Studying Arabic (with a baby in your lap)

Based on my extremely limited experience, I can say with some confidence that Arabic is a challenging language to learn. You don’t have to take my word for it. Ask the Defense Language Institute, which provides language training for military personnel, department of defense employees, and other government types. The basic courses they offer in Romance languages—French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese—last for 25 weeks. This means you need under six months of full-time intensive instruction. You could start the program on New Year’s Day and be interrogating suspects in Lisbon, Barcelona, Venice, or Paris before Bastille Day. German takes 34 weeks. If you started German on the same schedule your course would end in late August. A cluster of languages that require you to learn a new alphabet and/or have little linguistic relationship to English require a 47 week course. If you started a course in Turkish, Hebrew, Russian, Tagalog, Thai, Serbian, or Croatian on New Year’s Day you could go home for Thanksgiving with no homework. Four languages require a 63 week course: Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese, Korean, and…wait for it…Arabic. So if you started with one of these languages on New Year’s Day you would be done in mid-March the following year.

Because of their common Semitic roots, Arabic is most accessible, perhaps, to people who have some grounding in Hebrew, which is another reminder of how tragic it is that the relationships between the countries where these languages are used is so dangerously fraught.

The Arabic alphabet, which I am struggling to learn, has letters that represent three different sounds that resemble the English “h” sound; three different “th” sounds; two different “s” sounds; two different “d” sounds; and two different “t” sounds. There is a guttural “ch” that is not unlike some sounds made in German, plus a guttural “gh” sound and another guttural consonant that I have so much trouble pronouncing that I can’t transliterate it. Some letters have as many as four different forms, depending on whether they appear in the initial, medial, final, or independent positions. This is all before we get into vocabulary or syntax.

Even the numbers are different. We call our numerals Arabic, thus giving the Arabic world rightful credit for inventing arithmetic. This terminology distinguishes Arabic numerals from Roman numerals, which actually represent letters (cent-, mill-, etc). In fact Arabic numerals look only enough like what we call Arabic numerals to be confusing. Nine and one are pretty much the same in both systems but the five looks like to me a zero, the four looks like a backwards three, and the zero looks like a typo. When you read them, you read the numbers left to right, as we do in the European world, but if the numbers represent words, as in 1935-1939 you would read the words right to left, as the Arabic language is written. So the numerical phrase above would look like this: 1939-1935 (but in Arabic numerals, of course).

Then there’s the whole business of spoken vs. written Arabic which I am too much of a novice to understand. Fus-ha—written Arabic—is highly formal. It is spoken only in official situations—such as political speeches and newscasts—which makes certain registers highly international. I once heard Munther, who directs the Arabic program at Cornell, refer to a colleague who tries to help his students understand the difference by putting on a necktie when he speaks Fus-ha and takes it off when he speaks dialect. Many Arabic programs in the U. S. and elsewhere focus their instruction on Fus-ha so students can learn to read Arabic texts and write in Arabic. But everyone says that if you got out of the airport in Egypt or Syria or Dubai and tried to tell a cab-driver where to go in Fus-ha he wouldn’t understand you. Or he would understand but laugh.

Everyone compares speaking Fus-ha to speaking Shakespeare. As a literary scholar who wants to qualify everything (I find it impossible to fill out surveys) I find this comparison frustrating. When you tell me speaking Fus-ha is like speaking Shakespeare, do you mean it is an Early Modern form of the language? Do you mean it uses the cultural equivalent of blank verse, i.e. unrhymed iambic pentameter (perhaps with the odd couplet thrown in to indicate the end of a scene)? Do upper class people speak Fus-ha in blank verse while commoners speak Fus-ha prose? Is Fus-ha rife with extended metaphor and (during the middle period) soliloquies?

It surprises me not at all that spoken Arabic should vary significantly from country to country, region to region. The English spoken in the United States differs significantly, and not just in pronunciation, from the English spoken in Jamaica, or Scotland, or South Africa, or India. And, of course, significant variation exists within regions of each of those countries.

When I’ve talked to the director of the institute where I am studying I’ve explained that I want to learn equal parts written Arabic (Fus-ha) and spoken Arabic (specifically the Egyptian dialect). I don’t expect I’ll ever learn Arabic well enough to use it as a research language. (Nor would I have much to gain by committing this kind of time to the endeavor). It’s more important that I don’t get into a taxi and say, “Gentle driver, I would be driven to Midan Al Gazayir, to the street called Al Gayazir, to the market where one may purchase equipment for mobile telephony.” The director has communicated my desires to my tutor, but it’s actually hard to tell what I am practicing when I practice my oral phrases. I can’t really ask my tutor whether we’re speaking Fus-ha because we are not allowed to speak English in class, his English isn’t great (as is clear when we use English out of desperation), and it’s a little challenging to ask sophisticated questions about linguistics when my vocabulary is limited to hello, goodbye, thank you, one, five, pen, book, rope, door, house, and desk.

I think the spoken phrases I am practicing are Fus-ha, but I can only confirm this by asking Deborah, and she has to rely on my less than perfect pronunciation to make a diagnosis. Even the pronunciation is confusing. I’ve heard variation between the pronunciation of letters that my tutor teaches me orally, and a book I’ve been using (at the recommendation of the program’s director), designed at and for the Middlebury language program. The book includes a DVD in which Egyptian speakers model pronunciation. Of course, it may be a while before any of this matters much. There may be little difference between how the Lebanese prime minister and an Egyptian fruit vendor would say, “The pen is on the desk.”

But studying Arabic with Hannah in my lap, as I have done, raises a whole different set of reflections for me, reflections on possibility. Although we had narrowed down to one our choice of girl names (ditto for boy names) at least a month before Hannah was born, we refused to commit to either choice until after she was born, and not just until we knew whether it was a boy or a girl. (Nor did we give the slightest hint to anyone what either name might be, although I think most people who bothered to think about it probably guessed the first letter). This was partly a matter of superstition. (I didn’t know I was superstitious until I was about to become a parent). Ashkenazi Jews have all kinds of superstitions about birth and names. Traditionally, you wouldn’t buy anything for the baby until after it is born. (Baby showers are out). You certainly wouldn’t announce a name to anyone. Indeed, you might not announce the name until the brit milah (for a boy) or the public announcement at the synagogue (for a girl). You also don’t name children after living relatives, apparently because the Angel of Death might mistake the younger one for the older when it came time to take someone away. (I am always surprised that the Angel of Death can get directions precise enough to know that there is someone named, say, Harry Rachmaninoff on his list, but can’t be sure whether the person in question is a sixty-six year old man with lung cancer living in Cleveland or his three year old grandson with the same name who lives in Seattle.)

Even leaving the superstitions aside, it seemed important that we meet Hannah before we named her. I made Deborah wait for 24 hours before we decided that her name was, indeed, Hannah. The card on her bassinet in the hospital remained blank for our entire stay. Even after that, it took me a long time to understand that this was indeed her name. There is something about naming that seems so final. Once she was named, all the other possible names she could have had were no longer available. (At least, until she reaches the point in her childhood or adolescence when she renames herself, as everyone seems to do, if only temporarily).

Studying language with Hannah in my lap reminds me of this sense of possibility. I’ve sat with her in my lap while my laptop is on the table and I go through a DVD practicing the Arabic alphabet sounds. The DVD also shows video of an Egyptian professor writing Arabic letters with a calligraphy pen. Hannah is pretty interested in the video. As entertainment, it will seem limited long before she starts on Sesame Street. But right now it’s got colors (mostly black and white) and images that move (not very fast. The professor does his calligraphy very deliberately). She hears the sounds as I do. Her throat and voice will eventually learn to speak primarily English. (I hope she learns other languages as well). But right now, Arabic sounds are no stranger to her than English sounds. The guttural sounds that require me to rewire my throat would be just as easy for her to learn as American words like “Long Island” “thoroughfare” “maple syrup” or “Chicago.” All languages are equally available to her now, in ways they have long since ceased to be for me.