Messin' with authority ...

Submitted by Amin Riaz (United Kingdom), Mar 23, 2012 at 06:46

"For the readers: It was brought to my attention that the word al-qibtiyya in al-Tabari's masoritic exegesis of the word asfara could very well be al-nabatiyya and not al-qibtiyya. I do see a qaf and not a nuun"

The passage you quoted at me clearly said the word Nabatean and not Qibtiyyah.

"Even if al-Tabari claims that the word sifr is a loan word from al-lugha al-nabatiyya he is still wrong because the people of the Nabataen kingdom spoke a hybrid of Arabic and Syriac but used Syriac when writing their documents which means that the word book would have been kitab or the Syriac spar in the spoken language and spar or sifr in documents"

The word Sifr is a rare word even in Syriac language. It is not a word that is used daily to mean either book or writing. More the books of the Bible and etc.

Nabateans were fore runners to Arabic - who borrowed their writing style the script - and vocabulary. Unlike Syriac, Hebrew & Arabic - Nabatean doesn't originate from Aramaic - but a related language of the same family.

Just to declare Tabari - wrong out of the blue like that is meaningless. You need evidence - and expert evidence.

---

This is what happens when you paste someone's work without actually knowing the subject matter. This is how you Arabic is like Dhimmi - that is why you struggle - to counter argue.

I know perfectly well whose books you got there.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".