notes on language learning
As I commence my study of Coptic, I realize that it is the seventh foreign language which I have studied formally. Of course, studying and mastering languages are two completely different things which are sometimes separated by many years, but I happily note that I am still working towards the poly-glottism that I began dreaming of sometime before high school. In fact, it has probably been about seven or eight years since I enrolled in my first language course – that’s a rate of almost one a year. Not a rate of one language mastered per year (which would be incredible, but, I think, doable) but a rate of one new language studied per year. The majority have come recently though: I first started French at the end of middle school, Latin as a sophomore in high school, Old Persian, Pahlavi, and Arabic as a sophomore in college, Ancient Greek as a junior, and now Coptic as a senior.
Reflecting upon my time spent studying language, I am going to attempt to gather some thoughts that have been milling in my head concerning it. It seems that every time I take another language class, new problems and challenges are presented (along with eventually, one hopes, new ways of solving them); but indeed every single one has been different and changed the way I pursue language.
My first confusion – question or dilemma, perhaps – is that of learning one’s own language, one’s own mother tongue. And it is interesting that in nearly every language I can think of, the word for the body part ‘tongue’ also can refer to human language! Anyways, with my native language being English, I sometimes read English texts and encounter words that I have never seen before and do not understand. Sometimes not understanding a single word does not prevent comprehension, as anyone who has read a book while trying to acquire a foreign language knows. But if it does, how to go about figuring out what that one word means? If there is sufficient context, that can be used: for example, I recently read an article in which the author referred to some English idiom about grist in a mill. I’ve never heard of grist, but I figured that it has something to do with mills (which narrowed it down a bit) and that people generally put stuff in mills to be milled. So grist is probably something that people grind in a mill. At this point I still have no clue what grist actually is, but I can vaguely picture it and at least I get the meaning of the phrase.
The English language is awash in Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes. You might figure turn to one of those languages when trying to figure out a word. I checked out from the library a book entitled “Arabic Chrestomathy”. I have never seen the word ‘chrestomathy’ before but I figured it had to come from Greek and that some “intellectual” in the 18th century probably invented it in order to make his book sound intellectual and obscure. In this instance, there is no context outside of the book being a book on Arabic grammar. Turning to Greek would be the right idea in this case, but what if you’ve never seen “chresto-” and “-mathy” before? Then you have no clue what the word means and you get the book because you want something intellectual and obscure on your bookshelf like I did. But here is a case where, in English, we have a valid word (“chrestomathy”) and a valid native speaker (myself) and an utter lack of comprehension. These situations are always interesting because they illuminate a phenomenon that seems rather bizarre to me. That is, it is a situation in which a native speaker does not understand his own language; and it is not the result of dialect difference (which I’ll have something to say about later). Anyways, it turns out that the suffix -mathy comes from the Greek μαθω which means “to learn”, while the prefix chresto- has something to do with helping or aiding. Thus we have “chrestomathy”, a “learning-aide”.
The thing is…how much English have I listened to, read, and spoken in my life? Millions upon millions of words, most likely. These situations, which do not really occur frequently enough to create problems, probably are not exclusively related to the fact that the English vocabulary is so large. I imagine that native speakers of any language, including literate and highly-educated ones, encounter words – that are not slang and colloquial – that they do not know. It begs the question: how can one study and master another language without having mastered his own? Does being a native speaker imply mastery? Does not knowing one word or phrase here and there imply not-mastery?
religion comes from god but the country comes from the people
Today was one of those days that got exponentially better as it went on. You know how exponential curves go to infinity? That’s how I felt just getting home now.
I’ll skip the boring details of the early slow-growth part of the exponential curve-day. After my evening Coptic class (which should become fun), I hung out at a coffee shop for a bit with two other students from the class – one is a graduate student and the other is actually a professor sitting in on the course. We had a quite interesting, fast-paced discussion on languages – both of them have studied quite a few, and between us, we three have knowledge have probably more than 10 different ones. I learned a lot in about only an hour. The most exciting thing that I learned was that being in Egypt and having access to AUC’s library of Arabic texts and other books gives me the opportunity to simply photocopy and bind these books rather than buying them. Egyptian copy shops have no qualms about copyrights or anything. Magnificent! Maybe only I would be really excited about such a thing….
But really it was the taxi ride home which made for the most excitement. The driver was talkative, but I’ve learned that if one is friendly and asks questions, then nearly everyone wants to talk and tell you about Egypt. So I asked him – as I often ask taxi drivers – what percent of Egyptians are Christian. He estimated that between 25 and 30 percent are various types of Christian. This is a figure that actually astounded me, because to date every working, more or less formally un-educated Egyptian that I’ve asked has given a much lower figure. That is, if they even admit that there are Christians in Egypt (which is a fact, especially since I know some). Some drivers estimate 5 or 10 percent, some say that there are but they pretend to be Muslim so as not to get beaten or harassed. Those kinds of things have occurred, but not on the scale that would force all Christians to go into hiding as happened in 15th and 16th century Spain.
This particular driver then explained to me how unimportant religion is compared to the Egyptian people and their country. He said, “listen – our religion comes from God, but our country comes from all the people together.” He pointed at a police officer, “look at that policeman, maybe he’s Christian maybe he’s Muslim. I’m Muslim. Good, but he is Egyptian and I am Egyptian. All these people in the street, they are Egyptian with me. Our country is Egypt, not a country of Muslims or a country of Christians.”
Based on my previous experiences with Egyptians in a similar social class (i.e. taxi drivers), it was a rather radical statement. Practically a statement of Laïcité. A difference between personal religious affiliation and one’s nationality. This Egyptian was admitting to both a religious identity and a larger, national identity that does not take into account individual religion: being Egyptian in whatever non-religious sense it entails.
al-ahly vs al-zamalek: the blood of a city stops flowing
Yesterday was one of the annual derby matches between the two top teams in the Egyptian Soccer League, al-Ahly (a sports club based on the island of Zamalek) and al-Zamalek (another sports club confusingly based in Mohandeseen). al-Ahly has been the top team in the league for several years, and routinely defeats al-Zamalek; usually the outcome is not a surprise and if you tell people that you are cheering for al-Zamalek they look at you a little funny (“yeah, i know you’re a foreigner and don’t know anything….but supporting al-Zamalek is just crazy…”).
The match started about the time that I went to water polo practice (yesterday’s practice was a little later than usual, about 10pm). As I walked down the street, nearly everyone that I usually pass involved in their affairs had found some way of watching the game. Firstly, the two doormen were in their small room near my building’s entrance watching the game. They distractedly returned my greeting. A circle of chairs had been set up outside an electronics shop down the street to watch the game on their window-display TV. All the workers in the government fruit and vegetable shops had vacated to the street to watch the game on a small TV with a fuzzy picture. The people at my usual ful stand were ignoring their vats of steaming fava beans to watch the game. The traffic cops (Zamalek is unusual in that it has traffic cops at most of its busy intersections) were distractedly gesturing to traffic as they tried to focus on the TV they had set up on their corner stand. As a result cars were crashing into each other all over the place, further crowding the already crowded 26th July Street….actually no one crashed, but the cops were distracted all the same. If I had walked into any other business, I imagine that the scene would have been exactly the same.
I was here last summer when the two teams played a match but did not notice any large-scale, American football style game watching. I only remember fireworks going off around my neighborhood like gunfire in Palestine when al-Ahly won (as was expected). It was fascinating…people just dropped what they were doing and found the nearest television. Well, I though, it is too bad that I have practice and can’t watch the game. Wrong! I got to the club, walked to the pool…and half the team, including the two coaches, were in the manager’s office with their eyes glued to the match. What is the score, I asked. 1-0, in al-Ahly’s favor. Darn, I said, I like al-Zamalek. The whole room laughed – good joke! When we eventually started practice, several minutes late, the score was 1-1. I haven’t yet found out the final result but street affairs returned to normal by this morning.
water polo in cairo
After last summer, during which I got about zero exercise during my three months in Cairo (not including walking from place to place), I decided that if I were to go back I would try and find somewhere to exercise. Preferably, it would be a place where I could swim or play water polo. The problem was that I had no idea where one could play water polo, I had no idea how to join the various sporting clubs in Cairo, and the local friends that I had did not really know either.
This time around I got pretty lucky. The guy I sat next to on the bus the first day of class was a member of the Gezira Sporting Club (a large and I think very old sports club in Zamalek) and knew that at least there was a pool that people swam in. But he told me he would ask about water polo the next time he went to the club. I was hoping to learn something about water polo within the next few days, because I had already been in Cairo a week without doing much. He then called me the same night from the club, where he had met the water polo coach (who is actually Hungarian) and the trainer (who is Egyptian). So I called and talked to the coach the next day and showed up for my first practice on Monday night!
According to Egyptian league rules, a team can only have two foreigners. There is already one playing for the club and I, so far, am getting the second spot. We’ve practiced every day since then (twice some days) for three hours, which is split between dry land and water workouts. Exhausting; I am really glad that I had been swimming daily during the summer or I would be absolutely dead.
The practices have been a lot of fun so far. In addition to being a challenge athletically, they are also challenging linguistically – because everyone speaks Arabic. Some of the coaching (but not all) is done in English, so I am picking up some interesting water polo terms in Arabic. For example, instead of referring to the treading water technique as “eggbeater kick,” they call it “bicycle kick.” Most of the players speak good English (because most of them are at English language schools), but they speak Arabic to each other and prefer to speak it with me. I think that this might actually be the best opportunity I could have for learning and practicing Arabic….
university matters
So I’m attending AUC, nominally. I’ve managed to arrange my schedule so that I only have to commute out to the new campus three days each week – which is nice because the new campus is out in the desert. Literally, surrounding the huge campus is nothing but sand for a while, and then if you drive fifteen minutes you get to some “New Cairo” developments which are nevertheless also in the desert. Though the architecture of the new campus is quite nice, many buildings are still unfinished (though they are close to being done). They also have yet to finish the food court, which should be a pressing matter, but is not. I will try to put some pictures up later.
My classes meet either once or twice a week, which is how it works out that I only have class on three days. The other days will hopefuly be occupied with volunteering, working on Arabic, making videos, writing, finding good places to eat, going to concerts, going to the French Culture Center…..
Maybe that’s a bit ambitious. But I have a whole semester and nothing to do four days a week. Actually I might have some schoolwork, though we shall see about that. It will be mostly reading, I imagine, so the hour long bus ride to campus will give me time to get it done. The classes I’m taking are:
“Arabization and Islamization in Early Medieval Egypt”
“Non-Muslim Communities in the Middle East”
“Gundpowder Empires: the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals”
“Introduction to Sahidic Coptic”
The first three are more or less self-explanatory. They seem like they will be interesting, though if they’re not then I will be rearranging my schedule. Coptic is the Egyptian language – it is essentially the ancient Egyptian language that was written in hieroglyphs, but evolved and changed. It was spoken as a majority language in Egypt at the time of Christ, but began to be replaced by Arabic around the 7th century CE when the Arabs conqured Egypt. At the present time, it is still used as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and few people still speak it. The word “qibti” in Arabic means “egyptian,” referring to the egyptian ethnicity rather than the egyptian nationality (which is “masri”), but is used mostly to refer to egyptians who are Coptic Christians.
My Early Medieval Egypt professor said that we might be trying to read some texts in the original Classical Arabic. That would be really neat; it would be a great opportunity to practice reading and translating in a class setting (rather than by myself, which is how I’ve been learning to read Classical Arabic).
But that is it for now. The professors have apparently been told to teach nothing the first week, so we have yet to do anything in the classes that I’ve been to. It will be interesting to see how much the workload picks up in the subsequent weeks…
what makes a cairene…?
Last night I attended the concert of Qithara, an ensemble which plays early 20th century style Egyptian music, at the Cairo Opera House. The Opera House is at the southern tip of the island of Zamalek and comprises several facilities: an open-air theater (where the concert was), a main theater hall (in which jacket and tie are required for entrance), a music library, a modern art museum, and another museum of arts. I had not visited it last summer, but last summer I also did not really have the linguistic means to access event directories and the like.
I wasn’t too into the music - the three singers that accompanied the group were so-so (the girl was the best) – until a guest singer came onstage just before intermission and the audience went crazy. He had a really smooth voice and was apparently very popular. I asked the guy next to me, with whom I had been conversing on and off throughout the performance, who the new singer was.
“Are you Egyptian?” he asked me. Ah, being familiar with the local star singers is a must if one is to be mistaken for a local. I hadn’t realized that my cover could be so quickly blown…
qaddafi’s darling african
Libya is once again in international news. Shortly after a gathering of tribal chiefs met in Tripoli to declare Qaddafi the ‘king of kings of Africa,’ US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice made the first official state visit to Libya by an American in about 50 years.
This could be something beneficial for Libyan-American relations. There is word that the US will establish a full embassy in Tripoli in the next few years (and I assume that Libya would reciprocate with an embassy in the US). If more Americans (and foreigners in general) could get tourist visas, it would only benefit the economy of Libya: there are beaches, deserts, and Roman ruins to be visited. And I believe that most ancient Roman sites in coastal Libya have yet to be fully explored and documented. There is quite a potential for international collaboration and research there alone.
It is significant that the United States has finally decided to deal with Libya as a fellow country deserving of official privileges. It is significant because Qaddafi is not someone who can really be taken seriously as the leader of a country ready to play a part in international affairs. That is not to say that Libyans are not ready to be international citizens – some already are, to the extent that their government allows them to be – it is to say that Qaddafi’s government is not one that can be dealt with on a rational level. Have you read about his ideas for a ‘United States of Africa’? Unrealistic.
Not to mention that his last SIX (1969 – Egypt and Sudan; 1971 – Egypt and Syria; 1972 – Egypt; 1973 – Algeria; 1974 – Tunisia; 1981 – Chad; 1984 – Morocco) attempts at unifying with another nation have failed completely and led to border conflicts in some cases. Some of those cases came in the early days of his ‘revolutionary’ takeover of the country and needed credibility and stability. But some did not. And a “US of Africa” is quite an ambition for someone who has not been able to keep his own pseudo-democratic and economic policies stable over a long period. Besides, Robert Mugabe might have something to say about anyone but himself being in power.
At least Qaddafi is staying consistent in some things, though: he wore a solid green African continent pin, as he did last year in France, as he sat down to discussions with Rice, whom he refers to as “[his] darling little African.” I wonder if he invited her to join his vanguard of African ninja-women – she might be needing a new job soon anyway.
vanquished, again
The drive from the airport to my uncle’s flat in the Mohandeseen district of Cairo was as I remembered most drives through this city to be…noisy and with a slight feeling of being not completely safe.
I’ve been here for four days now and I must say that, after wandering around a bit, I’ve been left with some feelings of anxiety about staying here for the rest of the year. It’s that this time around I’ve noticed how unhealthy living here can be…pollution, dirt, access to clean healthy food. It also might even be that the opening hours of a lot of stores and restaurants are changed unpredictably because of Ramadan. There also is no “new city” excitement, at least at the moment, because I have already spent time here. Comparing my feelings now with those that I had when I first arrived in May 2007 (which was also the first time I’d gone to another country on my own) I note that I am looking at everything, not with a sense of awe and absolute cluelessness, but with a feeling of “I’ve already done that, now, how can I do it better?” I suppose that is natural and a feeling that comes with having already experienced a situation…nevertheless I feel a lot more critical about certain things. I feel a post coming about public works that could improve Cairo (and let me tell you, I’ve had quite a few ideas about that these past few days…).
For those who don’t know, the reason I’m in Cairo in the first place is, nominally, to study. The American University of Cairo (AUC) is an interesting opportunity for me because there are not a lot of courses in Middle Eastern history and languages at USC. I’d be able to study such things at AUC. There also isn’t much opportunity to study Arabic at USC, either (which is a shame for a university that counts itself among the nation’s elite and has recently hired several new faculty specializing in the Middle East). But as one of my friends noted, people don’t go to AUC to attend AUC…they go to AUC to go to Cairo. Which leaves me wondering, since I recently spent three months here…am I here to be in Cairo or am I here to take advantage of a good scholastic opportunity? I myself am not quite sure yet….
Al-Qahirah (القاهرة) (n. def.) – the one who defeats soundly, the vanquisher
pseudo-terrorist bombing in yemen
17 September 2008 at 9:19 am (asides and comments)
Just because a “terrorist” “attack” occurred in a country in the Middle East does NOT mean that al-Qaeda was involved.
Please note some stupidity on the parts of the US, and, unfortunately, the British media:
“Deadly explosions rock US embassy in Yemen“ -The Guardian
“Al-Qaeda blamed for US embassy attack” – CNN
The aforementioned organization is a large, extremely well-organized and funded, international network of extremely resourceful and in some, but not all, cases crazy, Arabs bent on destroying anything to do with the United States. At least, that is what one would think by reading press reviews of bombings and the like around the world. They have become quite the scapegoat for tragedies in the Middle East, whether they had any involvement or not.
Let us review a few things. Just because a group claims responsibility for an event does not mean that they were actually involved. That is a somewhat basic post-situation analysis that everyone, probably without exception, learned in childhood. People (and it seems “extremist terrorist groups” in particular) like to boast about such things. Next, just because Yemen is the ancestral homeland of the Bin Laden family (of which Osama is/was a notable member) does not mean that he nor al-Qaeda (which he pseudo-directs from his pseudo-alive, crypto-directorship) had anything at all to do with anything that happened in Yemen. Let us note that the Bin Laden family does not live in Yemen anymore, hence the term ‘ancestral.’
The word terrorist in the first sentence was placed in quotes for the specific reason that explosive, destructive bombing events in which people die are not necessarily terrorist attacks. Perhaps such events were intended to cause fear, or do cause fear despite their perpetrators’ intent, and that may be partial justification for deeming them “terrorist” events. Were, for example, the Yemeni people in proximity to the recent bombing made fearful, coerced into something from the bombing, or the like? Though when people die in such events, it is profoundly sad, I think it trivializes their deaths to focus on assigning blame to X organization. Also, just because something American was attacked does not make the attack a terrorist one. I think the limited vocabulary and analytical skills of George Bush have infiltrated our way of thinking and we must be wary of that!
I would also like CNN and the Yemeni government to clarify what is meant by an explosion having the “hallmarks of an al-Qaeda” attack. Is it possible to look at any old explosion and tell what terrorist organization initiated it? Indeed, that would be a useful skill…
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