iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Ja, ich kann schon problemlos dir verstehen aber meine Aktivproduktion (!!??) ist nicht so gut

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Danke! Am Anfang ist es nicht so beeindruckend. I won't be able to keep it up like this forever!

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Wrong side of the country, but my window views here in Berlin are just as industrial

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Living in Berlin, so immersion is very helpful. And I meticulously make flashcards for new words I encounter and review them with Anki

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I've learned 2500 German words in the last 3 months, let's see how long I can keep this pace up

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Only just now realized that Arabic عملاق ʿimlāq "giant" is related to, and probably borrowed from, Hebrew עמלק ʿamālēq, the Biblical "Amalek"

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Oh I don't mean to correct, just participating in the conversation. I appreciate any opportunity to nerd out on this stuff 🤓

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I should have said "Tehrani Persian", I'm not sure if there's variation in this word (haven't paid attention) but there could well be. I'm used to saying and hearing fowqo-l-āde

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Same thing happens with your examples downthread, Azerbaijani and Persian words for "international"

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Ironically Azerbaijani maintains the correct Arabic case ending (fawqa should be manṣūb because it's an adverb of place) but Persian subjects it to vowel harmony (fowqo-l-āde). I think the latter is by mistaken analogy with the Arabic iḍāfa structure.

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Shaul Magid's new book, open access The Scourge of Jewish Nationalism: Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum's Anti-Zionist Thought Free PDF here: www.luminosoa.org/books/m/10.1...

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

These are perfect recs I just second everything Matt suggested 👌 The Said might be a little dense for them but Khalidi is super readable.

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Reposted by Alexander Jabbari

Dana El Kurd @danaelkurd.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

NAZA is a film by Israelis primarily for Israelis. And *that is a good thing*. It is a thing that cannot be accomplished by palestinian victims. It is a thing we NEED israelis to do. The critiques of this film from the left+Palestinians come from a position of pain, but are inaccurate & not helpful.

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Yes! Everywhere should have a public bathroom and (separately) a public screaming room please

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Libraries should have a screaming room for when you need to step away from your work for a brief scream

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Honored to give a talk next week at the University of Chicago in the lecture series in memory of Frank Lewis

What Does Grammar Do? Some Answers from Persian Philology

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Palestinians living in tents in Gaza urgently need tarps for the coming winter. Please donate to the Gaza Support Network to purchase tarps and help families in Gaza stay warm and dry. chuffed.org/project/tarp...

chuffed.org

Urgent: In Gaza Now - Tarps Are Everything

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

chuffed.org

Urgent: In Gaza Now - Tarps Are Everything

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The biggest accounts and core userbase on this site are basically blue MAGA

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Well they are but it's because the former is borrowed from Persian -kār and the latter from Persian -gar and those two Persian words come from variations of the same Middle Persian suffix.

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The answer is because this suffix is borrowed from Persian gar, where it has a front vowel. The same thing with breaking vowel harmony happens with all kinds of Persian loans in other Turkic languages too.

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

-gar forms agent nouns in Persian. If this were because of a k>g sound change why wouldn't it become *šıypagar?

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Yes and you sent me a link to šıypager (would be ~shifogar in Uzbek orthography). Both words use the noun shifā "healing" but they have two different Persian suffixes, -kār "doer" vs. -gar "-er". They are different morphemes.

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Yes. Interestingly it would be a perfectly comprehensible Classical Persian word that doesn't seem to exist in Classical Persian, to the extent that it's not even recorded in this massive dictionary of (literary) Tajik: archive.org/details/Shuk...

archive.org

Shukurov Et Al Farhangi Zaboni Tojiki 1 2

One of the best Persian to Persian dictionaries.

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

To this point, it's possible it was coined in Uzbek on the basis of Persian vocab/morphology, that kind of thing is not uncommon. But the fact that the word exists in Uzbek + Tajik but not other langs means it was a loan from 1 to the other, and Tajik➡️Uzbek would be by far the most likely trajectory

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Yes, شفاکار . I don't see it in the major dictionaries either, though it's easily understandable from its components. Here it is in a Tajik dictionary vazhaju.tj/word/%D8%B4%...

vazhaju.tj

شفاکار чист? маънии شفاکار - Вожаҷӯ / واژه‌جو

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Judah Grunstein @judah-grunstein.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Philosemitism is the most cringe expression of antisemitism.

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Is it this? dn760109.eu.archive.org/0/items/thet...

dn760109.eu.archive.org

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Here we go (thanks to @lameensouag.bsky.social ) www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

degruyterbrill.com

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

So maybe there's a rule that the ethnic/nisba adjectives are always masc, and then further adjectives agree with the masc nisba that precedes them, giving us قهوة تركي مضبوط (which I feel like is more common than قهوة تركي مضبوطة ) ?

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Thanks, I'll have to look up the paper! The same phrase (without agreement) seems to be used in Tunisian, judging by online videos. Maybe borrowed wholesale from Egyptian, though. I take it this isn't the case in Algeria?

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Nah, the same thing happens with e.g. ahwa faransī. But some Egyptian coffee vocab *is* Persian (via Ottoman Turkish), like ساده "plain" (no sugar)

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I like the idea, but it's not a loanword afaik, qahwa referred to wine before the introduction of coffee to the Arab lands. (Kind of like how qahwa refers to green tea in Kashmir)

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Weird gender agreement in Egyptian Arabic: قهوة تركي ahwa turkī "Turkish coffee", f. noun with m. adj. Same with "Arabic coffee," "French coffee" etc. Adding another adj to the noun phrase you can hear both قهوة تركي مضبوط and قهوة تركي مضبوطة. It's fem across the board in MSA. What's going on?

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Love to receive AI slop emails from my employer announcing steep budget cuts 🤬

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robin celikates @robin-c.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I’m so angry I wrote an article: In Germany, fascist majorities are a real possibility again, but the centrist merger of a revived Red Scare with open racism shows that mainstream media & politics are unable or unwilling to comprehend the seriousness of the crisis tribunemag.co.uk/2026/09/germ...

tribunemag.co.uk

Warning from Germany: It’s Socialism or Barbarism

Fascism is at the door, and liberals are ushering it in. Only the left offers hope.

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Reposted by Alexander Jabbari

Philip Leventhal @philipleventhal.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Congratulations to Shir Alon, whose book, STATIC FORMS: WRITING THE PRESENT IN THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST is the winner of the 2026 Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize! bit.ly/46EHCFm #ModernistLatitudes @moderniststudies.bsky.social @columbiaup.bsky.social

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CMA: Islamic Art @cmaislamic.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Illuminated Folio (recto) from a Gulistan (Rose Garden) of Sa'di (c. 1213-1291) clevelandart.org/art/2006.147.a

The <em>Gulistan, </em>completed around 1258, is one of the most celebrated works of Persian literature. The book’s name means “rose garden” in Persian; just as a rose garden is a collection of flowers, the contents are a collection of anecdotes. Written in both prose and verse, the <em>Gulistan </em>was used for centuries as a primer for schoolchildren in greater Iran, India, and Turkey. The text on these pages is written in <em>nastaliq </em>script and comes from the first chapter, “On the Conduct of Kings.”<br>The exquisite borders of these two folios show lions, dragons, foxes, and peacocks in a lush landscape, painted in gold and silver that has tarnished over time.

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It's just „Judeo-Bolschewismus” updated for 2026

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Dom Tak (about music, really good) + Sarde

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Cool! Need to read a grammar of Ḥassāniyya

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I think it's interesting that speakers of every Arabic dialect (afaik) and modern Hebrew have all dropped the construct state (other than in certain fixed exceptions) in favor of a standalone genitive like bitā3/dyāl/etc. and shel

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Alexander Jabbari @ajab.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

For that generation I'd genuinely be surprised if he *didn't* understand Egyptian

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