Arabic ramblings

We frequently bring up and laugh about the fact that one of the first words introduced in the Arabic curriculum Al-Kitaab is United Nations (الأمم المتحدة). Granted, the curriculum was developed somewhat specifically to train foreign service officers of varying capacity—to read the news, to act in diplomatic capacity, and so forth. So it makes sense. It really does. 

But it's also hilarious. 

You learn things like "hello" and "my name is" and "how are you?" and..."United Nations"...in like the first week! It's...hilarious. 

We aren't into Al-Kitaab at our house yet. We're still slowly chipping our way through the alphabet in Alif-Baa. But we're encountering some of these seeming incongruences. 

Today we worked on "faa" and "qaf." 

The kids were saying words that they knew, like elephant (فيل), that begin with "faa." Butterfly also begins with "faa" (فراشة) and we actually know all the letters for that word! But the book suggested with just write the name Farid. 

Here's a little "faa"-shaped elephant (فيل) that Zoë made (the dot is the sun above its head):

"Now we're going to work on the medial form of ف." I said. "And the word the book suggests we write is...seriously?!"

The word was ambassador. Like, yeah. Obviously that's a word we should learn while learning the alphabet. There couldn't have been a less complicated word to cover...

سفير is the word for ambassador (safir), so I was like, "I guess we're learning سفير today."

Andrew popped in excitedly to tell us that سفير really is an exciting word because of the word safari! 

The root of the word is the same as in the verb "travel": أسافر (which, honestly, I was having trouble remembering in my Duolingo lessons and for some reason continuously get it confused with sparrow—عصفور). Anyway, "travel" (سافر/saafir) was borrowed into Swahili to mean a little journey...a little tour of...the savannah. 

So it really was exciting for him to point that out to us. I really wish I had a book of Arabic root words. My book of Russian roots is one of my favourite books—etymology thrills me. 

Anyway, for "qaaf" one of our words was "plum" (برقوق/barquq). Alexander thought that "barquq" sounded like barracuda, so he drew these barracudas eating the word برقوق.

I thought it was funny that the first part of the word is similar to "cold" (بارد/barid) because it reminds me of William Carlos Williams' poem "This is Just to Say." 

In reality, "barquq" or "albarquq" shares a root with the English "precocious" coming from the Latin meaning "early ripening." In Arabic "albarquq" comes from that same Latin origin and has come to mean what we call "plum" in English...meanwhile in English we have apricot. 

It's the same word—early ripening fruit—that was once more general and now means a specific fruit (just different ones in either language). And, to be fair, both apricots and plums belong to the same genus—Prunus—so they're basically the same thing anyway.

Apricot in spoken Arabic is مشمش (mashmash), which is sort of onomatopoetic in nature, as far as I can figure (the noise one makes while sucking). The phrase "Bukra fil mish-mish" means "tomorrow in the apricots," but basically means "fat chance" (because that fruit ripens so fast that it disappears before you can enjoy it).* In Egypt, we'd often hear "mish mushkila" (مشكلة) meaning "It's no problem." 

Mushkila means problem. Mish means not.

We think the word apricot is rather fun. But we don't know the letter m yet, so we can't write it yet. 

But then the kids were remarking that it's interesting that in Arabic they don't simply say "Hello." They say "As-salamu alaykum," which means "peace be upon you." 

So I told the kids that we say similar things in English. We've merely forgotten. 

Like, I've often stumbled across memes and things that remark on what a cold language English is—and how there is no word for "goodbye" in [insert whatever language here, typically a Native American language] because there is no sense of finality at parting. And I just...

Goodbye is a contraction of "God be with you." 

God be with ye. Godbwye. Goodbye. 

And the unstated (but oft-sung) extension of that is "until we meet again." 

So I suppose technically there is no finality about a goodbye in English either. 

It was a good way to talk about how religion is also very much baked into our culture as well...it's just so normal that we hardly even recognize it, whereas we see it so much easier in Arabic because everything feels different.

(Phoebe just now said, "I don't even know how to speak Arabic. I just know lots of Arabic words. Like I can do wahid, itnan, talata, and laa...so that's pretty good!")

* I think the phrase "bukra fil barquq" actually sounds just as charming. The kids pointed out the similarity between those two words as well, though they are entirely different roots (b-k-r is of Arabic origin, while barquq...is borrowed...as we learned).