Re: Argument Structures

On Thu, 24 Aug 2000 10:58:08 +0100 JJ <jonathan.jones@...>
writes:
>Well, thinking about this, it crossed my mind that our number system
>is derived from Arabic, yes? And Arabic is written right to left.
>Does anyone know which way Arabic numbers are written?
    I never understood why writing proceeds from right to left, but numbers
proceed from left to right, in the Middle East.  Is this part of the South
Asian tradition (from whence these numbers originally came)?
    In a related vein, I much prefer to refer to the region formerly known
as "the Middle East" as "South-West Asia," although this term isn't as
recognizable as "the Middle East" or "the Near East."
    From the perspective of an "Orientalist" such as myself, the "Near East"
refers geographically to "South-West Asia," including Turkey but not
necessarily Iran.  Iran is usually lumped in with the Islamic countries of
South-West Asia (on the basis of religion), but sometimes lumped in with the
South Asian nations (on the basis of language).  From this same Orientalist
perspective, the term "Middle East" refers to the Indo-Iranian nations east
of Iran, and south of Afghanistan, bordered on the east by South-East Asia.
The "Far East" generally refers to East and South-East Asia.  These terms
are relics of a day when everyone east of London was an "Oriental," and are
now (thankfully) more or less obsolete, except in some scholarly literature
(the name of my department, for example, is Near Eastern Languages and
Civilizations, and encompasses everything from Indo-Muslim culture to
Yiddish).
    For reasons unknown to me, the terms "South Asia" and "East Asia" have
caught on in the Western Media (when was the last time you heard anyone say
"the Far East" or "the Subcontinent?), but the term "Middle East" continues
to be used, albeit with a modified meaning: generally, it refers to the
Islamic countries of North Africa (especially Libya and Egypt) and
South-West Asia.  Many of the inhabitants of these countries consider
themselves part of "the West," and I've met Moroccans and Algerians who
considered themselves to be "Europeans." (!)

Steg Belsky wrote:
"i think this idea came from seeing a map somewhere of the Biblical Period,
which labeled the Persian Gulf something like ha-Yam ha-Tahhton, making it
"lower" and the mediterranean "upper"."
     This is the old Mesopotamian nomenclature for these areas - Mesopotamia
being located between the Upper Sea and the Lower Sea.  Unfortunately I
can't remember what the native terms for these regions were (I can only read
Akkadian with much pain and suffering).

Speaking of which...
Dan Sulani wrote:
    "Just one small quibble: the root het-lamed-vet/bet
can mean either "milk" or "animal fat" depending upon the vowels. "Milk" in
Hebrew has the qamats, which in Israeli pronounciation is /a/
and in Ashkenazic pronounciation is AFAIK /O/, but to use /e/
turns the milk into animal fat."
     Of course - you're absolutely right.  Unfortunately Hebrew is a
language that I've only recently acquired and I first learned it improperly
(my first exposure to Hebrew was four years ago ... I was taught Hebrew in
an Italian university, by a Israeli, who used a French grammar (ivrit
ahshav, I believe it was called).  Prior to this, the only Semitic language
that I knew was Phoenician (!) which I learned while I was still an
Egyptologist).  The word *was* helebh "animal fat," but for some reason I
had "milk" on my mind (probably because I mentioned earlier that the only
word I know from Kurdistani Jewish Aramaic is "halwa.")
     Yet another interesting note... the word in Phoenician for "king" is
"Milk."
-Chollie
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