Small Victories

One looks like a bird. Another resembles a wiggly snake with a long tail. Some look like lacy edging, with dots above and below a row of scalloped half-moon shapes.

Slowly, these bits of Arabic writing are beginning to look like words to me. Yesterday, I recognized a word on one page in my textbook that I had seen and written three pages before. When I turned back to that page to check, I found that I was correct. I had recognized a word written in Arabic! What had all been completely nonsensical scribbles just three weeks ago were now beginning to take shape as ordered communication.

And this has started me really thinking about the arbitrary nature of all writing systems.

Why do our Latin alphabet characters look the way they do and not some other way? Why are some of the characters in, say, the Cyrillic alphabet so strange to our American eyes? How is it that we have come to associate certain sounds with certain written characters? And who came up with these systems of written representation?

I remember learning about the phonetic alphabet that linguists use to represent spoken dialects. Some of my classmates thought it was confusing to learn different characters for each and every possible uttered sound, but I found it refreshingly simple. There was no confusion about how to pronounce a string of those characters. Each one stood for one, and only one, sound. It had nothing at all to do with spelling; maybe that's why my fellow students were confused. Maybe they had internalized their English teachers' admonishments about correct spelling too assiduously, and found the phonetic markers too rudimentary. But these characters are about sounds, not spelling. The way a word sounds, especially in English, does not always have anything at all to do with how it is spell.

For instance: psychology, pleasure, mention, debt, mnemonic, pterodactyl, paradigm.

All of those words have silent letters in them, making them a minefield for new English learners. And how to explain the two ways 'live' can be pronounced? (I live in a big house vs. we saw a great live show last week.)

Arabic has no silent letters. That seems kind of nice, until you have to insert a breathy 'h' right after or before another consonant in the middle of a word. Try it. It's harder than you would think.

And there's this 'khaah' letter, represented in writing by an elaborate, rounded sort of capital T that loops below the line and is dotted underneath. It looks quite elegant, but is super hard for me to pronounce.

It’s something like the 'ch' sound at the end of Bach and the Scottish pronunciation of 'loch.' It's a bit similar to how some of the French pronounce their 'r' sounds, but more like how Germans pronounce almost all of their words: a rough, unvoiced scraping of the back of the tongue against the soft palate.

Like you're trying to clear your throat or call up a loogie.

I almost spit on my classmates whenever we practice words containing this sound in class.

So far, that's the most difficult of the sounds for me. Except for maybe the two 'h' sounds. Arabic allows for a sort of soft 'h' (like in 'hand') and a hard 'h'. But I can't really hear the difference, so it's not easy for me to represent it. One of my classmates, who is from Palestine, told me to "just push on it a little harder." I didn't really know what she meant, but when I tried it again, she said it was better.

The book describes it as "the sound you make when you breathe on glass to fog it up."

But every time I try to differentiate between this 'hard h', the softer 'h', and the 'khaah' sound, my throat practically locks up, my tongue gets tangled, and I run out of all saliva. These sounds require spit! I'm stuck between a desire to maintain social graces (i.e. not spitting on people) and a desire to pronounce Arabic words correctly.

I had no idea a new language would be this much of a physical challenge.

When I mentioned to Eihab that I was having some difficulty getting these three sounds figured out, he answered with something of a non sequitur.

"There are four components to learning language," he said. "Reading, writing, speaking, and listening. You may not be as strong in all of them."

I'm no stranger to the components of language learning, but I wasn't terribly satisfied with that answer.

At least he had praised my handwriting earlier in the day, so I know I'm doing something right. Now I shall go and practice writing those birds and snakes and lacy scallops.

Small victories are what will keep me going in this class.