Both Levantine and Egyptian dialects are filled with phrases and idioms that reference food, and in some cases, the word used to describe a certain food item can have an entirely different meaning in other contexts. Because it is understandably confusing the first time you hear a person’s sleeping patterns compared to a dead, fermented fish, we’ve compiled some of the most common food words/phrases in both dialects here. كوسة – kosa: Egyptian ...

Hi everyone! For today I’ve transcribed a scene from غدا نلتقي ghadan naltaqi, a Ramadan series from 2015 that follows a group of Syrians living in an abandoned building in Beirut. In it we see Abu Abdo – the excitable patriarch of a traditional working-class family – bombarding his wife and children with information and speculation about possible refugee destinations. If you were already following Team Maha back in 2016, you might remember this video. But I’ve re-transcribed it and uploaded it with optional Arabic subtitles so you can follow the words as they’re being spoken. I hope you enjoy it! ...

Syrian Salabina is a Facebook group that produces a lot of memes and short comedic videos. salabiina سلبينا is a slang term for somebody who makes jokes out of everything. It’s derived from the verb سلبها على séléb-ha 3ala, which means something like ‘pretend not to know things in order to trick someone’ or ‘act stupid’. This suffix -iina – though I have no idea where it’s derived from – is apparently used to make pejorative nouns in a similar way to the suffix -ji. It occurs in at least one another word, fakhfakhiina, which you might translate as ‘posho’ or ‘stuck-up’ (from فخفخة fakhfakha, the maSdar of tfakhfakh ‘act posh’, ultimately derived from fakhkhaame ‘fancy, elevated’). ...

Continuing in the spirit of Chris’ last post, here is another joke — which is in pretty bad taste, I might add — about engagement/marriage from the Internet. It’s not as full of useful vocabulary as the last one, but it is certainly amusing: انا جاي اطلب ايد بنتك يا حج بس يابنى دى لسا بالمدرسة خلاص اجى بالليل تكون جت I’ve come to ask for your daughter’s hand, Hagg. Son, she’s still in school! Alright, I’ll come back at night when she’s here. ...

In the Levant and probably most of the Arab World, when a man wants to get married to a woman, he goes to see her father and requests her hand in marriage. This interaction is quite awkward, and has spawned a whole genre of jokes. Here is one from the internet: شب رايح يخطب مرحبا عمي انا جاية اطلب ايد بنتك طيب عمي ازا قدرت تاخد الموبايل من ايدا خدا كلا وبلا مهر ازا بدك shabb raaye7 yikhTob mar7aba 3ammi ana jaayye eTlob iid bintak Tayyib 3ammi iza 2der@t taakhod ilmobayl min iida khida killa w bala mah@r iza biddak A guy goes to get engaged “Hello, sir, I’ve come to ask for your daughter’s hand.” “Look, son, if you can get the mobile out of her hand you can have all of her and without paying if you want.” ...

نمت زي الفسيخة ‘nemt zay el fasee5a’ MMMMM how delicious and appetizing!!!! Fasikh is a rotten, pungent fish pickled with salt that many Egyptians eat during the Sham El Nessim holiday to celebrate the beginning of spring. According to Wikipedia, the dish is comprised of “fermented, salted, and dried gray mullet” and the secrets of the fermentation process are often passed down from father to son. ...

Doubled verbs are those verbs whose second and third root letter are the same, like 7-b-b (حبّ). In Classical Arabic, these verbs decline basically like sound verbs, with one exception. This exception is that when the third root consonant is followed by a vowel – i.e. when a suffix beginning with a vowel is attached – the second and third root consonants cluster together. The vowel which should have been between the second and third root consonants is dropped. This is slightly complicated to explain in words, but easy to understand with examples: when the suffix -tu is attached to the verbs katab- and marr-, you get basically identical conjugations: katabtu and marartu. But when the suffix -a for ‘he’ is added, you get kataba and marra. MSA mostly follows Classical Arabic, although you sometimes see unexpected forms like محاصصة mu7aaSaSa, conjugated like a sound verb, instead of the more correct محاصّة mu7aaSSa. ...

This is an episode of the excellent dark comedy أمل ما في There’s No Hope, which takes the form of short three minute dialogues between two unnamed characters dressed, for unclear reasons, like fishermen. Perhaps these outfits are read differently in a Syrian context, or perhaps fishermen are just famously miserable bastards. In any case. There’s no puns in this one, but it does have a positive take-home message and an upbeat theme tune you’ll be humming all day! ...

This song – one of my favourite Lebanese songs – is, like many things which come out of a country I am increasingly convinced is populated entirely by DJs, totally ridiculous; it’s also full of very useful expressions and vocabulary, as well as a couple of puns (and who doesn’t love puns!). The slightly awkwardly written English description explains that this song, and the accompanying music video, are poking fun at the self-contained bourgeois bubble of Downtown Beirut through a little bit of absurdism, i.e. riding the eponymous camel around and generally causing chaos. The incident made the Lebanese press – which slightly surreally explains that nobody would have had a problem with a horse, since horses are generally considered to be in keeping with the high level of culture in the city centre (?), but that a camel just wasn’t on. The lyrics themselves make the politically critical nature of the song pretty clear, so I won’t bother explaining it further. The sentences are obviously scrambled a bit syntactically for the purposes of rhyme and rhythm, so perhaps don’t copy the word order exactly, but the expressions and words are all perfectly normal. ...

يدغدغ “ydaghdagh“ As I was discussing Arabic grammar over some Stellas with friends the other day (before you think to yourself ‘wow this girl is a total nerd’: 99% of you have done this before. do not lie.), I said that during my year with CASA I discovered a love for words with 4 letter roots in Arabic, like يهمهم and يوشوش (both onomatopoeias for whispering) as well as يدغدغ (MSA for ‘to tickle.’ not entirely sure how this came up in a graduate level Arabic class, but. you know.). Then my friends informed me that in Egyptian, يدغدغ means ‘to smash’ as in ‘I’m going to smash your head in.’ Probably something you wouldn’t say in an actual fight, but definitely lies within the realm of siblings threatening to beat each other up. ...