December posting meme: studying Arabic

[genarti]

Okay, obviously, I am not doing these meme exactly on the days I intended. (Although if you asked for a specific day for a reason I'm aware of, I will try to make that day! I know myself too well to outright guarantee.) But I am aiming to do them all, even belatedly, and so! As per

Comments

[sovay]

(I'm sure it was a very weird experience for our teachers, and any visitors: all these people wandering about earnestly speaking in broken and accented and highly formal Modern Standard.)

One of my professors at Yale had this story. He was the epigrapher for a dig in Iraq and knew a little Arabic to go along with his fluent Assyrian, but it wasn't even Modern Standard: the way he told it, what he knew was classical. He could read it, not really speak it. At one point he had to ask for directions at a village and there was a substantial hiatus while someone's grandfather was located who had been to university and studied the classics and could tell the tall skinny German turn that way in some incredibly formal, archaic grammar.

koshary (lentils and onions and rice and pasta all heaped in a bowl, with hot sauce), and I miss all three of those still, and if you know of a place in Boston to get koshary I would love to hear from you about it.

I would swear I have actually seen this mentioned in a recent restaurant review, because I didn't recognize the name and had to look it up. Now I just have to remember where.

What I really mean is: it's more human than that. That's what complicated usually means, with human beings.

That's well said.

[genarti]

He was the epigrapher for a dig in Iraq and knew a little Arabic to go along with his fluent Assyrian, but it wasn't even Modern Standard: the way he told it, what he knew was classical. He could read it, not really speak it. At one point he had to ask for directions at a village and there was a substantial hiatus while someone's grandfather was located who had been to university and studied the classics and could tell the tall skinny German turn that way in some incredibly formal, archaic grammar.

Ha! Wow, what a fantastic story. I'm glad someone's erudite grandfather was on hand to (at least eventually) make it easier for everyone!

When I was visiting Morocco, actually, I found my Modern Standard was of much more direct use than it was in Egypt. It's not that Moroccan Arabic is closer to Modern Standard, but apparently (as I understand it) their school system puts a much higher emphasis on learning to speak Modern Standard than Egypt's does. Possibly in part because Egypt has a large film industry, and so a lot of other countries are more exposed to Egyptian dialect than they would otherwise be, so you can get by on it more? I'm not sure. I do know that I could get by on Modern Standard there, and had in fact a fascinating if somewhat halting conversation about philosophy with occasional tidbits of folk medicine with a seller of medical supplies in the central and tourist-heavy square. (When I say medical supplies, I mean that I don't remember a lot of what he had on hand -- lots of herbs and containers of things -- but I do remember him holding up a dried hedgehog, and explaining to me that something about it was a treatment for epilepsy, because the hedgehog is the king of small animals. He was great. And possibly very bored.) My Iraqi-American friend, on the other hand, had enormous trouble making herself understood in Morocco with her Iraqi Arabic, and was deeply frustrated by it. For practical things, my other friend who'd studied French often took point in Morocco, though, as much as anything because her vocabulary was more useful for buying train tickets, etc than mine was.

I would swear I have actually seen this mentioned in a recent restaurant review, because I didn't recognize the name and had to look it up. Now I just have to remember where.

Ooh. If it doesn't spring to mind, no worries, of course, but if it does I'd love to know!

[sovay]

and had in fact a fascinating if somewhat halting conversation about philosophy with occasional tidbits of folk medicine with a seller of medical supplies in the central and tourist-heavy square.

That's wonderful.

My Iraqi-American friend, on the other hand, had enormous trouble making herself understood in Morocco with her Iraqi Arabic, and was deeply frustrated by it.

Are the differences between dialects of Arabic comparable to the situation with the Scandanavian languages? None of which I speak, but the impression I got from a Norwegian friend in graduate school was that they are mostly mutually intelligible, but not entirely and not always both ways: listening comprehension and ability to converse do not run identically. (I believe his example was Norwegian being comprehensible to Danish listeners, but Danish spoken to Norwegians sounding incredibly strange.) Which I thought was fascinating.