راس الغول

mrs. noz and i saw batman begins last night. it was pretty good for a super hero movie (over the years i have developed a general prejudice against super heroes. why is a long story, one i don't feel like writing yet).

of course the thing that most jumped out at me was the name: ra's al ghul. like the various vocabulary from dune, ra's al ghul is a name i knew from years ago when i was collecting comics. back then i knew nothing about arabic. which is why it's funny when i heard his name uttered on the screen last night. it is so obviously an arabic name. why didn't that ever occur to me before?

it means "head of the monster." the word "ghul" for "monster" has even migrated into english. it's where we get the word "ghoul" and describes a creature from arabic folklore that eats corpses. as for the first half, "ras" means head (it's like hebrew. the jewish new year, rosh hashana, in arabic is "ras as-sana") the "al" is the definite article on "ghul" (i.e. "the monster"). the two nouns in "ras al ghul" are put together is in what is called an اضافة (iDaafa); a grammatical construction that is used to show possession and which is designed to torment first year arabic students.* in this case, it gets translated as "of" in "head of the monster."

so are you bored yet? i don't know why these arabic bits i find in everyday culture fascinate me so much. but they do. so i will blog about them now and then. deal with it.
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* at least it once tormented me. but now that i'm used to it, i don't remember what the big deal was anymore.