Culture Note

This guest post was written by Hossam Abouzahr, the man behind The Living Arabic Project (www.livingarabic.com), a compilation of multiple dialect and Fusha dictionaries that contains the largest Egyptian dialect dictionary and (what will hopefully soon be) the largest Levantine dialect dictionary. A half-breed (Arab-American), he found out that Arabic is actually beautiful after escaping from Arabic classes and meeting cool teachers who introduced him to the fun side of the language. ...

Transcription of an interview with a surprisingly satisfied hijack-ee. With Cyprus, planes and nervous laughter.

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! ...

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. ...

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. ...

A transcription of the short Egyptian film el Qonbela, with bombs, street theatre and pickles.

Guest Post by Christ Hitchcock for #TeamNisreen This expression – اسم على مُسَمّى – is apparently found everywhere in the Arabic-speaking world and is an excellent go-to compliment – as long as the person you are speaking to has a nice name. It basically means ‘your name describes you exactly’. If you meet someone called نادرة (rare), وسيم (handsome), باسم (smiler) or جميلة (beautiful), this will probably go down pretty well. I wouldn’t suggest citing it in response to a surname like عدوان (aggression), though, or to someone called غيث (light rain). I’m still working on finding out if this proverb was used in the days when people were called things like معاوية (bitch in heat). ...

ابو شنب “abu shanab“ This literally means ‘father of moustache’ but in reality is just a convenient way to point out an unknown man with enviable facial hair, aka ‘that guy with the moustache’ in English. If you’re referring to a guy walking down the street wearing a red shirt, for example, he may similarly become “abu a7mar,” and sometimes the phrase has a comical, “I’m kind of making fun of this person but not really,” type of feeling. ...