rot13 doesn't make this post any more intelligible.
Nf-fnynnz nynvxhz jn enuzngh Nyynuv jn onenxnghu.
Sure, you're not the one they'll put in Gitmo.
Some of us don't celebrate it until Saturday, you know.
La mayyitan ma qadirun yatabaqqa sarmadi
Fa idha yaji' al-shudhdhadh fa-l-maut qad yantahi?
Geez, it's like Arabs have a different word for every word in the English language.
انت الان تقول ان الرافضة لا يسبون الصحابة اذا ابحث عن فيديو اسمه الرافضة و موقفهم من عمر بن الخطاب و الشئ الثاني هل تعلم ان الرافضة في ايران يطوفون حول قبر المجوسي و يترحمون عليه لانه قتل عمر رضي الله عن
Yn znllvgna zn dnqveha lngnonddn fneznqv
Sn vqun lnwv' ny-fuhququnqu sn-y-znhg dnq lnagnuv?
That's right, laugh at the other. I'm actually waiting until Saturday as well, but I wanted to put this up before I forgot.
Is Christmas early this year or something?
Someone's got to work on the spam filters, all kinds of crap coming through on this thread.
If it's a holiday, can I take the day off? Please?
You'll need to get a job first, B.
I'm scared and angry, and I don't know why.
I've had enough of this sort of thing, I'm gonna go vote for Rudy Giuliani.
14: Sexist.
How about if I take the day off from this INCREDIBLY PAINFUL spider bite ON MY ASS? That would be nice.
Give a honky a break. I know as-salaam alaikum, but not the whole thing. And it's not like there are any good transliterated Arabic-English dictionaries online.
Oh, never find, I found it. Professional researcher and all. Labs, the preference of the internets seems to be "rahmatullahi" as one word.
17: I'm glad you are moving this thread away from incomprehensible foreign stuff and back on the correct topic for any unfogged thread: ass.
Labs, the preference of the internets seems to be "rahmatullahi" as one word.
Presumably because that's the way it's actually pronounced. Labs may have broken it apart to emphasize that the second word is "Allah," which is also known to most honkies.
21: I'd be happy to comply, but my neck and shoulder are so fucked up right now that I am physically incapable of doing so. I had to ask PK to look at my butt this morning to tell me what the hell had happened and why it was hurting so much.
And to emphasize the interfaith nature of Islamic incantations that pay homage to Rahm.
but my neck and shoulder are so fucked up right now that I am physically incapable of doing so.
You are Mr. B were really getting busy last night, huh?
You'd better hope it doesn't fall off, B. Watch out for necrosis. Mmmm... brown recluse....
As-salaam alaikum wa rahmatu Allahi wa barakatuh.
OK, let's see here...
"As-salaam alaikum": peace be on you, a common greeting.
"wa": and
"rahmatu": I have no idea what the word means, but it's a verb, in the first person singular I think. Or third person singular? Crap. No, wait, if h is a root consonant, then the t is also part of the suffix, making this... plural?
"Allahi": God, obviously, and the "-i" usually is an adjectival form.
"wa barakatuh": and... some other verb. This is even harder to conjugate, because of trying to transliterate the letter H. Arabic has three of those, but in English that H probably wouldn't be voiced at all, so maybe it's just meant to be a generic vowel sound, like in "duh"?. In that case, I think it would be the third person feminine singular, but I'm not sure.
So according to the boring generic office calendar next to my desk, today is the Day of the Race, Eid al Fitr. (Are those two separate holidays?)
Oh yeah, my professors after three years of Arabic in high school and college sure would be proud of me.
rahm: "mercy"
barakah: "blessing"
They aren't verbs, obviously, but nouns, with the suffix -hu "his" added to them. The final -u is dropped on barakatuh because it is in pausal form. The whole thing means "May peace and God's mercy and blessing be upon you."
Actually, it's rahmah rather than rahm.
I wish my Arabic class had had words like "pausal" in it.
And looking at it again, there isn't a -hu suffix on rahmah because it's modified directly by Allahi. "God's" rather than "his."
What the hell kind of Arabic did you guys take, anyway?
Here's the textbook. I agree with H. Abadzi's critique. Also, as I said in another thread, it was taught by random people around the university who happened to be native speakers, and didn't know anything about the structure of the language in linguistic terms.
My Arabic professor had harsh words for that book. It is unfortunately very widely used.
When was the last time three consecutive posts were by Labs?
Actually that's part two of the textbook. We didn't get past part one.
I also agree with Raymond Moody's critique.
I don't think any Arabic class would really have succeeded in three hours a week, but they really should have focused 100% on reading and writing since it would be even more impossible to try to become conversational even a tiny bit.
Three hours a week? That's ridiculous.
When reading Amazon reviews I sometimes forget that they are written by random people.
"Very grammar intensive, not conversational/spoken language. Obviously designed for students in pricey universities who want to be CIA agents or State Dept. employees. Good for understanding Arab TV news, but that's about it."
Any two of those sentences completely contradict each other. All three of them are completely incompatible. No two of them could possibly both be true.
The language classes for languages that people have already taken in high school are 5 hours a week, but the language classes for obscure languages are 3 hours a week.
39: The first and third sentences actually are compatible.
39: All those sound to me as though they're inartfully addressing the Standard Arabic as opposed to any dialect actually spoken issue, don't they?
40: That seems completely backwards.
All those sound to me as though they're inartfully addressing the Standard Arabic as opposed to any dialect actually spoken issue, don't they?
Yeah. The part about State Dept./CIA employees is a little tricky, because many such people would need to know spoken Arabic as well, but the basic theme is that the book focuses on the written rather than the spoken language.
The first and third sentences actually are compatible.
No, if it's grammar and language intensive and not conversational/spoken language, then it doesn't teach you how to understand actual people talking, e.g. those you see in real life, or those you see on TV.
And if it was supposed to be for would-be CIA agents, then it would be nothing but how to talk to real people, without any of this pansy crap about the "jussive" and the "three-consonant root".
That seems completely backwards.
Well, I exaggerate. Usually if you had actually learned some of the language in high school you could take a placement test to skip the five-hour course and go directly into the more advanced three-hour course.
No, if it's grammar and language intensive and not conversational/spoken language, then it doesn't teach you how to understand actual people talking, e.g. those you see in real life, or those you see on TV.
One of the peculiarities of the Arab sociolinguistic situation, though, is that TV news is broadcast in the formal language.
That is, what you say would be true for most languages, but not Arabic.
The class did not, however, enable us to understand what was being spoken in the videos that we were shown. Maybe if it was twenty hours a week it would have, though, so I guess I shouldn't blame the book/video system for that.
Isn't it Saturday for the U.S. or whenever ibn-Labs al-FLU sees the new moon?
What the hell kind of Arabic did you guys take, anyway?
Well, I spent the 2000-2001 school year attending a French high school as an exchange student. French high schools require students to take a third language other than English and French, so I picked Arabic just because it seemed interesting. But as far as actual learning went, that class wasn't that good. (Students didn't want to be there, I was learning it through a second language, etc.) And I took a few Arabic classes in college, with teachers who were so nice and knowledgeable themselves and stuff that I feel guilty saying that those classes may have been even worse when it came to actually getting stuff done. Despite all that, I could probably have at least figured out the conjugations correctly back when I was taking the college classes.
The state of Arabic as a second language education really is atrocious. The classes I took weren't that great, but they were a lot better than what Ned and Cyrus are describing.
Actually, Cala, I just cut and pasted that comment onto my CV.
You'd better hope it doesn't fall off, B. Watch out for necrosis. Mmmm... brown recluse....
Heh. Driving to the chiropractor, I saw an exterminator's truck with a big black widow on the side, and thought "hey, if a black widow bit my butt, maybe the muscle will get all infected and fall off, and then I can get a tattoo of a black widow on my shrunken ass cheek."
54: MY PHONE NUMBER IS 1-976-PHALLUS SO ANYONE CAN CALL ME THERE.
53: True, but also, it's a pretty hard language, isn't it? Big differences between modern standard (written) Arabic and most spoken Arabic, much more different from English than most European languages, etc.
54: Which comment, yours or Cala's?
True, but also, it's a pretty hard language, isn't it?
Yes, which is part of the reason instruction in it is so terrible. But only part.
And if it was supposed to be for would-be CIA agents, then it would be nothing but how to talk to real people, without any of this pansy crap about the "jussive" and the "three-consonant root".
Actually, it's my understanding that even the Defense Language Proficiency Test is in the reviled Modern Standard Arabic. I imagine it's different for NCS folks, tho.
Yeah, the formal training even for the federal government is all MSA, I think. People who have to actually live in Arab countries, like diplomats and spies, go through different training in dialects.
Sorry, this thread is already dead by the time I find it. I studied Arabic in the US foreign service. They concentrate on speaking in dialect (they teach Shami which means Lebanon/Syria/Jordan/Palestine area and also Egyptian which I took) and reading newspaper articles which are in Mod Standard. It is a very good system for conversation and newspaper scanning. It however does not teach writing at all apart from merely learning the letters to write vocab lists.
The best student in my second year Foreign Service Institute Arabic course had had his first year at DLI in Monterey and he was in Army intelligence. He knew Mod Standard better than us and picked up dialect really fast.
I also took Arabic at Georgetown for a year, where we used the bright orange Modern Standard text which is very heavy on the grammar, so I was pretty fortunate to be able to have the best of both methods and learn the language pretty well. I am appalled at the method that Teofilo was taught.
I don't think I described the method that I was taught. Do you mean Ned?
And the DLI program, though focused on MSA, does seem to be very good. There was a guy at our conference who went through it, and his Arabic was excellent.
The foreign service system sounds very good, btw.
Sorry, Teo, you're right. I actually meant Ned and Cyrus. I think the FSI program is very good for the sort of language skills that diplomats are supposed to have. Since it completely does not teach writing, though, it can't really work in an academic setting.
The FSI program sounds a lot like what the program I took was trying to be. It wasn't really able to get there, for a variety of reasons both general to the academic environment and specific to the school.