»In which we have some language lessons

The New York Times Book Review had an all-Islam issue on Sunday, with an interesting essay on learning Arabic by the Times's Beirut bureau chief, Robert F. Worth. I have been studying Arabic intermittently for the past few years, and many of his observations ring clear and true.

For anyone who knows only European languages, to wade into Arabic is to discover an endlessly strange and yet oddly ordered lexical universe. Some words have definitions that go on for pages and seem to encompass all possible meanings; others are outlandishly precise. Paging through the dictionary one night, I found a word that means “to cut off the upper end of an okra.” There are lovely verbs like sara, “to set out at night”; comical ones like tabaadawa, “to pose as a Bedouin”; and simply bizarre ones like dabiba, “to abound in lizards.” Dabiba (presumably applied to towns or regions) is medieval, but I wouldn’t put it past Dr. Zawahri to revive it.

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At the same time, all Arabic words have simple three- or four-letter roots, with systematically derived cognates that allow you to unfold a whole range of meanings from a single word. The word for “to cook,” for instance, is related in a predictable way to the words for “kitchen,” “dish,” “chef,” and so on. Arabic speakers are often dismayed to discover that the same principle is less common in English.

As the months passed, the sounds of the language were gradually transformed. Arabic’s hard “h” letter, so difficult to pronounce at first, began to seem like a lovely breath of air, as if countless tiny parachutes were lifting the words above their glottal base. The notorious “ayn” sound, which often takes months for English speakers to produce, lost its guttural edge and acquired, to my ear, the throaty rumble of a well-tuned sports car.

Like the author, when I first began learning Arabic I tried out my meagre conversational phrases on everyone I could, but my enthusiasm tapered off as I realised that I could sustain very little in the way of constructive dialogue. Sure, I could ask after the health of obscure relatives (the vocabulary for family is very rich), but I could not easily understand the answers, especially if they were spoken fluently. I was very surprised a few months ago when, sitting in the front seat of a downtown-bound cab, I not only got the gist of our cabbie's conversation, but understood entire sentences. His Arabic was remarkably clear and dialect-free, and he must have hailed from the Levant (alas, the group with me in the cab were all hurrying to catch a ferry, so I could not stop and make chit-chat with the driver).