Month: June 2016

Speak Arabic Openly and Joyfully!

Arabic is a tapestry

Modern Standard Arabic is a construct used to help Arabic speakers living over a wide expanse to understand each other. To speak the language, and yet be understood, you have to choose among Arabic dialects specific to particular geographical areas, as suggested by the map below:

Arabic_Dialects.svg

Modern Standard Arabic is akin to Esperanto among its many speakers: about 400 million Arab speakers on this planet of ours!

Lines on a map I’ve viewed 10,000 times mask the neighborhood scenes, but empires find borders (preferably using a straight edge) an expedient means for control.  Africa before Europeans. Is there a downside?  Empires rape as much as they can as fast as they can, but what’s wrong with that?  Endless decadence for one.

My safari (سفر, from Swahili) into Arabic started some years ago when teaching a German class: sample, sample. One student was born in Jerusalem. Palestinians live under constant occupation. Occupied by Ottomans until 1923, British Empire until May 1948, then another legal entity to 2016 and counting (down). But Palestine is a forever place.

I made a good deal “if you can learn some German I can learn some Arabic.” It was a means for transcending culture and stereotypes, the kind explained in the documentary Reel Bad Arabs.

It’s fun tackling curiosities in Indo-European roots. Only recently did I discover that Persian shares Indo-European roots along with most European countries. Their alphabet looks like Arabic, but there isn’t much overlap in vocabulary.

Farsi doesn’t use the root system – a fundamental building-block system for assigning meaning. Arabic dictionaries are arranged by consonant groupings

SFR = SaFaRi, a journey

indo-european-word-history-of-plek

Arabic script is brilliantly beautiful. The Roman alphabet has a tiny toolbox, as useful as thimbles for trumping fingers and thumb IMO.

Latin doesn’t even have lowercase letters and it does not often include curved letters like U when a V will do. But they are easier to chisel into stone.

alan-dunn-does-ex-take-the-ablative-or-the-dative-new-yorker-cartoon

Nothing beats a zero when speaking the language of science. The Romans didn’t get there. To paraphrase the John Cleese (Why does British food suck? “they had an empire to run.” It’s not easy to derive square roots using Roman numerals.

Let me say something about resources: not all Arabic alphabet aids are good. This one helped me the most: Sugar comes from Arabic.

Many Spanish words derive from Arabic. They stayed on after Arabic culture was forceably ejected from Spain in 1492. So at least two all-time epic fails happened in 1492.

The Crusades and the Inquisition (The Church Militant) were not good ideas. Spreading lies like Joseph Goebbels lends not a single grain of truth. Truth went into exile from 1933 to 1945. No literature or art of any value springs forth under Fascism. Nothing good comes of Fascism. “When I hear the word ‘culture’…”

Islamophobia (from the xeno family of racism) will not lead to a better gentler world.

An earlier post on this theme: Thinking about language

 #RumiWasntWhite.

 

 

 

Understanding the School to Prison Pipeline, Cincinnati tour: Avondale

billziegler1947.com/category/prison

America’s prison-industrial-complex becomes an ever larger sector of the global economy with every passing year: it’s not going to change until we own the ability to break the vicious cycle at its deepest roots. I’m a citizen of this tiny planet who still believes “Think Global, Act Local.” It’s more than a bumper sticker.

This is also a personal invitation to anyone finding themselves near the juncture of Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky June 25 between 3 and 6 o’clock.

Source: Understanding the School to Prison Pipeline, Cincinnati tour: Avondale

Update: my reaction to the teach-in that I posted on FaceBook.

This teach-in was marvelously planned and conducted. The visual aids were convincing and well documented. My thanks go to everyone who made this possible. The room was filled and I look forward to the next one scheduled for next month in Price Hill. It’s important information for an informed citizenry. Grass-root movements like this one are crucial.
My written stuff is more coherent than my vocal attempts these days, so I’m including a link here to the articles I’ve written this past year on the subject of America’s prison-industrial-complex, how it relates to being a Mensch. Again, my thanks to all and each.

Thanks for reading.

#HateHurts

#HateHurts is a blog I follow and recommend. Misinformation and deliberate bias provokes; it intends to provoke. Broadcasters who long for a return to the Pre-Enlightenment write volumes that with titles like The Glory of the Crusades. Authors with absolutely no knowledge of Arabic language and diverse cultural roots endlessly repeat bad translations of the Quran. This is not scholarship: the title is all you need. Wink and a nod to the ignorant, arrogant and angry. The following video features propaganda using false witness.

Not responding to evil is a complicit act.

In the aftermath of acts of violence/terror by someone from a Muslim background, there is a unique backlash that takes place against Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim. There is often an upswing in assigning collective blame to the greater Muslim community, resulting in violent attacks or harassment against Muslims and their institutions. This […]

via A List of Anti-Muslim Incidents Since The Orlando Shooting — #HateHurts

Better Living through Buycotting

I am updating this post from June 2016 to focus upon the cows, chickens and fish excluded from non-vegan conversation — the other sentient beings on this planet.

Tomato farming in Florida relies on the most exploited and marginalized. Working conditions are among the worst in the US: each workday brutally slams workers’ bodies. Everyday existence means pesticides, bugs, heat, humidity, humiliation, hopelessness. Consumers who could give less than a crap will wait in long lines at a drive-through

Celebrating the Women of Fair Trade

fairfood_icon_6002

A few cents can be the difference between bitter privation and mere privation.  A slice of tastelessness for the harried in the land of freneticism is a cost of production, it’s also a joke to consume.

Tomato-message

“As Chairman of Wendy’s Board of Directors and one of the company’s largest shareholders, Mr. Peltz is also one of Wendy’s top decision makers.  And Wendy’s is the only one of the country’s top five fast-food companies to decide — in 2016, after five years of unprecedented progress for farmworkers in Florida under the Fair Food Program — that it is better to fight than to join the FFP and help lift the farmworkers who pick their tomatoes out of generations of grinding poverty.”

nelson.peltz.protest

E.F. Schumacher wrote of “economies of scale” in 1974. I still own a copy of Small is Beautiful. Its message speaks to its subtitle: “Economics as if People Mattered.” I would add “animals” to that.

small.is.beautifulI am also one who believes that Jimmy Carter‘s grasp of economics is as strong as his understanding of the proper use of the word “apartheid.”

Bill Ziegler Empties A Room

I haven’t mentioned my ability to clear a room of human occupants before. To paraphrase someone I don’t appreciate “You work with the skill set you have.”

Speaking candidly places you in the disturbing position of H.G. Wells’ protagonist in “The Country of the Blind.” Having an ability not shared by the company you share is taken as a threat by the opposing viewpoint. I’ve discovered that vegans are not always greatly valued. Vegans are welcome here.

Adventures in a state of vegan

Replacing your body’s molecules one at a time. What gives?

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