Here is the evening sky for the 45,000 Cop27 delegates now meeting at Sharm el-Sheikh.
They are standing on the ball of rock that may be the only spot of life in the universe. May they be victorious in their struggle to agree on the laws, grants of money, and restraints of lifestyle that all their countries must undertake if forests, ice, cities are to survive.
Intricacies of Language department
Philology doesn’t have the importance of human rights or the climate, but, like astronomy, it’s one of the delights of civilization.
Sharm el-Sheikh, in a strategic position beside the strait where the Gulf of Aqaba opens into the Red Sea, was in the news in 1956 when Israel overran the Sinai peninsula. Now it’s a luxury scuba-diving resort. Its name means “bay of the elder.”
It has no connection with Alok Sharma, who was born at Agra in India. He is the British cabinet minister who presided over Cop26 at Glasgow in 2021; is more genuine about climate action than most politicians, threatened to resign from the government if the candidate becoming prime minister did not commit to Britain’s net-zero target, and is attending at Sharm el-Sheikh.
While Egypt hosts the climate conference, it imprisons environmental activists, and blocks internet access to human rights organizations. So much for the Arab Spring of 2011. The family of the prisoner for whom we suggested that you send an appeal, Alaa Abdel Fattah, including his British mother, is pleading for evidence that he is still alive after he extended his months-long hunger strike to refusing even water.
His name is shared with the dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. You may have seen, in different sources, Abd El Fattah or Abd el-Fattah, and it could be Abdul Fattah, Abd Al-Fattah, and other combinations of vowels and hyphens and spaces and capital letters. What gives?
The small middle morpheme is the definite article, “the.” It’s written as an l joined to the following word. There are no hyphens or capital letters. The vowel is not written (in ordinary writing) and is really a case ending on the preceding word, so in classical Arabic it would be u, a, i depending on the grammar of the sentence. And in modern dialects it could sound as e.
In other words, Arabic just doesn’t lend itself easily to being transcribed into our alphabet. A newspaper may decide on a convention, but it’s a matter of taste.
Abd means “slave,” and al-Fattâh is the 18th of the “99 beautiful names of Allah.” It is an “intensive” form from the root fath, which has the meaning of “conquest” or, more fundamentally, “opening.” The Ottoman who conquered Constantinople is called Fattih Sultan Mehmet, “Comquering Sultan Muhammad.” In Hebrew the three consonants of the root are pth, and the first Jewish town founded in 19th-century Palestine is Petah Tiqva, “opening, or door, of hope.”
And, by the way, el-Sheikh is pronounced as esh-Sheikh. And the h of the fth root should have a dot under it, to show that it represents a pharyngeal sound, one of the Semitic consonants unfamiliar to European languages. You can imitate it by trying to hawk a crumb out of your throat. But that’s enough, or too much, on the delights, or inconveniences, of language.
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On the subject of the evening sky as it appears now, your picture is not quite wide enough to show the long, gentle arc of bright objects high in the west / southwest: Vega, Altair, Saturn, and Fomalhaut appear to me very nearly defining an arc of uniform curvature, a very pretty sight for as long as Saturn holds its position.