Learning the nuances of Arabic

I have been learning Arabic for nearly 40 years. I am still learning; it is a lifelong process. At its best Arabic is an enormously rich language - flexible and adaptable. It is a moving experience to sense the rhythms of the Quran. But to read even a lot of medieval and modern literature can be an outstanding aesthetic experience. When I used to take exams in Arabic I would beforehand read some of the work of the blind Egyptian Taha Hussain. His autobiography is a great read. His manipulation of the language and his ability to use the exact word to describe an experience or a perception can move the readers to ecstasy.

Most ordinary use of the language - letters, conversation, newspaper articles - cannot attain these heights. But there is a rich demotic - colloquial - Arabic, that lacks the status of the best formal written Arabic. It is never taught or researched in Arab universities, but to understand what is spoken anywhere the learner of Arabic has to acquire a vocabulary that cannot be found in dictionaries.

There are varieties of colloquial Arabic, reflecting the different regions of the Arab world. And this alternative language can reveal a social and economic history of the region. Just as languages of India - especially Urdu - and the languages of East Africa - especially Swahili, and to a lesser extent the languages of Europe have Arabic loan words, so in spoken Arabic there are foreign loan words. Often the loan words suggest particular kinds of influence. For example, the eastern Mediterranean world was often influenced by Italian commerce. In Syria, Palestine and Egypt there have been Italian words used such as kambiyu for money exchange and sigurta for insurance.

Traces

Four centuries of Ottoman occupation have also left their traces. In Egypt (and the Sudan) the standard word for bridge is kubri (from the Turkish kopru). The Ottoman army had been the first bridge builders. The Ottoman suffix - ji is also quite common as in suffraji, a waiter. One of my favourite "popular" words can be seen on workshops on roads in Syria, kumaji. This is the word used for the repairer of punctures. The first part of the word is from the Italian, gomma, meaning rubber and hence tyre, the second part is the Turkish agent suffix: a completely hybrid word.

Many technical innovations are Arabised foreign words, such as the Arabisation of radio, telephone and television. There have been attempts to use hatif for telephone (literally "shouting" - which may have been a truer image of the use of the telephone 50 years ago), but this has never been generally accepted. Some Arabic roots have shown their adaptability and so the word for "container" is hawiya, literally, something that contains. In Aden there was an interesting mixture of the adaptation of an Arabic root and the sound of an English loan word in the word hafiz, meaning "office". It sound vaguely like the English word, but the Arabic meaning has the idea of preserving, maintaining something - like documents - and so being an appropriate word for office.

Imported fruit, even when developed locally, sometimes used Arabised foreign words. Fareez and farawla are used for strawberry, from the French fraise and the Italian fragola respectively.

In 1973, I was in Beirut and was puzzled by the fact that the word for grapefruit was ghiribfirut, obviously a localised form of the English word. Lebanese colloquial Arabic has very few English loan words. I was in a café in the downtown area and asked people when grapefruit were introduced into the country. Why did it have an English name? My question provoked an argument in Arabic that I was unable to follow. It became so heated that one man threw a plate of humous at another. What have I started I thought. There was a moment of silence when I feared a gun would be produced. The tenseness defused and I slipped out of the café as soon as I could, more or less throwing what I owed at the white-faced cashier. I wondered, then and for the next 20 years, why a discussion on grapefruit could provoke such feelings.

In the 1990s I was again in Beirut and the guest of the late Fouad Salam, who among other things was the president of the Lebanese Citrus Fruit Growers Association. I thought it might be safe to ask the question that I had long and anxiously puzzled over. He told me that grapefruit had been introduced into Palestine by American Zionists from California in the 1920s, and from there had come to Lebanon. I realised that there was a bitter history behind the Lebanese use of an English word for grapefruit. I had unwittingly stirred up a linguistic hornet's nest in 1973.

Dr Peter Clark, is a Middle Eastern culture specialist who is a consultant for the Booker Prize Foundation and the Emirates Foundation on an upcoming prize for Arab fiction. He has translated eight Arabic books into English.