Talk:Nabataean script

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Why is there Hebrew?[edit]

Why is there Hebrew in an alphabet that's derived from Syriac alphabet -_- —Preceding unsigned comment added by Assyrio (talk • contribs) 17:08, 11 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

For anyone else looking here interested in the topic, the reason for including Hebrew is that the standard method for transposing Nabataean Aramaic (and indeed all ancient aramaic) is to utilise the modern Hebrew alphabet which alows for ease of reading and standardisation of often eratic epigraphy. Vastiel (talk) 06:07, 11 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Is the correspondence table correct?[edit]

I have a quick question. In the correspondence table, shouldn't the "Sin" correspond to «ﺳ» and «ס», while the "Ṣad" correspond to «ﺻ» and «צ»?... or at least the shape suggest so. CJLippert 19:26, 9 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Table of concordances[edit]

The Arabic letter given for yaa is not a yaa (ي) but an alif maksoora (ى), a yaa without lower dots.

Also, there is not a common usage of the isolated form of the Arabic letter in the Arabic column; for example haa (ه) is given in its inital form, whereas waw (و) is given in isolated form. This sort of inconsistency is...undesirable. Msanford  T  04:12, 11 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]


The first letter of the arabic alphabet that corresponds with the hebrew letter Aleph is mistaken. There is a hamza in place where there should be an 'alif which is closer to this: | —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.50.230.128 (talk) 20:05, 9 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Missing Hebrew letter ש[edit]

The sin/shin is missing in the Hebrew list. Please note that I added it. שלום -- 21:22, 15 July 2009 171.65.22.250

Problems in the table[edit]

Unfortunately, equating Arabic س sin with Aramaic/Hebrew ס semkat/samekh is highly misleading in the context of the table in this article. In the Nabatean inscriptions (predominantly Arabic-influenced Aramaic as written by Arabic-speakers) the Aramaic letters ס and ש were already often confused or substituted for each other. Later on, when when developments of the Nabatean script were used to write Arabic, the letter ס was simply dropped. So the Arabic letters س and ش BOTH derive from Aramaic/Nabatean ש (and were not distinguished from each other until centuries later, with the introduction of Arabic consonant dotting)... AnonMoos (talk) 01:05, 14 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Nabataean Kingdom[edit]

How can I write Nabataean Kingdom in Nabataean alphabet for use in its article? Makeandtoss (talk) 23:50, 7 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I don't particularly understand Malkûtâ Nabatu on the article. Malkûtâ is Aramaic for "the kingdom" מלכותא, while Nabatu doesn't seem very Aramaic. The meaning "Nabatean kingdom" would probably be expressed by a construct-phrase construction, but the word Malkûtâ is not inflected in a way that would allow it to appear first in a construct phrase... AnonMoos (talk) 13:59, 23 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I have no idea as I didn't add it. I was planning on replacing that term with an actual term in Nabataean language, could you help? @AnonMoos: Makeandtoss (talk) 14:56, 23 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The term "Nabatean language" could have multiple meanings, since they started out attempting to write in Aramaic, but this was increasingly permeated with Arabic as time went on, until towards the end some inscriptions pretty much gave up the effort or dropped the pretense of Aramaic. You could consult Cantineau's "Le Nabatéen" etc., or a scholarly inscription corpus, but you'd probably need some familiarity with both the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets... AnonMoos (talk) 15:52, 23 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I have seen a number of inscriptions, most of which where written in Aramaic, so I assume that Aramaic letters are considered to have had the greatest connection to the Nabataean alphabet? In any case, Le Nabateen isn't available online and I am not familiar with Hebrew alphabets. Makeandtoss (talk) 19:56, 23 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
You'd probably need a little familiarity with the Hebrew alphabet, because early Aramaic and Western Aramaic inscriptions are conventionally transcribed into Hebrew letters in scholarly works. (Anyway, what we call the "Hebrew alphabet" is technically known as the "square" or "Assyrian" script, and is historically an Aramaic-influenced script which replaced the early "Paleo-Hebrew" script which was uninfluenced by Aramaic...) Not sure I can help you much further without conducting intensive personal researches. AnonMoos (talk) 20:38, 24 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Nvm then. Makeandtoss (talk) 21:24, 24 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 13 August 2022[edit]

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

result:
Moved per consensus seen below with help from Wikipedia policy's community consensus. Thanks and kudos to editors for your input; good health to all! P.I. Ellsworth , ed. put'r there 08:55, 21 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Nabataean alphabet → Nabataean script – It is an abjad not an alphabet. AleksiB 1945 (talk) 13:58, 13 August 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. – robertsky (talk) 18:37, 20 August 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. Jack Frost (talk) 08:56, 4 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • STRONGLY OPPOSE --"Abjad" in this meaning is a neologism which didn't exist until the 1990s. For centuries before that, and still often after that, people spoke of a "consonantal alphabet" if any greater precision was needed. If the titles of the "Arabic alphabet" and "Hebrew alphabet" articles don't change, then the title of this article should not change. There's some discussion of this issue at Talk:Arabic alphabet, where a move for that article was basically rejected (though not a formal proposal with template). AnonMoos (talk) 21:55, 13 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support but not for the nom's reasons. The proposed title is more common than the current and better conforms to our practice, since the Nabataean script was also used to write Arabic (on at least a few occasions). Srnec (talk) 16:25, 20 August 2022 (UTC)\[reply]
Srnec -- see my comment of 15:52, 23 July 2016 above... AnonMoos (talk) 22:40, 20 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Austronesier -- As I said on the "Aramaic alphabet" talk page, it's very hard to see how such counts can be useful, since the phrases "Nabatean alphabet" and "Nabatean script" could actually be used with different meanings. They are not simple synonyms. AnonMoos (talk) 22:37, 20 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
That's an interesting conjecture which should be easy to verify: there are only 87 sources on JSTOR, and I would be delighted to see a pair of articles where "Nabataean alphabet" and "Nabataean script" are not coterminous. –Austronesier (talk) 18:52, 21 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It's a fact about the meanings of words (and I don't have JSTOR access). AnonMoos (talk) 21:59, 21 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
If you don't have access to the search results, you shouldn't jump to hypothetical conclusions (and repeat them over and over). I have looked into the search results, and haven't found an instance where the choice between "Nabataean alphabet" and "Nabataean script" was related to any hypothetical difference in meaning between "script" and "alphabet". –Austronesier (talk) 20:46, 31 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
My knowledge that the words "alphabet" and "script" can have different meanings does not depend on JSTOR search results (that would be a very strange world)... -- AnonMoos (talk) 22:31, 31 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Abjads are alphabets, so that's irrelevant. Although we do use Daniels & Bright terminology for classification, we don't use it for article titles. Per WP consensus for the past decade or so, if the topic of this article is about the writing system, then it should be 'script'. If it's about the use of that script to write Nabataean Aramaic, then it should be 'alphabet'. In cases where a script is used primarily for a single language, there isn't much to differentiate the two choices, but if we place this article at 'script', it should cover all adaptations to the languages that used it, and so wouldn't focus on Nabataean Aramaic orthography. If we focus on that language, then it should be at 'alphabet'. — kwami (talk) 10:01, 21 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    "Abjad" is not irrelevant to AleksiB_1945's motivations for proposing the move in the first place (see above). Also, the Nabatean alphabet was a local form of the Aramaic script, and it wasn't really "adapted" -- rather most of the inscriptions were composed by Arabic-speakers who started out attempting to write in Aramaic, but this was increasingly permeated with Arabic as time went on, until towards the end some inscriptions pretty much gave up the effort or dropped the pretense of Aramaic (as I said before). The real adaptation came in when descendants of the Nabatean alphabet were used to write Arabic without Aramaic influence, but we have only somewhat fragmentary evidence of that... AnonMoos (talk) 22:05, 21 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    This is not an area I'm familiar with, but if as you say this is the Aramaic script used for Arabic, or mixed Aramaic-Arabic, then it should stay at "Nabataean alphabet" as an instance of the "Aramaic script". — kwami (talk) 00:52, 22 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @kwami: It's a script by our current standards. More exactly, it is the scholarly term for a spectrum of distinctly-shaped Aramaic-derived scripts associated with the Nabataeans. While it was primarily used to write Nabataean Aramaic, there are also texts in Ancient (North) Arabic. I have looked up a number of the sources in JSTOR. Whether it is called "Nabataean alphabet" e.g. in this article[4] ("Written in the Nabataean alphabet but in the Arabic language") or "Nabataean script" in numerous articles by Michael C. A. Macdonald (e.g. "The text is in the Nabataean script and language, except for two lines of Old Arabic verse (written in the Nabataean script) which are embedded in it"[5], they talk about the same thing, the Nabataean script sensu stricto Wikipediae. –Austronesier (talk) 16:41, 22 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. "Nabataean script" has been demonstrated by Austronesier to be the WP:COMMONNAME; it also improves on the accuracy of the title, as (like the nominator pointed out) the script is an abjad rather than an alphabet. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 14:04, 30 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    If the phrases "Nabatean alphabet?" and "Nabatean script" can actually have different meanings, then it's hard to see how such search-engine results can establish anything useful whatsoever... AnonMoos (talk) 17:55, 31 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Also, saying that an "abjad" cannot be an "alphabet" is unfortunately neologistic nonsense as discussed above. The word "abjad" in this meaning did not exist until the 1990s, and cannot immediately displace centuries of established scholarly terminology (it certainly hasn't done so yet, as discussed at Talk:Arabic alphabet). AnonMoos (talk) 18:00, 31 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    There's certainly room to disagree on whether an abjad is meaningfully distinct from an alphabet or just a subcategory – I take the former view myself, but can understand the latter – but it seems much less tenable to claim that a term with 20+ years of growing usage in the field is "neologistic nonsense". In any event, using "script" in the article title would let us neatly sidestep the alphabet/abjad debate anyway, without any loss of naturalness or accuracy. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 14:07, 1 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The term "abjad" itself is not nonsense; it's merely a synonym of "consonantal alphabet". Some people find the word useful, while other people find it unnecessary, since a perfectly good phrase with exactly the same meaning existed for centuries previously. However the idea that supposedly somehow "an abjad is not an alphabet"[sic] is basically nonsense with respect to current accepted scholarly terminology, as mentioned by User:Kwamikagami above and discussed previously at Talk:Arabic alphabet. Therefore, there is nothing to meaningfully "sidestep", and such sidesteppping is not a valid reason to rename the article... AnonMoos (talk) 15:07, 1 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The idea that there is a consistent differentiation between scripts and alphabets in current accepted scholarly terminology is also nonsense. Yes, the words have different meanings, but both are ambiguous and they overlap. If scholars do not often call the Nabataean writing system an abjad, they do often call it a script. Srnec (talk) 20:29, 1 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The words "alphabet" and "script" have partially-overlapping definitions, but they're not simply synonymous. This doesn't mean that "Nabatean script" would be an inappropriate title for this article, but it does mean that the mechanical search statistics beloved by Austronesier can't actually be used to prove anything... AnonMoos (talk) 22:45, 2 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Re-read Austronesier's comments. He is not employing "mechanical search statistics". He is demonstrating that "Nabataean script" is preferred in RS to "Nabataean alphabet". And that this it is preferred by our current guideline. The only "mechanical" thing here is your kneejerk canned response to the RM based on the nominator's flawed logic. Srnec (talk) 13:34, 3 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
If he doesn't control for shades of meaning, then he can't prove that anything is preferred to anything. If term A occurs more often than term B because a meaning associated more often with term A is referred to more frequently than meanings more often associated with term B, that does nothing to prove that term A is preferred to term B in the cases where the two terms have overlapping meanings. AnonMoos (talk) 18:36, 3 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The fact that I have only have cited two sources does not that I have only inspected two sources. In fact, I have looked into more than a half of the 87 JSTOR search results, and haven't seen a single instance were the choice between the two was anything more than just a terminological preference of the author(s) for either "Nabatean script" or "Nabatean alphabet", without expressing any asserted "shade of meaning". –Austronesier (talk) 19:05, 3 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose: There seems to be no particular rule for when article titles use "script" or "alphabet" (see Category:Abjad_writing_systems) and there's no sign that common use really favours one term over the other. So, there seems no pressing reason for change. If this is something people really want to invest their energy in, perhaps a wider afd would be the way to go, so that we can have some consistency. Furius (talk) 22:16, 2 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Right now, consistency favors no change (Hebrew alphabet etc). AnonMoos (talk) 22:45, 2 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Relisting comment - Relisting in the hopes a consensus will emerge given the ongoing discussion. The dialling down of the volume of replies in this discussion would be of benefit to the closer. --Jack Frost (talk) 08:59, 4 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
None of the other User:AleksiB_1945 proposed renames have gone through, so consistency in that respect would also recommend that this article stay at "Nabatean Alphabet". AnonMoos (talk) 21:13, 7 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
AleksiB_1945's reasoning has nothing to do with support for this move. Srnec (talk) 00:34, 19 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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