… about the book that I bought. I had thought that it had something to do with Syria and religion. Well, after some quality time with a dictionary, I decided that it was a book about prosecuting the Bahai. Score! This would fit right into my current Old Testament mind frame… I took it to my teacher and he informed me that it was a biography of Slahaldeen. Yes, I got it completely wrong, but to be fair, it was his name that was throwing me off. I’m still not up to speed on Arabic names. I do OK with the “servant of…” names. It’s abd followed by one of the 99 names of God. Abdulla and the like… Many many Arabic names are simply Arabic words. Jameel (or the feminine version Jameela) is a name, it also means “beautiful.” “Justice,” “red,” “flower,” and even “pigeon,” (no I’m not kidding) are both words and names. So when I was translating the title of the book, the first word meant “to judge or prosecute,” the second word (deen) means “religion”, and the third word is very very close, but is not the word for Bahai. When you have two regular words back to back, I don’t anticipate them being names. <\/p>\n
Anyway, the first sentence, roughly translated is, “Praise be to God Who brings (brought?) peace upon us and guides (guided?) us with His right hand to the best way (or method literally). That’s as far as I got when I brought it home. I was going to do some more last night, but the power went out. I’m too tired tonight to do any more Arabic. It reads in what I have come to believe is the typical formal Arab style. It’s really stuffy and I think a bit full of itself. There is what any typical English speaker would consider a lot of redundency. “John he was in love with her Sarah,” is typical. Pronouns are stuck in every which way. Usually, they aren’t mandatory, but they do lend emphasis. Sometimes some sort of grammar rule dictates that a pronoun has to be there, and pronouns are put in some places as well due to grammar rules even when they don’t add anything to the meaning of the sentence. This is one of the reasons I think that translated Arabic sounds so haughty. It’s partly because it is, but the grammar forces you to write in a certain style. I find it redundant and a bit opaque at times. For example, today in class I read a sentence that literally translated says, “You will not find the people that pollute there.” I thought that the meaning was pretty straightforward, there is pollution but you won’t find the people that did it. I was told that it actually means that there is no pollution. I asked why the words “find the ones who pollute” was negated and not finding pollution, but I never got a good answer. I gave him a few other ways of making the sentence clearer, at least to me. He agreed that they said the same thing. I said, no, they don’t, I negate the pollution, not the finding the people that did it. He wasn’t convinced, and since he’s the native speaker I guess I should defer to his judgement, but the style hides meaning I think. Unfortunately, it’s the style that I’ve got to work with….<\/p>\n
Turns out I have a cold, that’s why I’m so tired. I don’t feel too bad, but my nose is running like crazy and I’m really tired. Class was a chore today. The only reason I went was because I went to bed early and felt decent this morning. I went downhill pretty fast during class and was having trouble remembering anything. I’ll try to learn what we went over today tomorrow morning, mostly vocab. With any luck I will have shaken this thing by tomorrow…<\/p>\n
… about the book that I bought. I had thought that it had something to do with Syria and religion. Well, after some quality time with a dictionary, I decided that it was a book about prosecuting the Bahai. Score! This would fit right into my current Old Testament mind frame… I took it to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arabic"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}