook', with a Lego book nook on a shelf surrounded by mythology and Underworld-related books.
Side view of the book nook, with text that says, 'This year, for International Lego Classicism Day 2026, I'm building an Underworld Book Nook.
View of the Lego book nook in the dark, with light-up Lego pieces providing illumination.
Full side view of the book nook, with windows and characters.
It's #InternationalLEGOClassicismDay! 🎉
This year I've been building a LEGO Katabasis Book Nook, which has been a ridiculous amount of fun! Here are a few pictures - and you can find the whole thing on my website: classicalstudies.support/2026/02/20/i...
#ILCD10 #BCEPantheon
Very apt to put it next to Katabasis :-)
I have a new blog post out, looking into material that shows how people tried to sell private collections to public institutions in the Weimar Republic, what prices they were asking, and how librarians rejected offers due to fishy provenance.
medisi.hypotheses.org/8489
@dehypotheses.bsky.social
Western Amazigh
Tetserret / Zenaga :
- əskorək = askarag = i did
- əskorad = askaraḏi = i did it
- ǝnnak = ǝnnag = i said
- ǝnnad = ǝnnaḏi = i said it
Wehr is pretty old by now of course, so perhaps norms have shifted. Though who knows what Wehr based his decision to make thulth 'a third' and thuluth 'the calligraphic style' on... these things are so untransparent (and poorly studied).
Rather, people uncritically seem to impose what they happen to have learned in class in university onto the whole of the Islamic era with zero critical reflections as to what they learned in the 20th/21st century is actually an accurate reflection of the past 1400 years.
I hope you will find this article useful and illuminating, and I hope the tone is not too grumpy, but as should be clear: I strongly feel that we need to recallibrate our starting assumptions. The history of Islamic-era Arabic is not actually based on any material evidence.
The paper collects many more examples of variation, some of which has been explicitly called "non-Classical" without a clear definition of "Classical". Others features don't suffer the same fate but are hardly ever acknowledged as existing in Classical Prose.
Sure, some modern diactionaries of Modern Standard Arabic (like Wehr) only list the form ṯulṯ-, and my sense is that this is the more typical form in Modern Standard Arabic speech as well... but why would we project that situation onto the past 1400 years of Arabic history?
This is a rather bizarre conclusion. After all, ṯuluṯ is the *only* canonical form of the fraction in the Quran reading traditions. If the existence of this form indicates the loss of case vowels, then how do we account for the fact that the reading traditions have both?
For some reason, which I cannot reconstruct, they assume that ṯulṯ and ONLY ṯulṯ is the "Classical" form, and that the form ṯuluṯ could only have arisen by anaptyxis after the loss of case vowels. This then is brought as an argument for the loss of case in Judeo-Arabic.
A second striking case is the conclusions drawn by Blau & Hopkins from the form תולות <twlwt> for "a third" in Judeo-Arabic manuscripts. They correctly conclude that this must represent /ṯuluṯ/. However, they conclude that this form proves that case vowels have been lost...
So by what definition is this form excluded from Classical Arabic if it is recognised by Arabic grammarians, recited in the Quran, and used from (at least) the 8th century up until the 20th in texts that are perfectly recognisable as Classical Arabic? This is pure imposition.
The form is well-attested in Classical Arabic documents, not just in the Quran, but also in other (especially North-African) texts. This use, in fact, continues into the modern period. The great modern exegete Ibn ʿĀšūr used the form النبيء.
