Pub Date : 2020-08-26DOI: 10.1163/24519197-bja10008
A. Şen
This study examines an early-seventeenth century copy of a popular book in Ottoman Turkish originally composed by Nevʿī Efendi (d. 1599) in the early 1570s. With around 150 extant copies available in almost every major Islamic manuscript collection across the world, Nevʿī Efendi’s compendium, or the “fruits,” of sciences (Netāyicü’l-fünūn) deserves to be called an early modern bestseller among the Ottoman reading public. The particular copy of the work located at Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Or. 360) is a notable one with numerous minhu records (i.e., marginal glosses one could trace back to the author) written in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. In this article, besides situating Nevʿī Efendi’s work in the broader genre of taṣnīf al-ʿulūm (classification of sciences) in the Ottoman as well as the broader Islamicate realm of learning, I will pay closer attention to discussing the minhu notes that present intriguing insights into the questions of what a published work meant in the age of manuscripts, and how the continuous interventions on the text made by the author, and possibly by the copyists and readers, enrich as well as shuffle the “authentic” contents of the “published” version.
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Pub Date : 2020-08-26DOI: 10.1163/24519197-bja10007
A. Roberts
This article examines an Arabic mathematical manuscript at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library (or. 45), focusing on a previously unpublished set of texts: the treatise on the mathematical method known as Double False Position, as supplemented by Jābir ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ṣābī (tenth century?), and the commentaries by Aḥmad ibn al-Sarī (d. 548/1153–4) and Saʿd al-Dīn Asʿad ibn Saʿīd al-Hamadhānī (12th/13th century?), the latter previously unnoticed. The article sketches the contents of the manuscript, then offers an editio princeps, translation, and analysis of the treatise. It then considers how the Swiss historian of mathematics Heinrich Suter (1848–1922) read Jābir’s treatise (as contained in a different manuscript) before concluding with my own proposal for how to go about reading this mathematical text: as a witness of multiple stages of a complex textual tradition of teaching, extending, and rethinking mathematics—that is, we should read it philologically.
本文研究了哥伦比亚大学珍本和手稿图书馆的阿拉伯语数学手稿。45)，重点关注以前未发表的一组文本:关于被称为双重错误位置的数学方法的论文，由Jābir ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ṣābī(10世纪?)补充，以及Aḥmad ibn al- sari (d. 548/ 1154 - 4)和Sa ' d al- d n as ' ad ibn Sa ' d al-Hamadhānī(12 /13世纪?)的评论，后者以前未被注意到。文章概述了手稿的内容，然后提供了一个版本的原则，翻译和论文的分析。然后，它考虑了瑞士数学历史学家海因里希·苏特(1848-1922)如何阅读Jābir的论文(包含在另一份手稿中)，然后以我自己的建议结束:作为教学，扩展和重新思考数学的复杂文本传统的多个阶段的见证人，也就是说，我们应该从语言学的角度来阅读它。
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Pub Date : 2020-06-16DOI: 10.1163/24519197-bja10004
C. Bahl
Persian narrative sources provide a colorful picture of Mughal courtly life, but in order to zoom in on cultural practices one has to turn to the artefacts of cultural pursuits. This article studies one specimen of the empirical treasure trove of Arabic manuscripts in South Asia in order to approach a lacuna in Mughal scholarship: the role of Arabic at the Mughal court. In the following, I will analyze the different paratextual layers of a manuscript of the thirteenth century Arabic grammar commentary Sharḥ al-Radī by Radī al-Dīn al-Astarābādhī to study its reading and transmission. The manuscript version represents a written artefact, which emerged out of a series of intellectual engagements. On the one hand, these textual engagements offer a perspective on the manuscript’s initial owner, Saʿd Allāh Khān (d. 1656), and his intellectual pursuits, as well as the scholarly framework in which he was brought up and worked in. On the other hand, the history of this manuscript’s circulation highlights the treatment of Arabic written artefacts at Shāh Jahān’s court. In an exemplary manner, the manuscript’s history of circulation demonstrates how courtly elites engaged with Arabic during the seventeenth century.
波斯的叙述来源提供了莫卧儿王朝宫廷生活的丰富多彩的画面，但为了放大文化习俗，人们必须转向文化追求的人工制品。本文研究南亚阿拉伯语手稿的经验宝库中的一个样本，以接近莫卧儿学术的一个空白:阿拉伯语在莫卧儿宫廷的作用。在下文中，我将分析radi al- d n al-Astarābādhī所著的13世纪阿拉伯语语法注释sharjah al- radi手稿的不同副文本层，以研究其阅读和传播。手稿代表了一种书面的人工制品，它出现在一系列的智力活动中。一方面，这些文本的参与提供了一个关于手稿最初的主人，萨伊德Allāh Khān(公元1656年)，他的智力追求，以及他成长和工作的学术框架的视角。另一方面，这份手稿的流通历史突出了Shāh Jahān宫廷对阿拉伯文字手工艺品的处理。以一种典型的方式，手稿的流通历史展示了17世纪宫廷精英是如何与阿拉伯语打交道的。
{"title":"Arabic Philology at the Seventeenth-Century Mughal Court. Saʿd Allāh Khān’s and Shāh Jahān’s Enactments of the Sharḥ al-Radī","authors":"C. Bahl","doi":"10.1163/24519197-bja10004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Persian narrative sources provide a colorful picture of Mughal courtly life, but in order to zoom in on cultural practices one has to turn to the artefacts of cultural pursuits. This article studies one specimen of the empirical treasure trove of Arabic manuscripts in South Asia in order to approach a lacuna in Mughal scholarship: the role of Arabic at the Mughal court. In the following, I will analyze the different paratextual layers of a manuscript of the thirteenth century Arabic grammar commentary Sharḥ al-Radī by Radī al-Dīn al-Astarābādhī to study its reading and transmission. The manuscript version represents a written artefact, which emerged out of a series of intellectual engagements. On the one hand, these textual engagements offer a perspective on the manuscript’s initial owner, Saʿd Allāh Khān (d. 1656), and his intellectual pursuits, as well as the scholarly framework in which he was brought up and worked in. On the other hand, the history of this manuscript’s circulation highlights the treatment of Arabic written artefacts at Shāh Jahān’s court. In an exemplary manner, the manuscript’s history of circulation demonstrates how courtly elites engaged with Arabic during the seventeenth century.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24519197-bja10004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46557115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-16DOI: 10.1163/24519197-bja10006
Avi-ram Tzoreff
The discourse about the Arabian Nights illustrates the ways through which hegemonic poetic and literary discourses crystallized themselves, while developing a set of distinctions as a yardstick for the estimation of literary works, as well as the connections between these various distinctions—namely ‘realistic’ and ‘fantastic’, East and West, and oral storytelling and folklore versus written literature. This article focuses on the discourse about the Arabian Nights in the field of modern Hebrew literature. In turning towards the collection, discussing it and translating some of its sections, the various characters who dealt with it expressed and promoted a cultural and political narrative which saw cultural affinities as a potential basis for broader political cooperation between Arabs and Jews. I will argue, however, that the discourse about the collection illustrates a process of modern Hebrew literature adopting a definition of itself as European and secular literature. I will also argue that the discourse on the Arabian Nights reveals the various directions taken by those who resisted the construal of modern Hebrew literature as a vector in the European- secular tradition. These counter-hegemonic assertions particularly took the form of arguments that the collection was a multifaceted cultural treasure that includes Hebrew layers, or, alternatively, representing it as a model of a modern literary genre, the city-centered anthology.
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Pub Date : 2018-11-27DOI: 10.1163/24519197-12340051
V. Singh
The decades of the 1930s and 40s, in which India’s struggle against British rule gained momentum, also ushered in critical technological change in the way texts in many Indian languages were materially produced and represented in print. The foremost facilitators of this change were third parties precariously placed in the colonial equation. Focusing on the dilemmas and contradictions of one such concern, the New York-based Mergenthaler Linotype Company and its program for the Devanagari script, this essay examines the mechanics of the power struggle embodied in the process of technological and typographical change. Against the backdrop of India’s independence movement, in deeply contested territories of language and script, the examination of typographical networks that formulated and realized this project throws new light on the richly ambivalent ideological negotiations involved—between popular and academic aspirations, altruistic and commercial enterprises, communal agendas and nationalist politics, and between imperial administration and colonial subjects.
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Pub Date : 2018-11-27DOI: 10.1163/24519197-12340054
Fiona Ross
The scripts of South Asia, which mainly derive from the Brahmi script, afford a visible voice to the numerous linguistic communities that form over one fifth of the world’s population. However, the transition of these visually diverse scripts from chirographic to typographic form has been determined by historical processes that were rarely conducive to accurately rendering non-Latin scripts. This essay provides a critical evaluation of the historical technological impacts on typographic textual composition in South-Asian languages. It draws on resources from relevant archival collections to consider within a historical context the technological constraints that have been crucial in determining the textural appearance of South-Asian typography. In so doing, it seeks to elucidate design decisions that either purposely or unwittingly shaped subsequent and current typographic practice and questions the validity of the continued legacy of historical technological impacts for contemporary vernacular communication.
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Pub Date : 2018-11-27DOI: 10.1163/24519197-12340055
G. Leonidas
This article discusses the associations with tradition, modernity, innovation, and revivalism contained within, and enabled by, three seminal Greek typefaces for continuous reading in a modulated style, developed from 1998 onwards outside Greece. It starts with an analysis of the historical model of types cut by Firmin Didot; this style was later adopted by the Monotype Corporation for hot-metal composition, and survived across technologies well into the digital era. It provides a reference point for subsequent work, and informed new digital typefaces, starting with Adobe Systems’ Minion Pro (1998). The article discusses Adobe’s programme of developing large typographic families with Greek complements, which explicitly pushed the design envelope with each iteration. It examines the approaches taken for features such as the first pairing of monotonic and polytonic diacritics, the pioneering of functionally correct diacritics over small capitals, and their impact on wider practice. Parallel efforts that reinforced this trend by Microsoft, as well as notable independent work, are referenced in the context of active explorations of the relationship between Latin and Greek styles by non-Greek designers. The article concludes that the period between 1998–2007 has been revolutionary for Greek typefaces for continuous text.
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Pub Date : 2018-11-27DOI: 10.1163/24519197-12340050
Thomas S. Mullaney
This essay serves as the entry point into a broader exploration of critical issues in the history of “non-Latin” type design—that is, type design beyond the Latin alphabet. With special emphasis on certain scripts (Arabic, Chinese, Greek, and Devanagari, among others) and regions (South Asia, East Asia, South Africa, and beyond), this special issue brings together practicing designers and scholars, federating rigorous archival work, practice-based insight, and a deep engagement with the global history of the written, designed, and printed word.
{"title":"Facing the World: Towards a Global History of Non-Latin Type Design","authors":"Thomas S. Mullaney","doi":"10.1163/24519197-12340050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-12340050","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This essay serves as the entry point into a broader exploration of critical issues in the history of “non-Latin” type design—that is, type design beyond the Latin alphabet. With special emphasis on certain scripts (Arabic, Chinese, Greek, and Devanagari, among others) and regions (South Asia, East Asia, South Africa, and beyond), this special issue brings together practicing designers and scholars, federating rigorous archival work, practice-based insight, and a deep engagement with the global history of the written, designed, and printed word.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24519197-12340050","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46082549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-11-27DOI: 10.1163/24519197-12340053
K. Campbell
This article focuses on the conceptual implications of specific works of contemporary artist and wordsmith Adriaan Willem Boshoff. Boshoff uses his creations to challenge the terms of the current debate around indigenous languages in southern Africa through artworks such as Blind Alphabet and his Sand Writing Series. These works call viewers to an emphatic return to an understanding of scripts (and the worlds they produce) as embodied systems of tradition that occupy the central place not only in the groups they serve, but indeed in a larger vision of a culturally tolerant and affirmative nation. The article tracks key South African educational policies such as the Apartheid era Bantu Education Act of 1953, and the Corrective Language Act of 1998 after the first democratic elections to contextualize the politics of legislative development in South Africa as related to indigenous scripts and languages. Beyond this bureaucratic history, the article foregrounds partisan agency that individuals such as Wilhelm Bleek, Lucy Lloyd and Magrieta Jantjies displayed as custodians of endangered scripts and languages, culminating in a discussion of the provocative works Boshoff created to stimulate critical thought on contemporaneous philological concerns in South Africa.
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Pub Date : 2018-11-27DOI: 10.1163/24519197-12340049
Thomas S. Mullaney
Since the invention and globalization of hot metal printing in the United States and Europe, engineers and entrepreneurs dreamt of a day when linotype and monotype technologies would absorb Chinese script into its growing repertoire of non-Latin writing systems, just as they had Arabic, Armenian, Burmese, Devanagari, Hebrew, Korean, and over one hundred other scripts. In the early 1920s, the much-celebrated release of a new font—the “Chinese Phonetic Alphabet” by Mergenthaler Linotype, and later by the Monotype corporation—led many to believe that the day had finally come. This article charts out the quixotic history of Linotype and Monotype’s efforts to enter the Chinese market, examining the linguistic challenges that had long prevented China’s absorption into a Western-dominated “hot metal empire,” the design process by which artists in Brooklyn and London crafted these new fonts, and ultimately the cultural misunderstandings that doomed the projects to failure.
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