Arabic grammar and Egyptian culture

One of the things I love about the Arabic language is all the crazy ridiculous complicated (but powerful!) grammatical rules. The language is pretty much infinitely extensible, and was designed/developed such that if you master certain basic grammatical techniques, you can rapidly expand your vocabulary to a shocking degree.

For example, if you wanted to talk about teaching and learning in English, you need to know two wholly unrelated words. In Arabic, though, you just need to know the root ج ر س ("da-ra-sa"), which conveys ideas related to studying. You can take that triliteral root, plug it into any number of grammatical formulae, and come up with most of the vocab. you could need to talk about things related to learning. For example, درس - يدرس (darasa - yadrus) mean "He studied" and "He studies," respectively. If you take that root and add the prefix م (ma-), which means "place of [root's meaning]," you get مجرسة (madrasa), or "school."

Side note: this is one of the reasons the Right's attacks on Obama during the campaign were so ridiculous. OF COURSE he attended a MADRASA! MADRASA just means school, you ignorant knuckleheads!! What the hell ELSE was he supposed to attend?

Anyway, you can also change the root in other ways. One way is to put it in what's called "Form II": essentially, you double the middle root (i.e., d-r-r-s instead of d-r-s) and change the internal vowelling a little bit (to u-a-i from a-_-u). This lends a transitive, causative, and intensive quality to the meaning conveyed by the initial root. So now, instead of "learning" or "studying," you get درّس - يدرّس (darrasa - yudarris), which means "He taught" and "He teaches." Instead of كرس (karasa), "to break," you get كرّس (karrasa), "to shatter" or "to smash." Instead of قتل (qatala), "to kill," you get قتّل (qattala), "to slaughter."

Pretty cool, right? Well, there's one more nifty feature of Form II, and it's the most important for our purposes. You can take a noun and sort of "verb-ify" it. What do I mean? Well, take the word ملح (malH), which means "salt." If you put it in Form II, ملّح (mallaHa), you get "to season."

YES. THIS LANGUAGE IS JUST THAT AWESOME.

The best example of this that our professor gave us involved مصر and مصّر. The original word is maSr -- "Egypt." By Form II-ing it, you get "to Egypt-ify." ("Make Egyptian," but I like Egyptify better.) We wound up talking about an Egyptified version of Romeo and Juliet.

In the Egyptified version of Shakespeare's classic work, the lovers don't die.

Umm...Whaaaat?!

Yeah, that's right. They don't die. In FACT, they get married and have three kids. THEN, they give one kid to the Montague family, one kid to the Capulet family, and keep one for themselves. Thus do they resolve the longstanding feud between the families.

I nearly noseshot my water when our professor told us this. I am certain the Bard is rolling over in his grave.

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Just one quick final note. I've been frustrated by my progress in Arabic. Things are getting better, but there's SO FAR to go...and sometimes I just don't feel like I am getting much of anywhere. Progress is marginal at best.

BUT. It appears that being here has sharpened some of the other language corners of my brain. There are songs in French that I've been listening to since about 9th grade, and while I've understood the meaning and about 85% of the words, there were always a couple of lines I couldn't quite make out. Well, they've all been falling into place recently. Crystal-clear, like. I dunno what the deal is, but it's kind of neat.