Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Hezbolleen? Hezbollene? Hezbollahin!
In a statement this morning, Bush referred a couple of times to "the Hezbolleen attacks". He also used Hezbollah to refer to the terrorist group itself, so I didn't know if he was just being dyslexic, or using an Arabic plural form for the people who follow the group.
Turns out it was the latter, and I suspect he's sending a rather subtle signal.
Here's a precise linguistic discussion of the word, from a year-old post on FaithFreedom.org, linked here via Google cache.
"Hizb" is Arabic for "party", "Hizbu" is its nominative case (in Classical Arabic) when followed by a word beginning with a consonant. In compounds after vowels, "Allah" becomes "-llah". So, "Hizbu-llah" means "party of Allah" (nominative case). Remove the hyphen and you get "Hizbullah". Shift the pronunciations of "i" and "u" the way Persians and many Arabs do and you get "Hezbollah". Furthermore, an Iranian organization of thugs calls itself "Ansar-e Hezbollah" (Supporters or Partisans of the Party of God) and Iranians generally refer to regime supporters (now pejoratively) as "hezbollahi" (pluaral "hezbollahin").
So it looks like Bush is giving a little signal to the anti-mullah Persians. I like it! ¶ 8:07 PM
Turns out it was the latter, and I suspect he's sending a rather subtle signal.
Here's a precise linguistic discussion of the word, from a year-old post on FaithFreedom.org, linked here via Google cache.
"Hizb" is Arabic for "party", "Hizbu" is its nominative case (in Classical Arabic) when followed by a word beginning with a consonant. In compounds after vowels, "Allah" becomes "-llah". So, "Hizbu-llah" means "party of Allah" (nominative case). Remove the hyphen and you get "Hizbullah". Shift the pronunciations of "i" and "u" the way Persians and many Arabs do and you get "Hezbollah". Furthermore, an Iranian organization of thugs calls itself "Ansar-e Hezbollah" (Supporters or Partisans of the Party of God) and Iranians generally refer to regime supporters (now pejoratively) as "hezbollahi" (pluaral "hezbollahin").
So it looks like Bush is giving a little signal to the anti-mullah Persians. I like it! ¶ 8:07 PM
