holy shit i understand something!!! twice!

other than english, the only two languages that i have ever been able to hold a conversation in are french and arabic. the languages here are russian and kazakh, both pretty different from the ones i know. but thanks to peter the great, russian has a bit of french in it. and thanks to the spread of islam, kazakh has a bit of arabic in it as well (also arabic was influenced by ottoman turkish, a close relative to kazakh).

that doesn't mean that either french or arabic are much help here. but every once in a while there is a word that is similar enough to something that i know. for example, both words in the name of the ruling party here, nur otan, come from arabic.

so far i've only found one instance where the arabic-kazakh connection and the french-russian connection converge, and that's the word for "shop":



(the french/russian word for "shop" is also originally from arabic. convergences everywhere!)