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Learning Arabic was like alternating moments of elation with moments of soul-shaking harshness and despair. The language is vast rather than difficult, with dozens of ways to form plurals and words that vary from region to region and town to town. Every time a sign of progress appears, it seems to get deeper beneath you, like a coastal shelf. Famous Arabists like Gertrude Bell, who lamented that she could only pronounce the Arabic “h” with one finger on her tongue, and Tim Mackintosh-Smith, who spent years writing about Reading about their early struggles offers only modest solace. Another world: “Land of Dictionaries”.
However, the academic rigor was a small price to pay for the chance to catch up. After spending the better part of two years in Baghdad as a reporter, I was tired of playing the stupid Westerner, constantly passing blank glances between interpreters and interviewees. The scattered phrases I knew only seemed to emphasize my ignorance. Wayne Allynfjar? (“Where was the explosion?”) or Shakumaku? (“How are you doing?”) and a condescending pat on the back. When my boss offered me a year of intensive language training with him, I jumped at the chance.
For someone who only knows European languages, stepping into Arabic means discovering a world of vocabulary that is endlessly strange, yet arranged in strange orders. Some words have page after page of definitions, seemingly covering all possible meanings. Others are surprisingly accurate. One night, while flipping through a dictionary, I came across a word that meant “cut off the top of an okra.” There are nice verbs like sara, which means “to leave at night.”something comical like Tabaadawa, “Pretending to be a Bedouin.”and just plain weird daviva“There are a lot of lizards.” daviva (perhaps applied to towns and regions) is medieval, but we will not ignore Dr. Zawahri to revive it.
The language can be surprisingly vague to Western ears. I’ve always been bothered by Arabic’s tendency to ignore the distinction between “a lot” and “too much.” I’ll never forget my Iraqi friend saying out loud in English, “There are too many black people here,” as we walked through a crowded Brooklyn street.
At the same time, all Arabic words have simple three- or four-letter roots with systematically derived cognates that can develop any meaning from a single word. For example, the word “cook” has a predictable relationship with words like “kitchen” and “dish.”
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