أنا محمد عز العليم سلام العليم وحصلنا على السبب هنا لتكون حقاً مستعدة من الحالة ونحن نحن هنا لفعل آخر يوم العديد ونحن هنا لتعاون الأموال ونحن في مرسلتنا الإسلامي السعودية ونحن في المزيد والأجهزة ونحن في العديد الأسلال أنا محمد عز العليم و المؤسسة للمنزل العربية هذا العام لديها مجرد من المساعدة هذا جيد جدا هذا جيد جدا يأتي بسرعة و لكن هذا جيد جدا كما تعلم العربية الآن مجرد من المساعدة يتكلم بسرعة و بسرعة من 400 مليون في العربية و نحن هناك من المساعدة العربية وكثيراً للمسلم المسلم، المسلم الذي يجب أن يقوم بعمل المسلم بشكل كبيراً العربية هي عريمة كبيراً، التي يجب أن تساعد من مليديا سأتحدث عن العربية العربية التي يدعوها في فصحة حقاً, هذه كانت لديها المتحدة التي تشغلت التغاية والغرب الممتلات التي تجدها في الحلقة العربية كانت تجربة العربي في العربية فى سنوات 610 و 632 هذا كانوا تقريراً لإموط العربية لم تكن هناك قرآن ، يمكن أن يكون حدود في مدينة الغزر كما لديه الكثير من الناس الناس بمعاربة السنة العربية ستنقلها بسنة العربية السنة العربية بسنة التنقل وكانت نفسها الناس وراء المدينة مباشرة دون العربية الآن في مدينة الثلاثية ولكن في لانجوج الإسلام يتبعون العالم بين المسلمين هذا هو لانجوز الإسلام والآرام أيضا حصلت على العالم العربية والغرام was developed to help converts from other cultures to read the Qur'an العربية was developed to make people understand articulate the Qur'an well Arabic rhetoric was developed in order to identify and describe the stylistic features that makes the Qur'an inimitable inimitable as the Arabs and the Muslims saw it the language you say because of the connection with the Qur'an because of the connection with the Qur'an it really made Arabic control the language from early on Arab linguists have decided on where a pure language will be taken time and in location middle of Arabia and for a certain time after which it will be as it will be mixed by so many other people in different culture any time that comes after that yes it is on the pattern that has been established in the Qur'an would not be considered a fosha or real pure Arabic so that was controlled by the Qur'an and linguists in modern times in 1930s what we had in Arab world language academies like the one in Cairo which was established to regulate and develop the Arabic language now another important point is the Qur'an asked Muslim to look into the horizons and everywhere around them to reflect on God's creation look around and reflect actually the Qur'an emphasizes it is only the learned people that stand in all of God in that context it really means those who observe reflect and discover that is in the first chapter 30 chapter 35 first with the A so only those who can reflect and discover these are the ones who will be in all of God for this reason we find that Arab scientists and philosophers the Arabs also Muslims who came Arabized in their language you see all the Arab scientists and philosophers started their life their education learning the Qur'an by heart okay the prophet of Islam Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم is reported to have said seek knowledge even unto child this is important and he said wisdom is the lost property of a believer wherever he finds it he has the first right to it he has the first right to it so it was these teachings that directed Muslims to seek knowledge from civilizations other than their own around them like Greek Syrian Persian Indian and Chinese and to translate the work from these languages into Arabic translation became very important during the time of Al Mahmoun K. Al Mahmoun who died in 933 he established something called the house of wisdom and used to pay very well for translators it is reported that he was some translators he would give them the word not weight of their book in gold in those days paper was very heavy and thick so they did very well our days we translators have come very cheap so Islam Islam then is not an isolationist or a rejectionist religion it is not it is not Muslim philosopher speak of Aristotle as the first master the first master and you find very great Christian Syriac families who were brought very close to the king number of apostle king and the great Jewish philosopher and physician the Maimonides of Andalusia served Salahuddin Saladin in Egypt so now we should remember that Arabic was a literary language you see some of the characteristic of literary language is you have emotional you have figures of speech you have synonyms and so on this does not work for science language so first thing first requirement was to develop a set of technical terms for translating these works from other cultures you see precision was required and this became a very important science in Islam and in Arabic we have large numbers of technical terms throughout the Islamic Arabic period okay you see this you must Salahuddin as they called in all subjects and they were after a couple of times okay so Arabic had to face had to face the requirement of developments and discoveries scientific discoveries from the centers of learning in the past and now from the most advanced centers in the world the most advanced centers and discoveries in the world Arabic had to face this absorb it in obedience to the tradition and what the prophet said and remain Arabic at the same time because this is the language of the Quran this was that challenge it was a very tall order but they did it it was it was done in the past and in the present time Arabic was helped helped by the nature of the language itself ingenious morphology self in Arabic great this was very helpful and also the broad mindedness of Arabic and Muslim scholars I would urge you to even leave your job and come and study Arabic morphology and so on you will never regret it okay Arabic developed tools for getting new vocabulary new scientific vocabulary how to develop expand the language it had tools to do this I can mention six of them here the first one is derivation you have a word like which means to write and from this you get vast numbers of words writer something written your letter your desk when you write to write and so is library waterstone bookshop and many many other words derived from the same who this is a great virtue of Arabic morphology which realize mainly on derivation as English and some other European languages rely on affixation at the beginning and at the end of the word so derivation number 2 analogy pias in Arabic building new words and by analogy with others yesterday the last I heard of this yesterday is دعشان to دعشان someone or some people take the noun take the noun turn it to a verb and transitive verb or a pattern which is particular to this part but very clear for the Arabic language especially with words that are unacceptable like دعشان and so on but the analogy increases enriches the language then there is fusion is called نعحت in Arabic you see بسم الله for بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم the wrong statement is بسم الله it's used in modern Arabic now in science so I'm fit here I'm fake I'm phibious it's called بر المائي it helps the language to fuse words together then you have borrowed from other languages a lot of words were borrowed from Persian and Greek so in the past and now you have you borrowed from English I have seen Zoom and I have seen Google and so on in the year what was borrowing I think English is more is more you are flexible than Arabic in this then you have an invention of words so in English you have you can send which because the blog one blog ate a lot of that stuff so they leave them sent which if any of you eat all the food that's coming this evening Arabic will not name him or her after that yes then Arabization is called تعريب so invention you see like sandwich Macintosh and so on تعريب try to tweak the words to make them like Arabic and sound and then food okay the Arab you see after having the Arab having this developing having the translation and developing to take knowledge their terminology began their own rich heritage of Arabic sciences rich heritage of Arabic sciences in all subjects you have medicine you have biology you have chemistry etc there is a long list of them here yes they were a head of anybody at that time they were a head of the west for sure and we find in the west people trying to get information or knowledge from the Arabic the prophet of keton who translated the Quran into Latin in 11 30 43 I think went to Spain to learn Arabic sciences and you will find the chair of Arabic in Cambridge in 1632 was established and the founder gave some I mean objectives for that one of them was to get the land which is still looked up in that learned town about Arabic to get the learned from there still looked up in that town and up by the way another objective was to help the kingdom state by kingdom state by trade and a third one wait for this was to enlarge the border of Christianity and propagate Christianity among those among them who still live in darkness these people lived in hope in those days our professor of Arabic here at search doesn't have anything like this in his job description okay now so among the most I mean among the most this is a statement by Arman writing about the Arabic medicine among the most creative geniuses of the medieval times was Abyssinia Abyssinia you see a spoke school the canal was translated 36 times in the 15th and 16th centuries and what's the book in Europe the Abyssinia or Abyssinianism was the all the medicine in Europe or the medical centers relied on that as this man is saying and you will have in order to be a good physician you have to be a good Abyssinianist okay it has been established that hundreds of times went into Europe and learned from Arabic I have an English here I can tell you one word if I may I will give you alcohol which was introduced to Arabic and the people here learned it simply because they love this stuff some excessively judging by the number of Arabic around the country now on the shoulder of this Arabic scientist the European Renaissance started and naturally built and you have enlightenment and you have just an evolution and technology and learning evolution scientific technological revolution in the west to an unprecedented level before so while the west woke up the rules were reversed the west woke up the Arab went fast asleep and were shocked into reality by the advancing armies colonial armies equipped with science and technologies now they quickly started to build up their education here in Egypt for instance and many other countries so Egypt is an example they started their education incidentally some people then started to cast doubts on the ability of the Arabic to catch up with the world in time there was a British advisor to the ministry of education in Egypt it was Scottish and he said to them if you want to develop you will have to give up Arabic and have your education in English they said to him this is all Haggis we will have none of this because they want to keep the connection with the Quran incidentally Haggis happened to sound like the Egyptian word Haggis which is nonsense yes so rather than take another language the Arabs began to translate again from other languages and they developed language academies like the one in Cairo which is more active I suppose than the other I have listed four of them now and plus a center started by the UNESCO ISISCO ISISCO which is the Arabic UNESCO to coordinate the third innovation among these centers okay I have put many information here I would say that Arabic has as we said lived and remained as Arabic absorbed the language absorbed all the foreign sciences and philosophy and now it has absorbed all the scientific and technical terms of the western languages they are all in Arabic now we have the university language academy in Cairo reduced vast numbers of دكشنري this is one of the latest dictionary of computer terms I looked up spam because I had a lot of it so I found I found it translated as as rubbish trash and I looked up chip little chip and it says رقاق a nice word say after me رقاق رقاق رقاق now you know have learned some Arabic in the Arabic language today but you must always remember that it's so happen that in Egypt رقاق also means في لو باستري so eat your chip with fish if you like the Arabic language it is not the fault see Arabs don't produce much sense now this is not the fault with the Arabic language just as there are many countries that speak English and don't produce anything it is great that the Arabic language the Arabic language is the head of Arab scientists it has encompassed everything in Arabic while remaining Arabic with a glorious past when we put the best for you nothing but the best I now have a great pleasure for introducing my learned friend Dr. Moussel بن مغالي from the Saudi Arrival Council on Center he will speak about Arabic as a language of course I'm taking knowledge of Arabic and you have the tools 15 minutes no more I think I've been in it 10 minutes before I just might support him in it so International Arabic Language Day is celebrated on December 18th the event was established by the United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization which is UNESCO in 2010 it was established to celebrate multi-languism and cultural diversity as well as to promote equal use of all six of its official working languages throughout the organization December 18 was chosen as the date for the Arabic language as it is the day in 1973 when the General Assembly approved Arabic as an official United Nation language with an estimated 390 million speakers Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world it is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations as well as the historical language of 1.6 million Muslims today there are three different levels of Arabic classical Arabic modern standard Arabic which is used in publishing education and media across the Arab world Arabic and everyday dialect is also used in different regions and has numerous variations the Arabic group in UNESCO used to celebrate this day under different title or titles every year it was decided by them that Arabic as a language of science and technology to be the title of the celebration of this year I'm not going to talk about this subject simply because I have no time but I will take a small issue with the subject which is Arabic language and localization of knowledge and try to just to shade a light on it for knowledge to be localized well it needs to be understood well and for that to happen that knowledge need to formulate it and then transferred using the national language which is Arabic in this context Arabic would feel and understand and use and be creative with very well studies and research indicated that the absorption of science and technology doesn't occur in depth unless those sciences and technologies are taught in the national language in all states of ministries education all the way through to higher education the advancement in science literature arts and religion that occur in our Arabic Islamic civilization during its prosperity was carried by the Arabic language civilization was wasn't to reach to a state of localizing the knowledge and then reaching the creativity and productivity the states if it wasn't for the stage of understanding and absorption of important knowledge that interacted with the elements of the local and original culture first comes understanding then comes creativity and productivity as a result everyone's understanding of the language that is used for transfer production one example of those important or imported sciences is medicine it went through the states of understanding then through the or through to creativity in the first stage the box of a Greek scientist where transferred where transferred to Arabic and people started studying understanding and explaining them for a while Arabic allowed for the wide separate of those sciences and made it available for those who are interested then came the creativity and productivity stage which introduced to us famous scientists such as Ibn Sina Ibn Rushd Arrazi and Ibn Jazar and made others who words and words became references that were recently included in a university including the European ones using Arabic language in medicine resulted in wide separate of the science among the Arabs and Muslims society's knowledge of Arabic participated in the wide separate of medicine for all members of the Arabic or the Arab nation and everyone who use its language the benefit or the benefits became greater among all local I mean the the social classes and many branch of medicine became a popular knowledge that is circulated between people this is because it was available in their own language that they understood and mastered its vocabulary and terminology the first thing that grows things that distinguish our language from other languages is that it is old and new at the same time it coexisted the Greek Latin and Sanskrit and was able to continue till today helped by its flexibility and very characteristics such as etiomology and analogy and synonym Arabic is suitable language of science and technology because the uniqueness of it is structure and the richness of it is vocabulary its history culture and civilization it is spoken by a large number of the people and one of the six languages of the united nations what is lacking or what is lacking is only the adoption of it is language of science of technology where sciences are using it in all levels of learning and translated to it politician political institutes and decision makers need to adapt it in international relations and science and technology thank you very much the task of chairing very easy thank you very much and now I now have the great pleasure I will have another great pleasure to see I now have the great pleasure to introduce my colleague Dr. Pes Lucas who is a senior lecturer in linguistics Arabic and linguistics what a fine combination the excellent combination of Arabic and linguistics which qualified him which speaks to us this evening about some good in linguistics solution and how they invite us okay thank you very much indeed that's all I need sound so can we stop so it's it's a great honor for me to speak to you this evening in such eminent company so I'm as professor Abdul Helim said I'm a linguist and I work on Arabic I studied the Arabic language here at SOAS for my undergraduate degree and the best place the best place to do it yes and it truly is from my point of view an extraordinarily rich language to study from a linguistic point of view okay so seeing as the theme of this UNESCO Arabic language day this year is Arabic and science and seeing as I don't know all that much about what Arabic has contributed to science I thought what I would do instead was tell you something about how science and other language sciences have contributed to our understanding of Arabic so as we've already heard it's absolutely clear that Arabic language and Arabic culture have historically made enormous contributions to science but what I think many of those who are interested in Arabic don't perhaps appreciate as much as they ought to is that we can make progress in understanding we can improve our understanding of Arabic by applying modern scientific methods to the topic and there's no doubt whatsoever that in the past shall we say 100 years we took in progress in understanding various aspects of Arabic language thanks to research in linguistics now I don't want you to misunderstand me as we've heard Arabic speaking culture was way ahead of Europe in scientific matters in the European dark ages and linguistics is no exception whatsoever I've heard of this great linguist I mean he stands as one of the greatest linguists of all time to this day and he was working in the 8th century and produced analyses of Arabic which are astonishingly sophisticated even today but even though he produced these great insights I think we can still make progress so I want to I want to have a quick look at these two questions today so we've already heard that you can distinguish at least two types of Arabic the classical language or the standard language and the colloquial or dialectal Arabic and a very long standing debate within Arabic is when did this differentiation between two types of Arabic occur did it occur before or after Islam so that's one thing I want to look at and the other is another often discussed question the extent to which different Arabic dialects are mutually intelligible so my point is going to be instead of debating such questions from our armchairs and speculating how we draw on the appropriate evidence so let's hope my technology works I want to give you a very quick sample of classical Arabic and a quick sample of dialectal Arabic both taken from the great Lebanese singer Feroz okay let's give it a go very nice okay that was a very short snatch of standard Arabic or classical Arabic but there are many very significant and very interesting differences between these two types of Arabic and we can't possibly unfortunately go into all of them now but one very salient difference between the two which people often focus on is the fact that classical Arabic has cases nouns and adjectives that align according to three cases and verbs also have mood endings whereas in dialectal Arabic we don't get this at all so this is one feature that we can focus in on to explore this question of when did the difference between these two types of Arabic occur so here's the question was the colloquial Arabic brought to for example Lebanon where Feroz comes from in the early Islamic era was it identical at that time to classical Arabic or not so like I say this is a huge long standing debate so on the one side many scholars have argued that yes when the Arabs left the Arabian peninsula after the coming of Islam what they brought with them what they spoke every day was classical Arabic and the differences we see between the dialects and classical Arabic are because people in say Lebanon whose native language was a type of Aramaic learned Arabic but didn't learn it very well and changed it and thereby lost the case and that's one one way of looking at it the other side of the debate says no even in pre-Islamic times you had this differentiation between dialectal Arabic and high Arabic and the Quran and pre-Islamic poetry was written in the high variety but that doesn't mean that there wasn't also a colloquial variety which just hasn't come down to us and the interesting thing is about this debate as I said it's it's all speculation it's been conducted just from the armchair as it were but we can answer questions like this in a non-speculative way by looking at appropriate evidence like this now it's very often claimed that before Islam Arabic was an unwritten language and this is actually completely false well let's say few Arabic speakers were literate that is true but there were a few and they wrote Arabic predominantly in other scripts whether south Semitic scripts or Greek now there are a lot of pre-Islamic Arabic texts written in the Greek script and this is very useful for the question of case endings because Greek has an ordinary alphabet that obligaterally includes symbols for vowels and the case endings of Arabic are vowels so the evidence is in fact conclusive we know from documents written in Arabic in Greek script that come from before Islam that already before the time of Islam there were varieties that did not have cases and this is mainly due to recent work by an American scholar of Syrian extraction called Ahmed Al-Jallad so the point is there's no doubt that when speakers of other languages in Syria or Berber in North Africa came to learn Arabic they made enormous changes to the language there's no doubt about that but we can see here that even so it's not the case that before Islam the only type of Arabic there was classical Arabic okay do I have time to move on to my other okay thank you very much so what about this question of whether all Arabic dialects are mutually intelligible this is another thing that's hotly debated in my experience Arabs will usually tell you that it's very easy fat to understand different dialects but as you know I'm still learning Arabic you spend your whole life learning Arabic it's not an easy language because you've learned something about one dialect it doesn't mean you're going to find the next one particularly easy and if we really think about it if we put it this way are all Arabic dialects mutually intelligible if we think about that question seriously very few people I hope would disagree the answer is no not all Arabic dialects are mutually intelligible so can you understand this Arabic dialect now it's very often said that the purest Arabic comes from Saudi Arabia where do you think this man is from yes جبل فيفر in Saudi Arabia so it's easy to find some dialects that are very extreme and hard to understand equally it's easy to find pairs of dialects where mutual comprehension is near total for example something like Lebanon and Syria but then we could ask the question are these really different dialects there's a huge gray area in between these two extremes and instead of just subjectively giving our impressions about these issues we can test the question scientifically so for example a Slovak scholar called Slavomir Chepler and his colleagues have made a start on answering this question about the mutual intelligibility of Ben Ghazi Arabic Tunis Arabic and Maltese which you may or may not know is historically a variety of Arabic so they made recordings of native speakers of each and they recorded these native speakers saying how everyday vocabulary items were said in their dialect and also recorded them reading a set of simple sentences and then 24 native speakers of each of the other two dialects were tested on the dialect that wasn't their native one so this shows you some of the kinds of words that were tested colors, basic adjectives eating and drinking and the task here with the vocabulary items was they simply had to say what kind of category does this word fall into is it a type of animal is it to do with time and date etc and with the sentences they had to write what they heard in their own in their own variety so what did they find well perhaps not surprisingly Maltese people are not very good at understanding Tunisian and Libyan less than 40% correctly understood words but look at this with the vocabulary everyday vocabulary Libyans don't even get to 80% comprehension of Tunisian and Tunisians trying to understand Libyan only around about 80% and with sentences it's even less so this gives you some impression it's only a start Tunisian and Libyan but we're looking at something like 2 3rd comprehension and this kind of methodology can be continued with other pairs of dialects so I'm sorry for going too long I'm finishing now what I want to say in summary is that Arabic but there's still more to know and I think the way to find out more about the Arabic language is to use knowledge of linguistics other languages other scripts and innovative empirical techniques absolutely you are in an incredible position being an arabist and a linguist but you should have stopped without telling us more thank you thank you very much I now have again a great pleasure introducing my colleague that professor of Arabic where has he gone that's his professor of Arabic and now the head of department in the Middle East another very great arabist and he will speak to you okay thank you well good evening I'm very pleased to be here to speak about this very remarkable subject which you see illustrated here the Quran manuscript from the 15th century have a look at it quietly for a moment what you see is a script which is generally described as remarkably beautiful there is clearly a certain regularly there but there is also immense fluidity, rhythm agility, appliances the question I'd like to discuss very briefly with you is where does all this come from and I'd like to show you that it has in fact a lot to do with science because today we are talking about Arabic and science well let's go into the past where did it all begin and we can go quite a long way into the past to 1800 BC to this particular little animal this is a things from the Sinai Peninsula and on this Egyptian things an inscription was discovered which looks like this and what you see here is the earliest beginning of the alphabet out of these alphabetic signs which are derived from the hieroglyphs emerged what is today Greek Latin and Arabic and Hebrew and Cyrillic and one of these we can even recognize here you see already our T we recognize here our T this little thing is the ancestor of our O and also the ancestor of the Arabic Aein there's a lot to be said about this but here you have in a nucleus the earliest beginning well let's fast forward very quickly because we don't have much time we fast forward some over 2000 years and we come to this which is one of the earliest inscriptions in the Arabic language from the year 300 commemorating a king called Imrul Qais and it's written in a script which is close to the script of Nabataean some of you have been in Jordan we have seen that and well let's fast forward further and see what did the Arabic script look like at the time of the prophet well there is this particular document here which is a letter supposedly sent by the prophet is this letter genuine what is certain is that it is a medieval document it was dated but whether the genuine this could not be assured but you can see here a script which whether it's genuine or not is highly rudimentary and miles away from that beautiful manuscript which we saw at the beginning but let's look at something more reliable which is this one here this is a remarkable document it's a papyrus from the year 22 of the Hijra or 642 and it's written in Greek and Arabic it was found in Egypt and it's a receipt it's the Arab armies conquering Egypt got hungry in an Egyptian village and they wanted something to eat so the army got 65 sheep from the local village headman and the army commander gave the headman a receipt in two languages for the 65 sheep so that the village headman could deduct it from the taxes you can see from this rather interestingly that the Egyptian armies that the Arab armies were not simply pillaging but already were engaging in some kind of administration you already see here remarkably here the formula which already existed in this very very early document and it's definitely genuine because the Islamic dating and the Byzantine dating coincide so this is a fascinating document the story continues however because from then on the Arabic script faced a major challenge in fact two challenges first of all it became the script of empire it had to represent power and secondly and as an even bigger challenge the Arabic script had to become commensurate with the divine revelation of the Quran and here comes the biggest challenge that Arab scribes faced what script is there that can be commensurate with the divine message that can give visual representation to the words of God well the challenge was there and here is one answer this is a script from the Umayyad governor of Egypt from the year 723 you see here a script which suddenly becomes stately and powerful that wants to convey authority again it's a demand for taxes this time and here is the typical early Quran script the so-called Ma'il script which was developed in Umayyad times to give expression to the Quran and you can see already an attempt of power of consistency and a certain kind of rhythm but it's still very far from what we've seen at the beginning well then came a new phase then came the so-called Kufic script which is this one here which you know well and which was the first really convincing answer that scribes had to the aesthetic challenge of how to give expression to the Quran in a visual medium that was beautiful and coherent the technique here is really quite remarkable what they've done is to take all the individual letters and combinations of letters and spread them all over the page with equal distances in between and construct what has been called an architecture of the page whereby there is a proportional relationship between the height and the width of the page but it has one thing it is very difficult to read if you don't the text is really hard for instance here you have this word here is hugely spread out with all these distances and here you have because it plays together it's all compressed so there is a tremendous difference between compression on the one hand and expansion on the other looks tremendous but really hard to read well then came a revolution and that revolution is called the proportion script in the 4th century we have something that resulted in this and that is the famous which is the earliest Quran in this new script and anyone of you who know Arabic and I think all of you here know we recognize that this is actually the Arabic script we know today so something happened something happened to generate the script and that revolution is what was it it was the rise of the proportion script which took place in the 4th century of the Hijra spearheaded by a man called and based upon what based upon geometry we have here the geometry of letters a system by which every single Arabic letter shape was put into a proportional relationship with every other working out or investigating the rules of the with a great Egyptian calligrapher and painter and artist whom I would like to pay tribute here Ahmed Mustafa and we produced this book to look into these rules and what you see here is an illustration of the rules from a Mamluk manuscript and the basis of everything is the length of the letter Aleph which is composed of 7 dots out of the Aleph and its 7 dots emerges everything else and emerges also many different script styles which also have Alephs that are longer or shorter than 7 dots but this is the fundamental pattern and so we started investigating this and we were wondering what is it based upon why geometry and what we realized is that geometry was seen as a perspective as the language or the laws with which God put the universe together there are laws of society on the one hand and there are laws of nature on the other these are laws of nature were perceived to be geometric by generating a script based upon geometry we generate a script based upon the laws of the cosmos hence we have this conclusion the proportion script can be understood and modeled upon the cosmic order in which geometry represents the concrete manifestation of divine justice and for this reason our book carries the title the cosmic script so we see here that science in actual fact is deeply rooted into a certain vision of the cosmos as an ordered entity an ordered creation of the Lord which must be reflected in the arts of mankind then we proceeded to look into how these rules work and I want to give a very very brief illustration first of all we have the 7 dots in sequence which make up the length and breadth of Alif and out of this everything else comes and if you superimpose the rules of the proportion script upon each other you come to this geometric pattern a pattern made up of a circle a square and a hexagon out of which everything comes and one very simple example the letter B is made up of a vertical stroke one-third of Alif and of a horizontal stroke the length of Alif and out of this comes that when it is drawn with the pen so here is something extremely important there is a difference between two things the geometric skeleton of the letter and what happens when the skeleton is so to say brought to life by the pen and bringing it to life in Arabic there is a term for it تارطيب giving it the moisture of life and the meaning of this can be illustrated with this image here here you have a snow crystal here you have geometry in nature a hexagon like we have it also in the script when that crystal melts and becomes fluid water becomes fluid in the same way when this pattern rigid geometric pattern say melts into fluidity through the action of the scribe it gains this feature and that this is not invented but rooted in the theory at the time you can see from the following quote with which I will end which comes from an 11th century manuscript about the proportion script and it says the following the soul is not content with the form of the letters without the correct execution of its proportions like the members of a living being are proportioned or like the paths of a plant are balanced because the soul is an amount of beauty and that is to be found with the proportionality of the natural world with a seeing or heard so it is both the proportionality and the living beauty of the natural world that is reflected in the aesthetics of Arabic calligraphy at its greatest and this is then the result thank you very much thank you you are great you have got the Arabic language today you have got the Arabic language learning and you enjoyed it today thank you very much indeed now we have again another great pleasure in mind I have a letter of pleasure this evening producing the Saeed who is actually the head of teaching Arabic so you have some point me to read and it it is transfer it for him Sarah do you want to read she will read a translation thank you Professor Halim good evening ladies and gentlemen first of all I am grateful to Sarah to agree to read the translation with me and I have to admit I am going to read 4 short pieces only one of them is translated already by the famous translator Lord Arbery of Cambridge was he? no he wasn't okay okay the other 3 pieces I translated myself but Sarah did help me in what we call in Arabic she kind of added some flavor to the translation thank you Sarah we say in Arabic الشعرو ديوان العرب poetry is the record of the anthology or the register the book the life of the Arabs so we cannot celebrate Arabic language without some poetry starting from the pre-islamic period I have selected a short piece by Antara Antara the legendary poet warrior of the tribe of Aps whose poetry depicted the 2 most important themes in Arabic poetry الحب والبطولة love and bravery here's a few lines he said to his beloved عبلة after returning victorious from the battlefield having single handed he rebelled the attacking tribe Antara addressing عبلة يا دار عبلة بالجواء تكلمي وعيني صباحا دار عبلة واسلمين كيف المزار وقد تربع أهلها بعوني زتيني وأهلنا بالغاية عبلة's dwelling in الجواء هل أسألت القومة يا بنت مهلكن إن كنت جاهلة بما لم تعلمي يخبرك من سهد الوقي عطى أنني أفس الوغى وأعفوا عند المغنمي ولقد ذكرتك وارغماح ونواه الامن وقال وقال وارغماح ونواه وبيض الهند تقتر من دمي فوددت تقبيل السيوفي فوددت تقبيل السيوفي لأنها لما عبلة كبارك ثرق المتبسيم يا بنت مهلكن إن أخيك أن أعرف لك عني لماذا أسأل المغنمي ومتأكد من سؤالك هؤلاء المغنمي will tell you how I fearlessly run into battle and fight and how I refrain from sharing in the spoils I remembered you when the spears were dipping into my body and flashing swords dripping with my blood at that very moment how I desired to kiss the swords because they sparkled like your smiling mouth with the coming of Islam and then poetry began to spread its functions and widen its rules some of the caliphs themselves were connoisseurs of poetry and patrons of poets the second caliph عمر عمر الخطاب who was one of the most strict and fair rulers ever he imprisoned a poet a poor poet called Al-Hotay'a because Al-Hotay'a had a very sharp vicious tongue he attacked, his tongue attacked everybody from his prison cell Al-Hotay'a sent عمر very few lines of poetry very emotional imploring poetry asking forgiveness apparently عمر when he heard those lines apparently it's said that he cried and pardoned and forgiven Al-Hotay'a Al-Hotay'a imploring عمر some seek to notice he actually addresses عمر by the first name عمر he didn't say امير المؤمنين or anything just عمر ماذا تقول لأفراخن بذي مرخن زغب الحواص للماء ولا شجر غادرت كاسبهم في قعر مظلمة فغفر عليك سلام الله يا عمر أنت الإمام الذي من بعد صاحبه القائل إليك مقالد النها البشر لم يؤثروك بها لم يؤثروك بها إذ قدموك لها لكن لأنفسهم كانت بك الأثر فمن على صبية بالرمل مسكنهم فمن على صبية بالرمل مسكنهم بين الأباطح يغشاهم بها القدر نفسي في دائك كم بيني وبينهم من عرض أودية يعملها الخبر الله جميل أنت هو المدينة who was given the key position of power of royal mankind they have not favoured you when they gave you the leadership they have actually favoured themselves please be kind to the young children who have no home but the sandy desert where they are exposed to their miserable fate I am far away from them across a very wide valley no one can see its other side by the 9th and 10th century the great poetry has reached its golden age with the great poets the greatest among them without doubt was El Mutanabi the man who was given the title Mali Udunia Washari Lunas that translates as the one whose fame spread far and wide and made all people think of nobody but him those four words needed two lines in English after his very busy life busy composing great poetry moving from El Kufa to Bardat to Aleppo to Antioch to Damascus to Taborias to Egypt later in his life he found himself travelling far east into Persia passing through a famous beauty spot in the valley of Bouan which really fascinated and bewitched him this resulted in a superb amazing depiction of this natural beauty but suddenly in the middle of this depiction he felt a stranger far from his roots and suddenly remembered Damascus I am now emotional I have remembered Damascus he remembered Damascus with great affection and nostalgia I'll start by reading some selected lines from the description of the natural beauty I'll stop when he remembered Damascus المتنبي in شعب بوان شعب could mean a road between mountains where he was travelling and the natural beauty and the birds and the trees and the flowers and the water etc مغان الشعب بيبا في المغان بمنزلة الربيع من الزمان ولكن الفتا العربية فيها غريب الوجه واليد واللسان ملاعب جنة ملاعب جنة لو صار فيها سليمان لسار بترجمان فصرت وقد حجبنا الشمس عني وجئنا من الضياء بما كفان قشرق منها في فياب دنانيرا تفرر من البناني لها ثمارون دعني أردت أن أردت الشمس لها ثمارون تشير إليك منه بأشربة وقفنا بلا أوان هل أنت قامت بذلك The drink was in no cups لها ثمارون تشير إليك منها وقفنا بلا أوان Let's hear the sound of the water وأمواهم تصلوا بها حصاها صلي للحلي في عيد الغوان The abodes of the valley in respect of delightfulness are in relation to all other abodes as spring among all other times But the Arab lad amidst them is a stranger in face, hand and tongue They are places of jins to play in If Solomon had journeyed to them he would have journeyed with an interpreter And I proceeded the branches veiling the sun from me and yet bringing me sufficient radiance and the orient sun cast from them upon my garments denies that fled from my fingers On the branches were fruits pointing to you sweet vines standing without vessels and there were waters in which the pebbles chinked on the hands of young girls Some great poets in situations like that suddenly they remember Damascus The great Ahmad Shoukri in his Zahla tribute after he said He switched and said ودي مشقو جنات النعيم Damascus is جنات النعيم Help Professor Halim جنات النعيم At that moment he switched and said ولو كان الدي مشقو ولو كان الدي مشقو ثناع ناني لبيق الثرد الصيني الجفان تحل به على قلب شجاع وترحل منه عن قلب جبان منازل منازل لم يزل منها خيال يشيعني الى النوبا ذجاني وقد يتقارب الوصفان وقد يتقارب الوصفان وقد يتقارب الوصفان جدا وموصوفه ما متباعدان يقول بشعب بوان حصان عن هذا يسار إلى الطعان أبوك مؤادم سن المعاصي أبوك مؤادم سن المعاصي وعلمكم مفارقة الجناني وإذا كانوا دماسكس سيكونوا راينز بشكل جنرس أفلونت من انتظر معه ومتباعد منه من خارجه خارجه شكرا لكم أبوك منها ومتباعد منها ومتباعد منك خامدهم أبوك منهم نقاعد النوبا ذجان أبوك مؤادم ومتباعد منهم ومتباعد منهم أبوك أبوك يجب أن يتبع كل العالم only for the sake of the children نحن now need to pray for peace يجب أن يقوم براءة جيدة و يا رب من أجل الطفولة وحدها أفضل بركات السلم شرقا ومغربا و رد الأذاء عن كل شعب و رد الأذاء عن كل شعب وإن يكون كفورا وأحبب هو إن كان مذنبا و صندحكة الأطفال و صندحكة الأطفال يا رب إنها إذا غردت في موحش الرملي أعشبا و يا رب حبب كلطفل و يا رب حبب كلطفل فلا يا را فلا يا را وإن لجه في الإعناتي وجها مقطبا وهيئ له في كل قلب صبابطا وهيئ له في كل قلب صبابطا و في كل لقيا مرحبا ثم مرحبا Oh God for the sake of the children alone may you make the blessing of peace flow east and west and may you prevent harm from all people even those who are ungrateful and love even those who are sinful Oh God for when the barren sand hears their singing it will be full of green grass and make every child be loved oh God and not let him see any frowning face no matter what he does make him find affection in every heart and welcoming faces everywhere he goes when we finish translating these five lines when Sarah said to me it sounded like a real prayer I said yes we want it to be a real prayer let's pray for peace شكرا I'm delighted that Sarah stepped in because we were saying we must have some women amongst all these speakers and some students yes and some students as well now it is really my great pleasure to introduce our player of the festival because of you Kennedy who will speak to us about the language of history and history and history we could not have found anyone to talk about this better than him Thank you very much and it's been a real trip down memory lane this evening for me in a sense that Arthur Arbery whose translations you've just been hearing I was his last pupil I believe and even more so and more relevant it is now almost 50 years since Professor Abdul Halim started to try to teach me Arabic I don't think I was a very good pupil because I'm still learning now and finding out things that I don't know and should have known and so on and so forth but what have I done with this education that I was given by such eminent scholars I've used it really throughout my career as a way of reading the great tradition of Arabic history writing the great tradition of Arabic historiography in the classical period in the pre-modern period which I think is one of the great historical traditions in the whole world and it contains such a wealth of wonderful details such a wealth of wonderful observation and so on in a way all human life is there and it's a source of endless fascination to me it's also an enormous and vast tradition I'm going to talk about two historians very very briefly the first is Abu Jaffa Tabari an old old friend of mine whose work I constantly refer to to return to and find new things in and the second Abu Ali Mosqueway Tabari died in 923 of the common era was an immensely industrious man he wrote a history of the Islamic world which dates from roughly it starts from the beginning of the world and goes through to his own time and this has now been translated into English and it comes out the English version in 38 printed volumes each of these volumes is more than 250 pages long and that was only half of what he wrote before he went on or he did it at the same time or before I can't remember he wrote a Tafsir of the Quran which is almost as long as his tariq what an immensely industrious man he was and you might think that the whole of this history would become sort of rather tedious sort of history that the famous Duke of Wellington called one damn thing after another just a procession of angels boring and melancholy events not so because Tabari uses the immense resources that were at his disposal the resources of literature he must have had access to his Baghdad at the time when it's the thriving heart it's the thriving metropolis of culture and civilization he must have had access to an enormous library of books we know a bit about how he found these books and so on and he takes stories and he chooses stories that illustrate the points he wants to make and people talk a lot about whether this history is reliable or not there's been a trend in western scholarship a part of which actually began here in Zas some years ago to be very critical of this historiography we can't believe it it's all a sort of sorry I'm being told I'm not hearing it's all a sort of it's all made up so to speak to make particular religious points and so on but when you actually read Tabari's history as well as his concern for detail and chronology as all good historians should have there's a wonderful concern for the human experience for people who behave well people who behave badly a section that I like to read with my students every year one or two of them I'm seeing here in fact about just the death of the caliph Alameen now this is a tiny fragment of in the year 813 when he was murdered by the troops supporting his brother it's only a tiny proportion of Tabari's great history a sort of a thousand perhaps of it but the way that when we read this carefully together we can see the way in which he uses it as a whole discussion of the human predicament the way the young caliph Alameen who has been portrayed in the early days as the rather ignorant boastful contrast to his brother Ahmed Moon and his father Haruna Rashid becomes in the story of his death something of a martyr something of a real life human being and I compare this when I'm introducing students to this to the whole discussion in Shakespeare's Player of Richard II about again a profligate arrogant young man who in his death days becomes a hero even a martyr and I'm very interested in the way in which Tabari and Shakespeare both come together and develop these themes of human experience and it's this whole richness this whole humanity of the tradition which I think is so inspiring and interesting my second historian Awali Miskawa is a less well known figure I think he's writing about 150 years after Tabari he chronicles the disintegration of the Abbasid caliphate with meticulous detail relying on eyewitness accounts and people whose works he read the story of human folly the story of how people make one bad decision after another and the violence and unhappiness that results from this but he does this not in the sense I think of condemning the participants not in the sense of making judgments about how foolish and stupid people are and so on but he does it as part of a real philosophical enquiry how should politicians behave well what makes for good government what do good people do when they have to make decisions that affect the future of nations and peoples and so on for the other book that Miskawa is famous for he wrote quite a lot of stuff but apart from his history is a book about أخلاق about morals it's a philosophical treatise about what the good life should be now Miskawa was without doubt a pious and God fearing Muslim but it's not a book about religious ethics it's a book that stresses what we might call humanistic ethics it stresses moderation in all things avoidance of unnecessary cruelty thinking what you're going to do in advance taking into account other people's motives and so on and he uses the rich and really rather terrifying and shocking in many ways the story of the historical events to make these ethical points not often he doesn't stress it he doesn't bang on about it so to speak and bring it up front but his story is the way he chooses the stories of peoples lives illustrate exactly the points about what should good men do in power what is good government what is bad government what leads you to disaster what leads you to success how can you benefit your fellow men so for all these reasons I find reasons that go way beyond actually establishing what dates things happened and who was where and so on I think that both these great historians are in a way great minds who make a profound and very interesting contribution to our investigation of the human condition the investigation of all our human conditions Ladies and gentlemen thank you very much and that we had you right at the end it's all joy and all pleasure thank you very much you know I am very pleased I am fully satisfied with this I was wondering at the beginning how it would work but we had these excellent speakers we have enough of you working here


Once upon a time there was a very rich man who lost all his wealth. Unfortunately he became so obsessed with his loss that he couldn't think of anything else. Waking, sleeping, eating, drinking. All he could think about was the money that he had lost. Now one day obsessed as he was he had a very strange dream. In this dream a voice said to him tomorrow morning at exactly 11 o'clock a monk will walk past your house. This is not really a monk this is actually all of your money in disguise.  So as you can imagine the next morning the man is waiting anxiously outside his house when on the dot of 11 a monk walks past his gate.  Unfortunately however a barber was walking past the house at this very moment. He saw what happened and he thought to himself what a great way to make money. So he immediately ran to the closest temple and under pretext of wanting to feed them he invited 10 monks to come to his house.  You can imagine the chaos everyone was shouting the blood everywhere people heard the commotion they came running in they saw what was happening they dragged the barber off to court. The barber tried very hard to explain to the judge that he was doing exactly what the other man had done. He was trying to turn the monks into bags of gold but of course nobody was ready to listen to him and he was sentenced to death. So what's the moral of this story? As always I think the story has many lessons but for me the most important lesson is don't mindlessly imitate someone because you think that by copying their actions it'll lead you to the same kind of success. What we always get to see is people's last actions it's the visible elements of their success. Intelligent people understand that there has been a plan a process and a purpose that has gone before that. So by all means be inspired learn from others but first understand the point of what you're doing and why.


Everything you need to know about the WS1 spring 2022 update. You can go to the timestamps for the update categories you are interested in. For more information please look at the update notes on the WS1 website. 5th age PvP. After years of waiting PvP has entered the 5th age. Most importantly this brings a brand new currency blue arena tickets, meaning the current ones have been revoked and you will start from the bottom. A big difference from the 4th age is leagues. These are brackets with a specific level requirement and special rules. There are currently four leagues. The master league requires wizards to be level 40 to 50. The rule set for this league is wizards won't be able to crit spells and you are not allowed to use pre-enchanted spells. The legendary league requires wizards to be level 60 to 69. The rule set for this league is wizards won't be able to crit and you are not allowed to use pre-enchanted cards. The exalted league requires wizards to be level 100 to 109. The rule set for this league is no shadow pips meaning Shadow and Shadow Enhanced spells are disabled and no preenchanted cards. The Premiere League requires wizards to be level 140 to 150. The rule set for this league is no preenchanted cards. The PvP and Derby rating page have got a refresh and now have a similar UI to the Badge page. Once you click on the age you will get more information about your ratings. PvP will now work in seasons, each will last around two months. At the end of each season you will have to start at the bottom as a recruit again. Speaking of recruit there has been a slight change to the ranks and they can be seen on screen. These ranks now use an elo system which is similar to most other esports and generally make for a much more fair competitive competition. Instead of losing 16 rank for losing or gaining 16 rank for winning, the new system will give more rank for winning against a higher ranked player and less rank for losing against them. On the flip side, if you are higher ranked than the other player you will gain less rank beating them but lose more if you lose. Draws will now make both players lose rank, this is to try and stop draws from being a viable win condition. There is a new infraction system similar to the Beast Moon infraction system. The more infraction points you have the more likely you are to not be able to queue until the infractions have decayed over time. You can increase your infraction count by disconnecting during a match, this does include internet outages, abandoning an opponent before the match begins also known as Q dodging, and for both players when the match ends in a draw. Ambrose has given Diego funding to expand the arena, it is now a vast social area for those who love PVP, Beast Moon and Decathlon. With the bigger size there are vendors with new rewards for those who win arena tickets. Most notably there is a new crafting vendor Marco Artijano, he has recipes for brand new stitch gear to show off your rank and recipes for some gear that has been seen and packs in the past. There are now some new reagents specific to PVP that you can get during your battling triumphs. Gearchangers. Gear will now start offering multi-school stats to encourage mastering more than one school for both PVP and also PvE. Most notably some gear from Dragonspire, Chrysalis and Lemuria have been completely changed adding other schools stats to yours. Spellements. Spellements have been changed significantly in this update. There are now spellements for rank 1 to 6 spells for most schools. Balance wizards have spellament paths for Scarab, Scorpion, Locus Swarm, Spectral Blast, Hydra, Samurai and Savagepore. Plus a new spell from Alhazard, Gearhead Destroyer. Death wizards have spellement paths for Darkspite, Ghoul, Banshee, Vampire, Skeletal Pirate, Wraith, Deonite and Lord of Night. Fire wizards have spellement paths for Firecat, Fire Elf, Sunbird, Immolate, Phoenix, Halifn and Hephaestus. Ice wizards have spellement paths for Frostbeetle, Snow Serpent, Evil Snowman, Ice Wyvern, Colossus, Handsome for Maury, Winter Moon. Plus a new spell from Lydia Grey Rose, Blighthound. Life wizards have spellement paths for Imp, Leprechaun, Nature's Wrath, Seraph, Luminous Weaver and Goatmonk. Plus a new spell from Mulindawoo, Earthwalker. Myth wizards have spellement paths for Bloodbat, Troll, Cyclops, Cyclops Minion, Minotaur, Ninja Pigs, Keeper of the Flame and Athena Battleside. Plus a new spell from Cyrus Drake, Stone Colossus. Finally, Storm wizards have spellement paths for Thundersnake, Lightning Bats, Storm Shark, Kraken, Stormzilla, Triton, Catalan and Queen Calypso. If you need more help about spellements, Abna K. Doodle has a tutorial and he is located in the hub of every world. Spellements drop from bosses in the worlds related to the spells as long as they are on appropriate level. All wizards can collect spellements using the appropriate pet adventure talents, and wizards who have trained cantrips can use the magic touch spell on new chests with two other friends. Cantrips Speaking of cantrips, it's a new activity that lets your wizard cast magic outside the battle circle. You can start by talking to Abna K. Doodle in the hub of every world once you are level 25 or above. Cantrips has five different types, Flourish, Teleport, Radiance, Ritual and Sigil support spells. Flourish cantrips are a small emote-like action that let your character do various things, such as spin. Teleport cantrips let you teleport, pretty self-explanatory really.  Anyone inside the aura will get these effects. Ritual cantrips will allow you to cast a beam of magical energy at a target. When multiple wizards cast them at a ritual object, interesting things will happen. For example, you can find special chests that once open drop spellements. Sigil support cantrips are currently not available yet and will be coming in a future update. Cantrips spells have ranks and you can cast spells the same rank as you or below your rank. This is similar to fishing and gardening. Cantrips costs energy and you can gain XP to level up your cantrips. Level locking. With the introduction of PvP leagues, you are now able to lock your level so you can still quest but stay inside a league. There is a lock icon above your experience count in your character sheet. Clicking this brings up a warning and you can activate level locking. You can only do this when you are over level 50. Any experience gained while you are locked will go into an overflow count which will be added once you unlock your level. Be warned this could take a moment to calculate overflow experience once unlocking your level. Loyalty store. The loyalty program is a way to reward people with memberships. There is a vendor in the shopping district where you can spend loyalty tokens for packs, mounts, cosmetic gear, member benefit, elixirs, spellements, skeleton keys and more in the future. Every month members will get more loyalty tokens. The store will be updated frequently so you should always check it out. Beast moon. Venture into heap with the brand new beast moon map. Because of the lack of mana in this region, the map has a lot less pip wisps than normal. All the other maps have had their pip wisp count updated to match the mirage map. There are two new beast forms, the fire draconian and the death crocomummy.  He is strongest when healed up, allowing him to detonate his damage over times. To keep his health up he extends heal over times along with having the ability to cast some himself. The death crocomummy sacrifices himself to deal extra damage and heal his allies. He's got familiar death tools and also has the first drain that hits all enemies. The next few months rewards for both beast moon hunt and beast moon mayhem have been announced on the update notes. Unforgiving dead gauntlet. Head to the far off land of etembra and take a stab at the queen of the unforgiving dead. This new gauntlet can be crafted from pet reagents. You can buy the recipe from Lloyd Fallingweather in the chopping district. The gauntlet has three tiers starting at level 50. Get your friends and have a go. Social kiosk. This kiosk is for your adventure party to find new members or for those without an adventure party to find one. If you're the owner of the party you can add your party to the kiosk. You can add it to a specific category so you find someone who does similar activities to you. If you are not on a party you can easily find adventure parties and ask to be a member. The owner will either accept or decline you. If accepted you will be made a member of that party for one week. The owner can promote you to a permanent member any time during that week. If they don't after one week you will be removed from the party. Bug fixes and other changes. Players can now purchase an additional brick-a-brack elixir in each area of your house. The limit is now 400 items. Some items from the aquiline whore pack are now sellable for gold. Lawmaster has had several spells removed from her collection and they will instead be dropped as spellements from various sources in future updates. If you don't like looking at your most recent pet fail anymore you can trash them from the pet inspect window. There has been a fix to a few decathlon exploits. The camera angle in the quest release is now more flattering for dinho. Second chance chests have been added to more places in caramel and lemuria. The help section has been updated with the new spell icon so you know what they mean. There have been some UI and animation adjustments and also stability and performance fixes.


I just want you to know that I resent having to make this video because last night I saw everything everywhere all at once and it is better than every single one of these movies and I'm mad that I'm talking about them instead of it. I will do my best to not let that fact color the way I read all of these words that I wrote before I saw what might just be the best movie the best the best one it's the best one there aren't a lot of traditions on this youtube channel even the annual reflection that I did on the first and second anniversaries didn't happen at year three I'm not sure anything has survived into a third year until now today we cement the week air reviews reviewing the academy awards best picture nominees as a thing that I do every year probably I wanted to do more to celebrate the award season I had planned full reviews of every best international nominee but when it came time I wasn't able to give worst person in the world the effort it deserved let alone all five so this is what I've got for you sorry one slight difference this year versus previous is that I have not actually reviewed any of the nominees prior to this so all of these opinions are nice and fresh for the channel also where I have historically gone in alphabetical order this time we're going in preferential order least to most loved I didn't actively hate any of these movies the way some people I know did and I would recommend most of them though none are as good as worst person in the world anyways I barely scratched the surface on most of these and the video is still too long so let's just get on with it there are several entries on the back half of this list that when taken on concept alone feel like pretty bad ideas of them I think one does a fairly good job handling it one does a not so good job handling it and then you've got king Richard the worst movie nominated for best picture in 2022 it is a perfectly serviceable execution of a baffling concept hey you know serena and venus williams two of the greatest tennis players of all time and women who broke all sorts of boundaries let's make a movie about their dad what the fuck I get that the sisters parentage played a key role in their eventual sport superstardom I get that Richard Williams wrote a 78 page plan for two children who hadn't been born yet that would turn them into all-time greats and and that's interesting that that worked out it's pretty wild that that's some cool stuff that would have been great to include in a movie told from the perspective of the sisters whose lives were prescribed prior to their damn conceptions will smith gives a great performance he'll probably win an oscar and I will be glad to see that will smith has an oscar because I had a willenium cd when I was a kid so you know lifelong fan right here but this exact performance would have been guaranteed a best supporting turn for him as well and it would have been a much more interesting performance because we would have been able to see how frankly fucked up the whole situation was like king Richard is told through the lens of a total weirdo so it's just accepted that this guy controlling his children's lives is good actually and that is a bad thing to take at face value actually yeah it's cool that it worked out but it it sure would have been nice if we saw Venus Williams growing frustration at her dad's control over her schedule instead of like her coaches so much focus is put on people who really shouldn't have been the focus of this movie to the point where they couldn't even tell the story of both of the women and so we're just told that Serena became the goat instead of getting any real sense of how that happened I don't understand it and I don't like it now before you go and get mad at me for having a better opinion than you know let me say that I actually think that Belfast is a better movie than the next entry on the list and would recommend it to more people but it also literally put me to sleep I had to like pause it about 30 minutes in on a Friday afternoon and then slept for two hours we're not for this video I don't think I would have finished it because I was just so bored I don't have a problem with slow movies many of this year's nominees are very slow and arguably the slowest is at the top of the list but this is the only one that is truly boring I had two distinct problems with the film one is that little boys are annoying and Belfast did nothing to convince me otherwise I don't know what that kid's name was but he sucks and I hated every single time the movie tried to tell me his story instead of his parents I don't care that the kid wants to do well in maths so that he can look at a girl or whatever give me more of the sweet sweet bitter familial conflict where the parents are trying to wrestle with the danger of their current location against the desire to stay within their community but also they're trying to work and make money so that this deeply uninteresting child can grow up to become an Oscar nominated film director but as much as I like those conflicts they still kind of didn't work for me because all of this feels so artificial Belfast feels less like a real place where people actually live than it does a couple of roads on a studio lot the buildings don't feel like houses but facades no one lives here so I couldn't connect with the idea that this family might be compelled to stay because they're not in a place and I get that it's trying to evoke this old-timey feel but they didn't do a particularly good job of that either like why was this movie shot digitally Kenneth Brenna has never shot digitally why was this his first one the movie is way too crisp for what it seems to be going for and I was never not aware of how modern this desperately trying to seem old thing really was a few people asked me to do a full review of don't look up and in the immediate aftermath of watching it I definitely had some things to say but before I could hunker down and start writing I read a bunch of takes far better than mine would have been on both political and artistic grounds so it didn't happen the best came from a pseudonymous max fisher at the Hollywood forever sub-stack it is not a movie about climate change it's a movie about twitter and specifically writer-director Adam McKay's experience on twitter and if you think of it through that lens it is definitely a lot more interesting it isn't good necessarily but but interesting because it's not actually interesting as the allegory for climate change that McKay proclaims it to be as Matthew Eglacius notes in his also-on-sub-stack piece about the film don't look up provides a woefully inaccurate view of the actual politics going on the movie obsesses over the media and celebrities as though the reason the arctics are currently as warm as we've ever recorded them being is because we care about Ariana Grande's love life and and also seems to believe that there is some silver bullet plan that everyone agrees is good but isn't happening because of big tech instead of like the fossil fuel industry I mean sat satire inevitably simplifies complex subjects but don't look up goes past simple to just dumb like my overriding feeling when the credits rolled was sure I guess because I didn't have anything unique to say every idea is old and played out it's almost as though McKay felt like he was in a race to out ridiculous the real world and in the process just lost sight of the message and yet I actually enjoyed the act of watching it more than I enjoyed watching Belfast I like watching talented people be talented and this movie has so many talented people giving frankly more effort than the project deserves so I mean that was that was nice I guess but you know movies also feature talented people being talented the the next seven on the list so just watch those instead everything going forward is something I liked at least a lot they may be in an order but all of this is a recommendation and I mean to start with how am I not going to recommend the latest Paul Thomas Anderson I'm hardly the world's biggest PTA stan and at this point I will probably never get around to seeing Magnolia no matter how good film bros tell me it is but even with the movies that I don't like as much I can't deny his craft and licorice pizza sees that firing on all cylinders no one could think that Belfast was actually made in anything but our current decade but if someone told me that licorice pizza was a lost film from the 70s I would have at least considered believing them it's a it's a vibes movie I just got vibes for days of course the film doesn't come without controversy and while broie deschanel said basically everything I would want to but better here's a summary of my thoughts I went in knowing that it was about an illegal age-gapped relationship though I had wrongly gendered the participants as it turns out the 25 year old is a woman while the 15 year old is a boy and it's important to call them such because like who is that not following the half year age plus seven rule lady but it's not as though the movie just treats this as a as a good cool thing there there is no actually illegal activity I think there's plenty of weird fraternizing and some scenes that sure did make me uncomfortable there in that movie theater but again it's treated as weird and is meant to be uncomfortable which is good I really hated the ending though and by ending I mean literally the last 10 seconds if the whole thing ended one line of voiceover dialogue earlier than it did it would probably be at least one or two slots higher on this list but it left a real bad taste in my mouth still you want to talk about talented people being talented so many scenes bring in random people you've definitely seen before doing some genuinely fantastic work and like is it all strictly necessary no but it's all about the vibes and when it feels this good just hanging out who's gonna mind a little meander in the summer between my junior and senior years of high school my local summer theater put on a production of west side story I played Tony and I was fine you can see a few scenes on youtube in a heck of low quality and I honestly don't know if the off-keyness was actually me or just the bad recording but it's been more than 10 years since that mattered anyways until recently that was my only experience with the musical I never saw the original film and though I had gotten tickets to see the 2020 revival Broadway shut down before I got the chance so when I heard that Steven Spielberg was directing his first ever musical and it was a new adaptation I was excited and sure enough it was fucking wild but specifically for me and probably not as much for you like aside from the fact that I saw it at the movie theater on the corner of 68th street and Broadway in Manhattan New York where much of the film takes place each new scene brought with it a flood of memories mostly good with the occasional not so much it was honestly a little difficult for me to focus on the movie at times because I was so caught up in my own little world and what a deeply unpleasant teenager I was anyways well we had to spray tan white kids to play Puerto Ricans Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner decided to really lean into the culture of these characters adding Spanish dialogue and refusing to subtitle it for those of us who couldn't be bothered to pay attention in high school Spanish this choice goes a long way towards making these sharks etc feel like actual people and less like scary outsiders who the jets might justifiably hate now the jets are the bad guys here they always were really but this movie leans into it it's kind of fucked up how relevant it all feels keeping the same framework but just amping up the tension like seven percent my only real issue other than Ansel Elgort not being particularly good at any level is that is that he's really just too old Romeo and Juliet works because their children and children do stupid things like think that they fell in love at first sight and that their world will end without the person that they've just met adults don't do that and if they do the rest of us cringe about it both romantic leads in this movie are explicitly adults and highlighting that undercuts a lot of the drama by making what happens to them pathetic sad instead of emotional sad but also come on this movie is a stunning and sumptuous spectacle from a man who understands the basic tools of filmmaking as well as anyone who has ever existed Steven Spielberg directs the shit out of this movie and makes it look easy it is an audio visual treat and it would have been a lovely capper to a shockingly prolific year for Hollywood musicals if only anybody actually saw it speaking of which actually very little to say about nightmare alley other than that I really liked it it's the kind of movie you don't see much a weird mid-budget project that may be based on a novel but really is basically an original Guillermo del Toro has just been doing his own thing for the past few years not really concerned about where the rest of the industry is trending and I love that for him he won an Oscar and decided to make this a bleak fairy tale 1940s with style for years and of course it is because del Toro is good as fucking making movies and he made this one good as fuck unfortunately we can't talk about nightmare alley without talking about the fact that I didn't even know nightmare alley was a thing that existed until it was already in theaters at which point I saw a single poster in a single subway station and was like wait Guillermo del Toro has a new movie which is to say the Disney of it all fuck Disney the acquisition of fox by the house of mouse was obviously a bad thing for the industry and you can really feel that in the way that both nightmare alley and west side story were kind of fucking buried just as you can feel it in the fact that the erotic psychological thriller deep water which was co-produced by the studio formally known as 20th century fox was completely pulled from theatrical release and unceremoniously dropped on hulu now to their credit searchlight pictures has continued to acquire and distribute some interesting and niche films since the acquisition so I don't know what their mistreatment of del Toro's latest is actually about but fuck them for doing it anyway nightmare alley is great and disney is terrible did you know that in 2010 the new zealand government made it effectively impossible for film crews to unionize by turning them into independent contractors the so-called hobbit law took power out of the hands of workers because hollywood wanted a pretty place that they could do all of the things that they're not allowed to do domestically because of the gosh dang labor movement and while the law was revised in 2019 to technically allow collective bargaining although you know without the ability to strike aka have any real power in the bargains I sure was sad when I learned that and it puts a bad taste in my mouth anytime I see a hollywood production taking place over there which is to say those mountains in the power of the dog look less like montana than they do exploitation but that's just a fun fact for you to chew on doesn't really have anything to do with jane campion's latest film it's a when this seemed destined to win the big prize this year until its director said some things she shouldn't have and soured it for everyone this was the last of the nominees that I saw less than a week ago actually I put it off because I heard it was a pretty tough movie to watch but also because I don't like westerns and while I would eventually realize that it's not really a western it sure looks like one and that's most of the problem for me like many on this list the power of the dog is a slow burn and for a while I was almost bored not belfast bored but not sure where it was going in a way that I hadn't yet piqued my interest but then it started to feel different tense unnerving the stillness became eerie and it continued to transform before my eyes until literally the final shot at which point I understood what it was that I had just watched and wow what a ride I appreciate the first half a lot more in retrospect and I have no doubt that a second viewing knowing where it's all going will reveal all sorts of little bits that will just make it even better it may not be my top choice but I'd feel real good about this one winning the big prize although weird people who make ward predictions their business think that the wins have changed towards a movie that's just a little bit more my thing I watched kota on my laptop on a northeast regional amtrak train it's not a great environment for movie watching there are frequent loud announcements and stops every 20 or so minutes so people can get on or off the train it's annoying and despite that kota made me tear up three separate times the film follows ruby a child of deaf adults and the only hearing person in her family of four who wants to be a singer and it turns out is pretty good at it but she has to leave her family and become her own person in order to see that dream come to fruition it's basically every coming of age story ever a really good incarnation of that same story and also there are deaf people in it which in the context of the movie doesn't really feel like a big deal but obviously it is I mean if it weren't for that kota wouldn't be up for an oscar let alone a potential frontrunner but since it's being recognized more for its representation than for the fact that it's a really good coming of age movie I can't not mention that it is somewhat controversial in its portrayal and look no community is a monolith you cannot say that ex group of people feels why way because you're talking about humans and humans have wildly different opinions about basic tenets of reality so like nah but the response to this film from actual deaf people does seem split one of my patrons is married to a deaf person and apparently they loved it others don't there's a viral tweet thread by jenna become a writer sensitivity reader and perhaps most critically a deaf parent of a hearing child and she hates the way this movie portrays deaf competence and while I sort of disagree in the sense that I don't think the plot contrivances make the rossie family actually seem as helpless as she says it does and the one I don't personally feel this way so it's unrealistic that this character would is just always a bad argument to make in any situation her general point that the movie doesn't really acknowledge the legal frameworks that exist to help people in some of the sorts of situations we see depicted as well as her questions about how things were going in the family before ruby was able to sign on their behalf are good ones fair enough it would be nice if those things had been addressed and I'm sure that there are ways that the movie could have done it without completely undercutting the drama it's a shame they didn't but I have seen comparisons to green book and those are fucking absurd and can only have been made by people who haven't seen green book a movie wherein a historical white man explains to a historical black man how to eat fried chicken because comedy you know what kota does for comedy it has ruby's father make her translate him signing about how hot his wife is to a doctor who told him to ease off the sex it's great this movie is great spider man no way home is a good movie a very good one even I had more fun watching it than I did any other marvel movie in 2021 partially because spider man is my favorite marvel character but mostly because spider man is my favorite marvel character as a direct result of me seeing the samurai me spider men as a youth and so getting to see my spider man be a spider man again was pretty fucking cool and though I never saw the amazing spider man I do like Andrew Garfield so that was like unexpectedly delightful I bring this up one because basically everything great about that movie has nothing to do with the marvel cinematic universe or even disney in general so fuck disney but also because the idea that spider man no way home deserved any oscar nominations other than the fee effects one it received is fucking absurd maybe marvel will get a best picture nom someday but first they should make better movies they're good but they sure as heck ain't the best dune is and it's a reminder that incredibly expensive effects heavy science fiction movies about white boy saviors can absolutely get awards recognition beyond the technical stuff they just need to be good enough to deserve it I wrote a smiley face here because the idea of a seething marvel fan smashing their keyboard to complain in the comments that I no longer read is funny to me but being honest I know that I'm preaching to the choir here anyways dune is so fucking good especially in IMAX I didn't know that nearly half of the movie was going to fill up the entirety of AMC Lincoln Square's 80 foot tall IMAX screen none of the promotional materials even at the IMAX theater showed that we would have more there was mention of IMAX formatting but it wasn't shot with IMAX film so I don't know I didn't expect much and then the second shot filled my entire vision and huge swaths of the film would continue to do so it's fascinating to me that the home video version of the film is entirely in 2.4 to 1 and they didn't have shifting aspect ratios for the scenes that were done differently I can't even fathom how much time and money went into creating effects for the select group of people lucky enough to see it on a 5x4 screen dune is true spectacle an exceptional example of world building that doesn't get bogged down in needless exposition giving you only what you need when you need it did I understand everything that happened the first time around no of course not but I understood what I needed to how the characters related to each other and what they wanted it's just solid fucking storytelling and look I will cop to being a Viennese stan he is right up there near if not at the top of my list of best working directors his ability to take these enormous films and make them feel really special and like they came from a clear creative vision and not a gosh damn boardroom is admirable everyone is killing it the production design magnificent the visual effects stunning the sound oh my god the scene where Paul and Jessica are being kidnapped and get to really unleash the voice on their captors was the coolest thing I saw on screen in 2021 and probably cooler than anything I saw offscreen if we're being honest but it's also just one amazing moment in a movie chock full of them hats off glasses raised dune's amazing but it's not as good as drive my car look science fiction spectacle is cool and all but true cinema is three hours of watching a Japanese man sit in the back of a car and listen to a recording of his dead wife reading lines from Uncle Vanya and that may sound like a joke but only a little bit drive my car is an exceptional little film and one that I think benefits greatly from being seen in a theater I know I have talked about slowness a few times but this movie is really slow and I don't think it's too slow and I was never bored but I know that it would not have had nearly the effect on me had say I watched it on an Amtrak northeast regional train it is a movie that you need to sit with and commit to and if you do you will be handsomely rewarded I've never seen or even heard of anything like the theatrical production at the center of drive my car where each of the actors speaks Chekhov's original Russian lines translated to their respective spoken or in one case sign language Japanese Mandarin Korean Korean sign language Tagalog Malay around and around all practiced in rehearsals run in English the same story being told across cultures proves the universality of these experiences it doesn't matter who is saying what how emotions transcend language and super titles can fill in the gaps or subtitles as everyone who sees the movie will eventually need for one or most of the 10 different languages spoken or signed the one inch tall barriers that Bong Joon-ho talked about at the Oscars two years ago are actually a uniting factor here I'm not sure there is a single person on earth who could experience this narrative fully without them and that's kind of cool honestly I don't know this is a movie that makes you contemplate how you communicate and connect the role that language and art have in the way that you see the world it's not a pretentious film but it's a heady one and if you're not willing to seriously engage with what it's showing and telling you you'll probably be left cold but if you commit to it you will find that it's emotional core burns white fucking hot and there's nothing you can do but feel everything thank you so much for watching thank you particularly to my patrons my mom my cat cat Saracota Benjamin Schiff Anthony Cole Elliot Fowler Greg Lucina Kojo Phil Bates Willow I am the sword Maddie Zimmerman Claire Bear Taylor Lindy's angiomedicine design and the folks who'd rather be read than said you like this video great if not too bad you want to see more please subscribe hope to see in the next one