linguistic miscellany
some frequently asked questions
Diana als Personifikation der Nacht (c 1765), Anton Raphael Mengs via Wikimedia
Over the course of this project, I periodically come across random linguistic situations that I think a lot about. Many of these things probably don’t matter terribly much to many readers but because my brain has been rotted by linguistic analysis, I need somewhere to stick them.
My main goal with my linguistic approach in this work is to do what I can to open up readers to the beauty of the Arabic language, primarily, and all the other languages that have been used to discuss the stations, secondarily. The primary languages used are Arabic, Greek, Sanskrit and Chinese, all languages that are notoriously impenetrable for people who did not grow up with them. I have the most education in Arabic (Fusḥa and Shāmi), middling familiarity with Koinē Greek and contemporary Mandarin Chinese, and very little knowledge of Classical Sanskrit and contemporary Hindi-Urdu. I do not read or speak any of those languages fluently! I’ll use what I have to help give a leg up to all of the lunar stations girlies, but surely there will be mistakes.
This will be another living document. For now, here are a few miscellaneous linguistic tidbits.
The indicator stars
Each station is associated with an asterism which in contemporary astronomy means a prominent grouping of stars that is smaller than a constellation. As you will see, many of these asterisms are subdivisions of the more famous Western astronomical constellations. For example 17 Iklīl, 18 Qalb, and 19 Shaula divide the Scorpio constellation into three subdivisions (the head, the heart and the tail). Others reflect ancient Arab starlore from before their culture made contact with Hellenistic astrology, as can be seen in 7 Dhirā’ and 8 Nathra, which are parts of the Gemini and Cancer constellations respectively, but are grouped with the Leo stars in the shape of a giant Lion that takes up a fifth of the sky.
This set of 28 asterisms make up the indicator stars of the lunar stations. Each station has at least one star that indicates it, with most of them having multiple. The most notable star in each station is technically called its lucida, which means its Bright One. Anecdotally, I’ve found that certain stations prefer to stay in their teams and, although they may technically have a brightest star, the stars prefer to show up as a group—either in a pair (like Castor and Pollux in 7 Dhirā’), a trio (Zavijava, Porrima and Vindemiatrix in 13 ‘Awwā’) or a whole crew (even the Creator themselves cannot separate out the stars of the Pleiades marking 3 Thurayyā).
In general, I’ve just called all these stars indicators of the stations without getting too hierarchical about who is Thee One True Lucida (except when it’s abundantly obvious, like Regulus with 10 Jabha or Spica with 14 Simāk). I like the idea of these stars functioning like an ecosystem. Perhaps this is one particularity of studying the lunar stations as opposed to the fixed stars in general—these are sidereal ecosystems that describe the landscape of the ecliptic, not a series of standalone heroes.
A note on numbering
The 28 stations have two primary numbering schemes. The first, and most common, begins with Sharaṭain. The second begins with Thurayyā. I see the first system as primarily numerical and influenced by Hellenistic astrology. We start with Sharaṭain because it is the first of the stations of the Aries constellation, the sign that generally comes first in horoscopic astrology.
The second system is more spiritual. In Arabic, they would sometimes call Thurayyā, simply, al-Najm, which just means “the star.” 3 Thurayyā isn’t a station, it is Thee Station. For this reason, I typically name the stations starting with 3 Thurayyā, but I number them starting with 1 Sharaṭain.
This explains why we start our stroll through the stations with the 3rd one, instead of the 1st.
Arabic plurals: manzil → manāzil (not manzils)
When using an Arabic word to refer to the stations, I use the conventional word manzil • منزل. Its plural is manāzil • منازل, not manzils. It’s become a weirdly specific pet peeve of mine.
Arabic has what are called broken plurals. These are found in many Semitic languages but nowhere are they more magnificent than in the Arabic language. Semitic languages (the language family that Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic and many other languages are a part of) are famous for their complex system of three- or four-letter roots that form the foundation of their languages. These roots provide a skeleton which is then fleshed out with vowels for grammatical purposes.
In English, the word station is a root. When it contains no suffix, it is a singular. When we add the -s suffix, it becomes plural:
{station} → {station}s
In Arabic, the unpronounceable root made of the 3 consonants N Z L • ن ز ل means “something related to settling down.” If we put it in the form maCCiC, it becomes manzil • منزل “a place where you settle down for the night” or “a station”. When we put it into the form maCāCiC, it becomes manāzil • منازل which means the same thing but in the plural form. Observe:
{N Z L} → ma{nz}i{l} → ma{n}ā{z}i{l}
Sure, there’s nothing really wrong with saying manzils. Any word in English can take the plural in -s, even if it’s a loan word. See, for example, cactus which is equally correct as either cacti or cactuses. I know that not everyone is a linguist or an Arabic student but, where possible, let’s show our admiration and respect for the Arabic language and culture that brought us this system by using the correct plurals as much as we can!
The Arabic alphabet and assigning letters to manāzil
As mentioned above, the Arabic alphabet only represents consonants and short vowels in its writing system (this is called an abjad). It is a descendant of the Phoenician alphabet which is, basically, the original alphabet. It was used to write the ancient Semitic languages spoken in Canaan back in the day. All of these languages use the unique system of three-letter roots with predictable vowel patterns I described at the top, so they all work quite well with alphabets that don’t include all the short vowels (’nglsh, fr ‘xmpl, wld b vry hrd t rd ‘f w wrt ‘t lk tht).
Arabic has two different systems for ordering the letters of the alphabet. The one that you will find in Arabic dictionaries and textbooks today is the hijā’ī order, which groups the letters into series based on the similarities of their shape. The second, called the abjadī, is the more ancient one. The ordering of the letters in the aforementioned Phoenician alphabet follows a more abstract customary order rather than anything so scientific as their shape, and that ancient order is what gives us our ABCs (and ΑΒΓs in Greek). The abjādi order follows the shape of the ancient Phoenician system (like Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac, Arabic’s other cousin alphabets).
The letters assigned to the manāzil follow the abjadī order (specifically the one called “common abjadī” on that Wikipedia page), not the hijā’ī. All of the references to this practice I’ve encountered in Arabic-speaking culture seem to follow the abjadī order (though there are a couple sources in English which follow the hijā’ī). The abjadī order is also the only order that is used for numbering things, as is common practice in the Greek and Hebrew alphabets too.
Well. There is one outlying correspondence system between the letters and the manāzil: that of Ibn Arabi. His system seems to follow its own mystical pattern and is a subject ripe for investigation, but somewhat of its own thing. I hope to learn more about it later!
A note on transliteration of the stations’ names
Anywhere in this project, you will see the following principles uniformly applied to the stations’ names:
Stations are referenced with their number as much as possible, especially when multiple stations are being mentioned in one essay. So you’ll see 3 Thurayyā or 19 Shaula more often than not. This is for you and for me!
I have generally set standard transcriptions for the names of each of the stations. These standard transliterations are a compromise between phonological accuracy and recognizability. I generally follow the standards of the ALA-LC with a couple of changes to enhance readability/recognition
I transcribe شولة as Shaula instead of Shawlah because it makes it more obvious that its name is identical to the common name of its indicator star (Shaula). For the same reasons, I also transcribe شرطين as Sharaṭain instead of Sharaṭayn and بطين as Buṭain instead of Buṭayn so that they resemble their stars Sheratan and Botein more closely.
I also leave the final -h off of words that end with a tā’ marbūtah. It is silent (outside of compound words) and generally not written in star names that have been borrowed into English from Arabic (like Alhena, Aljabha, Adhafera, Zavijava, Shaula etc). This also helps stations like 19 Shaula • شولة more closely resemble their indicator.
I am disappointed to say that I have settled on transcribing hamza and ‘ayin both with an apostrophe. I decided to do this for both my own labor and readability for my generally non-Arabic-speaking audience. Usually hamza, the glottal stop [ʔ], is transcribed as a single right quotation mark and ‘ayin, the pharyngeal approximate [ʕ], as a single left quotation mark. Because these are encoded as punctuation and not letters there isn’t a good way for me to maintain the direction of quotation marks with the word processing tools on Squarespace and Substack. Considering that we do not really have either of these sounds in English and they will be unpronounced superfluous punctuation for most of my readers, I have given up and just used a single quotation mark for both.
Note however that on my cheat sheet that I have transcribed hamza as the single quotation mark and ‘ayin as the number 3, as is common in Arabic texting. Hopefully this emphasizes their difference to Arabic students who wish to look up proper pronunciation. A good example for this are the 13th and 20th stations, both of which contain both sounds. Generally, I will write 13 ‘Awwā’ and 20 Na’ā’im on my blog, but on my reference cheat sheet you will find the much more correct 3Awwā’ and Na3ā’im.
I have found that the Arabic names of the 26th and 27th stations have several different vowel diacritics in my sources with slightly different meanings (all of which are spelled the same in Arabic, which is written without short vowels). I have chosen to follow the vocalization used by Amina Inloes, translator of al-Buni’s work on the stations: 26 Muqaddim and 27 Mu’akkhir, which are the active participle forms of their respective verbs.
Perhaps most obviously: I have omitted the direct article from all station names. In Arabic, in basically all contexts, each station would be referred to in the definite form with the prefix al- attached to it. For example, 3 Thurayyā would be uniformly called al-Thurayyā, effectively “the Thurayyā.” These were borrowed by the earliest translators and even when the names were corrupted, the prefix was often kept. I made the decision to leave the articles off primarily because I hope it will make the stations easier to distinguish from each other.
The other reason is related to star names, which are completely haphazard in their borrowing of an Arabic name with or without the definite article. We have Aldebaran next to Sheratan.
Including the article also creates problems with transliteration. Arabic separates their sounds into Sun and Moon letters which cause the [l] sound to be pronounced differently. Linguistically speaking, the [l] sound assimilates to coronal letters (the Sun letters), lengthening them. So the word that’s spelled “alṢarfah” would never be pronounced that way, it would be pronounced aṣṢarfah, with no [l] sound and a longer ṣ sound. It’s a minor detail but another reason I tend to refer to the stations without their articles when referring to them in English text.
Station names in other languages
This section will surely be fleshed out further as we go along.
The Arabic word manzil has been interpreted into different languages and cultures a number of times. The two that I have encountered the most in my own research are into Latin and Hebrew.
mansiō is the standard Latin translation of manzil. It looks very similar and means just about the same thing and, as best as I can tell, it is very widely used. It’s also the reason we call them mansions in English, as I’ve mentioned before, despite mansiō not having the association with luxury and grandeur that mansion has. The conventional French word for the stations is mansion, a learned borrowing from Latin (compare to the regular French word for house, maison). The same situation is found in Spanish where they use the word mansión (which has the same connotation of grandeur that the English word developed). The descendant of the Latin word is mesón, which has the right vibe as a translation of manzil too, I think.
maḥaneh • מחנה (plural maḥanot • מחנות) is the standard Hebrew translation of manzil used by Abraham ibn Ezra and Abraham bar Ḥiyya, two of the main writers on astronomical/astrological topics in Hebrew (it seems like it was coined by bar Ḥiyya and further popularized by Ibn Ezra). It means “camp” which has a somewhat divergent meaning from manzil. These researchers fluently read/spoke Arabic, so I suspect their choice of term was in part because it (sort of) sounds like manzil. It comes from the root M Ḥ N which has to do with parking/camping. Maḥaneh has a somewhat more militaristic undertone to it (especially in more ancient forms of Hebrew) that doesn’t feel like the perfect fit for this concept, but at the same time I do feel like the idea of the Moon settling down at a campsite each evening still fits much better than the image of a luxurious mansion. There actually is a Hebrew word that I think could be a better fit: תחנה taḥanah (from the same root) which means “station”, as in a space station or a train station. I’m not sure how often (if at all) that word was used in Medieval Hebrew, though. Maybe its undertone is a bit too modern for our manāzil.