Poetry for linguistic description
The Maldives inside and outside the Arabic cosmopolis in 1890
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3667776 |
|---|---|
| Authors | G Field (0000-0001-9178-6093, Ohio University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 1951-1982 |
| Publication date | 2022-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Modern Asian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0026-749X • E-ISSN: 1469-8099 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0026749x21000603 |
| OpenAlex | W4221099799 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
In 1890, the Maldivian judge and poet Sheikh Muhammad Jamaluddin connected poetry with linguistic description in two ways. First, when he described features of the Dhivehi language with the aid of Arabic linguistic theory, he used Dhivehi poetry as linguistic evidence for correct usage. Second, he authored Dhivehi-language poetry about Arabic linguistic theory. Cosmopolis scholarship relates a narrative of how the wide circulation of Sanskrit, Arabic, and/or Persian fostered a vast network of writers who authored texts in major vernacular languages like Bengali, Burmese, Javanese, Kannada, Khmer, Malay, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, and Urdu. This scholarship suggests that authors living within a particular cosmopolis wrote in divergent vernacular languages yet were, in some sense, connected because they translated and responded creatively to the same widely circulated source texts written in Sanskrit, Arabic, and/or Persian. Yet in cosmopolis scholarship's effort to reveal understudied connections, various degrees of disconnection among writers of vernacular languages within a cosmopolis tend to be missed. One problem of overlooking disconnection among writers of vernacular languages is that readers could mistakenly conflate superculture-subculture interaction with intercultural interaction. In this article, I argue that Dhivehi-language poetry and linguistic description was inside the Arabic cosmopolis but simultaneously outside, because in circa 1890 non-Maldivians in the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia could not even read the Thaana script of the Dhivehi language
Arabic · Art · Bengali · Diglossia · Linguistics · Literature · Poetry · Sanskrit · Scholarship · Tamil · Telugu · Urdu · Vernacular · Asian Studies and History · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Hispanic-African Historical Relations · History · Philosophy
The Language of the Gods in the World of Men
Art. VIII.— The Maldive Islands
Maldivian Thaana, Japanese kana, and the representation of moras in writing
Dotting the dal and penetrating the letters; The Javanese origin of the Syair seribu masalah and its Bantenese spelling
The Cosmopolitan Vernacular
People of the Maldive Islands
Micromusics of the West
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |