part of the problem:
Learning Arabic
by Tim Macintosh-Smith
Tim Macintosh-Smith writes in the opening of his book Yemen: The Unknown Arabia1 about his travails learning Arabic on his own on the Isle of Harris in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Scotland, then in class at Oxford University. His experiences will ring true to most students of Arabic.
The fire let out a rich belch of smoke. I threw on another sod of peat and drew up a chair. Cowan's Modern Literary Arabic lay open at "The Dual" (not content with mere singulars and plurals, Arabic also has a form for pairs): "The two beautiful queens," it said, "are ignorant." The odds against ever uttering the sentence were high: grammars, like theatre, call for a suspension of disbelief. Under Cowan was an Arabic reader produced for British officers in the Palestine Mandate. At the bottom of the pile, as yet untouched, was a dictionary. I reached for it and looked at the title page. The dictionary had been compiled for the use of students and published Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam by the Catholic Press, Beirut, in 1915. As I turned its foxed pages, I broke through the wall of words into a wilderness of idea. It was another world, a surreal lexical landscape whose inhabitants lived in a state of relentless metamorphosis.
Over there was a zabab, "a messenger" or possibly "a huge deaf rat," while in the distance grazed a na'amah, "an ostrich," although it might have been "a signpost," "a pavilion on a mountain" or even "a membrane of the brain." Nearer to hand someone was maljan, "sucking his she-camels out of avarice"; he'd be in for a shock if he had istanwaq them, "mistaken male camels for she-camels." He could just be suffering from sada, "thirst," also "a voice," "an echo," "a corpse," "a brain" or "an owl." He was in a bad mood so I passed on quickly, worried that he might tarqa me, "strike me upon the clavicle.". . .
Time and again in the years [of Arabic instruction] that followed, some verbal curiosity or weirdness of phrase would sidetrack me out of the corridors of the Oxford Oriental Institute and back into Dictionary Land.
"I didn't get the drift of lines 66-7. Could you, er. . .?"
‘"Verily I have seen upon your mandibles the belly- and tail-fat of a lizard./Your words reveal the buttocks of your meanings."'
"I'm sorry?"
‘"Your words reveal the buttocks of your meanings."'
"Oh."
They taught us abstruse and arcane mysteries, how to compound the base elements of syntax into glittering and highly wrought prose. We were apprentices in a linguistic alchemy. And, like alchemy, Arabic seemed to be half science and two-thirds magic. The Arabs themselves are spellbound by their language. Look at the effect on them of the Qur'an: the Word—divinely beautiful, terrifying, tear-inducing, spine-tingling, mesmerizing, inimitable—was sufficient in itself. It did not need to become flesh. But Qur'anic Arabic is only one manifestation of the language. You can be preacher, poet, raconteur, and fishwife in a single sentence. You can, with the Arabic of official reports, say next to nothing in a great many words and with enormous elegance. You can compose a work of literature on the two lateral extremities of the wrist-bone. You can even be cured of certain ailments by procuring a magic chit, infusing the ink out of it, and drinking the water: word-power at its most literal. They taught us all this, but they didn't teach us how to speak it. After two years of Arabic I couldn't even have asked the way to the lavatory.
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