My research area is Arabic linguistics, more specifically the emergence and development of Arabic and the philological and rhetorical exegesis of the Qur’an (and its use and abuse), as well as Digital Humanities, especially corpus and computational linguistics. In my published dissertation in Arabic Studies, I analysed the use of hapax legomena in the Qur’an. I have also compiled an Arabic-English dictionary of the 3,500 most frequent lemmas and multi-word items of contemporary Media Arabic which cover 95% of an Arabic media text based on a corpus of 200 million tokens. Recently, I have finished a volume on adaptations of One Thousand and One Nights including my contribution on the linguistics of the first printed edition of the Nights in Arabic and its editor’s adaptation of the manuscript(s) that it was based on. My current research is dedicated to a corpus linguistic exploration of Hadith Arabic, and transcultural Muslim women’s rights movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Media Arabic is being integrated into university curricula (e.g. Leeds, Edinburgh, Vienna) not le... more Media Arabic is being integrated into university curricula (e.g. Leeds, Edinburgh, Vienna) not least because of the popularity of the satellite station al-Jazeera and the modern need to reflect the Arab perspective. However, if there are any textbooks available, they are proprietary and tailored to the home institution of the author, restricting their use in terms of knowledge and year of learning. Therefore, and since I started teaching Media Arabic in 2008, I created a corpus of about 25 million tokens and extracted the top 3.500 lemmata using a statistical heuristic which was substantiated by the lemma frequencies in Google News. The extracted lemmata are not only the most frequent, but their number seems to bring students at CEFR-B2 level, and last but not least they cover about 95% of contemporary non-trivial Media texts, while reducing the number of external dictionary look-ups for a text of about 550 ± 60 words in length to about 24 ± 10.
Proceedings of the seminar for arabian studies Volume 41 2011 Papers from the forty-fourth meetin... more Proceedings of the seminar for arabian studies Volume 41 2011 Papers from the forty-fourth meeting of the
The present article offers insight into a fresh way to utilise hadith collections beyond criticis... more The present article offers insight into a fresh way to utilise hadith collections beyond criticising their material in terms of their authenticity or discussing their implications for Islamic law. It builds on a digital corpus of collections to represent the wealth of canonical Sunni, Shia and Ibadite traditions. In this first exploration of this corpus, the interconnectedness of early Islamic Arabia with other parts of world is highlighted through an analysis of travelling words, proper names, and concrete objects in a few case studies organised into five sections by geographical area. These include translation, a Wanderwort, and contact through commerce and trade. The methods applied to analyse the material are those of historical and comparative linguistics. The results indicate that exploring linguistic aspects of hadith collections— notwithstanding editorial revision and their canonisation—can inform studies of language change in Arabic and set the course to research the standa...
Dieses Forschungsprojekt war solchen einmal vorkommenden Wortern im Koran gewidmet, die die einzi... more Dieses Forschungsprojekt war solchen einmal vorkommenden Wortern im Koran gewidmet, die die einzigen loci probantes ihrer Wurzeln sind (unikale Hapaxlegomena, HLu). Der erste Teil der Arbeit bestand darin, deren morphologischen, in Bezug auf die Reimbildung (Homoioptoton) funktionellen, phonetischen, semantischen und rhetorischen Beitrag zu beschreiben, um abschliesend - unter Zuhilfenahme von acht klassisch-arabischen Lexika und 17 Koranexegesen - die Bedeutungsgeschichte solcher HLu zu rekonstruieren, die in der deutschen Ubersetzung von Paret als unklar markiert wurden. Die 14 HLu, deren Bedeutungen und Interpretationen untersucht worden sind, lauten: Hubuk (Q 51:7), Hard (Q 68:25), Husuum (Q 69:7), dusur (Q 54:13), rahw (Q 44:24), zaniim (Q 68:13), saamiduun (Q 53:61), musannadah (Q 63:4), shuwaaZ (Q 55:35), Samad (Q 112:2), `iDiin (Q 15:91), qiTT (Q 38:16), kunnas (Q 81:16) und naHb (Q 33:23).
The article offers insight into a fresh way to utilise hadith collections beyond criticising thei... more The article offers insight into a fresh way to utilise hadith collections beyond criticising their material in terms of their authenticity or discussing their implications for Islamic law. It builds on a digital corpus of collections to represent the wealth of canonical Sunni, Shia and Ibadite traditions. In this first exploration of this corpus, the interconnectedness of early Islamic Arabia with other parts of world is highlighted through an analysis of travelling words, proper names, and concrete objects in a few case studies organised into five sections by geographical area. These include translation, a Wanderwort, and contact through commerce and trade. The methods applied to analyse the material are those of historical and comparative linguistics. The results indicate that exploring linguistic aspects of hadith collections—notwithstanding editorial revision and their canonisation—can inform studies of language change in Arabic and set the course to research the standardisation...
Media Arabic is being integrated into university curricula (e.g. Leeds, Edinburgh, Vienna) not le... more Media Arabic is being integrated into university curricula (e.g. Leeds, Edinburgh, Vienna) not least because of the popularity of the satellite station al-Jazeera and the modern need to reflect the Arab perspective. However, if there are any textbooks available, they are proprietary and tailored to the home institution of the author, restricting their use in terms of knowledge and year of learning. Therefore, and since I started teaching Media Arabic in 2008, I created a corpus of about 25 million tokens and extracted the top 3.500 lemmata using a statistical heuristic which was substantiated by the lemma frequencies in Google News. The extracted lemmata are not only the most frequent, but their number seems to bring students at CEFR-B2 level, and last but not least they cover about 95% of contemporary non-trivial Media texts, while reducing the number of external dictionary look-ups for a text of about 550 ± 60 words in length to about 24 ± 10.
Proceedings of the seminar for arabian studies Volume 41 2011 Papers from the forty-fourth meetin... more Proceedings of the seminar for arabian studies Volume 41 2011 Papers from the forty-fourth meeting of the
The present article offers insight into a fresh way to utilise hadith collections beyond criticis... more The present article offers insight into a fresh way to utilise hadith collections beyond criticising their material in terms of their authenticity or discussing their implications for Islamic law. It builds on a digital corpus of collections to represent the wealth of canonical Sunni, Shia and Ibadite traditions. In this first exploration of this corpus, the interconnectedness of early Islamic Arabia with other parts of world is highlighted through an analysis of travelling words, proper names, and concrete objects in a few case studies organised into five sections by geographical area. These include translation, a Wanderwort, and contact through commerce and trade. The methods applied to analyse the material are those of historical and comparative linguistics. The results indicate that exploring linguistic aspects of hadith collections— notwithstanding editorial revision and their canonisation—can inform studies of language change in Arabic and set the course to research the standa...
Dieses Forschungsprojekt war solchen einmal vorkommenden Wortern im Koran gewidmet, die die einzi... more Dieses Forschungsprojekt war solchen einmal vorkommenden Wortern im Koran gewidmet, die die einzigen loci probantes ihrer Wurzeln sind (unikale Hapaxlegomena, HLu). Der erste Teil der Arbeit bestand darin, deren morphologischen, in Bezug auf die Reimbildung (Homoioptoton) funktionellen, phonetischen, semantischen und rhetorischen Beitrag zu beschreiben, um abschliesend - unter Zuhilfenahme von acht klassisch-arabischen Lexika und 17 Koranexegesen - die Bedeutungsgeschichte solcher HLu zu rekonstruieren, die in der deutschen Ubersetzung von Paret als unklar markiert wurden. Die 14 HLu, deren Bedeutungen und Interpretationen untersucht worden sind, lauten: Hubuk (Q 51:7), Hard (Q 68:25), Husuum (Q 69:7), dusur (Q 54:13), rahw (Q 44:24), zaniim (Q 68:13), saamiduun (Q 53:61), musannadah (Q 63:4), shuwaaZ (Q 55:35), Samad (Q 112:2), `iDiin (Q 15:91), qiTT (Q 38:16), kunnas (Q 81:16) und naHb (Q 33:23).
The article offers insight into a fresh way to utilise hadith collections beyond criticising thei... more The article offers insight into a fresh way to utilise hadith collections beyond criticising their material in terms of their authenticity or discussing their implications for Islamic law. It builds on a digital corpus of collections to represent the wealth of canonical Sunni, Shia and Ibadite traditions. In this first exploration of this corpus, the interconnectedness of early Islamic Arabia with other parts of world is highlighted through an analysis of travelling words, proper names, and concrete objects in a few case studies organised into five sections by geographical area. These include translation, a Wanderwort, and contact through commerce and trade. The methods applied to analyse the material are those of historical and comparative linguistics. The results indicate that exploring linguistic aspects of hadith collections—notwithstanding editorial revision and their canonisation—can inform studies of language change in Arabic and set the course to research the standardisation...
Gorgias Press' 2018 Islamic Studies' catalogue sets out a selection of Gorgias' published and for... more Gorgias Press' 2018 Islamic Studies' catalogue sets out a selection of Gorgias' published and forthcoming publications that are related to Islamic and Near Eastern studies, as well as studies carried out for other fields of research that intersect with Islamic studies.
The premodern Islamic world was multilingual and multicultural, and by necessity was continually ... more The premodern Islamic world was multilingual and multicultural, and by necessity was continually engaged in comparative critical practices. Mapping the interconnected trajectories of these practices, everywhere they arose between Urdu, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and other language traditions of Asia and Africa, is the aim of this conference. We invite scholars to employ methodologies based on direct engagement with primary sources that negotiate the multilingual Islamic world(s) in ways that are overlooked or misunderstood by Comparative Literature.
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