Literal Translations and Phrase Explanations

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: ...

‘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: ...

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’): ...

كانت رامية ودن معانا ‘She was eavesdropping on us.’ As though unnamed woman was so desperate to hear your conversation, she went all van Gogh on your shit, ripped her ear off, and then threw it in your general direction. It is times like these I wish TeamMaha had a cartoonist.

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.

I’m going to posit that بتاع – ‘thingy, thingamajig, whatever’ – is one of the most important words in Egyptian Arabic. It has several flexible grammatical uses and is thrown around constantly; the word is especially important for Arabic learners because you can expand your vocabulary tenfold by just replacing words you don’t know with this convenient linguistic evasion. Yes, it is a cop out, but whatthefuckever! Egyptians use it copiously anyways and you’ll fit right in. Anyways. How it works: ...

Both Levantine and Egyptian dialects are filled with phrases and idioms that reference food, and in some cases, the word used to describe a certain food item can have an entirely different meaning in other contexts. Because it is understandably confusing the first time you hear a person’s sleeping patterns compared to a dead, fermented fish, we’ve compiled some of the most common food words/phrases in both dialects here. كوسة – kosa: Egyptian ...

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. ...