People are unbelievably in love with Allah here. There are a handful of phrases they use all the time, "inshahallah," "maashahallah," "humdoolillah," "al-hamakallah," and the most popular "bismillah," or translated "in the name of Allah." I fully support doing things in God's name, no problem there, but the hackneyed use of it drives me crazy. On a good third of all of my students' work, be it writing assignments quizzes worksheets, they have written on the top of the page either in English, "In the name of God," or the same translated in Arabic script. That is easy to deal with, when they begin speeches by saying "bismillah," in Arabic and under their breath, it's then that I really don't know what to do. Sometimes I chastise them for using Arabic in the classroom, but most often I just let it slide.
The time that irritates me the most is on mass transit, which are these Toyota Hiace vans which need more than a little TLC. The dabub experience is something that words will never do justice. To flag one down you stand on the street and wave a pointed finger in one of three directions which means practically nothing but everybody does it anyways. Then they'll stop and you get on and climb over two fold down seats to sit in the back where the ceiling is low and you have to crane your neck or hunch over and the springs of the seat are sticking into your cheeks. Then it takes off at breakneck speed and detritus from the ceiling or seats or just the dusty road are blowing into your face on a hot wind, before the driver slams on the brakes twenty yards after they started because someone wants to get off (and here, get off is more correct than get out because the sliding van door is permanently open). But it's the person in the very back and four people must get out to let them off which requires folding down two seats and then everyone must pile back in before the dabub goes again. And repeat twenty yards later. When full, the dabub can uncomfortably seat fifteen people including the driver. But, there is an etiquette for public gender mixing. Men and women do not sit on the same bench, or row of three. So to accommodate a boarding woman there is a big shuffling and consolidating of men to clear up seats for the ninjas. Then, when you want them to stop to let you off all you do is tap coins on some metal which they hate, just knock on the metal which most of the time they don't hear so well, or shout "nazil," which I have no idea what that means but it seems to do the trick because then half of the passengers also shout "nazil" to the driver and he slams on the brakes, four people get off and seats are folded and you squirrel out onto the street and give anybody in the front seat (driver or passenger) your twenty riyals. Today, as I was riding in a dabub to somewhere, this shuffling to let people off occurred a bunch and the man closest to the road had to reboard four times. Each time, as he was climbing in, he said, "bismillah." Piousness has ceased to impress me.
The other common phrase is "inshahallah," which means, "if Allah will allow it." It is used everywhere at all times. In the classroom it's really annoying:
"All right class that's it for today, see you tomorrow."
Followed by sixteen voices, "inshahallah teacher."
Or, "No homework tonight, just study for the quiz tomorrow."
"Inshahallah teacher."
Or, "Remember that your writing homework is due at the beginning of class on Saturday" (like a Monday, after the weekend).
"Inshahallah teacher."
This really gets on my nerves. I think, "No, not 'inshahallah teacher.' If you don't do the homework then there will be consequences handed out by me, not Allah." Teaching is not a great megalomaniac rehab. Recently though, I've learned how to use this magical phrase, on the dabub. Leaving certain busy areas, the dabub waits until it is completely full before going, and for some reason I'm always the first person on so I climb into the far back and wait ten minutes until it is full with a good multiple of three gender ratio. Coming from the mall to my house is too far to walk but still a short distance. When I shouted "nazil" and the following chorus urged the driver to stop, these three women sitting on the folded down seats glared at me through their burqa slits and contemptuously asked me, "nazil?" As in, are you really serious that I have to get up and off to let some white punk in the back off?
So I replied, "inshahallah," and there was no more animosity. These are magic words.
Showing posts with label linguisms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linguisms. Show all posts
10 December 2009
09 June 2009
powpowpower
Arabic is not an easy language to learn. For every rule, there are ten exceptions to it, at least, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
First, there are more than a handful of letters that don't exist in English nor in any other Occidental language. There are letters for the four 'k' sounds, two 'h' sounds, two 's' sounds, two 't' sounds, two 'd' sounds, three 'th' sounds; there are no 'p' or 'v' or 'ch' sounds. There is also the ordinary glottal stop, as well as the "violent, tense glottal stop" which is made by using muscles whose only other function is to aid vomiting. There is also the dark 'l' found only in Allah. The most difficult though, is the special H, which unfortunately is pretty common. Of the vowels: there are three written, two of which are also consonants, and three unwritten. They make 8 standard vowel sounds. More, certain letters are elided in pronunciation by their proximity to sun or moon letters. Arabic is phonetic, which would be nice if all of the sounds are written, and if it were physically possible to pronounce them all. But the phoneticism is still handy, although since it's script (or Squiggley as it is more aptly known) there are hundreds of accepted ligatures. Each letter has a few different forms depending on where it is in a word. Arabic reads right to left, except numbers. The numbers used in English are actually Arabic numbers and the numbers used here are actually Indian, don't ask me why. Transliterations are always different too, some are phonetic and some aren't, some use letters where others use apostrophes, and the apostrophe could mean any number of sounded or not-sounded consonants (really, I don't even know what a syllable is anymore).
Lexus depends always, entirely on context. There are three words which can mean yes or no depending on the question's context. I read a word the other day which could mean white, black, or light red. The joke is that most words mean one thing, the opposite, or something about a camel. Grammar structure is different than English, but I won't go into that.
That all is actually the easy part, first you must decide which Arabic to study. Fus-Ha, Quranic, Modern Standard (MSA), or whatever local dialect is spoken where you are. As I understand it, Fus-Ha is the traditional language that all current Arabic has stemmed from. When the Quran was being written, scholars decided that Fus-Ha wasn't adequate to write the holy scripture, so they pretty much invented Quranic Arabic out of love for Allah (which, good grief, that's pretty awesome). By studying Quranic you would inevitably learn Fus-Ha, but unless you're devoted to reading the Quran, there's not much point. MSA was formatted for the business world and as far as I know nobody uses it, but for some reason two-thirds of all learn Arabic books I found in the states were teaching MSA. What's spoken everywhere is any number of local dialects. In Aden they speak Adeni, and cannot be understood 100km away, at all. Moroccan Arabic is immensely different from Yemeni, as is Egyptian or Lebanese. The good thing is that newspapers and tv all use Fus-Ha, so most people understand Fus-Ha. The bad thing is that when you speak Fus-Ha only, you're responded to in the local dialect. A friend of mine who speaks Arabic actually just went to Morocco and said he relied on his French. Since humanity basically started in Yemen, there's a language tie here also. In Yemen as a country, and Ta'izz as a city there exists the purest Arabic and quite a number of people come to study as a result. That, and it's wicked cheap if you exclude the travel overhead. Having a native speaker is essential, so studying outside of the Middle East is fairly futile.
Arabic is difficult to learn for more than just linguistic reasons, but political as well. Within the American media industry there are only three Arabic translators, and given the geolinguistic issues I mentioned above, I find it hard to reason that those three can accurately interperet concepts coming from somewhere that is so foreign to American that it is almost its opposite. The three are all registered republicans, and they all recieved their language training from the military. In fact, outside of the military, there exist only three scholarships available to Americans for studying Arabic. As of 2007, there haven't been any American Fulbrighters awarded Arabic language study in almost ten years. This reeks. And I'll tell you why:
People here want you to learn their language. My students are always teaching me words. As soon as my classes learned how to give advice using 'should,' they all told me I should learn Arabic. Every single Adeni I've met has asked me where I'm studying Arabic and when I tell them I'm not they offer to teach me or to find someone who will. Whenever a foreigner says one word in Arabic, we are immediately met with the excited response, "Oh you know Arabic?!" People here are incredibly kind and helpful to begin with, but extravagantly so when it comes to their language.
So, I'm very slowly learning Arabic, both Fus-Ha and Adeni. I can count to six, I can tell people where I'm from and that I'm a teacher and that I don't know Arabic, I can buy produce mostly with pointing, I can use mass transit which strangely enough involves even more pointing, and I can tell people that I really like Yemen and think it's beautiful. Well, in so many words.
First, there are more than a handful of letters that don't exist in English nor in any other Occidental language. There are letters for the four 'k' sounds, two 'h' sounds, two 's' sounds, two 't' sounds, two 'd' sounds, three 'th' sounds; there are no 'p' or 'v' or 'ch' sounds. There is also the ordinary glottal stop, as well as the "violent, tense glottal stop" which is made by using muscles whose only other function is to aid vomiting. There is also the dark 'l' found only in Allah. The most difficult though, is the special H, which unfortunately is pretty common. Of the vowels: there are three written, two of which are also consonants, and three unwritten. They make 8 standard vowel sounds. More, certain letters are elided in pronunciation by their proximity to sun or moon letters. Arabic is phonetic, which would be nice if all of the sounds are written, and if it were physically possible to pronounce them all. But the phoneticism is still handy, although since it's script (or Squiggley as it is more aptly known) there are hundreds of accepted ligatures. Each letter has a few different forms depending on where it is in a word. Arabic reads right to left, except numbers. The numbers used in English are actually Arabic numbers and the numbers used here are actually Indian, don't ask me why. Transliterations are always different too, some are phonetic and some aren't, some use letters where others use apostrophes, and the apostrophe could mean any number of sounded or not-sounded consonants (really, I don't even know what a syllable is anymore).
Lexus depends always, entirely on context. There are three words which can mean yes or no depending on the question's context. I read a word the other day which could mean white, black, or light red. The joke is that most words mean one thing, the opposite, or something about a camel. Grammar structure is different than English, but I won't go into that.
That all is actually the easy part, first you must decide which Arabic to study. Fus-Ha, Quranic, Modern Standard (MSA), or whatever local dialect is spoken where you are. As I understand it, Fus-Ha is the traditional language that all current Arabic has stemmed from. When the Quran was being written, scholars decided that Fus-Ha wasn't adequate to write the holy scripture, so they pretty much invented Quranic Arabic out of love for Allah (which, good grief, that's pretty awesome). By studying Quranic you would inevitably learn Fus-Ha, but unless you're devoted to reading the Quran, there's not much point. MSA was formatted for the business world and as far as I know nobody uses it, but for some reason two-thirds of all learn Arabic books I found in the states were teaching MSA. What's spoken everywhere is any number of local dialects. In Aden they speak Adeni, and cannot be understood 100km away, at all. Moroccan Arabic is immensely different from Yemeni, as is Egyptian or Lebanese. The good thing is that newspapers and tv all use Fus-Ha, so most people understand Fus-Ha. The bad thing is that when you speak Fus-Ha only, you're responded to in the local dialect. A friend of mine who speaks Arabic actually just went to Morocco and said he relied on his French. Since humanity basically started in Yemen, there's a language tie here also. In Yemen as a country, and Ta'izz as a city there exists the purest Arabic and quite a number of people come to study as a result. That, and it's wicked cheap if you exclude the travel overhead. Having a native speaker is essential, so studying outside of the Middle East is fairly futile.
Arabic is difficult to learn for more than just linguistic reasons, but political as well. Within the American media industry there are only three Arabic translators, and given the geolinguistic issues I mentioned above, I find it hard to reason that those three can accurately interperet concepts coming from somewhere that is so foreign to American that it is almost its opposite. The three are all registered republicans, and they all recieved their language training from the military. In fact, outside of the military, there exist only three scholarships available to Americans for studying Arabic. As of 2007, there haven't been any American Fulbrighters awarded Arabic language study in almost ten years. This reeks. And I'll tell you why:
People here want you to learn their language. My students are always teaching me words. As soon as my classes learned how to give advice using 'should,' they all told me I should learn Arabic. Every single Adeni I've met has asked me where I'm studying Arabic and when I tell them I'm not they offer to teach me or to find someone who will. Whenever a foreigner says one word in Arabic, we are immediately met with the excited response, "Oh you know Arabic?!" People here are incredibly kind and helpful to begin with, but extravagantly so when it comes to their language.
So, I'm very slowly learning Arabic, both Fus-Ha and Adeni. I can count to six, I can tell people where I'm from and that I'm a teacher and that I don't know Arabic, I can buy produce mostly with pointing, I can use mass transit which strangely enough involves even more pointing, and I can tell people that I really like Yemen and think it's beautiful. Well, in so many words.
02 May 2009
mayday
One session down. Matt's moved to Sana'a so I have a room to myself (with no view) now. Taryn went with him over the break and got her life stolen from her. Over lunch she told me the tale today -which is our first day back- and it sounds pretty horrific.
I on the other hand, spent a bunch of my time off nerdily reading about grammar and punctuation and usage (turns out the Guide to American Usage by Bryan Garner which I picked up in a thrift store in Bend of all places is the new Bible, or Linguinomicon rather, having pretty much ended the usage wars haughtily faught in the imaginations of dictionary and grammar editors). Not that that's going to do any good for my writing but it just means I'll have more self-confidence when I correct your terrible grammar. Which reminds me, this site is all around fantastic and you should check it out.
Anyways, Taryn got her passport stolen along with all of her banking information and any other personal information. And this happened in Sana'a, not Aden where she lives and works. Fortunately the American Embassy is in Sana'a, right? Physically, yes; effectively, it doesn't exist. How do you prove your citizenship without a passport, and how do you get anywhere in a beauracracy quagmired by bribery after you've lost all access to your money? Her situation right now is the nightmare of any foreigner; I'm feeling homesick, vicariously exposed, and am not taking this incident lightly. Her first vacation was ruined, decimated really, and basically invalidated her first three months of work here or at least that's how I would feel. After two months she should be able to get a new passport so that she can then reapply for all of the visas and not be living and working in Yemen illegally. It's a crappy situation for her right now that makes us all feel slightly unsettled until it gets sorted out.
I on the other hand, spent a bunch of my time off nerdily reading about grammar and punctuation and usage (turns out the Guide to American Usage by Bryan Garner which I picked up in a thrift store in Bend of all places is the new Bible, or Linguinomicon rather, having pretty much ended the usage wars haughtily faught in the imaginations of dictionary and grammar editors). Not that that's going to do any good for my writing but it just means I'll have more self-confidence when I correct your terrible grammar. Which reminds me, this site is all around fantastic and you should check it out.
Anyways, Taryn got her passport stolen along with all of her banking information and any other personal information. And this happened in Sana'a, not Aden where she lives and works. Fortunately the American Embassy is in Sana'a, right? Physically, yes; effectively, it doesn't exist. How do you prove your citizenship without a passport, and how do you get anywhere in a beauracracy quagmired by bribery after you've lost all access to your money? Her situation right now is the nightmare of any foreigner; I'm feeling homesick, vicariously exposed, and am not taking this incident lightly. Her first vacation was ruined, decimated really, and basically invalidated her first three months of work here or at least that's how I would feel. After two months she should be able to get a new passport so that she can then reapply for all of the visas and not be living and working in Yemen illegally. It's a crappy situation for her right now that makes us all feel slightly unsettled until it gets sorted out.
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