Language Glossary - Arabic

Classical Arabic, Fusha, was the language of pre-Islamic Arabs (back in Al-Jahilyyah, the period of ignorance) and the 7th-century Qur’an. Its complex rules of grammar were not derived until the Umayyad period, when the Islamic Empire rapidly expanded to include peoples of non-Arab origin (i.e., Turks and Persians). Today, both the rigid grammar of the classical tongue is preserved mainly in the collective memory of Arabic and religion teachers and writers. Though television and radio broadcasts, newspapers, political and other speeches, and religious sermons are all delivered in classical Arabic, rules are thrown to the wind. In daily life, on the other hand, Colloquial Arabic, ‘Amtya, is used.

Arabic uses several sounds that are unfamiliar to speakers in English. Kh is like the German or Scottish ch; h or just h (as in Muhammad) is somewhere between kh and plain English h; gh is similar to a Freeh r. In addition, vowels and consonants can be either long or short. You linger an instant more on the vowel in salaam (peace) than you do in baram (pyramid). Furthermore, a doubled consonant can mean the difference between ham-mam (toilets) and hamam (pigeons).

There are two kinds of k in Arabic: one that is pronounced as the k in English and the other (commonly marked as q) which comes from deep inside the back of the throat. The latter is usually dropped in colloquial speech, so if you are looking for the Mausoleum of Bar-quq, someone will give you directions to the Mausoleum of Bar’u’. R is pronounced as a tongue trill, similar to Spanish. In Egypt, g is pronounced hard (as in “gobble") whereas in Jordan and other Arab countries a g is pronounced like ay (thus gabal in the former country andjabal in the latter). The definite article is the prefix al, often written el. It is pronounced somewhere in between the two; when before the consonants t, n, d, s, sh, or z, the / is not pronounced, and spellings in this book reflect that for accuracy of pronunciation. Also remember that adjectives describing females (grammatical or real) add an “-eh” at the end. Yaa is the Arabic equivalent of “Yo!” and is considered polite when addressing someone directly.