Adventures in Arabic

arabic, beauty, language
Recently, I decided to learn Arabic. Why? There's just something about those curlycued letters, the combination of gutteral consonents and singing vowels that appeals to me. Besides, amost 200,000,000 people speak Arabic, so it might come in handy someday.

So, I borrowed a copy of Rosetta Stone and set to work. These are my notes from the first week:

Day 1: After an hour with that program, I can tell you exactly why Middle Easterners all know English: once you've learned Arabic, any other language is a breeze. Heck, they probably all learn English by watching a week's worth of Judge Judy.

This is what I remember: (all Arabic words transliterated badly)
welladoon: boy
bintoon: girl
regulan: man
edgerrin: run

And I couldn't even begin to spell those. Honestly, I was sitting there looking at the words thinking, "I think the one with the two bunnies in it is the plural for boys. What's up with the smilie face?"

Day 2: I think maybe I should learn "I'm a total idiot, so I hope you speak English" first. The way this is going, I'm likely to be involved in an international incident if I actually try speaking to someone from the Middle East. It's very frustrating. I picked up Spanish so quickly. Of course, Spanish uses (mostly) the same alphabet, but still.

Day 3: I was watching al Jazeera videos in Arabic yesterday, and I came across this one where people were demonstrating, and some of them were holding signs that said "Go America Go". Of course, to an American, that's a sports chant: Go, Eagles, Go!, so I thought maybe they were cheering us on in the World Cup or something. Then they were singing "Go America Go", but the song sounded happy to me, so I thought they really were happy to see us go up against Brazil.

Then they started burning American flags.

Not cheering us on in soccer after all, I guess.

i really want to go to the middle east and help them with their signage. "oh, no, ahmed, you want to say 'Go away, America' not 'Go, America, go.' "

Day 4: i had a breakthrough: I realized that arabic is written in cursive. oddly, this realization helped me a lot. i also figured out how to pause the program so i can listen to pronunciations over and over and over again. i think i'm getting that glottal stop down. (in reality, i probably have the worst accent in all of history, but i'm trying.)

Day 5: Today I realized 2 things:

1) arabic does not have singular and plural, they have singular, dual and plural. for every noun.

2) in arabic, verbs are conjugated according to the gender of the subject. so, if i want to say something swims, it's a different word depending on whether the girl swims or the boy swims.

i start to cry.

Day 6: today i learned that there are no capital letters in arabic. good news: i don't have to learn to recognize letters twice! however, there's so many random dots and slashes (representing vowels) splashed everywhere, i can't tell where sentences end. is that a vowel marker, a period, wtf is going on? and what is up with the smiley face?

Day 7: I tried livemocha, and it seems very similar to Rosetta Stone. I suspect that LM is teaching a modern form of Arabic (maybe egyptian), whereas RS teaches classical Arabic. I suspect this because livemocha teaches girl as "bint", whereas Rosetta Stone teaches girl as "bintoon".

I also learned that I am apparently traffic-stoppingly gorgeous to middle eastern men. Using a not-very-great picture of myself, within 3 hours I had 54 "friends", 53 of them men. Who all want me to help them with their english. or something.

I had no idea middle easterners were so friendly!

Once More With Feeling

"Allah" is simply the arabic word for "god".

Let me put this another way.

If I am in Mexico, I don't point at a dog and say "dog", I say "perro". I am not referring to any other animal, but if I said "dog", the Mexicans wouldn't have any idea what I am talking about. (Yeah, I'm pointing, but perhaps I am referring to the color of the dog, or the size of the dog, or the location of the dog. They wouldn't know.)

"Allah" does not refer to any specific god, any more than the english word "god" refers to a specific god. After all, I could use the word "god" to refer to Shiva or Krishna as easily as the christian deity.

Now that we have that cleared up, let's see what prompted it: a question on the RaptureReady bulletin board entitled Arabic Bible Version.

Shining Brightly: We recently purchased an Arabic/English Bible. However, upon reading the Arabic, I discovered to my horror that in reference to God it says Allah!!! You can handicap stupidity by the number of !s alone.

Allah: Derived from an old Semitic root refering to the Divine and used in the Canaanite El, the Mesopotamian ilu, and the biblical Elohim, the word Allah is used by all Arabic-speaking Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others.

This is a very popular version published by the International Bible Society. Does anyone here know of an alternative to this? Such as using the generic term for God "rabona". I cannot find the word "rabona" anywhere. If this is a generic term of "deity", it doesn't get used much. Probably because they're all using allah.

It is highly disturbing and misleading for the Arabic speaking world to read about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as Allah. Our God does have a name, but it is certainly not Allah. Do you typically refer to god as any of these? God has lots of names in the old testament, none of them are "god". Unless the poster is referring to "Jesus"? That's an anglicization anyway. The Hebrew for that is "Yeshua". Any help gratefully received.

A couple of respondents actually pointed out what I did, even adding that Arabic-speaking Christians referred to god with that word prior to the birth of Islam.

Antitox thinks that Arabic-speaking Christians are easily confused as to which religion they belong to: I think it is incorrect because today's arab/mideasterner is going to think of the Islamic god as Allah. That means the jihadist's god Timothy McVeigh was a Christian. Are all Christians domestic terrorists? is what they are going to refer to, not the God of the Bible. Ya know, unless they are christian. It just doesn't fly; it'll be too misleading, confusing, etc. This guy undoubtedly got all bent out of shape about Obama's name, too.

Faithmarie actually gets more disturbing than that: There is nothing to get upset over or is there? dumdumdum ...... BUT allah is not the word for god. It is a pagan gods NAME that existed before islam existed. Allah had three daughters. He was the moon god , I believe, that is why they kept the cresent moon. Mohammed kept the name from the pagan religion . Illah ( I don't remember the spelling) That is why the muslems say there is no Illah but allah. Illah= god.

Hey, why do christians celebrate the birth of Yeshua on December 25? Historical evidence definitively proves that he was born in March. Why do christians celebrate easter 40 days after the first full moon after . . . whatever? Why would it be a revolving date? You know why? Because when the christians moved into european pagan territory, rather than attempting to entirely replace the various pagan traditions with christianity, they simply placed the christian traditions right on top of them. Hence Christmas instead of the old winter solstice festival and Easter instead of Beltain (the spring equinox celebration and the most important pagan holiday of the year. pagans celebrated every phase of the moon, and ended up having celebrations about once every other week, but Beltain was the highlight of the year.)

This whole crescent moon thing with the three daughters is Jack Chick crap (WARNING: that link will bring you to the most hateful, bigoted shit you've ever seen. Seriously, Jack Chick makes the Grand Dragon of the KKK look like an open minded liberal). Yes, that was a belief system in place prior to Islam in those regions. It has less to do with Islam today than the old pagan traditions with christianity today.

So it is a BIG difference.no, there's not, but continue Christians will use allah because of the MANY years of persecution they have suffered. or because it is the Arabic word for god. Besides alot two freakin' words are nominal christians as in America. Even if Arabs are christians, they're not really christians. the only real christians are US christians.They are very big replacement theology, BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA see above christians in Syria and Lebanon. That is the only countries I have experience with.America's word for god is god for all other gods but to use a capital G for God we are referring God The Father. they use a capital "a" to refer to their guy. capital "g" beats capital "a" why? Allah is NOT the same god as the Christian God. It is demon god. WHo thirsts for blood. vampire! allah is coming to suck your blood (bela lugosi voice)

Nobody even tries to correct this.