Comprehension dawns

Every morning our new tea guy, Kasim, brings me a glass of water and a mug of green tea. When he comes to pick up the cups he asks me if I want more and I say, "No, I'm fine," but five minutes later he brings more anyway.

Somehow it only just occurred to me that he must be understanding the "fine" but not the "no." This should help me stop drinking two unasked-for cups of green tea a day.

Oh, and in other Arabic hospitality related news, I ate my first FRESH dates yesterday. Man are they good! They're crunchy, roughly apple-textured, but sweeter than any other fresh fruit I can think of. Yum!

Diglossia

When I was in second grade, my teacher played us a tape of Halloween songs several times in October, and we sang along. One of them went:

H A double-L O, double-U double-E N spells Halloween
H A double-L O, double-U double-E N!

I particuarly remember the song because learning it was the occasion of my realizing that "dubulyu" is really "double-U." But my point here is that, not long after I learned the word Halloween and the concept Halloween, I was taught to spell Halloween. I'm not a fabulous speller, but I have a pretty good idea how to spell most of the words I say.

Last October 28 our students celebrated Garangao, a somewhat Halloween-like celebration which I wrote about here. What I didn't write about was that, over the course of the day, I asked three or four Qatari students how to spell the word Garangao (in Arabic), and they were all stymied. The first reaction of each student was, "Oh, but it's a Qatari word." I didn't understand: I wouldn't refuse to spell a word like "ain't" simply because it was dialectal. So the students tried to come up with spellings for me, but none of them agreed. Gh-r-n-gh-o? K-r-n-k-a-o? Clearly none of them had ever written the word before, or even thought about doing so.

( Thoughts on diglossia )

Just think how different a perspective on language we'd have if English was like this. Imagine that, after learning normal modern English in the home, you went to first grade and all classes were conducted in Middle English:

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour

Not only is the vocabulary totally unfamiliar, but the grammar is much more complex (declensions, anyone?). A lot would be familiar, but I think it's safe to say most of us would miss out on a lot.

And of course, super-formal communication like the State of the Union address would have to be in Old English: "Gesæton þa æfter synne sorgfulre land, eard and eðyl unspedigran fremena gehwilcre þonne se frumstol wæs þe hie æfter dæde of adrifen wurdon." Anyone? Anyone?

But your native language -- the language that you naturally acquired as a child and that you will continue using in all conversations for the rest of your life -- will never be studied in school. You'll never learn how to write it. You'll rarely see its vocabulary on paper; it simply isn't a written language.

The students can't spell Garangao because there IS no spelling for Garangao. Somehow it just never hit me that you could know a word that just didn't have a written form.