Endless things about Arabic, Pt. 1

Totally typical of me. mollpeartree writes an excellent summary of the origins of jihad and I bog her down in a discussion of Arabic plurals. I promised her some research on the subject and I present it here in order to provide warning to all that--even more than Latin plurals--they are definitely Not To Be Trifled With.

The first thing I learned paging through the Hans Wehr dictionary of MSA (Modern Standard Arabic) is that the OED is not to be trusted on the subject. This shouldn't be too surprising, since if you're trying to learn how to make scrapple, you don't pull Bruce Cost's Asian ingredients off the shelf. Now for the two words in question:

1. Hadith or, in stricter transliteration, ħadi:th. From the verbal root ħadatha "to happen" (perhaps by means of the derived stem ħaddatha "tell, relate"). "Chat", "small talk", "gossip", "report", and "Prophetic tradition" are some of the many glosses Wehr provides. This certainly makes it sound like it could be a "mass-noun" (with no plural) or a "count-noun" (which takes a plural). Neither of the plurals he lists, aħa:di:th or ħidtha:n, corresponds to that given in the perfidious OED ("hadithat"), but that's not to say that this "sound plural" [vide infra] isn't in use by someone, somewhere, in some context. However, the first of Wehr's forms, aħa:di:th, is found in some of mollpeartree's sources.
   
   My recommendation would be to use hadith to mean an individual tradition concering the Prophet (each of which is proceeded by an elabourate genealogy establishing legitimacy--"I heard this from so-and-so, who heard it from so-and-so...blah blah blah..who heard it from the daughter of the Prophet, on him be peace!"--and take the form of a short narrative creating a context for an utterance of Muhammad's.) It might be wisest to avoid the plural, e.g. "those ahadith concerning remarriage", in favour of the collective noun Hadith (a proper noun, just like "Talmud" or "Tripitaka"), e.g. "the part of the Hadith concerning remarriage".



2. Sura (IST su:rah). From suwwara "to enclose" (cf. su:r "enclosure, wall", pl. aswa:r). The "sound plural" of this would be su:rat, but what makes Arabic noun morphology so daunting is its love of so-called "broken plurals", which retain the same consonants but rearrange the vowels. How "irregular" these are is a matter of debate, because there are definite patterns concerning what kinds of singulars are paired with which types of plurals, but let it be said that whatever regularity there is to the system is still highly complex and far from transparent to a novice. In any case, Wehr gives the broken plural suwar.
   
   However, the OED helpfully suggests that the word is not a direct borrowing from the Arabic but entred English from French and is, thus, naturalised enough to take a regular English plural, i.e. suras. Why mess with simplicity itself?

Portrait of Da in gray

Last night, it occurred to me that, if it hadn't been for the 60's, I wouldn't feel guilty that I spend so much time indulging my personal hobbies rather than working on Saving The World.

Then it occurred to that, if it hadn't been for the 60's, I'd be working myself to death at a job in the family business, which I hate, in order to provide for my neglected wife and three repressed children.

The worst part of this musing was the realisation that, in my socially irresponsible pursuit of pleasure, the decade I'm most a child of is the 70's.