The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States<\/em>, 4th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937). \u00a0I\u2019ve been browsing in it with considerable delight \u2014 I first came across Mencken in my early twenties, and have long loved his writing \u2014 and want to pass on what the man who was known as \u201cthe Sage of Baltimore\u201d has to say about Arabic in America.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not very much, and things have no doubt changed considerably since he wrote. \u00a0In fact, his first edition appeared in March 1919, fully a century ago, and I don\u2019t know whether his brief discussion of Americanized Arabic was altered at all in the fourth edition from that initial one. \u00a0When he was writing, as he himself says, almost all of the Arabs in America were Syrian or (perhaps better now) Lebanese Christians, with almost no Muslims or Druze among their ranks, and there were relatively few of them. \u00a0Since then, their numbers have increased considerably, and the \u00a0proportion of Muslims is much higher. \u00a0Moreover, the descendants of the original Maronite Christian immigrants are largely assimilated.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Mencken\u2019s discussion offers a fascinating (and sometimes amusing) snapshot into the Arabic spoken by Lebanese Christian immigrants in the United States during the early part of the twentieth century. \u00a0In what follows, verbs will be given in the third-person perfect masculine singular, which is the usual dictionary citation form. \u00a0However, I offer one note to prevent slight confusion: \u00a0As Mencken\u2019s principal informant, H. I. Katibah (along with the great Philip K. Hitti [1886-1978], of Princeton University), supplied the data, the verbs appear in a slightly different form than that in which many will have seen them. \u00a0Whereas\u00a0third-person masculine singular perfect verbs are commonly written out in Roman letters as FaMaLa<\/em> \u2014 with F<\/em> representing the first consonant, M<\/em> the middle consonant, and L<\/em> the final or last consonant \u2014 Mencken, Katibah, and Hitti write them as FaMaL,<\/em> omitting the final vowel.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
And now, with the boring preliminaries out of the way, we can finally get on to the fun stuff. \u00a0Ma\u00f1ana. \u00a0(Or shall I say bukra, in sha\u2019a Allah<\/em>?)<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
To be continued.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 Arabic is built almost entirely off of triconsonantal roots \u2014 e.g., k-t-b, which connotes the idea of writing, produces such derivative words as\u00a0kataba\u00a0(\u201che wrote\u201d), kaatib\u00a0(\u201cwriter\u201d), kitaab\u00a0(\u201cbook\u201d), maktuub\u00a0(\u201cwritten\u201d), maktab (\u201cdesk\u201d), maktaba (\u201clibrary\u201d\/\u201dbookstore\u201d), and so forth. \u00a0But it also sometimes uses quadriliteral roots \u2014 e.g. the obviously onomatopoeic verb\u00a0waswasa (\u201cto whisper\u201d) and the noun jumhuriyya […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>