Arabic
One of the formative events in my life - as 9/11 is for younger folks - was the seizing of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the taking of American hostages. Later, I even met one of the hostages.
While the events in Iran naturally link to Persian, the whole thing comes back to Arabic, language of the Koran. My junior year of high school I went to a "college experience week" where I studied Russian (to this day, all I remember is ya idu nrok - I'm going to class). But the big thing for me, while I was there, was coming across a copy of the Koran - specifically the Arberry translation.
Reading Arberry, I was extremely dubious that this is what the Koran said. I had translated from the French, at least, and knew that French poetry was impossible to bring across like that. So I returned home, went to the bookshop and got some books about Arabic, a few children's books and a zippered Koran in the original Arabic.
The books I used were Jack Smart's Teach Yourself Arabic, Ali's Teach Yourself Arabic (from Hippocrene) and the Wehr-Cowan dictionary. These I struggled through until I could no more. I learned to use a dictionary. I learned to read the verb tables.
Ultimately, the fairy tales (from Egypt) baffled me. But I was able to work through bits of the Koran and translated the opening verse plus lines here and there. My favorite is still the opening of the second book, the cow. Quoting from memory, and if Allah would please not strike me down: huwa al-kitaab laa raib fihi - This is the book in which there is no doubt. That even makes Ovid's exegui monumentum seem modest!
I have come back to Arabic a dozen times since, most notably with the Pimsleur intro for Iraqi/Eastern and Kullu Tamam, a nice presentation of Egyptian Arabic. But I haven't gotten very far. What I have gotten out of my Arabic studies, more than anything, is the ability to say that I'm most comfortable with the Pickthall translation of the Koran, plus a lot of handy words for everyday phrases in the Turkic languages.
For what it is worth, though, Arabic is on my list of languages that I will learn. I'll talk about that in my next post, before returning to my language experiences.
While the events in Iran naturally link to Persian, the whole thing comes back to Arabic, language of the Koran. My junior year of high school I went to a "college experience week" where I studied Russian (to this day, all I remember is ya idu nrok - I'm going to class). But the big thing for me, while I was there, was coming across a copy of the Koran - specifically the Arberry translation.
Reading Arberry, I was extremely dubious that this is what the Koran said. I had translated from the French, at least, and knew that French poetry was impossible to bring across like that. So I returned home, went to the bookshop and got some books about Arabic, a few children's books and a zippered Koran in the original Arabic.
The books I used were Jack Smart's Teach Yourself Arabic, Ali's Teach Yourself Arabic (from Hippocrene) and the Wehr-Cowan dictionary. These I struggled through until I could no more. I learned to use a dictionary. I learned to read the verb tables.
Ultimately, the fairy tales (from Egypt) baffled me. But I was able to work through bits of the Koran and translated the opening verse plus lines here and there. My favorite is still the opening of the second book, the cow. Quoting from memory, and if Allah would please not strike me down: huwa al-kitaab laa raib fihi - This is the book in which there is no doubt. That even makes Ovid's exegui monumentum seem modest!
I have come back to Arabic a dozen times since, most notably with the Pimsleur intro for Iraqi/Eastern and Kullu Tamam, a nice presentation of Egyptian Arabic. But I haven't gotten very far. What I have gotten out of my Arabic studies, more than anything, is the ability to say that I'm most comfortable with the Pickthall translation of the Koran, plus a lot of handy words for everyday phrases in the Turkic languages.
For what it is worth, though, Arabic is on my list of languages that I will learn. I'll talk about that in my next post, before returning to my language experiences.
1 Comments:
My own experience with Arabic is a bit different, and has come mainly via Persian, in which I am quite fluent. Persian adopted about half of its vocabulary from Arabic for obvious reasons, even though the languages, being from totally different families, were not really that amenable to such extensive influence. Nevertheless, it has been rare for me so far to come across Arabic vocabulary for which I have no point of reference in Persian, even if grammatically it is night from Persian's day.
The book that I have been using is the excellent al-Kitaab fi Ta'alum al-Arabiyya, which uses a series of interactive DVD's, which I have found to be invaluable, as they offer Egyptian Arabic variants of the Modern Standard Arabic dialogues and monologues.
How have you found your study of Qur'anic Arabic, which I understand to be quite different from the various modern variants?
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