The glories of social networking

I just got a message on Facebook from a friend in Syria. I spent a lot of time--and I do mean a lot--helping him with his English studies and tutoring him. Our friendship was one big language exchange and we taught each other a lot. Anyway, he said the following:

Hi! How is it going . what dose girrrrrl maen in USA does it mean lettel girl . and that why you wrote boyyyyyy .for jock or somthing .انا حبيت الرساله كتير . يعني كتير شكرا وحظا سعيدا مع الجامعة. انت شاطرة وانا فخور بك . انا الان في المسوى السابع في الانكليزي وادرس جيدا. طبعا انت السبب في ذلك

First let me say that his spoken English is exponentially better than his written English. I mean unbelievably so. He picked up a good accent from me and he speaks and understands very well. But his reading and writing are not so hot, partly because the English program he's in sucks. They didn't even teach them that capital letters come after periods. ANYWAY, what he said in Arabic was:

I liked the message [from you] a lot. I mean, thanks very much and good luck with university. You are clever and I am proud of you. I am now in the seventh level in English and I study well. Of course you are the reason for that.

I feel really good about that, what can I say? Last I heard from him he had stopped studying, so I'm really happy he's back at it.

Travel notes

Two days ago, I came back to the hostel at a reasonable hour for once and then got caught up in a conversation with two people staying there and Nora, my sometime roommate, for a really long time. Everyone had eventually gone to bed except for me and my friend Muhammad (or Mohammed, or any number of spellings--I don't know) when we heard the call to prayer (at about 3:45 am). We ended up going to the mosque, because he wanted to pray and I wanted to go.

We spent a long time being lost, and then we figured out where we were and got lost again, and then we found it. It was really...peaceful. I sat in the women's section, with mostly Iranian women swathed in black, and just watched and listened. There were birds flying in the rafters and they kept dropping small down feathers around me. I understood small parts of the sermon, but not most of it.

Eventually we walked back, got lost again, and finally made it home around 4:30 or 5.

The next day I moved into an apartment; the only housemates I've really met are two very studious but nice guys who are great about telling me words in Arabic and speaking slowly when I ask them to. They actually both speak good English but I've only really heard one of them speak: he says he has to speak English at work all day (he works at UNHCR) and doesn't like speaking it at home.

Yesterday was the first day I really got to use Arabic and by the end of it I felt like my brain had been stretched two sizes. I went to visit Nora at her apartment and made friends with several of her housemates--three Syrians, two with great English and one with almost none (though he does have a hookah, or arghileh as it's called here, named Shakira)--a Brit, who may be organizing some sort of local wine tasting for an article he wants to write, and a Belgian guy who's been here for two and a half years and is doing his Ph.D. in Arabic poetry. They all spoke lots of Arabic to me and got me to speak it. Then I spoke it at the cafe. Then I spoke it at Nora's house again. Then I spoke it when I got home.

I was doing pretty well by the end. I got told four times that my Arabic was good (granted, three of those by the same person) and once that my accent was good. It was a good feeling. I hardly remember any of the new words I was told, though. Oh, well. Progress by slow inches. I think I may have agreed to do a language exchange with Ahmed, one of Nora's housemates who's an Arabic teacher and is learning English.

Finally: I have gotten sick at last. Nora went first, with the typical traveler's sickness; then Merritt got some sort of horrible bug that made her throw up every 20 minutes for like two days; Ben got travel belly too; and finally, today, it's me. Woooo. I feel awful. At least I've been through this before.

I have pictures of my house and will post them as soon as I get around to putting them on my computer. EVERYONE STAY CALM.

Some links

One of Obama's first acts on his first day was to call President Mubarak of Egypt, Olmert of Israel, Abbas of the PA, and King Abdullah of Jordan. It's nice to see the President caring about the Middle East.

From DipNote (already, I know), an update on the international response to piracy off Somalia.

Advocates for the Geneva Conventions and the rule of law, as well as anybody who doesn't like crazy detention and torture policy, should be happy to see Neal Katyal Principal Deputy Solicitor General.

A linguistic analysis of racial dialect in Obama's inaugural. I can't decide if this piece is a total trainwreck of unnecessarily racialized horror, a well-meaning attempt that ends up trying for too many reaches, or legitimately interesting. I think there are some aspects of all three. The last paragraph definitely makes me unhappy, though:

So: The son of an African immigrant picks up a sonority of speaking from the descendants of slaves brought here from Africa centuries before--and then uses it to help seduce a nation full of descendants of slaveholders into making him their master. Linguistically as in so many ways, Obama embodies the extent to which we are all more "fellow citizens"--as he opened his oration--than we might think.

I mean, "master"? Really? That's not only a heavily laden term in this context, it's the kind of thing you'd read over at The Corner written by people who were expecting the inauguration to feature him lighting Abe Lincoln's Bible on fire, producing a turban from under his jacket, and screaming "FARRAKHAN 4EVAHZ YO!" before demonstrating the proper application of jihad by beheading Justice Stevens to the accompaniment of an illegally immigrated mariachi band and Bill Ayers on the banjo.

Plus, it's not like nobody noticed the topsy-turviness of a black man being elected President, you know? Stick to linguistics.

History has a sense of humor

It didn't occur to me to mention this here until just now, although I learned it a few days ago. The Arabic word for "church" is kineessa*. This is the same word as Knesset, which is the name of the Israeli Parliament. Both come from an Aramaic word meaning "to assemble".

I don't have any particularly detailed or meaningful point to make about this. It just makes me smile.

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*I don't know whether kineessa means specifically Christian church or just "worship," since our professor supplied the word in aid of a classmate who was trying to say that he had gone to church on Sunday. I remain undaunted. Even if the etymology can't make me smile over Abrahamic religious history, it can still make me smile over the relationship between representative democracy and Abrahamic faith. So there.