This one you might already know because of the recent-ish protests in Lebanon in which طلعت ريحتكم became a common slogan. Basically, to ‘smell’ (in the intransitive sense of giving off a smell, rather than detecting one as a smelling person) is expressed with two alternatives which are pretty similar – one with Tile3 and the other Talla3: بقي اكتر من خمس دقايق يشرح لحبيبتو انو الجسم بطلع ريحة bi2i 2aktar min kham@s da2aaye2 yishra7 la7abiibto 2inno ijjis@m biTalle3 rii7a He spent more than five minutes explaining to his girlfriend that bodies give off a smell ...

لا شغلة ولا عملة laa sheghle wala 3amle Literally ‘neither work nor work’, but actually used to mean ‘with absolutely nothing to do’ or ‘doing absolutely nothing’: في نائب ما عندو لا شغلة ولا عملة الا الكذب ولك عيب استحى وانضب fii naa2eb maa 3indo laa sheghle wala 3amle 2illa lkizeb wlak 3eeb sta7i w@nDabb There’s an MP who does absolutely nothing but lie – shame on you, have some shame and shut the hell up ...

Homsood is an internet presence (originally, I think, a youtuber) who produces a weekly 20 minute review dealing with media, usually recent musalsalaat, with a tone of eternal incredulity. He does an excellent job of spearing the often tortured plots and heavy-handed propagandising involved in Arabic-language drama, and his episodes are always pretty funny – especially, of course, if you’ve watched the TV shows in question. He’s always worth a watch, both for language and for content. ...

‘Think’ is another one of these words that translates to several different things in other languages, so here’s a post on all the different ways you can talk about what’s goin’ on in the old grey matter: فكر fakkar This one we all know from fuSHa (in fact this is true of most of the words here). It has two major meanings. The first is thinking about something, which takes b- for a noun or a subjunctive for a verb: ...

unfortunately wordpress won’t host anki files, but here’s a link to it on the ol’ google drive: here many thanks to the indefatigable Charlie Lawrie for producing it!

The English word ‘time’ means about a thousand different things, and working out which of the apparently endless list of Arabic words you should use when talking about ‘time’ when your own native language covers everything with one enormous semantic umbrella can be tricky. Here’s a rough guide that might help a bit. زمان zamaan The usual conceptual term for talking about ‘time’ as an idea: ...

This short post is on a song which everybody wrongly attributes to Ziad Rahbani (Fayrouz’s son) – as you can see from the enormous picture of him on the video – but which is apparently actually by one of the Bandali brothers, whose voices are apparently very similar to Ziad’s. I’ll let you guess what the song is about based on the smoky clouds in the video and the fairly on-the-nose lyrics. ...

Pinning down patterns in word order and the exact subtle or not-so-subtle implications that different kinds of word-scrambling can produce in colloquial Arabic (or for that matter MSA) is a tricky business and one that we’ve so far completely avoided delving into. I’m going to ambitiously try and address that a little bit in this post. Wish me luck! Verbal sentences I’ve almost certainly moaned elsewhere about how teaching materials misguidedly present Arabic dialects as simpler versions of MSA (sometimes even derivable directly from the MSA they teach you properly through a series of simple rules). At least in materials for an English-speaking audience, ‘simple’ is often actually code for ‘more like English’, and one of the outcomes of this is that it is often said that Arabic dialects, unlike MSA (or sometimes MSA, unlike Classical Arabic) has a word order that Puts The Subject First And The Verb Second, Just – Like – English! ...

‘Actually’ is another useful word used quite a lot in English (and not just at the beginning of patronising lectures about politics delivered by that person at a party nobody wants to talk to). Like the other words we’ve been looking at in this series, however, it defies attempts to find a single Arabic equivalent, which can often leave you grasping for a word you really need in the middle of a sentence. ...

تقريبا ta2riiban The most useful and all-purpose word for ‘almost’. This works for quantities: وتميتني هنيك شي اربع سنين تقريبا w tammeetni hniik shi 2arba3 @sniin ta2riiban and I stayed there for about four years… Vaguer things: تقريبا نفس اللي اشتريتو المرة الماضية ta2riiban nafs élli shtareeto lmarra lmaaDye Almost the same as the one [= the same of the one that] I bought last time ...