Lost in Tarjama: Arabic for the Pinoy

As with any new language or dialect, the hardest part in learning it is not the new characters or letters, it's keeping a straight face when your teacher says a new word but translates to something bad or funny in your native tongue.

Like our ancient Baybayin, the Arabic alphabet reads like the alibata or the Tagalog abakada. There is no link between Arabic and Baybayin or Tagalog but coming from this language, it was easier for me to understand the concept.

The Arabic language does not have vowels in the standard alphabet which consists of 28 consonants. Words are formed as you would imagine an SMS message devoid of vowels to maximize the alloted space. For example the Arabic word for "girl" is BINT but since they don't spell out vowels it is only written in Arabic as BNT or بنت. It's confusing because the beginner might read the text as BaNaTa so to aid the student in sounding off the word correctly, vowels, in the form of orthographic signs, are placed on top of the consonants.

The Arabic language can sound scary to the uninformed ear but once you get used to it and open your mind and listen to native speakers, you'll find that it is beautiful and quite easy to learn.

One thing I had to remember early on was that the Arabic alphabet does not have a letter "P". I noticed this when I first arrived in Doha because my boss can't seem to decide whether to call me Jaffy or Javvy. He simply cannot pronounce the letter "P". In place of this, the "B" is sounded off thus, pen becomes 'ben' and paper becomes 'baber' and "Jap, please pass the pen and paper" becomes "blah". Check out how my nickname is spelled out in this particular thread at Qatar Living where Arab speakers even type "b" instead of "p" making my handle sound like a kung fu move.

And so I started learning the alif, ba, ta, tha, etc. I can say that I've mastered 80% of the Arabic alphabet (reading, writing and sounding off), with the exception of a few letters that demanded glottal stops a'la Regina Spektor or what the judges in American Idol term as vocal gymnastics. The ع ('ayn ), for example, looks deceivingly easy to pronounce basing on the guide but in reality resonates like somebody choking from between your legs.

To learn several letters quickly and be familiar with some words, my mu'allim taught me some words that were simple enough to write and read and remember. Other words though are unforgettable because of the inevitable crossover of languages. It's good if two words from different languages are almost the same in sound and in meaning, like bantaloon=pantalon (trousers), but what if it's something dirty?

I almost laughed at my mu'allim's face with a generous serving of spit when he gave me the word for the day. "Today, I'm going to give you a word that is very important to Qatar, it means 'pearl'," my guru said, writing the word in Arabic on a piece of paper. "Now repeat after me," he said. "Lu'-lu'". I almost died of stifling one of the best laughs of the year! "Lu'lu'" mu'allim said again because I have stayed quiet for a few seconds. With lips quivering, I repeated a fast "lu'lu'". (For those who don't get why I found Lu'lu' funny: Lu'lu' means masturbate in my Ilonggo dialect).

I thought the worst was over. "Now what if you say "the pearl"?" mu'allim asked. "Al Lu'lu'?" I guessed. "No, it's lu'lu'-ah. Again, lu'lu'-ah." (now he's just commanding me to masturbate him). I wanted to share to him this funny coincidence but I figured he might get offended since a lot of Muslims treat their language as Holy so I decided to keep it to myself...but share it to the world.

I'm now reviewing the Arabic alphabet and will be having my exams soon. Next month we'll probably be doing grammar and more words.





It's back to pre-school for me. Meet my classmate.