Ajnabieh - The Foreigner

I have something of a linguistic puzzle that I can't follow. I'm hoping that both the folks around these parts better at Arabic, especially Cairene Arabic, than I am, and those who have formal training in linguistics, will be able to help me out with puzzling through this question of orthography.

So, Arabic has this letter, jiim: ج. Nice little letter, fifth of the alphabet, reasonably easy to write. In most dialects, it is pronounced like j in jar (IPA /dʒ/); so mountain is jabal, beautiful is jamil, etc. However, in most variants of Egyptian Arabic, it is pronounced like g in grip (IPA /g/); so mountain is gabal, beautiful is gamil. Generally, Egyptian Arabic doesn't have /dʒ/, and other dialects either lack the /g/ or get to it via some other sound change, frequently /q/=>/g/. In many ways, /dʒ/=>/g/ is the 'defining' sound change for marking the Egyptian accent (maybe like the vowel change in 'about' for marking Canadian English? sociolinguists, help me out). For me, at least, this was an easy sound change to remember in the switch from formal/Levantine Arabic to Egyptian; I had a lot more trouble remembering to tell the cab driver I was going 'urayyib min fundu' Flamenco, not qariib min funduq Flamenco, than that I should tell someone their baby was gamil, mashallah.

With that out of the way, here are two pictures of signs outside the same building in the Mohandessin district of Cairo:





(Sorry they're dark: my iPhone camera only works so-so at night.)

Both are intended to say "private garage," meaning that you can't park there; parking is at a premium in Mohandessin, most streets are double parked, and young men make livings rearranging parking on the streets to be more efficient. The issue is how they wrote the word 'garage.' The Arabic word is generally pronounced like the English version (though I think it actually comes into Arabic from French). Therefore, in most Arabic dialects, the Arabic alphabet would contain a way of writing the last sound, /dʒ/, but not necessarily the last; in Egyptian Arabic, the alphabet has a way of writing the first sound, /g/, but not the last.

Arabic has a way to handle this: it borrows the letter چ back from Persian and its related languages, where it represents the sound /t͡ʃ/. Those three dots underneath indicate that it represents a sound not found in Arabic. This is a regular pattern in Arabic: Havana Hotel, where I was staying, wrote its Arabic name with a ڤ, which is an /f/ with extra dots, for instance, and I've seen پ (/b/ with extra dots) used to make the sound /p/.

But you'll notice that these two signs don't spell the word the same way. The first spells it as چراچ, which I'd write as [dʒajadʒ], or "jah-raj." The second writes it as جراچ, which I would write as [garadʒ], or "ga-raj." I don't have a photo, but I know that I saw it written as جراج at least once, that is, as [garag].

What is going on here?

On the one hand, I really get the signs that use ج for both sounds. That letter is there, it's understood, people will get it. I don't add diacritics or accent marks to my English most of the time if I'm writing a word of foreign origin: I write role, not rôle, for instance, even though it's a direct loan from French. (OK, I probably add more accent marks than most people, but I think we can assume I'm not a typical Anglophone.) I also get the ones that get the spelling "correct," by my understanding of what the sounds in question are.

What I don't understand, at all, is what's happening when the چ is used in both positions. It includes both the 'foreign' sign AND doesn't accurately represent the phonetics of the thing. How did the sign-writer get there?

I can think of a few possibilities, and I'd love thoughts from more linguistically-trained persons than I:

Possibility 1: I've drastically misunderstood how the word 'garage' is said in Cairene Arabic. Fair enough, except that doesn't necessarily explain the inconsistency in how it's written.

Possibility 2: This is a repetition issue. Whoever wrote the sign had a thought process like, "I have to write that one weird letter. Maybe they should both be that weird letter."

Possibility 3: This is an overcorrection. "Wait, one of these ج has to have three dots. Which one? Can't remember. I'll just do both."

Possibility 4: The چis a mark of foreignness. Garage is a foreign loanword; چis a borrowed letter; they go together, somehow.

What do you think, friendly readers? How can we spell "garage"?

I wrote about my trouble getting Arabic learning software for my iTouch 2.0 in a previous post. However, I am very happy to say that the recent releases of the iOS do support Arabic. This has lead to a large number of apps that can help with Arabic learning...and I figured it behooved me to review them. You know. For the sake of the internet. Stop laughing.

Some caveats:

• I've been studying Arabic, off and on, for about a decade now. My major deficit is in vocabulary; I can go through, say, a newspaper article, and tell you what part of speech half the words are, and how to vowel them (Arabic, like Hebrew, doesn't write most of its vowels; most vowels are predictable by grammar), but I could only tell you what 5-10% of them are without a dictionary. That makes practicing with real texts a real pain in the butt, let me tell you. So I'm concentrating on vocabulary-building apps, rather than ones teaching grammar.
• This also means that I already know and am reasonably fluid at reading the Arabic alphabet. I looked at a few alphabet apps, but my judgement on them is that of someone very far out from the actual learning of the alphabet.
• I have an iTouch, and my wife has an iPad. I've tested most of these on the iPad, even the iPhone-only apps. Most apps that are made to run on the iPhone/iTouch can also run on the iPad, but they run smaller (you know, the size of an iPhone). But they can definitely still be used.
• I was doing this in the US; all prices in USD, all apps available in the US App Store. No idea what's available elsewhere.
• I've only tested the free versions of apps. Most of them have a pay-upgrade available, with access to more words. I indicate whether or not I would pay for the app.

( Apps for all! )

I think I've had these links gestating on my hard drive long enough...time to get them out there before they rust.


( Pretty & Yummy Things )
( Politics Things: Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Youth Identity )

( Academia stuff; okay, only one link here )

This morning, I got a call from my mother, which is not so unusual. But what was unusual was that she wanted my help for one of her students (she works for a student support program at a community college). Her student was taking Arabic, and had to ask someone a list of questions. Could I do the interview?

I managed it, though my spoken Arabic is beyond rusty. (My favorite moment was her surprise that mish aindi siyara, I don't have a car. Askunu fi nuyurk, I said, nobody's got cars.). But it reminded me of how important Arabic language education is, and how many people want to learn Arabic, especially these days. (Sometimes, when I'm feeling tetchy, I like to point out that I started taking Arabic in September 2000. Suck on that, posers.)

If you're among them, that's great! I think everyone should learn Arabic, despite my tetchyness above. I would generally recommend you take a structured course to learn it well, whether at a university or community center or mosque. Arabic is a difficult language, with a lot of sounds not present in English (and one or two missing from most European languages). It's also got a writing system that'll be new to most non-Muslim learners, and the root system is complicated. AND AWESOME. Have I mentioned Arabic is the most awesome language ever? Because it totally is.

But, if you don't have access to a class, you can teach yourself some Arabic. Even if all you pick up are greetings and a notion of how it sounds, it's an awesome language to know.

Here are some resources I've used to improve my Arabic and keep in shape. (All of these are targeted to native speakers of English; I don't know about resources for native speakers of other languages, sadly.)

( podcasts, Orientalist grammars, and other excitement )

ETA: I totally forgot about BBC Arabic's streaming audio option. Ooh, and they've added TV since I was a regular user! The internet is so shiny.