Your Regular Arabic-Hindi Update
So I’m thinking of taking intensive Arabic this summer, since facility with that and related Semitic languages has obvious importance for Byzantine studies, and I have been dabbling a little with it so far. My early dabbling reminded me that the Arabic word for ‘right’ or ‘correct’, sahih, was taken into Hindi (presumably by way of borrowings from Persian and/or Islamic influence) along with its antonym, galat, which I happened to come across also in my Armenian reading earlier this week. The main reason I know that these words are in Hindi is that I have seen Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, everyone’s favourite Bollywood movie, so all those hours spent watching Indian flicks have not been entirely in vain.
2 Responses to “Your Regular Arabic-Hindi Update”
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I’ve studied a little Arabic. It’s fun to get your vocal organs around, and word derivations are quite ingeniously constructed–kitab with the root “k-t-b” book,” yaktubu is “I write,” maktabi is “office,” if I’m not mistaken.
Hebrew is surprisingly similar and in fact Hebrew grammarians borrowed Arabic concepts and methods wholesale, but official Modern Hebrew has eliminated a lot of the interesting (and for English-speakers, difficult) sound distinctions.
As a seasonal aside, there’s a site where you can hear the Paschal greeting in these and many other languages on line.
From my brief acquaintance with it, I would agree that the pronunciation bit is entertaining. Maktab can mean office or desk, or so my Arabic book tells me anyway. Every language has its way of playing with roots and radicals. A few Armenian antonyms are interesting in the way they fix on the root: geghetsik is beautiful, tgegh is ugly; hatcheli is pleasant, t-hatch is unpleasant.
I am familiar with the Paschal greeting site. It’s a great resource. In a little over a week we can start saying with the Arab Christians, “Al’Masiah qam! Haqqan qam!” The Armenian version is a bit different, since their Paschal traditions evolved more independently from the others’, so they say, “Christos haryav i merelots” (Christ is risen from the dead) and then they respond with “Orhnyal e haroutiunen Christosi” (Blessed is Christ’s Resurrection). If you know anyone named Harutiun, his name means resurrection. Those are my two bits for today.