a story: one day when i was in syria i took a day trip from damascus to bosra with this irish guy i met in my hotel. we took the bus together to bosra, then split up to wander around. we met again a couple of hours later to catch the bus back to damascus. when i saw him at the bus station he had a question for me.
"what does 'bin' mean in arabic?"
"well, it could mean 'son of.' was it followed by another word--like bin laden? what was the context?" i asked.
"a bunch of kids were following me. they kept saying 'bin. bin. bin.'" said the irish guy
"oh," i said. "that was english, not arabic. they were trying to say 'pen.' arabs can't pronounce a P very well, so it often turns into a B."
that story was running through my head as i struggled with my arabic homework tonight. the assignment is to read an article and to answer some questions about it. the article is short; it looks like it would be fairly easy. i keep thinking it should be easy, but it's turning into a real pain in the ass.
not surprisingly most of the articles i get assigned are about things in the arab world. sometimes its the history of some city or country, sometimes it describes a cultural practice somewhere, sometimes it's about religion, or sometimes about an arab poet or literary figure. but this time it's about none of those things. this time the article is about the early history of new york city. you would think it would be easy--the names of people and places are familiar and i already know the basic story.
but it's not. the names are actually the most confusing part. they drive me crazy because sometimes i think i recognize arab roots in them that don't make any sense and they aren't ever in the dictionary. sure, they're written phonetically. but imagine seeing a word spelled phonetically by someone who doesn't always pronounce things correctly and who doesn't write any vowels. arabic is almost always written without vowels. it's usually not has hard as it sounds. i've gotten used to recognizing arab words i know sans vowels, but that doesn't work for words that aren't arabic and which i have never seen before written in arabic script.
sometimes it actually helps to transliterate the script back into latin characters to help puzzle it out. for example, this one word completely stumped me:
وستمنستر
i figured out that it was a foreign word pretty quickly, but i stared at it for a while and couldn't come up with anything. part of the problem was that the first letter (waw) could be the first letter of the word, or it could mean "and." in other words, the arabic word for "and" is actually a one-letter prefix. so i wasn't even sure if what i was looking at was only one word or "and-[something else]."
transliterating the letters into latin characters did help, however. it got me: WSTMNSTR--"westminster." i am sure i never would have figured that one out if i hadn't written out the latin characters. so apparently there was something called the treaty of westminster (or possibly the "treaty and stminster"). that's how the british got new york from the dutch. interesting, but not something i ever expected to learn from arabic class.
so the moral of this story is that sometimes words in your native language are the hardest ones to see. or maybe the moral is that arabs need to learn to write with friggin' vowels. or maybe the moral is that i like to find ways to slip gratuitous travel stories into posts that are ostensibly about what is going on in my life right now.
or maybe there is no moral; just a bunch of stuff that happens.
