I initially wrote this post as an email circular on 27 April. I'm not sure why I posted it then. But here it is, for your delectation. Health warning: it contains a fair amount of Arabic grammar.
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The
news in brief, since my last post. Significantly, my Korean housemate has
returned, almost entirely recovered (apart from lingering pains in the neck,
and a foot that doesn’t always do what it’s told). Furthermore, as a result of
the accident, he will likely stay longer than he had previously been intending
to, to make up for lost time. On the downside, his parents (who were quite happy
for him to come immediately following the revolution) are now entirely opposed
to his being in such a dangerous country, and have withdrawn
his funding.
I have
abandoned my study of a’mir (colloquial Arabic) on the grounds
that to study the grammar and vocabulary of fus’ha (formal)
and a’mir together was too confusing to be helpful. And for other
reasons – more on that below. Against that, however, I have finished my first
textbook. This may not mean much to you, so I give the additional information
that it is about 400 pages long, and that students at Leeds University (chosen
as an example only because I met one of them who told me) take 18 months to do
the same. But then, they are studying other things too, as well as having a
social life, so are probably more well-rounded and have more friends…
Final
piece of quick news is my new teacher. My previous teacher left (most
inconsiderately!) to have a baby – but before, she made an arrangement with the
manager that I was to be given the ‘best teacher in the school’ (I thought that
this was just her trying to make me feeling fine about her leaving, but others
have independently verified this fact). My new teacher is, indeed, incredible.
My previous teacher was very good, but her skills pale in comparison to my new
one. Though she can speak English, I only discovered this
after several lessons, when we reached a total impasse in explaining a new
grammatical concept, and she had to resort to a couple of words of it. As a
result of being forced, for two and a half hours a day, to speak and listen to
Arabic only, my capacity has come on in leaps and bounds. There are only two
problems: 1) it is fus’ha, which no one on the street speaks
(though laughter is a common response – fus’ha often appears
in films to mark out a comic character with a geekish nature…); 2) even if they
did, my teacher speaks to me very slowly so that I can understand her – most
people aren’t so considerate.
Given
the length of my ‘news in brief’, the remainder of this post will be brief, and
consist (sort of) of a short lesson in Arabic grammar. This will, I suspect, be
completely useless to you in your general lives.
There
is a strange piece of formal Arabic grammar related to case endings. Basically,
nouns and verbs will end with a different sounds (though they’re not spelt
differently) depending on whether they’re the subject or object, or come after
a preposition, or a host of other factors. This applies to all nouns
and verbs (though sometimes it seems only to happen in one’s head – I presume
this little trickery will become clearer later), including names. Hence much
childish fun was had talking about George-oo Bush-aa, or Tony-oo Blair-aa (or,
for that matter, Peter-oo Welby-aa). There seem to be a variety of problems,
however, with this whole arrangement. One of these would be that whereas
foreign names (of people or places) have this ‘oo-aa’ rhythm, Arabic names have
an ‘oo-oo’, or possibly ‘oo-ee’, for a reason that will follow (I’m not
entirely clear on when it is what – I tend to guess – and why Arabic names are
different. It seems that a lot of the time, Arabic grammar rules come about
largely because some authoritative text wrote in the way that the grammar
prescribes, and it was the hard job of some unfortunate soul to come up with a
reason why…). But a difficulty was hit upon in my teacher trying to explain to
me the reason for this structure in names, which is derived from the way that
Arabic names follow a set form. Part of
the whole problem is that names come into a structure calledidhafa (or, something of the
something), as Arabic names follow the structure your-name
father’s-name grandfather’s-name family-name (so to take the example
of a chap called John, whose father was Michael, and whose grandfather was
Charles, he would be John Michael Charles Family-name), which fits into the
form name of father of grandfather of family.
The family name, to add to the difficulties, is the name of some distinguished
ancestor – which led to the plaintive cry from my teacher, when trying to use
my name for her example, “but who was Welby?!”. Of course, my middle names
didn’t help either – it was quite an effort to convince her that my father was
not Douglas. The point of all this is that in an idhafa, the case
ending on the second (or final) word is always ‘ee’. Except that it seems from
all I’ve just written that this doesn’t seem to quite work for names. And thus
I bring this little narrative round in a circle, no further enlightened than I
was at the start – and having confused my audience in the process, I fear.
Maybe it would be better if we just forgot this whole thing and moved on…
I
promised earlier that I would write more about dropping a’mir.
There isn’t a great deal more to it than what was stated above – learning botha’mir and fus’ha together
is very confusing. It was, however, exacerbated by my teacher having been very
apathetic for about three weeks before the decision (as it turned out, she had
a good reason – an arranged engagement, with a man she hardly knew, who turned
out not to be all that she hoped for. She broke off the engagement, and now
seems much happier again). This was not, however, the reason that I gave to the
school. It was quite a complicated process: first I went to the administration
girls. “I’d like to stop studying a’mir and focus on fus’ha.”
Ah, this might be a problem – I’d need to do a placement test to work out where
I’d fit in the fus’ha textbook. “No, I’d like to continue
studying from the same textbook” (it is essentially a fus’ha textbook
in any case, with half a page of a’mir in every ten). This is
also difficult, it seems – they call the Director of Students. Oh no, she says,
quite impossible – my textbook is for a combination, not for fus’ha by
itself. I argue my case a bit further, and am told I need to see the manager. I
explain my position to her. “Good idea! Fus’ha and a’mir is
too confusing to study together!” I felt slightly aggrieved that she hadn’t
told me this in the first place, but I got what I wanted, so I make no
complaints…
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