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Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

bbc.com

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Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#121

Post by flyinghorse »

asymmetric wrote: post #52
PakG1 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a funny modern example, check out Kenyon Martin, former NBA all-star, having Chinese character tattoos. I never really thought about this until social media apparently all told him to back off when he said current Brooklyn Nets point guard Jeremy Lin shouldn't have dreadlocks in his hair because that was a black culture thing, and then Lin (politely) pointed out that Martin had Chinese character tattoos. I imagine…

I would be really interested in that article about t-shirt slogans!

Well in my country (3rd world country), most t-shirts are imported from China. If they have slogans, it's with English text with broken grammar or usually with text that doesn't even make sense. No one bothers though since English isn't widely spoken in neither of the countries.

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#122

Post by aedron »

heavenlyhash wrote: post #102
cerved wrote: post #86

Someone in r/Sweden who works in the field pointed out the severe lack of credibility of the researcher who published this finding so do your due diligence and check your sources before jumping to conclusions

... What on earth is going on in r/Sweden? There's some real sludge being thrown around in there. It's about par with 4chan's /b. Somehow I don't think that reddit is a very normal sample of the culture of Sweden. To put it gently... cough Where does r/Sweden get its credibility from?

Reddit is a refuge for a lot of very right-wing commenters, I've seen the same in several /r/.

The debate in Europe is so toxic, on one side starry-eyed humanists, on the other narrow-minded losers. Each resort to separate little bubbles where they can reaffirm each other. In the middle, reasonable people get squeezed out.

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#124

Post by jfaucett »

theprotocol wrote: post #72
smnrchrds wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allah literally means God in Arabic. It is comprised of definite prefix 'Al' and the word for god 'Elah'. In English, to show the difference between generic god and specific God, the first letter is capitalized. Arabic does not have the same capitalization rule , so instead they call the specific deity 'Allah', literally meaning 'the god', or 'God'. This is important because not all Mulsims are Arab and not all Arabs…

>I have also heard that Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews use the Allah to refer to God in their religions, but I have not fact-checked it. I can confirm this. We say "Allah." The advent of Islam into the global public awareness has created a lot of confusion about Middle Eastern cultures, e.g. I frequently hear "Allah is the name of the Muslims' God." But it is in fact a more generic word, exactly analogous to "Go…

> I can confirm this. We say "Allah."

Is there any difference at all? I was under the impression that all abrahamic religions referenced the same "God". So when a Muslim, Jew, and Christian say "God" are they not all referring to the same deity?

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#125

Post by trollopTheJope »

Yetanfou wrote: post #62

Placed in the perspective of the current political climate in Sweden I can not be but sceptic against research which tries to make islam part of Sweden's history. While the article is published by the BBC, the research - for what it is - was done in Uppsala. That Vikings travelled to islamic countries is known. That they traded with them - willingly or unwillingly - is also known. They did the same with many other cu…

The BBC has a similar mandate in the UK to the state broadcaster in Uppsala. It is more concerned with managing community relations by presenting a unified history than straight reportage, and so often rebroadcasts politically funded, highly speculative and poorly conducted research in "soft" fields, particularly archaeology.

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#126

Post by voidmain0001 »

anovikov wrote: post #26

Well, why don't they think that Vikings simply seen these as a decoration, not understanding what they mean? That happens in much much more recent times. Late Russian ex-foreign minister, and ex-prime minister Primakov, who is Arab states specialist and reads Arabic scripts very well, once saw a garment with 'No god except Allah...' on Patriarch of Russia Alexy II, shocking him because similar ritual garments were us…

You all know that language is notorious for co-opting words and phrases from other languages, without necessarily bringing the original meaning or tradition. E.g. In Spanish the phrase ojalá is used to respond to a question with an optimistic 'I hope so!'. It is derived from the Arabic "ma sha allah" meaning if God wills it, and yet I doubt many a Spaniard cares that they are invoking the title of the Muslim God. Heck, a lot of the Spaniards that I know have the last name Matamoro which basically means that someone in their ancestry was given that name because they killed Moors, and while my acquaintances find the thought of killing revolting, they don't change their name.

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#127

Post by hprotagonist »

saimiam wrote: post #11
hprotagonist wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

another good one: the Hallstatt salt mines in what is now Austria have been around since the late Iron Age. I recall but cannot currently find studies that have found bags of the mined salt in graves and digs all along the silk road over a time period of millennia. "The Dark Ages" is a horrible name. It was coined to denote "a period that we, historians, don't know much about because we don't have nearly as many anal…

Dark ages => ages we are in the dark about (Tongue well in cheek).

no, really, that’s what the people who coined the term meant.

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#128

Post by phaemon »

ominous wrote: post #80
DavidAdams wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spanish speaking people have an even more obvious loan word from Arabic they use pretty commonly: ojalá. It means, "hopefully," or literally, "God willing."

The word "alphabeth" is also of greek origin. But no one tries to pass the message of greek influence to the point of there being articles for that in hackernews.

I don't know what that means. Everyone knows that there is a massive Greek influence on Western culture. The only reason there might not be many HN articles on it is that it's so obvious.

Re: Arabic characters found woven into burial costumes from Viking boat graves

#129

Post by hprotagonist »

aedron wrote: post #119
rspeer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it actually shocking? Isn't it just a statement the Orthodox church would agree with ("there is no god except God") written in Arabic?

It's literally the first commandment.

not necessarily. monolateralism and monotheism aren’t exactly the same.

most versions of the commandments specify that the god of abraham is the only god that ought to be worshipped.

strict monotheism came later.

edit: that said, yes, it should be totally unsurprising.

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