After a Bad Night in Tahrir: First Year Arabic Students at UT Sing "Sawt al-Hurriya"

Bad stuff seems to have happened last night/this morning in Tahrir Square, and the situation iS still unclear. After a day of protests demanding that Mubarak be tried and other issues, some military officers, apparently, joined the protest, and at this point the Army moved in to arrest them. Clashes ensued, and while the Army seemed to succeed for a while, in the end the people apparently retook the square. This is going to increase tensions with the Army, which still seems uncertain of its real role.

While this sorts itself out: One of the great folk anthems of the Egyptian Revolution was "Sawt al-Hurriya," (In every street of my country/the voice of freedom is sounding). I posted it on Feburary 11, the day Mubarak stepped down. It has an inspiring beat and inspiring words. The original video is here:



The words are in some ways pretty easy for beginning Arabic students, and now the University of Texas First Year Arabic Students have done their own version for YouTube:



If I'd had that in my first year of Arabic, I'd probably have learned the language with less pain and struggle.

I'll be celebrating my daughter's birthday this weekend, so I'll see you Monday.

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Jim and Gim and Al Jazeera (Al Gazeera?)

Since Arabic dialects, pronunciations, etc. get mentioned here a lot, let me call your attention to a couple of interesting guest posts over at The Angry Arab (As'ad AbuKhalil), dealing with Al Jazeera's pronunciations; first came this post by contributor Joseph,

I should note that al-Jazeera has insisted, correctly I believe, in not granting the northern and urban Egyptian pronunciation (that is erronesouly claimed as representing all “Egyptian” pronunciation when the majority of Egyptians do not uphold it) of the “jim” as “gim” entrance into its coverage (Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir to name the most obvious example remains Jamal, and never Gamal), increasingly al-Jazeera insists not only on pronouncing the name of Qadhdhafi as Gadhdhafi or of the head of the Jordanian Mukhabarat as “Raggad” and not ‘Raqqad” but also of insisting on naming Libyan cities as “Briga” and not “Burayqa”. Does this mean that the Egyptian city of Qina should be pronounced on al-Jazeera as “Ina” for example? Why is al-Jazeera conceding on these pronunciations and not on others?"

To this Elias Muhanna (Qifa Nabki) replied:

This observation is problematic in my opinion, for a few reasons. First of all, the "gim" in place of "jim" is not limited solely to northern and urban Egyptian pronunciation but is also present in various other Egyptian dialects from around the country. It is also to be found in Omani, Yemeni, and Central Arabian dialects, and also (in certain linguistic contexts) in some North African dialects.

Furthermore, it is worth noting that there is some linguistic evidence that suggests that /gy/ was actually viewed as the "correct" pronunciation of the letter "jim" during the early Islamic period. (Phonetic descriptions by Sibawayhi and al-Khalil ibn Ahmad suggest that the letter was not pronounced as it is today in Modern Standard Arabic).

Obviously, this has nothing to do with whether or not Aljazeera is justified in deciding what kind of accents to permit... But, someone needs to stick up for the "gim"!"

In the midst of revolutionary upheavals, war and repression, this may seem a trivial discussion, but I thought it worth noting. I'm not, however, going to provoke the wrath of non-Egyptian Arabs by jumping in.

All I'll add is: when Al Jazeera starts calling itself Al Gazeera, that will get my attention.

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Second Tamazight Note of the Day: Libya

Sometimes stories come in pairs. Not only has King Muhammad VI pledged that Tamazight will be made an official tongue of Morocco (see previous story), but, as Lameen Souag notes, a rebel website showing various towns proclaiming their opposition to Qadhafi., includes one from the "Berber"-speaking Jabal Nafusa that is in Arabic with a short summary in Nafusi Tamazight at the end. He educates us on the other Tamazight and non-Arab speakers of Libya, as well.

And here is the declaration of support for the revolution from the town of Nalut in Jabal Nafusa. After the Arabic declaration (as Lameen notes, classical but with colloquializing on numbers/dates) it transfers to a Tamazight speaker at 1:29.

The second flag at right above, after the Free Libya flag, is the international Amazigh flag. The character is in the ancient Tifinagh script.

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Via Twitter

Oh, how I wish I'd said that.

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Saif''s Speech: "I Will Speak in Dialect," Fails

In the emerging theme of how Arabic diglossia is playing out in the fall of dictators (earlier posts on Tunisia here and Egypt here), the linguistics blogger Lameen Souag caught a great example. In Saif al-Islam al-Qadhafi's speech last night, he started out with this:

Today I will speak with you... without a written paper, or a written speech. (N)or even speak to you in the Classical (fuṣħā) Arabic language. Today I will speak with you in Libyan dialect, and address you directly, as an individual member of this Libyan people. And I will speak extempore. Even the ideas and the points are not prepared in advance. Because this is a speech from the heart and the mind.

And then he didn't. Lameen looks at that opening paragraph:

əlyōm saatakallam maʕākum... bidūn waraqa maktūba, 'aw xiṭāb maktūb. 'aw natakallam maʕakum bi... luɣa ħattā ʕarabiyya fuṣħa. əlyōm saatakallam maʕakum bilahža lībiyya. wa-sa'uxāṭibkum mubāšaratan, ka-fard min 'afrād hāða ššaʕb əllībi. wa-sa'akūn irtižāliyyan fī kalimatī. wa-ħattā l'afkār wa-nniqāṭ ɣeyr mujahhaza u-muʕadda musbaqan. liʔanna hāðā ħadīθ min alqalb wa-lʕaql.(YouTube - first minute; conspicuously dialectal bits bolded)

That's right: a prefix here, a vowel quantity there. It's hardly dialectal at all. As he notes:

Now the explicit association between dialect, extempore speech, and speaking as "one of us" is fairly obvious, if interesting. But the odd thing is that this paragraph, like the rest of the speech, isn't very dialectal at all; it seems far closer to Standard Arabic than to any dialect. Some dialectal features are present, but a lot of unambiguously Classical constructions are used; even something as basic as the first person singular oscillates between Libyan n- and Classical 'a-. What it looks more like is some sort of intermediate ground between dialect and standard - or, if you prefer, like the highest level of Arabic that he is capable of extemporising in at short notice.

At least he didn't have powerpoint slides. One of his commenters offers a magnificent parse (mild language warning):

John Cowan said...

Here's my suggested revision of your translation:

Today I'll speak with y'all... without a written document or a written text. I ain't even verbalizing to y'all in the Classical Arabic language. Instead today I will make my oration to you in Libyan colloquial dialect, and address you unmediatedly as an individual member of this Libyan populace. And I will speak out of my ass. Even the conceptualizations and the bullet points have not been prepared in advance. Because this is a presentation directly from the emotional side of me.

(In Ireland, this is called the "cúpla focal", the couple of words in Irish at the beginning of a speech otherwise entirely in English.)

And to think, Saif was the one popular in the West. Until last night.

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Linguistic Notes on the Revolution

We had a discussion in the comments a few posts back (see comments to the linked post) about the chant al-sha‘b yurid isqat al-nizam (The people want the fall of the regime) which is literary Arabic as opposed to the Egyptian colloquial al-sha‘b ‘ayiz isqat al-nizam, which would be more natural. We've also spoken recently about Arabic diglossia in the Tunisian revolution, and the etymology of the word baltagi, so it seems appropriate to link to Ben Zimmer's post on Language Log on "How Mubarak was told to go, in many languages" which includes references to diglossia (irhal ya‘ni imshi ya illi ma btifhamshi), (Irhal ("go away" in formal Arabic) means imshi ("go away" in colloquial), you who doesn't understand me"), shown above, which also alludes to Ben Ali's last, "I have understood you" speech in Tunisia, and even a sign in hieroglyphics (so the pharaoh could understand it, naturally). Also see a related column by Zimmer here. He's a linguist rather than an Arabic specialist, but there's some interesting stuff there.

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An Etymological Diversion: The Word "Baltagi"

The proper response to yesterday's attack on the demonstrators in Tahrir, and the ongoing clashes which continue, is revulsion, combined with amazement at the bizarre spectacle of men on horseback and (even more bizarre) camelback attacking the protesters. The Mamluk cavalry ride down the Facebook and Twitter revolutionaries.

I've said about all I can say without abandoning civility about what has been going on. And while the heroic demonstrators can expect no diversions or relaxation so long as they are under attack, here in Washington I have the ability to divert my own outrage by thinking about some of the cultural and other aspects of these events.

We have all talked about the "thugs," the attackers either hired by the ruling party or by the security services, who often are used against demonstrators and certainly were yesterday. They often carry sticks to beat people, and also abuse and humiliate women demonstrators in demeaning ways.

The word we are all translating as "thugs" is baltagi (بلطجي ), plural baltagiyya (بلطجية). It has an interesting history, and since I know some of my readers at least like my occasional diversions on the Arabic language, I thought I'd divert my own anger for a bit by talking about this word.

It comes from the word balta, axe, with the Turkish-derived suffix -ji (-ci in modern Turkish orthography, -gi in Egyptian pronunciation). It means literally "man with the axe," and no, you poker players, it doesn't refer to the King of Diamonds. It has meanings relating to woodcutting and such, but also came to be applied to halabardiers, the soldiers carrying the halberd or long axe-like weapon (like the King of Diamonds) in the Ottoman and Mamluk armies. Military terms tend to evolve (not all Grenadier Guards carry grenades), and in modern Arabic military terms it has come to mean a sapper or pioneer, someone going out ahead of the army to prepare the battlefield.

That's the core meaning. Socrates Spiro's 1895 dictionary of colloquial Egyptian Arabic still lists only the military meaning in colloquial as well. But somewhere along the line it acquired a pejorative, colloquial meaning, applied to street thugs, gangsters, pimps, and other such. It has come to be applied to Egypt's National Democratic Party enforcers, and their equivalents in the plainclothes security police.

How this new meaning evolved isn't entirely clear. Some have suggested that some well known street gang might have used the axe as a symbol, but that sounds like an after-the-fact rationalization. I'd be glad to hear any other explanations.

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Arabic Diglossia in the Tunisian Revolution

We noted last week that Ben Ali's last broadcast speech used colloquial Tunisian Arabic, instead of the formal Arabic that he traditionally used in public addresses. We've also talked frequently here about Arabic diglossia, the division between formal Arabic, the written tongue, and the spoken "dialects" in daily use. Lameen Souag, an Algerian-born linguist at SOAS whose Jabal al-Lughat (Mountain of Languages) blog I've linked to before, has a post on "Language Use in Tunisian Politics," which will interest readers who, like me, find this fascinating. (Yes, both of you.)

For the newcomers, fusha in the link refers to the formal, classical language, darja is the North African term for the local dialects. (Other words are used farther east.)

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