User talk:AraLink

Bilad al-Sham
How can Sham derive from Shamal when Sham has a clear triconsonantal root &#1588; &#1569; &#1605; (shin hamza mim), while Shamal has a triconsonantal root &#1588; &#1605; &#1604; (shin mim lam)? Did you look at the discussions on page Talk:Bilad al-Sham before editing the article? AnonMoos 23:57, 24 February 2007 (UTC)


 * You don't know Arabic better than Yaqut al-Hamwi or Dr Husain Atwan. --AraLink 00:16, 25 February 2007 (UTC)


 * I very probably don't, as far as speaking it goes (my active fluency is extremely limited at best), but I'm a linguist who has studied certain aspects of ancient Semitic comparative linguistics rather intensively, whereas I would assume that they haven't. AnonMoos 01:30, 25 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Since you are not an academic scholar, you cannot delete what they say. --AraLink 08:29, 25 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Dude, I just said that I was in fact an academic scholar directly above. However, that doesn't mean that anything I say should be accepted merely for that reason alone (and the same goes for Yaqut al-Hamwi or Dr Husain Atwan, whoever they are).  To settle this, I'll look up Sham in the huge multivolume "Encyclopaedia of Islam" -- I remember that it says basically the same as what was in the Bilad al-sham article before you came along, and at the "Encyclopaedia of Islam", they hire actual linguists to do linguistics -- not political scientists or political historians or whatever. AnonMoos 12:34, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

First paragraph of Encyclopaedia of Islam entry on Al-Sham by C.E. Bosworth

 * AL-SHĀM, AL-SHA'M, Syria, etymologically "the left-hand region", because in ancient Arab usage the speaker in western or central arabia was considered to face the rising sun and to have Syria on his left and the Arabian peninsula, with Yaman ("the right-hand region"), on his right (cf. al-Mas`ūdī, Murūdj, iii, 140-1 = §992; al-Mu k addasī, partial French tr. A. Miquel La meilleure répartition pour la connaissance des provinces, Damascus 1963, 155-6, both with other fanciful explanations). In early Islamic usage, bilād al-Shām covered what in early 20th-century diplomatic and political usage became known as "Greater Syria", including the modern political entities of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel and the west Bank of Palestine, in the north spreading into the modern Turkish ils or provinces of Hatay (the former sandja k  of Alexandretta [see ISKANDARŪN]), Gaziantep [see `AYN T ĀB] and Diyarbakır [see DIYĀR BAKR].  As often happened in the earliest Islamic times (cf. Mi s r = both Egypt and its capital), al-Shām could also denote the historic administrative capital of the region, Damascus [see DIMASH K ].
 * -- a verbatim transcription (except for a slight adjustment of transliteration conventions to be more suitable to web-browsers) of the beginning of the article on page 261 of Volume 9 of the Encyclopedia (1997). AnonMoos 21:24, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Arabic speakers
You have not addressed the issues I raised on the talk page about the inaccuracy of the encarta figure. Could you please do so rather than reinserting such data: there are several other sources for this figure: the highest other one is around 225 million. Drmaik 20:32, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I actually did. There are many non-Arab Muslims outsite the arab world who speak Arabic. --AraLink 16:13, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, but if there are to be 100 million such people, then we are not talking mother-tongue speakers, which is what such numbers of speakers mean. May be there are indeed 422 million people who know some Arabic, at least to say prayers (may be more), but the figures quoted in language articles are about native or first language speakers. Hope this makes sense. Thanks, Drmaik 18:22, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Have we reached consensus? Drmaik 06:38, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
 * As a consensus, I would say we can put all the numbers as a range. That way we don't choose for the reader. --AraLink 21:45, 22 May 2007 (UTC)