Month: February 2017

A SaFaRi into the SaHaRa

My last detour took us to a Picnic (pique-nique in French) in 1934 Grange, Pennsylvania. Here is a footnote to that previous post has ended up in the opening paragraph for this post. You may not have wondered about the Yiddish word shtick . It’s from the German noun Stück (a piece).  

What’s your shtick, Bill?

Yakking  on about different ways to yak away. 

There is just something exhilarating about learning languages. aha-momentHere are three (3) remarkable benefits: 

  1. remove barriers,
  2. erase borders and, if fortune favors,
  3. become less baffled

We’re glad that you are taking a safari into the Sahara. Please tell us less.

Root letters in Arabic do something quite curious. They occur in an ordained order. Here is a root you may have noticed in the title  — SFR. Arabic dictionaries segment meaning through a root system. Grab that Arabic dictionary over there and flip away until you’ve encounter SFR,  see below.

2-%d8%b3%d9%81%d8%b1-sfr

Don’t forget to read from right to left.

Bill, are you going to tell us about a book that teaches Arabic with aplomb?

Yes.

I want to share how much Sugar Comes from Arabic by Barbara Whitesides helped me master Arabic, and have a rollicking time at the same time. It’s an amazingly beautiful ring-bound volume that is simply delightful. As with all my reviews, I just want to pass on good words for great works. It’s what teachers do.

Calligraphy is one of those hobbies I’ve hobbled through with my left-hand. Now I can’t overestimate the unexpected thrill of gently pulling the pen along my paper — no plowing into the paper, or covering up writing while writing.  You may have noticed that English is written from left-to-right.

Let us consider prefixes, suffixes and diacritical marks. Hey you say, there are bunches of words having such and much to do with “travel” in Arabic — words like safari.Hey I say, the Arabic root for desert is SHR. Technically, the Sahara Desert suggests Desert Desert. Here is a fun web page for those wanting yet another resource on Arabic verb forms.sahara

Well that was breathtakingly tedious, but we needed to yawn in order to dispel stale air. But you were heading into a desert, please proceed.

Interesting innit?

 

Here’s another innit —

arabic-sound-heuristic
Here is a useful diagram for associating alphabet whats and wheres. I’ve found it helpful for distinguishing the “sun and moon” letters in Arabic.

Didn’t you write a toss-off post a while back — just trying to change the subject.

Yes — Sudden solitude in a crowded desert, based on a line from T.S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion.

Thanks for reading.

 

Teitsch Deitsch

The time has come, the ziegler said, to speak of many things, or perhaps just about Teitsch and Deitsch.

yiddish
Yiddish borrowings — from Teitsch

Yiddish is a rendering of the German word Jewish — ‘Jüdisch‘.  This evening I took another look at it. A German might say ‘Such’ (but pronounce it ‘zook’) – ich suche einen neuen Look (I’m looking for a new look).

Where did you look, Bill? And, by the bye, we despise digression. And we’re easily unamused.

Among the less traveled crannies and nooks, under rocks or falling from trees. The usual haunts.

I’m the kind of person that spends moments thinking about the structure of German language — the gleanings of such squandered moments might help explain the resilience of languages based on German — things that Tiggers do best.

tiggers-do-best

Here’s my tentative thesis: German is so god-awful complicated and rigid that it remains recognizable to the speaker of modern Deutsch, by dint of complexity.

So you posit that it is a durable language — rigorously so. 

The Engländer spoke a form of German brought from Saxony (Sachsen), but the proverbial original German was jostled so thoroughly by the Vikings that all the inflections fell off.

Well at least I’ve anchored that reference to ‘things falling from trees.’

Do you speak Yiddish, Bill?

I can very easily understand the transliterated and the spoken Yiddish, i.e. without the Hebrew letters. It’s as familiar as Swedish or Dutch subtitles for a German film. In fact, Yiddish adopts German sounds and word order. Take a look and listen to the Omniglot site for a timely example.

heimish-101

Profile of an Endangered Language

Might we have a piece of birther cake?

A word from our sponsor:

Beware the big lie, the humorless, the enforcer of arbitrary rules, the racist, maker of rules for jazz performers. In short, never underestimate the threat of fascism. Only 15% of its speakers survived the Holocaust. Of the surviving speakers 10% live in New York, many by way of Ellis Island.

Why doesn’t the current President of the United States ever laugh? Or is that a ludicrous question?

We now return you to our regularly scheduled program, in progress.

Do you speak Pennsylvania Deitsch, Bill?

Those immigrants from the 18th century brought their language of origin.  Deitsch is a spoken language with several transliterations to mime the sound. Yet, the structure, word order and vocabulary survive with amazing fidelity. Interesting stuff

padutch1934picnic

Hiwwe wie Driwwe (a Deitsche newspaper)

On a related topic, what kind of beach books do you read?

Here is an out-of-print volume that I found at a local library discard sale for 50 cents.  

The World’s Writing Systems by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright

the-worlds-writing-systems

Here is that very book on archive.org

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

Arabic: what gives?

Many posts ago a Palestinian pal (“pal” is twitterese for Palestinian) asked me to write about my adventures in Arabic. So here ’tis 🙂

lemon

you-already-speak-arabic-arabic-loanwords-in-european-languages-9-728

This pal o’ mine is a refugee of Nakba 1948. By various twists of synchronicity he found his way to one of my German classes, intent on reading a bit of the curious language.

What resulted?

A capital stroke of good fortune — a safari if you will. And so did it begin. I said “look my friend, if you are willing to learn some German I could at least learn some Arabic.”

Arabic script is daunting at first. I compare its foundation in the arts and sciences to the Roman alphabet: Arabic script is to the Latin alphabet what Arabic numerals are to Roman numerals.

A qualitative difference?

Take a Roman number. Calculate its root. Let’s take the most important number of all time 42 (XLII). Let me know when you have an answer. Show all work.

match-stick-pi

Nevertheless, Roman civil engineers achieved the splendor of the arch and its keystone cap.

I bet you didn’t know Farsi from Arabic at first.

That is actually correct. I looked at Persian and thought the pairing would be simple — like switching to Dutch from German. Well, a well of Arabic words exist  in Farsi, but Farsi is not based on the root system, a method residing at the very foundation of Arabic. It’s closer to English that way. Rootless.

arabic-or-farsi

Well well well. WTF is a root system?

Consonants that appear in a certain order to suggest meaning. The word ‘safari‘ has roots od SFR. Place some prefixes, suffixes and a few vowel sounds here and there. You’ll discover vocabulary treasures relating to ‘travel’ one way or another.

Why did your pal bleed from the ears?

Not just my friend — most of my students. Encounters with German involve a crazy  grammar that most German students to long for escape (The Great Escape). Though toddlers who drop every dread adjective ending perfectly every day — imagine tossing a deck of cards into the air and thinking them into well sequenced suits.

german-article-adjective-and-pronoun-chart-updated

What’s the deal with Arabic grammatical gender?

Look for a taa marbuta at the end of a noun — it’s that smiley face you see to the right, it’s easy to recognize too.

ta-marbuta

Arabic nouns are never neuter. There is no “it.” Just masculine and feminine. Wowser, that’s a 50% increase, from 2 to 3. There is no verb “to be” in the present, though there is a “was” in Arabic. The verb “to have” does not exist in the way of “haben” or “have” or “habeo.” Habemus Papam.

Did you know that it’s almost impossible to say anything in German without knowinf a noun’s gender?

Only a small exaggeration.

Herr Ziegler, can you craft a short sentence containing all four cases for us?

Let me grapple that in another post.  Gellerese anyone?

gellerese5

Thanks for reading.