A New History of Arabia, Written in Stone (2018) | Hacker News Reader

A New History of Arabia, Written in Stone (2018)

newyorker.com

55 pointsTomte15 comments

It's a compelling vision, nomadic herders wandering the plains of pre-Islamic Arabia, literate, inscribing poems, dreams and prayers on stones; centuries later, their lives are remembered.

I would like to know more about the deities hinted at in the article, about the cruelties of the Romans, about the Arab soldiers (or actors) writing in Safaitic in Pompeii

"have made profound advances in explaining how ancient speakers of early Arabic used the letters of other alphabets to transcribe their speech. These alphabets included Greek and Aramaic, and also Safaitic"

This is amazing to read because arabic speakers do this today. You can find examples of it on twitter and other social media.

This part is amazing to read because this is still done today..you can see all over twitter or other social media.

Arabic text/SMS speak is a thing too, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet; it's invented by necessity because sms only supports latin (ascii?) characters.

SMS can use Unicode, but it uses UCS2[1] so you get less than half the characters you get with the bitpacked 7 bit SMS character set. The 7 bit is mostly Latin, and uppercase Greek (using latin characters when identical). There are also some 7 bit shift-tables for some languages, including some Arabic for Urdu (would this cover other Arabic using languages?), but I'm not sure if anything use these tables instead of just going for Unicode as soon as it leaves the basic set.

I guess there might be input issues as well, do cheap feature phones have an Arabic input mode?

[1] Yes, UCS2 accord to the specs. I suspect modern systems ignore this bit of the standard and use UTF16.

Urdu extends Persian, not Arabic. Those two are very, very close but not identical IIRC (it's been 20 years since I studied Arabic). Disregarding pronunciation differences of the same character, there are a few different characters.

To clarify, the scripts not the languages are close.

afaik it was because of people living outside Arab countries who didn't have Arabic keyboards or didn't like switching the languages too much. It was always possible to send SMS in Arabic, atleast for the past 15 years.

intasa, that didn’t appear in the archive. “A new word!” he crowed. Abu Bashar, our Bedouin driver, proposed that it meant “to be forgotten after having once been famous.”

Wow “to be forgotten after having once been famous”.

This blows my mind, if in fact it turns out to be the actual meaning of this word.

People who had to be on constant watch from predators eating their herds, tribes stealing and capturing members of their family, needing to search for food and water and still valued fame and the desire to be known.

Maybe. Though a bit of a different take, a lot of tribal communities care a lot about legacy (theirs, that of their forefathers, etc). That legacy is really what defines a tribe, and if a tribe loses its legacy, it risks falling apart. And if it falls apart, then it is vulnerable to predators eating its herds, tribes stealing members of its family, inability to find food / water. Legacy is more collective than fame (at least the modern, Western version of it), which is a lot more individualistic.

It's not so much fame as legacy. The fear of a legacy (or your ancestors or your lineage) being forgotten is very, very real.

(I am from the Middle East. Obviously centuries later here, but I still feel like legacy is a big cultural factor for most Arabs)

> The fear of a legacy (or your ancestors or your lineage) being forgotten is very, very real.

Temple Grandin, decorated autist and celibate, once yearned wistfully about how to pass on the knowledge she has gained over her lifetime.

And who can forget:

“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” - Roy, Blade Runner (1982)

"intasa" just means "has been forgotten" in some dialects of Arabic. I think you are reading too much into the "once been famous" bit. "insa" is a word from the same root that means "forget it". I actually think both words are still in usage. Probably the more accurate translation is, "it was once known (i.e. known to all within the community) but has now been forgotten". Famous is less accurate.

It is used for mundane things. For example, the location of an abandoned water well.

Exactly right. And even if I hadn't heard the word before, somehow in arabic you can actually intuitively reach the meaning of the word, based on its structure. It's really an amazing language.

Arabic uses derivatives of words for specific connotations.

"nusi" means "has been forgotten", "instasa" means "made to have been forgotten", but in this case it might be used for what was described in the article.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKl3JkUoSx8

Here is a great documentary (by christian polemics) on the history of islam. Really intriguing stuff.

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