Levantine Arabic

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: ...

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 ...

‘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: ...

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 ...

All of the videos we’ve looked at so far, with the exception perhaps of that Camel song everybody liked so much, have been from TV and have represented a kind of scripted conversational language which represents more or less (minus the drama) the way that people speak in normal everyday situations. Obviously this is important – if you’re going on a year abroad, or want to learn Arabic to communicate with people in normal situations, this is the kind of language you need to become familiar with. ...

This is a post about some ways to say ‘seem’ and express conclusions about people without saying يبدو (although as with many fuSHa expressions this does sometimes appear in speech as a more formal alternative to the phrases given below). كإنو ka2énno This word literally means ‘as if’ (like the fuSHa ka2anna) and is one of the 2ukhawaat 2inna, which in 3aammiyye basically means you can attach pronouns to it (ka2énni, ka2énnak…). Like 2énno, however, the third person masculine form (ka2énno) often appears regardless of the gender and number of the subject. It can also appear quite freely in different positions, including at the end of a sentence and on its own. Its use in the meaning ‘as if’ was covered in this post. ...

Talking to people on the phone can be difficult enough in English, especially if you’re a millennial who barely remembers when you still had to pay for individual texts and didn’t have 3G everywhere. Doing it in a foreign language is notoriously even more difficult. By special request, then, here’s a few key pieces of vocabulary/expressions for speaking over the phone, along with a gif of Drake speaking Arabic over the phone (accuracy not guaranteed): ...