Learning Arabic
I always wanted to learn Arabic which was a family language as a kid. I had great difficulty learning the Arabic spoken by my family as a kid. Everytime I had a book to help me learn, my grandmother would always say the same thing "no that's not proper Arabic. The Egyptian Arabic is the proper Arabic." She was mostly wrong, but the truth was I didn't really want to learn MSA, I wanted to learn my family's dialect so I could speak to my cousins and family.
My grandmother had found that Egyptian Arabic was understood by nearly all of the Arabic speaking world partly because Egypt has such a pivotal role in distributing the media, particularly television, in her day. So no matter where she went, or who she spoke to, they understood her strange combination of Egyptian Arabic, with the odd Lebonese word and a tonne of European loan words.
The problem was most of the Arabic world had jumped on something called MSA (Modern Standard Arabic). Nearly all books on the language were focused on MSA not my family's dialect. Getting learning resources were difficult and I settled for a few phrase-books and romanized dictionaries in my dialect and most my text books were MSA. I also began to read some basic children's books in MSA, but what was I learning... it certainly wasn't the language my grandma spoke. My word for "what" was "maa", but she said "ey" and my aunt said "shu". Bread was "khebez", my aunt said "khobz" but gran said "3esh" (the 3 is the sound of the vowel deep in the throat made by an Arabic letter called 3ain which looks like a 3). I said "sayaara" for car and she said "ara3biya". What the hell was going on?
The Arabic world has always had massive respect for grammatical Arabic like that which was found in the Qoran. This language is the most complicated and oldest form the language. It incorporates strange additional sounds that indicate an noun's relationship to the sentence. Is it doing the verb? Is the verb being done to it? Is it related to preposition in the sentence? These were things you barely worried about while speaking modern sentences. It became clear however that while the Arabic world seemed to all speak different languages their respect for tradition and religion had forced them to teach a version of proper Arabic across the Islamic world that was consistent.
In European, Latin spread around and local areas developed their own way of speaking and over time these all became extremely different. They became the different romance languages: Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, Romanian etc. Imagine these countries still taught their children Vulgaric Latin. Then imagine one day instead of calling their languages all these separate names they would just call them all Latin and in school they would teach them the local spoken Latin (for example Spanish Latin) and teach them a modern simplified version of traditional church Latin (Modern Standard Latin). Well, this is actually very close to what happened in the Arabic speaking world. Instead of inventing a Modern Standard Latin, they invented a modern version of the Arabic of the Qoran with some dialectal influences, Modern Standard Arabic.
Modern Standard Arabic has the respect of the Qoranic Arabic since it essentially is Qoranic Arabic, but is accessible to a modern day speaker. However the closer the Arabic is to that of the Qoran the more respect it is afforded making it's ideal form essentially 6th century Arabic. That was what I was learning.
No wonder my words didn't fit. I was talking about carriages and my grandma about cars. I was talking about unleavened bread and my grandma about life sustenance, overtime in my Grandma's Arabic the word for "which" had taken precedence over "what" and soon replaced it, while my aunt's more Levantine dialect had preferred to say "the thing that" and dropped the question word altogether until the word for thing had essentially become the question word "what".
Learning Arabic has been the biggest lingual challenge for me because of the 4-5 languages in one not to mention the vowelless Alphabet and the fact the word "you" declines in 6 different ways, but I am glad to have had the experience I have had and frankly even though it is basically learning 4-5 languages in one, I hope to continue with renewed effort. I have picked up some of my old books and I hope to use them to the best of my ability accepting that a lot of them are MSA and eventually get some more colloquial books in my dialect before having a good clear out and keeping only the dictionaries.
See you on the other side of this hopefully transforming experience.
Graeme