Marjorie in Qatar

When we first moved to Doha, Justin and I drove around taking pictures of company logos in Arabic, in order to put together an identify-the-brand quiz. We never got around to actually making the quiz, though.

Happily, someone else has! Can you name the Companies From the Arabic Version of Their Logo?

We got 100%. :-)

Also, let this serve as a general plug for sporcle.com, one of our chief forms of evening entertainment.

I recently used Google translate to help me correspond with a Japanese company, and everything seemed to work out well... but now I'm worried that my emails read like this Read Me.

Excerpts:

"Many to be enjoyed by everyone it is matter of course, design professionals who are willing to give such a high-quality fonts will endeavor to create a vegetarian."

I'm not sure I want design professionals to endeavor to create a vegetarian, but I guess it'll be a very pretty vegetarian if they do!

"If you do not know of any problems or questions, mail a question that you, Question either please comment."

If you do not know of any questions, mail a question. That's so Zen.

"The font data to your hard drive to install about the trouble relating to the copyright holder will be responsible for any Hideki Katayama. And they also can not of any help.

But I don't want my font data to be responsible for even ONE Hideki Katayama, let alone ANY Hideki Katayama!

A student pointed me towards Save the Words, where you can do your part for the English language by adopting a rare or obsolete word that's in danger of falling out of dictionaries.

My word is adimpleate, which means "fill up," so if you hear me asking people to adimpleate my teacup in the near future, you'll know why.

The student also pointed out that I could now shout at the tutors to adimpleate their session forms (my constant refrain), which I thought was doubly nice since it reflects the subcontinental use of the phrase "fill up" in contexts where Americans would use "fill out."

Some of the adoptable words are quite lovely: my colleague got boscaresque, meaning "scenically wooded." Perhaps I'll adopt a new word every few days and try to work it into blog entries.

An Italian woman, decrying the assimilation of English words into Italian, in today's BBC News:

"People think it's chic to use English words, but I don't like it at all. It's important to keep language clean."

Yes, it's not... "chic"... to use words borrowed from other languages.

I found myself staring at the bookshelf in a hospital waiting room this morning, while waiting for a routine appointment. The bookshelf said something along the lines of:
Missionary Materials
Missionary and Guidance Department
For Reading Only
After I finished congratulating myself on reading the Arabic, I started wondering more about the books on that shelf. It held one copy of the Qur'an and a handful of pamphlets and booklets on the amazingness of Islam -- I recognized them, because I have the English versions. But the ones in the state hospital here are all in Arabic.

This leaves, as I see it, two options:

1. In a stunning market research blunder, the Missionary and Guidance Department failed to notice that the Qataris are already Muslim, OR


2. All these missionary materials exist for the sole benefit of Doha's Lebanese Christian population, at a rate of approximately one missionary book per Lebanese Christian.

I daresay they need to rethink their target audience a little. Perhaps they could learn from the Al Qaeda missionaries....

"English please so we all could join the convo!" That was just posted to a Facebook group, after a Chilean girl commented in Spanish. Posted by an ugly American, or a neocolonialist Brit? No, by a Bengali.

I've notice lately that, while I almost never hear native English speakers criticizing others for not knowing English, I hear non-native speakers doing this all the time. The friend lamenting Japan's lack of English signage, the person I heard dissing a guest speaker for his poor English -- neither of these, nor the issuer of the Facebook reprimand, speaks English as a native language. All three live in Qatar. Yet all three expect English to be used as the default language, and become irritated when it is not.

I often don't know how to feel about English as a lingua franca. It's awesome to see people from all over the planet being able to communicate through a shared medium. Without a shared language, Education City couldn't happen. Without a shared language, low-skilled laborers couldn't tell me about the human rights problems they face. Without a shared language, my dinner party on Saturday would have been pretty awkward, as the eight of us would have been speaking in five different languages!

On the other hand, the more English fluency becomes a sine qua non of participation in the global community, the more non-English-speakers are pushed to the margins. The laborers who don't speak English or Arabic can't talk to me about human rights abuses; more importantly, they can't file an official complaint. They simply can't participate in full society like those who speak one of the "important" languages.

Not only that, but as other languages are lost or demoted, the world loses some of its richness. What does it mean for Arabic that Qatari schools are shifting to English as the medium of instruction? Our students are confident Arabic will never be lost, because it is so tied to religion. (Should I tell them about Avestan or Pali?) The switch to English means that fewer of our students will struggle in their first year because they've never been taught in English before. On the other hand, it also means that future Qataris will only be able to talk about math and science in a language that is foreign to them. Surely that has its own costs.

In a strange way, I think it's also unfortunate for us English speakers that our language has become the default one. Of course, it gives us advantages: how many people can live 8,000 miles from their place of birth and still use their native language almost exclusively, I do? But it also means that English speakers can get by without ever learning a second language, which is by no means good for us. Realizing that your language and culture come with embedded assumptions that aren't shared by other peoples is important, and it's something that most people in the world learn early on. It's a shame more of us don't have the opportunity to do the same.

One of the history classes is reading letters written by a 19th century Englishwoman about her voyages in Egypt. They were thrown off by the following statement:
"I am to be mistress of a captain, a steersman, eight men, and a cabin-boy, for £25 a month."

It didn't help that the following phrase appears three sentences later:
"I shall lick the fellows."

I'm afraid they got rather the wrong impression of the lady, until we discussed alternate meanings of the words "mistress" and "lick." Or perhaps I'm the one with the wrong impression; who knows.

As I was trying to come up with a name for the photo group, foobart suggested just using my favorite word as the community name.

"My favorite word is 'stochastic,'" I said.

"OK, your second-favorite word then."

So I've been thinking about other favorite words. Quotidian. Postprandial. Adamantine. Incarnadine.

Hmm, apparently I like Latinate adjectives, although I prefer incarnadine as a verb, as when Macbeth says

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

A 2004 Merriam Webster poll tells us that these are America's favorite words:

1. defenestration
2. serendipity
3. onomatopoeia
4. discombobulate
5. plethora
6. callipygian (I didn't know this one. It means "having shapely buttocks.")
7. juxtapose
8. persnickety
9. kerfuffle
10. flibbertigibbet

but this list here has an even cooler selection, such as "aegrotat" (a sick note), "famulus" (an assistant to a magician or scholar -- should have asked for that as my new job title), "haecceity" (the now-ness of reality), "quincunx" (five things arranged in a square with one in the center, like the 5 on a die), and ultracrepidate (to criticize beyond your field of expertise).

What's your favorite word?

A political science professor from the UAE made some scathing comments about the Arab world at a conference on democracy and development held here yesterday. "We have a surplus of violence," he said, citing the (somewhat perplexing) statistic that Arab world contains 4% of the world's population but 36% of its violence.

He also said, in the words of the newspaper, that "the region is full of tyrants and notorious for large-scale violation of human rights" and likened the Arab world to "a big prison." Meanwhile, a former Bahraini minister said that "We have corrupt political and financial systems and weak and backward societies."

Gosh.

Coincidentally, we're learning about the Arab world in Arabic class this week, too. On Sunday we learned that the Arab world has tharawaat kathira wa quwwa kabira, much wealth and great strength. The next lesson explains that the Arab civilization is responsible for the spread of science and literature, and that its libraries 'aghnat al'alam kullah, enriched the whole world.

Somehow, these things are all true.

ثمّ يأتي الشّتاء، وتسقط الثّلوج فتابس الأرض حلّة بيضاء

This is not the most useful sentence we have learned in Arabic class.

It means something like, "Then comes winter, and snow falls, blanketing the earth in a white garment."* This is not something I have the opportunity to say very often, living in Qatar. (For the record, it's 73 degrees right now.)

* If you can translate it better, please do. The instructor was a little vague.