Dispatch From The Desert #1

When you can turn and ask someone for a specific translation from Arabic to English, it quickly becomes apparent that Arabic is an extremely rich language. It shouldn't be surprising, really, since it's a very old language, as well. I am ashamed to say I don't know all the details about it--when it was born, when it entered its present form--but I do know that it is extremely old. Or old enough, anyway, to make English of the modern variety look very young.

English is reputed to be the most difficult of all languages to learn for various reasons. For one, there's the massive vocabulary, bigger than that of any other living (and all dead) languages, which grows almost daily. Then there are the completely irregular verbs. Finally, there's the fact that it is so widely spoken, and that each region has variations, including contributing to the growing body of the language regularly.

Arabic, like English, is a language spoken over a very wide area. The written version varies very little from place to place, so theoretically, a newpaper from Morocco should be easy to read if you happen to be an Indonesian Muslim who speaks Arabic. Not so the spoken variety. Like English, it varies from region to region, but from what I have been told, the greater the distance between two points in the Arab world, the lesser the chances of two people communicating effectively, unless they both happen to speak Classical Arabic (and no one speaks Classical Arabic except professors, classicists, calligraphers, and some Muslim clerics and theologians). I even noticed last year that as we approached Mersa Matruh (a good bit of history there if you are interested in WWII and Rommel's march across the desert), which is pretty much the last real city before Libya, the Arabic sounded more and more different to my ears. So it is, definitely, a living language, one which grows, is in flux, and changes regularly.

But that isn't what makes it beautiful. What lends it charm is its richness, and the long oral traditions which have been passed down through hundreds and hundreds of years. For example, there's the daily greeting. I am not talking about the traditional Muslim greeting, "Salaam Aleikum", (Peace be with you), or its reply, "Aleikum Salaam", (And with you, Peace), but rather the regular old, "Good Morning." There are many, many ways to say, "Good Morning." I have only really mastered three, and those are the three I use regularly: "Sabah el-Kheir", "Sabah el-Nour", and "Sabah el-Fhoul." In order, they mean, "Welcome, the day!", "Welcome, the light!", and "Welcome, the jasmine!" (That photo is of a jasmine blossom in Daddy's garden, by the way.) All the rest, which I don't remember, tend to include greetings to things in nature, greetings to good things like health and prosperity, and greetings to other lovely things. The point is, there are many, many ways to greet the new day, and share your greeting with others. If Eskimos have many, many words for snow, then Arabs have many, many phrases just for "Good Morning." And that variety is repeated again and again in their language.

I was treated to an especially lovely one this morning. Since I live my life mainly at night, being here suits me well. I get up at about 9 am or 10 am, which is the middle of the night at home.(That is, truly, the only reason why I am able to get up in the morning and actually be human and cheerful.) The cook doesn't get here until sometime after 10, so I go down, and have a morning smoke, and then, if I have heard Dad stirring, I open up the kitchen. He has an electric kettle, and yesterday I watched him while he made his tea (the cook was late--she didn't get in until after noon). Today, he asked if I could go turn on the kettle, so I went ahead and started his tea. As I was working, the cook arrived, and seeing what I was doing, she immediately rushed to make his tea. I told her in my awkward mix of bastard Arabic and sign language that she needn't bother--I would take care of it. She tried to shoo me away, but I insisted. After all, I have had, in my life, precious few opportunities to make my father's morning tea. When I took it up to him, she followed me up the stairs, and as I set it down next to his chair, she said something in Arabic. I turned to see a big smile on her face. They had a brief conversation, and she repeated a certain word several times. Finally, Dad translated. "She says you wouldn't let her make the tea, that you wanted to make it yourself." "Yes," I replied,"I can make tea, I had already started it, she didn't need to hurry to finish." He continued, "She says that she could see that you liked making my tea for me." My only reply was a smile. She said that word again, and I turned to him for a translation. "Like honey," he said. I was puzzled. "What's like honey?" He explained, "You making my tea is like honey." "Oh! She means it was sweet of me," I said. "No!" was his reply. "It means many things. It means sweet, like honey. You did a sweet thing. But it also means more than in English. Here honey is special, because there aren't a lot of trees and plants. It is rich, golden, beautiful. It was, long ago, very expensive and precious. So, it means it was a sweet thing you did for me, but it also means it was good, and like a gift. An expensive and rare gift. It was something not just sweet, but special. Beautiful."

I didn't know what to say to that, or to their two smiling faces. I could only ponder the beauty of a language where "like honey" means so much more than it does in my own. I have a feeling that the next time a gum-chewing service station clerk asks, "Whatcha need, hon?", I will remember this morning, and remember that making tea for my father was, for me, a good opportunity. A precious gift, if you will.