Wednesday 20 October 2010

Arabic the Hard Way


VERSUS

It's easy. Just pretend you're swallowing the base of your tongue. Then let out a strangled cry. That's 'ain, one of the handful of letters in the Arabic alphabet which don't exist in English.

I read this advice in a text book years after acquiring colloquial Sudanese Arabic by rough and ready means. With neither a teacher nor the structure of an ordered syllabus to guide me, I attained a basic fluency in the language - by pestering people.

A most unscientific approach to language acquisition, it was certainly effective. Life in a foreign country is hugely enriched if you have a working knowledge of the language.

Two factors in Sudan helped me achieve a high degree of success. I had lots of spare time. But most importantly, I was in the perfect place to become a linguistic sponge. For four years working as an English teacher, I lived in small Sudanese communities surrounded 24 hours a day by Arabic speakers.


There was only one book on colloquial Sudanese Arabic available which I only glanced at after my first year in the country. My habit from the outset, was to carry a small notebook in the
breast pocket of my shirt wherever I went.

Sitting in the market, lounging as a guest in someone's house or perched on top of a desert lorry, I would produce this book on hearing any unfamiliar word or phrase. My victims were usually happy to repeat what they'd said and spell it out to me with a definition in English.

It took time to build up the ability to conjugate verbs and embark upon the heady business of constructing sentences! But I always had the advantage of hearing exact models of pronunciation from my Sudanese friends and colleagues. I didn't have to negotiate around the extra layer of language in text books which trys to explain at second hand, how things should be said. There was no tongue swallowing for me.

The alluring but difficult appearance of Arabic script was a further spur to my enthusiasm, rather than a hindrance.

One Christmas Day, in the tiny village of Ed-Debba on the Nile, I whiled away the hours copying out the letters of the Arabic alphabet and their equivalent English sounds, from a colleague's text book.

This opened a whole new avenue of activity. If I'd been in danger of driving some people mad by my constant badgering over the meaning of words and phrases, I undoubtedly drove others to distraction, once I started testing out my ability to read shop signs, bus tickets and newspaper headlines.

Again it paid off. Practical trial and error rather than the dry study of books allowed me to grasp the language with a constant focus on the application in real situations, of what I was trying to learn.

This was always instructive. It was frequently comic. The day I discovered the Arabic for fingernail 'daffara', I was keen for an opportunity to try it out. The chance came soon after in the village restaurant where I ate.

One of the locals arrived and greeted those of us who were sitting inside eating bowls of fuul beans. He inadvertently dropped a coin on the ground but no matter how hard he tried, couldn't prise it off the floor. With sympathetic intonation, I asked in my best Arabic if he had no, "daffara", (finger nails), with which to lever the coin up. This statement produced a ripple of mirth around me which I hadn't been expecting. Instead of finger nails, I'd asked if he had no 'naddara' - the Arabic for spectacles.

Gathering new words soon became like stamp collecting. I feverishly pursued every new lead. There was an endless supply of fresh specimens to add to my bulging notebooks. Many expressions were so colloquial, I could find no equivalent in standard Arabic dictionaries.

Sudanese Arabic has a word, 'zeefa', for the smell of sand after rain. Remarkable, in a country whose north can go years without experiencing any rain at all.

The Shaigi people who live on the Nile some 200 miles north of Khartoum, are used to drinking tea in times of sugar shortage. But this doesn't mean they drink their tea bitter. Instead they hold a date inside the mouth over which the tea washes as it's swallowed. The date is supposed to act as a sweetener. This practice of drinking 'shai banjoogli' undoubtedly predates the appearance of granular sugar in Sudan.

When I moved to the extreme north to teach in a new school in Nubia, I was delighted to hear that Arabic was the second and not the first language in the region. In fact Nubian, which crosses over into Upper Egypt, is a pre-Islamic language. And in northern Sudan it has at least three variants.

There is fierce debate as to whether 'rotana', as it's called in Arabic, is a fully-fledged langauge or simply a dialect. It seems that 'rotana' once had its own script and was a literary as well as a spoken language.

It's interesting to note the thrust of Islam in Sudan. The Nubians were the last group in the north to convert to the religion of the incoming Arabs. They in turn chose the Arabic word 'rotana', meaning 'gibberish', to describe the tongue of the Nubians.

Today Nubian is dying out. It's use in school classrooms is discouraged and younger people are unwittingly mixing the native speech of their forefathers with Arabic vocabulary.

But to me, the prospect of living amongst Nubian speakers was just as exciting as the experience of being in Sudan. It was clearly time to grab my notebook and start pestering my new hosts.