That Buck
By God tell that buck with the heavy buttocks
And a waist so small,
He is sweetest when he is ready,
And, when in ecstasy,
He is the most gorgeous of all.
He built a pigeon house,
And released a dove in the loft.
I wish I were one of his pigeons,
Or a falcon,
So he could do to me what he would love.
If he wore white linen,
The fabric would hurt or scratch him
Because he is so soft.
-Khadija bint al-Ma’mun
The utterances of some people are pearls memorized nigh;
Others’ are like pebbles hurled, and never in mind’s eye!
-Abul-‘Ala Al-Ma’ari
I Walk My Walk
By God I am fit for the highest of peaks
And I walk my walk and boast in pride.
I enable my lover to have my cheeks.
And if someone craves a kiss, I provide.
-Wallada bint al-Mustakfi
It's not a literal translation, a more literal translation is "but a lover is intoxicated/drunk for life"
Did you know that there is dual in Arabic? Dialects use it with nouns only, they don't conjugate verbs in the dual - the subject being dual is enough :)
To turn a word into dual you just add the suffix ـان -an (transliterated as aan), e.g. كتاب kitaab book and كتابان kitaabaan 2 books.
Do you know any singular Arabic words you can turn into dual?
Arabic only has 28 letters, they just change their shape a bit so that they can connect with other letters, and by change their shape they simply lose what we call a "tail" and keep the "core", see the spoiler and tell me if you're still intimidated
There are 28 letters in the Arabic alphabet. It’s written from right to left in a cursive style. There are no capital letters in Arabic.
أ ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن هـ و ي
Arabic letters have slightly different shapes depending on where they are in a word i.e. whether they stand alone or are connected to a following or preceding letter or both. We write in cursive so we need to connect the letters.
Let’s take the letter "meem" م (Arabic m) for example. In its independent (isolated) form it is made of a small circle, a small stroke to the left then a long downward stroke. Now, when we wanna connect it to a letter after it, it would be inconvenient to do the long downward stroke then go all the way up to where the next letter starts :think-about-it: . That’s why we just drop the long downward stroke, leaving just the small circle and the short stroke to the left مـ
So م 's small circle is what we call a core, that part of the letter that distinguishes it.
:meow-coffee:
This is the letter baa' ب (Arabic b). The core (main parts) of the letter are the initial tooth and the dot beneath the letter. The second tooth is considered the "tail" and we remove it when the ب is followed by another letter.
In the initial position (first letter in a word i.e. only connects to a following letter) it turns into بــ :
In the medial position (the letter is connected to two other letters) the ب looks like this ـبــ and in the final position (connected only to the preceding letter) it looks like this ـب :
م + ب = مب
:meow-coffee:
Look at these letters س ش ص ض :wtf-am-i-reading: they all have that curved part at the end so it doesn't help us tell them apart i.e. it is not part of the core, it's the tail. The core is سـ شـ صـ ضـ
You can still tell them apart, can't you?
The ص is the final letter which means it gets to keep its tail. We only remove the tail so we can easily connect a letter to the one after it.
:ortega-clap:
This guy also mastered Arabic, Persian, Greek and Syriac.
Ibn al-Tilmīdh, the Christian Arab pharmacist, poet, musician, calligrapher and physician to the caliph, used to reprimand his son with this line:
والوقت أنفس ما عنِيت به وأراه أسهل ما عليك يَضيع
Time is
the most precious thing
entrusted to you
and, I see
the easiest thing for you
to waste.
His name is Abu'l-Ḥasan Hibat Allah, he was called Ibn al-Tilmidh, meaning the son of the student, after his maternal grandfather.
Live your life while Time is snoozing,
don’t wait for the troubles Fate sends.
Life is a cup you drink:
it’s clear at the start
and dregs at the end.
—Abū Muḥammad ibn al-Dahhān