It's always a good day to accidentally teach your children the word "only" in Arabic

The day after we visited the falcon exhibition, the kids and I went through the worksheet we got on how to help preserve national heritage sites. I didn't pre-read the worksheet so the word "only" came as a bit of a surprise to me, although it makes sense...we say the something similar in English: "Take only pictures." 

And it isn't as "only" is a very difficult word. In fact, it's a pretty basic vocabulary word, so it isn't as if we're gatekeeping "only." It's just that...I dunno...I imagined this maybe said something a little bit different like, "I take photos," or something.

Again, given the fact that we say "Take only pictures" in English, it's perfectly fair that it would say this in Arabic as well. I was simply unprepared to have the discussion that we had to have when sounded out this sentence around our table... 

The root of "only" is F-Q-T, which you can see above: فَقَطْ. 

You pronounce it as, uh, faqat. 

It was actually (gratefully?) my turn to sound things out when we came to this sentence and I started out very slowly, as one does, stumbling over every word: "'Al...ta... Alta...Altaqit suuuu...waaaaaa...ran... fa...fa... " 

But then I recognized the last word, so I said, "Oh—faqat!"

"MOM!" Zoë shrieked, her mouth falling open.

My bad! I didn't even think before I said it because...it just means "only." But it did inspire a lovely conversation with my children regarding language use. 

(And that's not even the only word that sounds like a curse word in English... Oh, and...for the record, in our household we typically eschew the use of "Christmas words" like stupid so for the kids to hear their mother drop an "only" (in Arabic) was quite...shocking...for the children).

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We met up with some friends at the library yesterday and T mentioned that Zoë had said something in the car the other day that he wanted to tell me about, but we ran out of time before we all had to leave, so he said he'd tell me later. 

And I was biting my nails that she'd shared her newly acquired "spicy" Arabic knowledge with her friends. 

But that isn't what it was at all! It was completely (more or less) innocuous (though we did have to have a conversation with her about how far she takes her teasing because it went a little far in the car). 

*****

In other news, I read the book Karma's Rabbit from cover to cover. It was a painstaking process, but I made it through, and Phoebe made it through beside me, and we learned a few new words and happily recognized others. 

On the very first page, Phoebe stopped the story to ask whether it took place in Qatar. I asked her why she thought it might take place in Qatar and she pointed to...

...the electrical socket!

I thought that was pretty clever for her to notice. 

I don't know whether the story really takes place in Qatar. The author, Taghreed Najjar, is Palestinian-Jordanian. The illustrator, Hassan Manasrah, is Jordanian, so if I'd wager that neither Najjar or Manasrah were imagining Qatar when they worked on this book, but it's still cute that Phoebe noticed the different electricity. Most of our plugs do have those little switches by them!