Categories: linguistics
Date: 21 May 2008 03:24:51
A fun lesson last night: and a very useful one -- directions: asking and giving.
The sun and moon letters also made a reappearance, forcing my poor brain to attempt to dredge up memories long forgotten. Which category a letter falls into impact pronunciations of words when they are preceded by an article: the sun letters "swallow up" the "l" at the end of the articles -- so, for example, "the car" [al saiyaara] becomes "as-sai-yaa-ra" rather than "al-sai-yaa-ra" and "by car" [bil saiyaara] becomes "bis-sai-yaa-ra" than than "bil-sai-yaa-ra"]; the moon letters do not.
Though that is complicated enough, my struggles are remembering the Arabic words for place names: to my mind, they all seem so similar -- they begin with "m", and have an "H" and a "T" somwhere. I confused station [ma-Ha-Ta] and museum [mat-Haf] yesterday, and throw in airport [ma-Taar] and restaurant [Ma-T'am] and I'll no doubt hand over my boarding pass to a waiter. Expressing confusion, I did enjoy my teacher's reply: "We do it to confuse foreigners." :)
Still having a great time though.