[seqfan] Re: Arabic Poetry Sequences

Ali Sada pemd70 at yahoo.com
Mon Sep 2 05:43:42 CEST 2019


 Hi Everyone,
Thank you for your interest. 

I admit Itried to submit these sequences for personal reasons. I wanted to see the nameof Al-Farahidi in OEIS. I thought it would be appropriate since he was arguablythe greatest lexicographer of his time, and OEIS has many lexicography-basedsequences.

Searchingthis subject led me to find the groundbreaking works of contemporary Arab-speakingscholars like Dr. Mohammed Khashan, Dr. Nizar Habash, Dr. Mourad Gridach, andothers about Arabic prosody and Morphological analysis.

Brad’s remarkis excellent. I shouldn’t be the final authority on this subject. I simplified the rhythms into 0’s and 1’s, while Dr.Khashan, a much more knowledgeable researcher, used 1,2,3 and 4 instead. In hisopinion, representing Arabic prosody with numbers would make it easier forscholars to study prosody and link it to other fields. I should also mention thatmany prominent Arabic prosody experts mightnot accept Dr. Khashan’s methods. They don’t like the idea of mixing math with poetry.

Anotherpersonal reason is that it is frustrating to see that Arabic-speaking scholarslike Frahidi, Beiruni, Ibn Al-Haitham, Karaji, and many others are put in thebackground. A Google search for bin Laden, for example, would show much moreresults than the sum of searches for all Arabic-speaking scholars combined (201million results for bin Laden vs. 78,000 for Farahidi.) 
However, adding sequences to OEIS should not be basedon personal reasons.

Thank youall for your responses.

Best,

Ali

    On Sunday, September 1, 2019, 11:21:30 PM EDT, Neil Sloane <njasloane at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 Brad,  You are mistaken, the OEIS does not have a pro-Western bias.
We have a great many sequences from the Middle East, India, China, Japan,
Australia.
We do have a pro-scientific bias, but that is not the same thing.
(Submissions do have to be in English and use Arabic numerals and ASCII
characters: if that is a pro-Western bias, so be it.)

In my opinion, the Arabic poetry sequences do not belong in the OEIS.



On Sun, Sep 1, 2019 at 9:47 PM Brad Klee <bradklee at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Ali, Peter, and others,
>
> Thanks for this interesting discussion--it's one of the more diverse
> that I've read on sequence fanatics lately. I don't currently have a
> vote, but if I did, it would go after Peter's. I am also in favour of
> trying to figure out how to encode tala matrices as integer
> sequences or integer tables.
>
> It is no easy task to analyse cultural products, even slightly unnatural,
> so referees and editors would need to take extra time to make sure the
> content is correct.
>
> Ali Sada's encoding must be consistent with other analyses, including
> wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_prosody . If sufficient
> agreement is not found, the submission would need to be rejected on
> grounds of possible inconsistency.
>
> I don't think the pro-western bias of OEIS is at all a secret, but
> those involved in steering should be concerned if this exclusion
> scheme is a desirable feature of the knowledge service.
>
> Thanks
>
> --Brad
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 30, 2019 at 4:50 AM Peter Luschny <peter.luschny at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > For these three reasons, I think that the proposed sequences
> > have their place in the OEIS. Provided they are accompanied
> > by carefully selected references and their encoding is clearly
> > explained. Which of course can happen on a blog page that will
> > be linked to, as Giovanni suggests.
> >
> > Peter
>
> --
> Seqfan Mailing list - http://list.seqfan.eu/
>

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