The other night I got into a cab with my friend J. J., who has spent much of her life in the Middle East, addressed the cab driver in Arabic, the native tongue of many cab drivers in and around Boston. The driver, who was friendly anyhow (again, like the majority of cab drivers I've encountered here) seemed delighted for the chance to converse in Arabic, and he and J. chatted animatedly for the duration of our ride.
Of course, I understood next to none of it. You might think that knowing some Hebrew would have been a guide, but what little Hebrew I know is ancient, not modern, Hebrew, and I've forgotten most of it anyhow. Interestingly, when there were odd words here and there that I could understand, they were words I knew from Hindi, not Hebrew; "lekin" = but; "mushkil" = difficult, and so on. Hindi has borrowed a ton of vocabulary from Arabic, which is of course a point of political contention with some Hindi-vale, but the Hindi that I am learning (filmi Hindi, for example) is rich with such loanwords, and so they jumped out at me from J. and the cab driver's conversation.
I could understand, too, when the driver was trying to guess where J. was from. He listed nearly every Arabic-speaking nation one could think of, and she answered "la" to each one - cognate with Hebrew "lo," meaning "no." Eventually she told him where she was from and where she had learned Arabic.
J.'s skill in the language impressed me. She displayed only one moment of disfluency, when she stopped in the mid-sentence and exclaimed, in English, "I can't remember the word for library!" He provided the word and she repeated it before he'd finished saying it, so it was clearly just a momentary vocabulary lapse. Otherwise her speech and comprehension appeared clear, fluid. I did not notice her asking him to repeat himself, or vice versa. It was better than I've ever been in any language, including French, better than I'll ever be in Hindi.
And It was delightful to listen to. I suppose in a broad sense it's rude to carry on a conversation like that in the presence of someone who doesn't understand, but I would have been disappointed if they had stopped, because I love listening to languages that are foreign to me. Arabic in particular fascinates me, with its wonderful throaty consonants and interesting morphology that derives word forms from consonantal roots by changing the internal vocalic structure.
I'm attracted to Arabic. Arabic is a sister to Hebrew, a language I've been exposed to my whole life, and a generous donor to my newest linguistic obsession, Hindi. And my grandfather, Jaques Levy, was born in Morocco and spoke Arabic as well as French. (In fact, the punchline of my favorite family story turns on his sisters' expedient use of those langauges. Perhaps I'll tell that story here another time.) Not too long ago when I was out to dinner with my Hindi class, I joked that I should learn Arabic next, because then I'd get Urdu for free - my teacher nodded emphatically. And now Arabic has another hook in my heart, my new friend J., for whom life in the Middle East is not merely an interesting chapter of her past, but a continuing and inexorable influence upon the person she is and the choices she makes.
So perhaps I will learn Arabic next. Who knows? The world is so rich - there is so much to learn. How does a geek of all trades decide where to start? It's mushkil.
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