Re: VMs: Has anyone been down this route before?

["Dan Gibson/CanBooks" <dangibson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Jacques:

You mentioned that Arabic rules itself out and gave the examples:

bld "town" 'lbld "the town"
mlk "king" 'lmlk "the king"
fls "fils" (one thousandth of a dinar)
klb "dog" 'lklb "the dog"
qlb "heart" 'lqlb "the heart"

You of course assuming that the VM is written in classical Arabic, the one
that is commonly written today. But consider what the Arabs call sun
letters. shams "sun" becomes ishams, and sayf "sword" become isayf. Not all
definite articles use "il." It is also interesting to notice that before
Muhammad made the dialect of the Quraish tribe the standard in Arabic (by
reciting the Koran in this local dialect), Arabic had many different
dialects and forms of writing. These are referred to as "Old Arabic." Many
of these Arabic dialects had NO definite article, and were restricted to a
21 or 22 letter alphabet. The Quraish tribe had particular ways of
expressing themselves, and this became the norm across the Middle East after
Mohammed's armies forced this dialect on those around them. Many of the
earlier forms of Arabic continued to be used in the remote parts of the
Middle East. The mountains of Iraq are a good example. Many dialects
survived over the centuries, some only disappearing in the last 20 years!
Many of these dialect do not use the definite article il.

One must be very careful when dismissing certain languages as "ruling
themselves out." English should be ruled out, because English as we know it
was not spoken four hundred years ago, let alone 600 years ago. The problem
with analyzing the VM is that the language that it was written/ciphered in
may have changed significantly. Those who claim that Arabic has never
changed, have never tried reading old Arabic, or Nabataean, the language
from which Arabic was developed. Muslims usually know nothing of this,
because the time before Muhammad is simply dismissed as "the times of
ignorance" and totally ignored. For them, "before Muhammad" simply doesn't
matter, and they don't care to know their history or their roots.

Arabia was not a collection of small warring tribes, unrelated to each
other. The Nabataeans had formed a very successful civilization in the
Arabian Peninsula that influenced and controlled much of what happened in
Rome, Egypt, India and China. They were the middlemen, and they became very
wealthy and powerful. As their kingdom waned, Muhammad came on the scene and
resurrected the Nabataean Empire. It would be similar to a British
politician arriving on the scene today, and managing to put the old British
Commonwealth back together again, and then using it to challenge the balance
of power in the world. Muhammad restored, not created. He used his own local
dialect, not a language that had existed unchanged for many years previous.
Even Allah was virtually unknown before Muhammad elevated him to being
"greater that the other Gods in Mecca." Allah alAkbar means "Allah is
greater." (Not Allah is greatest). All languages grow and change. Their
change however can be slowed by universal recognition of certain writings,
like the Qur'an, the King James Bible, and even Shakespeare. Some of us are
working on checking the VM against old Arabic, Nabataean, etc., but we have
jobs and other commitments that necessitate placing this on the back burner
for a while.

Dan Gibson


______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list