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Abha Arabic is a dialect of Arabic (ISO 693-3: ara), belonging to the Semitic language family group, and spoken primarily in Abha city. Abha Arabic can be broadly classified as a variety of Arabic from the Arabian Peninsula group (Versteegh, 2014), and further sub-classified as a south (-west) Arabian dialect (Ingham, 1982). Abha city is the administrative capital of the province of Asir, in south-west Saudi Arabia (Figure 1). The population of Abha is approximately 290,185 and that of the Asir province is 1,601,725, according to the most recent data on the population (General Authority for Statistics, 2010). The province is named after the Asir tribe, who first inhabited Abha and the surrounding regions. The present day Abha Arabic dialect thus represents a blending of Bedouin and urban dialects. The first settlers to Abha were the Bani-Mghed tribe (an Asir tribe) followed by three additional Asir tribes (Alkam, Rabiah w Rufeda, Bani-Malik) and other nearby tribes such as the Gahtaːn, Bal-lahmir, Bal-lasmir, Shahran, Rejal Alma', all of which had distinct dialects (Al-Azraqi, 1998). These dialects merged to varying degrees and were further influenced by urban education and mass media, which were and continue to be dominated by Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth MSA) (Al-Azraqi, 1998).1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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We introduce a generic, language-independent method to collect a large percentage of offensive and hate tweets regardless of their topics or genres. We harness the extralinguistic information embedded in the emojis to collect a large number of offensive tweets. We apply the proposed method on Arabic tweets and compare it with English tweets—analyzing key cultural differences. We observed a constant usage of these emojis to represent offensiveness throughout different timespans on Twitter. We manually annotate and publicly release the largest Arabic dataset for offensive , fine-grained hate speech , vulgar, and violence content. Furthermore, we benchmark the dataset for detecting offensiveness and hate speech using different transformer architectures and perform in-depth linguistic analysis. We evaluate our models on external datasets—a Twitter dataset collected using a completely different method, and a multi-platform dataset containing comments from Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, for assessing generalization capability. Competitive results on these datasets suggest that the data collected using our method capture universal characteristics of offensive language. Our findings also highlight the common words used in offensive communications, common targets for hate speech, specific patterns in violence tweets, and pinpoint common classification errors that can be attributed to limitations of NLP models. We observe that even state-of-the-art transformer models may fail to take into account culture, background, and context or understand nuances present in real-world data such as sarcasm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is concerned primarily with Maulana Azad's early political and theological writings with a view to understanding his positions on Islam and the non-Islamic religions. It opens with a brief description of his discussion of Mughal history and religious culture, and then notes his portrayal of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624) as an exemplary political figure, who raised his voice against Akbar's heresy. This portrayal has had a significant historiographical afterlife. Several modern scholars followed Azad's reading. The article asks whether Azad was truly the first to have such a view of the saint, and thereby influenced the modern writings on Mughal India. We will notice that Sirhindi was already portrayed as a political figure in the Mughal-era historical accounts devoted to him. Azad only chose to work within a certain memory of Sirhindi—but why did he choose to use an earlier tradition and not a purely religious interpretive framework of his own for analysing and presenting the saint's position? The article examines Azad's rationale for such a portrayal in light of his political concerns. It then discusses in some depth the theological discourses in his Tazkira and the early issues of Al-Hilāl. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arabic presents many challenges for automatic processing. Although several research studies have addressed some issues, electronic resources for processing Arabic remain relatively rare or not widely available. In this paper, we propose a Tree-adjoining grammar with a syntax-semantic interface. It is applied to the modern standard Arabic, but it can be easily adapted to other languages. This grammar named "ArabTAG V2.0" (Arabic Tree Adjoining Grammar) is semi-automatically generated by means of an abstract representation called meta-grammar. To ensure its development, ArabTAG V2.0 benefits from a grammar testing environment that uses a corpus of phenomena. Further experiments were performed to check the coverage of this grammar as well as the syntax-semantic analysis. The results showed that ArabTAG V2.0 can cover the majority of syntactical structures and different linguistic phenomena with a precision rate of 88.76%. Moreover, we were able to semantically analyze sentences and build their semantic representations with a precision rate of about 95.63%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: In an increasingly interconnected world, migration has become a defining characteristic of the 21st century. While immigration offers new beginnings and prospects, it also presents unique challenges, particularly concerning mental health. The experience of migrating can exert pressure on mental health through factors such as acculturation stress, discrimination, and economic hardships. These challenges can, in turn, contribute to the development of mental health issues. Objectives: To study the socio-demographic and clinical profile of immigrants hospitalized in the "C" psychiatry department, Hedi Chaker Hospital, in Sfax, Tunisia. Methods: We conducted a retrospective descriptive study of immigrants hospitalized in the psychiatry department "C", Hedi Chaker Hospital, Sfax Tunisia from 2011 to 2023. Socioeconomic data and clinical profiles of immigrants were collected from archived files. Results: The total number of immigrants hospitalized during these 12 years was 32, with an average age of 28.81 years ±7.8 years, all of them were males, as the psychiatric department "C" only hospitalizes men. All were of African origin, of whom 21.9% (n=7) had Libyan nationality, 15.6% (n=5) had Somali nationality and 12.5% (n=4) had Sudanese nationality. Communication with them was possible in 87.5% of cases, primarily through the native Arabic language in 56.3% of instances. Illegal immigration was the most prevalent form, accounting for 75% of cases. During the immigration process, 18.8% of individuals reported experiencing violence." The majority of hospitalized immigrants were single (71.9%), had a primary school education (37.5%), a low socio-economic level (81.3%), and no profession (59.4%). 21.9% of them had received social assistance, and 59.4% lived in a refugee camp. Psychoactive substance consumption was reported by 53.1% of our study population. Regarding the clinical profile of the population, 21.9% had a history of somatic conditions, 43.8% had a psychiatric history, including 9.4% who had attempted suicide, and 34.4% who had experienced traumatic events since arriving in Tunisia. The primary reason for hospitalization was behavioral disorders in 71.9% of cases and suicide attempts in 15.6%. The most prevalent diagnoses were schizophrenia (50%), and bipolar disorder (18.8%). Upon discharge, 15.6% encountered administrative issues. Conclusions: Hospitalized immigrants exhibit diverse socio-demographic and clinical profiles. These findings underscore the significance of acquiring a deeper understanding of the mental health needs and existing barriers to healthcare within various immigrant communities. This is particularly crucial as immigration continues to be a central focus in Tunisia's public policies and discussions. Disclosure of Interest: None Declared [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1890, the Maldivian judge and poet Sheikh Muhammad Jamaluddin connected poetry with linguistic description in two ways. First, when he described features of the Dhivehi language with the aid of Arabic linguistic theory, he used Dhivehi poetry as linguistic evidence for correct usage. Second, he authored Dhivehi-language poetry about Arabic linguistic theory. Cosmopolis scholarship relates a narrative of how the wide circulation of Sanskrit, Arabic, and/or Persian fostered a vast network of writers who authored texts in major vernacular languages like Bengali, Burmese, Javanese, Kannada, Khmer, Malay, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, and Urdu. This scholarship suggests that authors living within a particular cosmopolis wrote in divergent vernacular languages yet were, in some sense, connected because they translated and responded creatively to the same widely circulated source texts written in Sanskrit, Arabic, and/or Persian. Yet in cosmopolis scholarship's effort to reveal understudied connections, various degrees of disconnection among writers of vernacular languages within a cosmopolis tend to be missed. One problem of overlooking disconnection among writers of vernacular languages is that readers could mistakenly conflate superculture-subculture interaction with intercultural interaction. In this article, I argue that Dhivehi-language poetry and linguistic description was inside the Arabic cosmopolis but simultaneously outside, because in circa 1890 non-Maldivians in the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia could not even read the Thaana script of the Dhivehi language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

anna's storytelling abilities are recognized not only in his orphan stories recounted to Galland, but also in more than 40 stories that he recorded in his travel account. Stephan's introduction focuses on the relationship between anna and Lucas as the driving force of the storytelling in anna's account. One of the major issues is the parallels between the orphan stories added to the I Arabian Nights i by anna and Galland and the tales which anna inserted in his travel account. [Extracted from the article]

It is received wisdom in variationist sociolinguistics that linguistic and social factors go hand in hand in structuring variability in language and any consequent instances of language change. We address the complexity of such factors by exploring data from several Arabic dialects in the eastern Arab world. We demonstrate that language change does not always follow expected phonological trajectories, even in cases where older changes are reconstructed to have operated along so-called universal patterns. In our explanation of recent changes in these dialects, we emphasise the role of social motivations for language change and the interactions between these social constraints and purely linguistic ones. Our analysis of change is supported by historical accounts of variation and change in Arabic. We illustrate how general principles of sociolinguistic theory apply to the Arabic data and provide additional layers of sociolinguistic information that highlight the importance of diverse data for evaluating cross-linguistic generalisations. (Arabic, language change, historical sociolinguistics) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Article 4 of the Nation State Law (NSL), entitled 'Languages', stipulates that Hebrew is the language of the state (Article 4(a)); the Arabic language has a special status in the state and regulating the use of Arabic in or by state institutions will be set in law (Article 4(b)); and this clause does not harm the status given to the Arabic language before the law came into effect (Article 4(c), the 'validity of laws' clause). The question is whether, how, and to what extent these provisions hinder the present legal status of the Arabic language in Israel. The legal status of Arabic had never been determined decisively before enactment of the NSL. The High Court of Israel has always been divided on this matter, particularly between judges who perceived Arabic as an official language and judges who deemed it solely as having been granted its acknowledged 'special legal status'. Furthermore, the judges who perceived Arabic as an official language of the state were also in dispute among themselves as to the meaning, the scope and the consequences of such recognition. Considering these circumstances, my view is that the NSL perpetuates the legal status of Arabic as prescribed in the laws and case law that already existed, and that the validity of laws clause, coupled with the special status granted to Arabic in a basic law, suggests that the door is still open for the Court to further endorse the legal status of Arabic in Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1894 Syrian émigré Alexander Maloof arrived in the United States to join the thriving community in New York's "Syrian Quarter." Working first as a music instructor and pianist, Maloof found success as a bandleader, composer, arranger, and publisher, integrating Arabic and US popular music and light classical styles. He wrote and edited Arabic-language piano songbooks for the Arabophone communities in the United States, and ran the Maloof Records label, the "Oriental" division of the Gennett Company's "race records" enterprise. Drawing on Arabic-language discourse from around the Syrian mahjar (diaspora), this article uses Maloof's output to demonstrate music's role in the vibrant and contested political conversations taking place in Arabic around the world, from the homelands around Beirut and Damascus, to the initial Syrian settlements in Cairo and Paris, to the American colonies in Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and New York. Concluding with a discussion of the 1919 "American Maid" (composed under a pseudonym), I argue that a thorough understanding of the history of Orientalist popular music in the Americas requires a decentering of European American audiences in order to examine those questions animating the New York mahjar, most centrally the political fate of greater Syria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the longest Hismaic inscriptions yet discovered comes from the region of Madaba, Jordan. It was published first in an Arabic article by Khraysheh in 2000 and was re-edited by Graf and Zwettler four years later. Both editions remark on the striking similarity in language and style between this text and Classical Arabic. Indeed, this inscription and a closely related text from Uraynibah West, also published by Graf and Zwettler in the same article, are among the best witnesses to the Arabic of this region during the Nabataean period. This article will offer a few remarks on the language of the Hismaic inscriptions and then provide a new reading of line 4 of the Madaba inscription, which had previously evaded satisfactory interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple varieties of Arabic attest a definite noun + adjective syntagm in which only the adjective is marked morphologically with the article, e.g., Lebanese bēt iz-zġīr "the small house". The feminine ending *-ah is everywhere realized -(v)t, e.g., Baghdadi sint il-māḍye "last year". Most have assumed that it was originally appositional, and re-analysed as a construct, prompted perhaps by the loss of case (Hopkins 1984; Pat-El 2017). A few scholars (Reckendorf 1921; Retsö 2009) have argued that this syntagm was originally construct. In this article I draw on relevant Arabic data, including parallels with dialectal tanwīn , as well as comparative Semitic evidence, to argue that this syntagm is, diachronically and synchronically, one of apposition and not annexation. I propose that the feminine -at here represents a retention of proto-Arabic *-at , which was protected by the close relationship between a noun and following attribute. I conclude with a discussion of historical and comparative implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will discuss the dating formula in the Dadanitic inscriptions. So far, some of these have been interpreted to refer not only to the reign of the local king (mlk lḥyn), but also to another political official called rʾy. The article will discuss the merit of this interpretation based on both the questionable etymology of the term rʾy and the problematic interpretation of the terms following this word as personal names. Instead, a new interpretation of this formula as a reference to a local calendar will be explored in light of the occurrence of a similar word rʾy in Safaitic dating formula, and comparison to other ancient methods of time reckoning in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The life of Ayuba Sulayman Diallo (also known as Job ben Solomon) receives a fresh examination in this article, based primarily on his own writings. The son of an Imam from Bundu in Senegambia, Diallo was enslaved in 1731 and transported to America. He survived to gain his freedom, make his mark in London society, and return to Africa in 1734. This article offers an analysis of documents from the British Library, including items that have not been previously analysed and are here translated into English for the first time. In addition, they bring together what is known of his archive, including the letters he wrote before, during, and after his time in London, the Qur'ans he scribed there, and the scraps and snippets created as he discussed the Arabic language with friends. A close analysis of Diallo's writings reveals new information about his life history; his relationships with the elites in both Bundu and London; his scholarly abilities; and the history of Bundu itself. Diallo used the technology of writing to direct the course of his own life and career, converting a disastrous course of events into favourable opportunities for himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In premodern monsoon Asia, the legal worlds of major and minor traditions formed a cosmopolis of laws which expanded chronologically and geographically. Without necessarily replacing one another, they all coexisted in a larger domain with fluctuating influences over time and place. In this legal cosmopolis, each tradition had its own aggregation of diverse juridical, linguistic and contextual variants. In South and Southeast Asia, Islam has accordingly formed its own cosmopolis of law by incorporating a network of different juridical texts, institutions, jurists and scholars and by the meaningful use of these variants through shared vocabularies and languages. Focusing on the Shāfiʿī School of Islamic law and its major proponents in Malay and Arabic textual productions, this article argues that the intentional choice of a lingua franca contributed to the wider reception and longer sustainability of this particular legal school. The Arabic and Malay microcosmoi thus strengthened the larger cosmopolis of Islamic law through transregional and translinguistic exchanges across legal, cultural and continental borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a very particular episode of the eastern Alexander legend, i.e. the building of an extraordinary "metal army" employed by Alexander in his war against the Indian King Porus, which is present in at least three Persian accounts written between the tenth and fourteenth centuries CE: the "Book of Kings" (Shāh-nāmeh) by Ferdowsi, the "Book of Dārāb" (Dārāb-nāmeh), attributed to Tarsusi, and an "Alexander-book" (Eskandar-nāmeh) in prose copied by ʿAbd al-Kāfi ibn Abu al-Barakāt. Compared to the most remote source, the text of Pseudo-Callisthenes, and to the closest ones (the Armenian version of the fifth century, the Syriac text of the sixth‒seventh centuries, and the Hebrew version of the tenth‒eleventh centuries), it is argued that the Persian authors have not passively received the inherited materials; on the contrary, they have been able to liven up the scene of Alexander's battle against the Indian King Porus by bringing onto the battlefield a fiery and phantasmagorical army of metal, giving us one of the more amazing episodes in the eastern legend of the great Macedonian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buṭrus al-Bustānī (1819–1883) was one of the leading figures of the Nahḍa period. In most studies on the Nahḍa , his activities, work and projects are seen as having made an important contribution to the revival of the Arabic language by transforming it to meet the needs of modern times. Although his lexical contribution has been researched there is no comprehensive research on his grammatical contribution to the Arabic language. This article shows that al-Bustānī's Encyclopedia reflects a conservative approach toward grammar in that he confined himself to abridging the grammatical rules enshrined by traditional grammarians. However, he took a liberal and reformist approach to the lexicon that drew on both classical and Western sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular music in Israel has recently seen a surge in the use of Arabic in music made by Israeli-Jewish musicians. Most of these, although descendants of immigrants from Arab countries, never acquired Arabic at home or in school, owing to national ideology which sought to label Arabic as the language of the non-Jewish other. This article reveals and contextualises this recent trend, offering a typology of the ways in which musicians engage with Arabic, their motivations for doing so and the challenges that they face. Discussing musicians who approach Arabic as Jewish heritage, as an aesthetic repository, or even as mere sound, we identify these mobilisations of Arabic as postvernacular uses of language, which often privilege its non-semantic qualities. Observed in the context of Israeli–Arab enmity, this trend appears to have emerged surprisingly not in spite of, but partly because of, the decline in peace prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates the morpho-syntactic behaviour of the Arabic complementizer ʔinn in a range of Arabic varieties (Modern Standard Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, and Lebanese Arabic). It essentially argues that this complementizer shares (not donates or keeps , pace Ouali 2008, 2011) its unvalued $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ -features with its complement $\text{T}^{0}$ , something that makes ʔinn and $\text{T}^{0}$ separate agreeing heads. An inflectional suffix attached to ʔinn is treated as a PF reflex (i.e. an overt morphological realization) of valuation of ʔinn 's unvalued $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ -features or lack thereof. This research also argues that the occurrence of such an inflectional suffix is ruled by the postulated Agree Chain Record , an interface condition that demands an Agree relation to have a PF reflex, called a Record (i.e. an overt Case marking on the goal or, if not, a $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ -affix on the probe). This way, we account for the complementary distribution of overt Case and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ -Agree in Arabic. We also show how a host of other phenomena, including word order agreement asymmetries in Modern Standard Arabic and lack of such asymmetries in Arabic vernaculars, fares well with this view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the geopolitics of reading in which literature critic Erich Auerbach wrote a letter to Walter Benjamin alluded his dislocation as a European humanist. It cites on the experience of Auerbach as a conscript in the neoimperial project of establishing a European curriculum in Turkey. The article also discusses the disenfranchisement of predominant languages such as the Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish.

We analyze resources and models for Arabic community Question Answering (cQA). In particular, we focus on CQA-MD, our cQA corpus for Arabic in the domain of medical forums. We describe the corpus and the main challenges it poses due to its mix of informal and formal language, and of different Arabic dialects, as well as due to its medical nature. We further present a shared task on cQA at SemEval, the International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, based on this corpus. We discuss the features and the machine learning approaches used by the teams who participated in the task, with focus on the models that exploit syntactic information using convolutional tree kernels and neural word embeddings. We further analyze and extend the outcome of the SemEval challenge by training a meta-classifier combining the output of several systems. This allows us to compare different features and different learning algorithms in an indirect way. Finally, we analyze the most frequent errors common to all approaches, categorizing them into prototypical cases, and zooming into the way syntactic information in tree kernel approaches can help solve some of the most difficult cases. We believe that our analysis and the lessons learned from the process of corpus creation as well as from the shared task analysis will be helpful for future research on Arabic cQA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arabic-speaking students learn to read a transparent maʃku:l script, which provides full vowel information using letters to represent long vowels and phonemic diacritics for short vowels. Gradually, they progress to an opaque ɣayr-maʃku:l script, without diacritics. In this script, internal short vowels can be retrieved using morphological information about word patterns. The current study compared the contribution of phonological information to that of morphological information in the reading acquisition process in Arabic. Four Arabic-speaking groups (2nd, 4th, 6th grades, and adults) read three lists of pseudowords aloud. Two lists included the same morphologically based pseudowords (MPW), one maʃku:l and the second ɣayr-maʃku:l. The third list comprised matched maʃku:l nonwords (NW) with no internal morphological structure. All groups read the ɣayr-maʃku:l MPW list faster than the two other maʃku:l lists, and maʃku:l NWs were read the slowest. There was an age by list type accuracy interaction: while ɣayr-maʃku:l MPWs were read more accurately with increasing age, there were no differences between the student groups with respect to either of the other two lists. However, maʃku:l MPWs were read more accurately than maʃku:l NWs. The findings suggest that from very early on, morphology exceeds phonology, playing a crucial role in supplementing missing vowel information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines heritage speakers’ knowledge of Standard Arabic (SA) and compares their patterns of SA acquisition to those of learners of SA as second/foreign language (L2). In addition, the study examines the influence of previously acquired language varieties, including Colloquial Arabic (QA), on SA acquisition.1 To this end, the study compares 35 heritage speakers, 28 L2 learners, and 16 controls with respect to sentential negation, an area where SA and QA diverge significantly. The participants completed five oral tasks targeting negation of eight different clause types. The findings showed that L2 learners and heritage speakers performed comparably, encountered similar difficulties, and produced similar patterns of errors. However, whereas L2 learners did not display clear transfer effects from L1 (English), heritage speakers showed both positive and negative influence of L1 (QA). The results shed light on the dynamics of the interaction between the spoken heritage languages and their written standard counterparts with specific focus on diglossic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Question answering systems retrieve information from documents in response to queries. Most of the questions are who- and what-type questions that deal with named entities. A less common and more challenging question to deal with is the why -question. In this paper, we introduce Lemaza (Arabic for why), a system for automatically answering why -questions for Arabic texts. The system is composed of four main components that make use of the Rhetorical Structure Theory. To evaluate Lemaza, we prepared a set of why -question–answer pairs whose answer can be found in a corpus that we compiled out of Open Source Arabic Corpora. Lemaza performed best when the stop-words were not removed. The performance measure was 72.7%, 79.2% and 78.7% for recall, precision and c@1, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an essential task for many natural language processing systems, which makes use of various linguistic resources. NER becomes more complicated when the language in use is morphologically rich and structurally complex, such as Arabic. This language has a set of characteristics that makes it particularly challenging to handle. In a previous work, we have proposed an Arabic NER system that follows the hybrid approach, i.e. integrates both rule-based and machine learning-based NER approaches. Our hybrid NER system is the state-of-the-art in Arabic NER according to its performance on standard evaluation datasets. In this article, we discuss a novel methodology for overcoming the coverage drawback of rule-based NER systems in order to improve their performance and allow for automated rule update. The presented mechanism utilizes the recognition decisions made by the hybrid NER system in order to identify the weaknesses of the rule-based component and derive new linguistic rules aiming at enhancing the rule base, which will help in achieving more reliable and accurate results. We used ACE 2004 Newswire standard dataset as a resource for extracting and analyzing new linguistic rules for person, location and organization names recognition. We formulate each new rule based on two distinctive feature groups, i.e. Gazetteers of each type of named entities and Part-of-Speech tags, in particular noun and proper noun. Fourteen new patterns are derived, formulated as grammar rules, and evaluated in terms of coverage. The conducted experiments exploit a POS tagged version of the ACE 2004 NW dataset. The empirical results show that the performance of the enhanced rule-based system, i.e. NERA 2.0, improves the coverage of the previously misclassified person, location and organization named entities types by 69.93 per cent, 57.09 per cent and 54.28 per cent, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The specificities of the Arabic language, mainly agglutination and vocalization make the task of POS-tagging more difficult than for Indo-European languages. Consequently, POS-tagging texts with good accuracy remains a challenging problem for Arabic language processing applications. In this work, we consider the task of POS-tagging as an optimization problem modeled as a graph whose nodes correspond to all possible grammatical tags given by a morphological analyzer for words in a sentence and the goal is to find the best path (sequence of tags) in this graph. To resolve this problem, we propose a novel approach based on ant colony. Ant colony-based algorithms are among the most efficient methods to resolve optimization problems modeled as a graph. The collaboration of ants having various knowledge creates a collective intelligence and increases efficiency. We have performed experiments on both vocalized and non-vocalized texts and tested two different tagsets containing fine and coarse grained composite tags. The obtained results showed good accuracy rates and hence, the benefits of swarm intelligence for the POS-tagging problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toponymic records are a useful tool for establishing initial discriminating criteria before undertaking an archaeological survey of a given territory. This study deals with a series of toponyms in an area located in the region of Cyrenaica which are characterised by containing several terms, the first of which refers to anthropic elements related to some forms of settlement, in particular the forms qaṣr, sīra and qarya. First, a semantic study of the toponyms was conducted and then they were incorporated into a geographic information system (GIS) with a 3D base map, which provided information on their location and their relationship with the physical environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Libyan varieties of both Arabic and Berber are among the least researched in their respective fields. In order to facilitate the study of these varieties, we present an annotated bibliography of all relevant research that could be identified up until the middle of 2016. With this, we aim to identify both the gaps in current and the possibilities for future research. Studies are grouped into Arabic and Berber sections, and subgrouped according to region. For Arabic, dialects of Tripoli and western regions, Benghazi and eastern regions, Fezzan and southern regions, as well as Jewish dialects, are treated. For Berber, varieties of Zwara, the Nafusa mountains, Sokna and El-Foqaha, and Awjila, and Tuareg are treated. Short introductions highlighting the most important studies precede bibliographic references and brief comments are given when of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address the problem of the large coverage dictionaries of Arabic language usable both for direct human reading and automatic Natural Language Processing. For these purposes, we propose a normalized and implemented modeling, based on Lexical Markup Framework (LMF-ISO 24613) and Data Registry Category (DCR-ISO 12620), which allows a stable and well-defined interoperability of lexical resources through a unification of the linguistic concepts. Starting from the features of the Arabic language, and due to the fact that a large range of details and refinements need to be described specifically for Arabic, we follow a finely structuring strategy. Besides its richness in morphology, syntax and semantics knowledge, our model includes all the Arabic morphological patterns to generate the inflected forms from a given lemma and highlights the syntactic–semantic relations. In addition, an appropriate codification has been designed for the management of all types of relationships among lexical entries and their related knowledge. According to this model, a dictionary named El Madar1 has been built and is now publicly available on line. The data are managed by a user-friendly Web-based lexicographical workstation. This work has not been done in isolation, but is the result of a collaborative effort by an international team mainly within the ISO network during a period of eight years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociolinguistic phenomenon of codeswitching, both diglossic and bilingual (Arabic-Hebrew), is extremely pervasive in all varieties of Palestinian Arabic, including Negev Arabic. Surprisingly, neither of these types of codeswitching in Palestinian Arabic has received due scholarly attention; moreover, their interplay has not been studied for any type of Arabic. This article analyses quantitative and functional aspects of diglossic and bilingual codeswitching in the personal interview style of 11 Negev Bedouin female students, focusing on their functional interaction. In the five distinct registers analysed, ratios of both diglossic and bilingual codeswitching were found to rise from childhood narratives to recounts of the period of academic studies and expository sections, with the use of Hebraisms dropping in the more formal registers. Although mixed bilingual discourse with intensive codeswitching is the default style for in-group discourse of the young generation, I show that many switches are not random, but fulfil discourse-pragmatic, communicative, social and textual functions typical of each of the registers. For example, in the narrative registers, switching may mark evaluation (commenting, explaining, self-repair, sidetracking, repetition). In both narrative and non-narrative discourse it may mark quotations, rephrasing or paraphrasing, with or without a metalinguistic introducing particle such as 'as they say'. The result is redundancy at the referential level, with pragmatic functions of emphasizing or elaborating at the discourse level. This is in keeping with functions identified for bilingual codeswitching in general and also for diglossic codeswitching in Arabic; but it is the first effort, as far as I know, to combine analysis of the two codeswitching dimensions in any given code; and, moreover, to study the interplay of this bi-dimensional switching with relation to the stylistic factors of genre and register. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samuel Ibn Tibbon (d. c. 1231) is best known as the translator of Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed and as the author of the bold and ambitious cosmogonic work of Avicennian inspiration Ma'amar Yiqqawu ha-mayim (A treatise on ‘Let the water gather’; 1231). His authorship (in 1199) of the Arabic-into-Hebrew translation of Galen's Tegni with Ibn Riḍwān's commentary, known as al-Ṣinā'a al-ṣaġīra (= Small Art), is attested by the colophons of two manuscripts, but has recently been denied. The question is not unimportant, because if Ibn Tibbon indeed is the author of this translation then, as Steinschneider observed, 'Alī Ibn Riḍwān's commentary is the first Arabic-into-Hebrew translation of a work by a Muslim writer. In this article I invalidate the arguments against Ibn Tibbon's authorship of the translation and, on the contrary, I positively show that a systematic consideration of the evidence unambiguously confirms it. The inquiry is notably based on probes into the evolution of Ibn Tibbon's philosophical vocabulary, whose results, it is hoped, will be useful beyond the immediate aim that has triggered them. This article accompanies Gad Freudenthal and Resianne Fontaine, “Philosophy and medicine in Jewish Provence, Anno 1199: Samuel Ibn Tibbon and Doeg the Edomite translating Galen's Tegni,” published in this issue of ASP, 26 (2016), pp. 1–26. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores how Judeo-Arabic and its speaking population were constituted as objects of research and reformation in colonial Morocco. I argue that the colonial project of dialectology, which emphasized the differentiated linguistic terrain of indigenous society, operated at two opposing levels. On one hand, the study of Judeo-Arabic contributed to the idea of homogeneous orality attributed to native languages, which despite their diverse relationships with literate textuality were made to appear divorced from locally established systems of writing. On the other, the historical and affective relationship between Jews and their Arabic dialect was figured in terms that stressed Jewish alienation from their mother tongue and thereby cast native Jews as differentiated objects of francophone linguistic reform. I pay particular attention to the material mechanics of ethnographic methodology, orthographic entextualization, and editorial arrangement through which colonial dialectologists rendered the Jewish dialect as an essentially oral and Arabic dialect, despite the countervailing circulation of Judeo-Arabic texts written in the Hebrew script. This investigation contributes to our understanding of how dialectology operated as a colonial science through which the hierarchical social categories of colonial rule were established, sustained, and manipulated against the backdrop of linguistic practices that never fully conformed to their colonial representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As is still the case in many parts of Iran, the distribution of languages and dialects in Ilam Province, western Iran, is unevenly documented. There have been several studies on specific language varieties spoken throughout the province but, in large part because of conflicting perspectives on the relationship between language and ethnicity, the situation for the region as a whole has until now remained unclear. The present study first of all brings together existing sociolinguistic and demographic data on language distribution and highlight areas of uncertainty. The main part of the study provides an overview of local perceptions of language distribution and language use based on field research and interviews conducted in each of the province's ten regions (shahrestān) and their twenty-five districts (bakhsh). Here, respondents' assessments of the geographic extent of the province's four main languages—Kurdish, Luri, Laki and Arabic—as well as more minor languages spoken by immigrants from elsewhere in Iran are summarized. For Kurdish in particular, which is the major of the four languages, the article shows the perceived geographic distribution of each major dialect and its affiliation within one of two major Kurdish dialect groups: Ilāmi (or “Feyli”) and Kalhōri. This analysis is followed by a brief discussion of multilingualism. The results of the study are brought together in a map of the province's languages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigates the areas of resilience and vulnerability in sentential negation in heritage Egyptian Arabic and explores their theoretical implications. Egyptian heritage speakers completed three narrative production tasks, five experimental production tasks, and a acceptability judgment task. The results indicate that they have a full grasp of the location of negation and its configurational properties, but diverge from native speakers in such aspects of sentential negation as merger with lexical heads and dependency or licensing relations. We propose that these asymmetric patterns are due to various factors, including the age at which a structure is typically acquired in the L1, as well as its morphological and syntactic characteristics. The results of this study have implications for the ongoing debate in heritage language research about the linguistic areas that display greater stability/vulnerability. For example, phrase structure seems less vulnerable than licensing dependencies and the mapping between syntax and the morphological interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the author discusses the issue's theme focusing on the sociolinguistic history of medieval Arabic languages and their interactions with other languages as proposed by historians.

In Modern Standard Arabic texts are typically written without diacritical markings. The diacritics are important to clarify the sense and meaning of words. Lack of these markings may lead to ambiguity even for the natives. Often the natives successfully disambiguate the meaning through the context; however, many Arabic applications, such as machine translation, text-to-speech, and information retrieval, are vulnerable due to lack of diacritics. The process of automatically restoring diacritical marks is called diacritization or diacritic restoration. In this paper we discuss the properties of the Arabic language and the issues that are related to the lack of the diacritical marking. It will be followed by a survey of the recent algorithms that were developed to solve the diacritization problem. We also look into the future trend for researchers working in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay about the cultivation of the Arabic and Persian languages during the Abbasid Empire is presented. Topics mentioned include the goal of imperial patronage, the formation of hybridity of language and discourse, the adoption of the script of the Arabic language by the Persians during the Samanid Empire, and the role of caliphate in social relations and the development of the Arabic vernacular.

An essay about the implications of revising the history of Arabic script vernaculars is presented. Topics mentioned include the translingual legacies of poets Amadu Bamba and Léopold Sédar Senghor and author/filmmaker Ousmane Sembene in Arabic and French context, literary self-consciousness across French and Arabic fault lines, and living symbol of the Arabic script.

Arabic language is strongly structured and considered as one of the most highly inflected and derivational languages. Learning Arabic morphology is a basic step for language learners to develop language skills such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Arabic morphology is non-concatenative and provides the ability to attach a large number of affixes to each root or stem that makes combinatorial increment of possible inflected words. As such, Arabic lexical (morphological and phonological) rules may be confusing for second language learners. Our study indicates that research and development endeavors on spelling, and checking of grammatical errors does not provide adequate interpretations to second language learners’ errors. In this paper we address issues related to error diagnosis and feedback for second language learners of Arabic verbs and how they impact the development of a web-based intelligent language tutoring system. The major aim is to develop an Arabic intelligent language tutoring system that solves these issues and helps second language learners to improve their linguistic knowledge. Learners are encouraged to produce input freely in various situations and contexts, and are guided to recognize by themselves the erroneous functions of their misused expressions. Moreover, we proposed a framework that allows for the individualization of the learning process and provides the intelligent feedback that conforms to the learner's expertise for each class of error. Error diagnosis is not possible with current Arabic morphological analyzers. So constraint relaxation and edit distance techniques are successfully employed to provide error-specific diagnosis and adaptive feedback to learners. We demonstrated the capabilities of these techniques in diagnosing errors related to Arabic weak verbs formed using complex morphological rules. As a proof of concept, we have implemented the components that diagnose learner's errors and generate feedback which have been effectively evaluated against test data acquired from real teaching environment. The experimental results were satisfactory, and the performance achieved was 74.34 percent in terms of recall rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1940s and 1950s, several organs of the newly independent Indonesian state oversaw the standardisation of the Indonesian national language. In this process, Western-oriented bureaucrats pushed the language towards European normativity, significantly decreasing the influence of Arabic. While this reform carried symbolic meaning, the practical ramifications on Indonesian orthography, spelling, and word selection also carried real, non-symbolic effects on the accessibility of this language to Indonesian Islamic leaders. Standardising orthography to use the Roman alphabet rendered many Muslims illiterate in a language they had been using for decades. Choices in word selection and spelling limited the Islamic meanings that the new language could carry, thus impacting how Muslims could use the national language for religious and other purposes. Indonesian linguistic reform carried serious social and political consequences in addition to the symbolic meanings often studied. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is widely believed that the Rbbl bn Hf'm grave inscription found at Qaryat al-Fāw is the earliest example of Old Arabic. The ten-line inscription – written in the Sabaic script – attests the common Arabic definite article, 'l, plus several other non-Sabaic linguistic features. I argue that the definite article is not a suitable diagnostic of genetic affiliation, and other features, such as mimation, the conjunction 'dky, and more, should also be given consideration. Through a close linguistic examination based on the principle of shared morphological innovations, I demonstrate that none of the morphological innovations which characterize Arabic are attested in this inscription. As such, its language is probably not a descendant of proto-Arabic. Our results further suggest that the 'l- article, which has previously been used as a marker of Arabic, was simply one of many definite article forms which spread to Arabic, and other Semitic languages of Arabia, through areal diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the nineteenth century, many Sino-Muslim scholars were seeking a more robust relationship with their Arab co-religionists. The efforts of Ma Dexin 馬德新 (1794–1874) exemplify this shift to strengthen ties with the Muslim community outside China and situate Sino-Islamic scholarship in widespread Islamic discourses. Ma's writings provided Sino-Muslims with discursive and pragmatic tools for engaging a global Muslim community. For Ma, Muslim cooperation was negotiated through the means of religious education, which was enabled through travel and language. In this paper, I demonstrate how Ma Dexin modelled the importance of global connections of inter-Asian networks of religious learning by exemplifying the value of Middle Eastern travel and fluency in Arabic. I employ Ma's Chinese and Arabic written works in relation to those of Wang Daiyu 王岱輿 (circa 1590–1658) and Liu Zhi 劉智 (circa 1670–1724) to illustrate how he differed significantly from previous Sino-Muslim authors with regard to the use of Arabic within the Sino-Islamic intellectual tradition and in his emphatic urgings to perform the hajj pilgrimage. Finally, I briefly show how his divergent position was embraced, as exhibited through the efforts of one of his intellectual inheritors, Ma Lianyuan 馬聯元 (1841–1903). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the history of the creole South Sudanese Arabic language from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. It analyses the historical evidence of language use in the light of insights drawn from linguistic studies of creolisation to argue that South Sudanese Arabic became an innovative and necessary means of communication among multiple actors within new fields of interaction. The article argues that these fields of interaction were both the product and the arena of local state formation. Rather than marking the boundary of the state, the spread of this creole language indicates the enlarging arenas of participation in the local state. The development and use of South Sudanese Arabic as an unofficial lingua franca of local government, trade, and urbanisation demonstrates that communication and negotiation among local actors has been central to the long-term processes of state formation in South Sudan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]