Levantine Arabic

This is just a quick one but a surprisingly complicated topic – different words for ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. Syrian Arabic has a surprisingly large inventory of different words for these two concepts. Weather is described as شوب shoob ‘hot’ or برد bar@d ‘cold’. You probably know these two, but you might not realise that they’re not adjectives but nouns. They most commonly appear in the éddénye X construction described by Caitlyn here and by me here – literally ‘the world is heat’, ‘the world is cold’. You can also use them as normal nouns in contexts like ما بحب البرد ‘I don’t like the cold’ or الشوب بنعسني ‘hot [weather] makes me sleepy’. ...

تاني taani taani is one of the first words you’re introduced to in a colloquial course, and I think is pretty much omnipresent in dialects in the meaning ‘other’ alongside its original meaning ‘second’. It often appears with indefinites in the meaning ‘else’: مو محتاج كون واحد تاني وانا معها ولا محتاج حدا تاني وهي معي muu mé7taaj kuun waa7ed taani w-2ana ma3a wala mé7taaj 7ada taani w-hiyye ma3i I don’t have to be someone else when I’m with her and I don’t need anyone else when she’s with me ...

This one is quite straightforward. ‘Anymore’ (in one of its senses anyway) expresses that there has been a change from something happening to it no longer happening: I don’t go there anymore. ما عاد maa3aad مابقى maaba2a There are two direct equivalents to ‘anymore’/’no longer’, both of them derived from verbs: ما بقى maa ba2a and ما عاد maa 3aad (this one is used in a fuSHa-y form in MSA too). Although they look pretty straightforwardly like negated past tense verbs, they don’t behave much like verbs – for a start, they’re usually invariable, not conjugating for person or number or gender: ...

I somehow managed to forget about حالs when writing this series, which considering how many interminable hours you have to spend learning to identify them when studying fuSHa (and how many ‘underline the 7aal‘ exercises I must have done) is quite some feat. To be fair to both me (for forgetting) and your teachers (for harping on about it for so long), 7aals are so omnipresent and so useful in both speech and writing that they’re almost hiding in plain sight. Hopefully this post will clarify some of the ~mysteries~ of the 7aal in spoken Levantine. ...

No direct equivalent to ‘already’ exists in Arabic, which is probably why a growing number of speakers familiar with English (and even some who aren’t!) use the borrowed form orredi (or older speakers in Lebanon deeja). This is not yet widespread enough or unstigmatised enough to recommend using, though, so for the moment let’s have a look at some of the partial equivalents you might want to familiarise yourself with instead. Each of these can be used in some of the circumstances ‘already’ can be used in. ...

In English ‘just’ can be used to indicate something happened very recently (‘just now’). In Arabic the idiomatic equivalent is by using ‘now’ with the simple past. The most neutral dialect word for ‘now’ is halla2 : هلق فقت halla2 fé2@t I’ve just (now) woken up انا هلق خلصت جلي ana halla2 khallaS@t jaly I’ve just finished washing up [jaly is the maSdar of jala yejli ‘wash up’] In the present, ‘just about to…’ has a similar effect but in reverse: it expresses that the action is in the very near future. هلق works here too, usually with béddi (which itself often expresses a ‘near future’): ...

Expressions of desire: بدي روح béddi ruu7 I want to go بدي ياك تروح معي béddi yaak @truu7 ma3i I want you to go with me حابب امشي 7aabeb émshi I’d like to leave يا ريت تعرفلي وقت الموعد yaa reet ta3réf-li wa2t él-moo3ed I’d really like you to find out the time of the appointment for me Fear, expectation and anticipation: خايف تروح عليي الفرصة khaayef @truu7 3aleyyi élférSa I’m scared I’ll miss/to miss the opportunity [= that the opportunity will go on me] ...

Since I promised some better content, here is some Top Quality breakup music from Syria’s biggest troll (or just worst musician?) Firas Hamzawi, described by Sawt Dimashq as ‘a new kind of shabbii7 and a new model of musical poor quality‘. The song – la-Tiizi ‘screw it’ (literally ‘to my arse’) – is directed at Hamzawi’s ex, who I’m sure was brought to tears by his touching lyrical style. /wp-content/uploads/2017/06/لطيزي-لاترجعي-الفنان-فراس-الحمزاوي.mp4 ما بدي ياكي معي maa baddi yaaki ma3i I don’t want you with me ...

BY FAN REQUEST Even in fuSHa ما is one of those tricky multifunctional particles that can be used in a large number of different ways – relatively (ما الموصولة), negatively (ما النافية), interrogatively (ما الاستفهامية), surprisingly (ما التعجبية) or even pointlessly (ما الزائدة). In (Levantine) 3aammiye most of these uses have been supplanted. As elsewhere, however, what seems like a standard case of ‘whoa man amiye has no grammar, it’s so much easier than fuSHa’ is unfortunately just a matter of 3aamiyye having a different, but also broad, set of uses for ما. We’ve covered most of its uses elsewhere, so this is more of an index than anything, but I hope it will be helpful. ...

This is another clip from Buq3at Daw2, this time from this season (which is airing now, catch it kids). This sketch (vignette? idk) is entitled حادث سير ‘traffic accident’ (7aades seer), and it tells the story of a man who is run over by a well-meaning driver who cannot afford to have his identity exposed and as such is an easy target for blackmail. I’m transcribing the first scene – the whole thing is about 12 minutes long, and this whole episode (particularly the other two sketches) was not very good, but it does have a lot of useful language in it. ...