I’ve put together a PDF giving the Jordanian and Palestinian equivalents of the verb forms we’ve already detailed elsewhere for Syrian, with the indispensable help of my friend and colleague Elias Shakkour, a native speaker of Palestinian Arabic. Here we go: Southern Levantine verbs

This is a post about the highs and lows of translation, the difficulties of colloquial, and – perhaps most importantly – the cack-handed half-heartedness of Netflix’s subtitling. In my actual life – that is, when I’m not following my real vocation of writing snarky and/or fake-authoritative posts about Syrian dialect on the internet – I work as a translator. I also, sometimes, watch TV (as the innumerable lines from musalsalat I’ve used as examples might suggest). We’ve already slated the bizarre and occasionally desperately wrong stabs at English you can find in MBC’s abysmal MSA subtitling – but bad translation is far from confined to media conglomerates and their poor renderings of 4-year-old American B-movies. It turns out that it’s also a problem for groundbreaking American streaming services’ poor renderings of (relatively new) Syrian-Lebanese dramas. ...

This is a belated FuSHa to Shami post on something that I somehow managed to completely avoid covering the first time round – what Cowell calls ‘presentational particles’. There are a few of these dialectally, but we’re only going to cover the main two here: ليك leek and هي/هاي hayy/haay. هي hayy This is the more universal of the two particles, used in all Levantine dialects. Its basic meaning is ‘here is’ or ‘there is’. Although for some speakers it’s homophonous with the feminine form of هاد (‘this [one]’, feminine), and might be etymologically related, it does not change for gender and can be used with anything: ...

This is a quick post about the word ‘barely’. ‘Barely’ is a pretty useful English word, with a few different possible translations in Levantine. يا دوب ya doob This is probably the most multi-purpose and useful word for ‘barely’ or ‘hardly’. It’s not particularly transparent, and I have no idea of the etymology. It can take pronoun suffixes (ya doobni, ya doobak) or appear on its own. Sometimes it triggers subjunctive. ...

You probably already know the words تقيل and خفيف in their literal senses, along with their plural forms. You’ve probably also heard at least some of the various verbs derived from them, or could guess at them based on our handy guide to causatives. You might not know, however, that calling someone ‘heavy’ is more likely to be a comment on how they deal with potential suitors than their actual weight. For this and more metaphors and expressions of similar weighty importance, have a look at this post. ...

متل العالم mitl il3aalam (zayy il3aalam) متل الناس mitl innaas (zayy innaas) متل العالم والناس mitl il3aalam winnaas (zayy il3aalam winnaas) As the different variations on the expression given above show, ‘like the world’ is a pretty misleading translation. (Psych!!!) As you probably know, عالم (in this sense feminine, not masculine) means ‘people’: في عالم بتقول انو… fii 3aalam bit2uul inno… There are people who say that… The expression متل العالم and its variations thus literally mean ‘like people’. What they actually mean, though, is ‘like [normal, respectable] people’, or by extension ‘properly’ or ‘decent[ly]’: ...

You may already know the word عزم يعزم ‪3azam yi3zem ‘invite’ (not ‘be determined’ as in fuSHa), but unless you’re German or Turkish this simply gloss is likely to expose you to some misunderstandings and possibly some embarrassments without a little bit of cultural background. If you tell someone: بعزمك على فنجان قهوة bi3zmak 3ala finjaan 2ahwe ‘I’ll invite you for a cup of coffee’ ...

This post is about all the different things you can do with your eyes (عين عيون ‭3een 3yuun). As anybody who’s listened to any Arab pop song can attest, the word 3een and its various variations appears all the time in Arabic. In fact there are loads and loads of nice idioms to do with eyes which it’s worth learning a bit about. You can more or less divide these idioms up into three broad sections. The first set will be fairly familiar to English native speakers because they depend on a straightforward enough equivalence of eyes and seeing. The second set depends on a broad idea of the eye as something positive to be attached to compliments willy-nilly. The third set are to do with the evil eye. ...

One of those translation curiosities you come across when you’re first learning Arabic is just how many different words for ‘mind’ there are. On the general theme of common idioms, one of the most common in colloquial is the word بال, which we’ll cover in this post. خطر على بالي khaTar/yikhTor 3ala baali ‘To occur to’, ‘to think of’, ‘to come to mind’ [= it occurred onto my mind]: اول شي خطر ع بالي هو هادا السؤال 2awwal shi khaTar 3a baali huwwe haada ssu2aal The first thing that occurred to me was this question ...

This one we’ve already touched on previously. The verb اكل akal, as we all know, means ‘eat’. It’s also used metaphorically/idiomatically, however, to express a negative passive (a usage which also exists in Turkish and Persian and probably other languages of the region). The things you can ‘eat’ in this sense are numerous – in fact it’s fairly productive, in the sense that anything negative you can experience you can probably ‘eat’ in this sense. Here are some of the common ones: ...