Lower Intermediate - What Kind of Sandwich?

congratulations on the 300th lesson

ﺃﺒﻴﺾ is a common-or-garden colour adjective which was introduced in the podcast about the philosopher. ﺃﺴﻤﺮ, by contrast, is a really interesting word. In this lesson it collocates with ﺨﺒﺯ (bread), but it can also collocate with nouns denoting persons. When combined with nouns belonging to the latter category it means “dark-skinned”.

In the podcast about the lost child we find ﺒﻨﻲ, which also means “brown”, but this adjective collocates with ﻋﻴﻦ (eye). This means that Arabic words for “brown” have to be selected very carefully. Perhaps we might have a podcast where a dark-skinned, brown-eyed person goes shopping, buys brown bread, brown eggs, brown shoes and a brown coat, and then goes home to plant red, blue and yellow flowers in the brown earth in his garden!

At this point it might be appropriate to raise another problem which nobody has mentioned so far, namely word-order. In English adjectives denoting size precede colour adjectives. We say “a large red book”, but not “*a red large book”. Are Arabic adjectives subject to similar constraints?

Fascinating question actually about modifier placement and comprehension!

I have been quiet the past few months, but I must admit I do enjoy the newer voices of Sierra and Elias (sp?).

Of course hearing Mohamed and Ehab is always great!

I am actually always fascinated with "restaurant/ordering out" lessons, because I find it interesting the word choice used.

I wonder in as-shami dialect what would replace اخذ
also I tend to get a moment of miscomprehension at Arabic restaurants in the States when I say,

"شوي اكثار ماء رجعا"

or something akin to using "Akthar" is there another way to say "May I have another water/item"

I'd be interested to see how this conversation would go down in a Beirut or Beka Valley mahalla.

Thanks again for putting out another fantastic lesson, I'm always listening and re-listening!

Tomes

im so happy that this podcast is the 300 cz we؛ me and sierra really enjoyed preparing and recording this podcast .thank you all for your comments !!!

The dark chocolate mentioned in this podcast calls for several remarks:

First, there are two Arabic nouns for “chocolate”. The word used in “Sweets and chololate” consists of four syllables and is stressed on the penultimate syllable like Ger. “Schokolade”. The word employed in “What kind of sandwich?” consists of three syllables and is stressed on the final syllable like Fr. “chocolat”. In fact, the only phonetic difference between the French word and its Arabic counterpart is that the final vowel in the Arabic word is slightly longer than the corresponding French vowel.

Second, since Elias lives in Beirut it is hardly surprising that he should have chosen the word ﺸﻮﻜﻮﻻ, for Lebanese Arabic is strongly influenced by French. Do Ehab and Mohamed use this word too?

Third, the Arabic expression for “dark chocolate” corresponds exactly to its French equivalent, which is “chocolat noir”. Like ﺃﺴﻮﺪ, the French colour adjective “noir” can mean “black” or “dark brown”. There is only a partial correspondence between Engl. “black” and Arabic ﺃﺴﻮﺪ.

Thanks for another fun lesson. One question: will the place in question be open in late August/early September?

Just a thought on Desmond's comment about word order of English adjectives. He's right of course, size normally comes first - "a large red book", but "an empty large house" would be possible ... there's a lot of large houses, but choose the empty one.

I just noticed that there seems to be a small problem with the "match the words" exercise. When I assign أسود to "black", Ehab's voice reads out "أبيض" and when I pair up "أبيض" with "white", I hear "أسود". ;-)

Oh, you're right Karen, thanks for lettting us know. It is fixed now.

I agree, Maasbar. “A large empty house” is the preferred sequence, but “empty” can be placed before “large” in a situation where large houses have to be assigned to two categories (“empty” versus “not empty”).

The problems associated with the ordering of attributive adjectives have been dealt with very competently in G. Broughton’s “Penguin English Grammar” (§ 11). Broughton admits that the rules he has mapped out are sometimes transgressed by English writers, and the example you’ve cited shows that such transgressions can sometimes be justified by invoking logical arguments.

The problems we are concerned with here have been put into a broader context in a collaborative volume entitled “Adjectives and Adverbs: Syntax, Semantics, and Discourse” (eds. Louise McNally & Christopher Kennedy, Oxford, 2008). On p. 34 Peter Svenonius says that English is one of several languages in which we can observe a marked tendency to place adjectives denoting size before those which denote colour. Unfortunately, he says nothing about Arabic.

Perhaps Ehab can tell us how he would say “a large red book” or “a small blue flower”. The adjectives clearly have to be linked by means of the conjunction ﻮ, but is it absolutely necessary to but ﻜﺒﻴﺮ before the colour adjective?

I think we need more than three lessons on colours. It would be quite easy to put together an Arabic text containing sequences consisting of nouns modified by adjectives denoting size and colour. Example: “The bank robbers, who were dressed a long brown djellabas, escaped in a big red car. Several weeks later, the police discovered that the thieves were hiding in a small white house on the outskirts of the capital.”

I've just noticed a typo. In the penultimate paragraph of my comment I wrote "but" instead of "put".

Thank you all for your comments!

DESMOND, you must be psychic since our next color lesson - the last in this current series - is on complexion. That's a very good point about needing to choose different words for brown. Thanks also for clarifying the point about chocolate. I think you're very right about the French influence.

I'll let MOHAMED and EHAB respond as to whether they use the same word.

You are in luck, KAREN, because the place in questions will definitely be open in August/September or you might want to try out the newish Whistlestop Snack, also in Hamra. These are two of the main places for ordering "franjieh" (French)-style sandwiches. There are tons of places that sell "mana'oush' and "saj," which are essentially the national snack.

And TOMEST5, those are good questions. If you're ordering in Shami dialect, then you can use أخذ, but you'll want to put a بَ in front of it, so it becomes بأخذ سندويتش جبنة for example, meaning I'll take a cheese sandwich. You could also just say: بدي سندويتش جبنة meaning "I want a cheese sandwich." And if you want to say "a little more please" in dialect, you'll either say: "شوى أكتر ازا بتريد" or شوى أكتر بليز.

You could also say: فيك تْزيد خَس - can you add some more lettuce? Or if you want to say one more, you'd say "واحد تاني" which literally is "one other."

Hope that helps ;-)

Dear Sierra,

I guessed you were going to talk about complexion in the third lesson devoted to colour words, but I don’t know how I attained that knowledge. Ehab and Mohamed sometimes write to me, but they haven’t yet told me anything about the topics you’re going to deal with in your podcasts.

I am indeed psychic, but I can assure you that clairvoyance is not a blessing. Most of the things I foresee are very unpleasant, and I can’t do anything to avert untoward events.

Perhaps I ought to add another comment on some of the more sombre hues. I wasn’t surprised when you pointed out that ﺃﺴﻮﺪ collocates with the Arabic words for “chocolate”. I’d guessed that too, for brown often shades off into black, and colour adjectives are frequently so vague that the semantic areas they cover overlap.

Typical examples are provided by English colour adjectives like “swart”, “black” and “brown”. The Old English word for “black” was “sweart”, which later became “swart”. “Swart”, which was used by Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Keats and Whitman, still survives in some dialects and in the adjective “swarthy”, but in modern English a swarthy complexion is dark brown, not black. The word “brown” also has a long and complex history, for it used to mean “black” or “dusky”. In “Paradise Lost” Milton wrote “brown as Evening”, and in “The Cook’s Tale” Chancer wrote “brown as a berry”. (The same comparison can be found in Sheridan’s “School for Scandal” and Jack London’s “People of the Abyss”.) In this expression “berry” means “grape”, and “brown means black”.

I love that the English word for brown used to mean "black" ;-) Thanks for sharing that, Desmond!

Thank you so much for these great pointers, Sierra and Elias. Can't wait to get to know Beirut and Lebanon! :-)

Sierra/Elias,

Thanks for the response. One of my Arabic teachers was Lebanese from Jabal Chouair, so I have a rough understanding. In one of your responses you said
"ازا بتريد" as in "if you wish/like/want", is this a sort of polite filler word when requesting something in al-Sham?

واحد تاني , that is very useful, and great for practical use, I tend to find myself speaking in a mix of Fousha and Iraqi when conversing with native speakers.

I usually say something similar, "اذا تريد اي شيء لا تخاف قل لي" to my Arab friends "If you want anything, don't be afraid to tell me".

I am still getting my ear attuned to Shami and Khaleeji dialects. The most frustrating for me is the dropping of the "qaf" ق , I remember listening to Wael Kfoury's song قضة عشاق and it totally threw me off.

Keep the lessons coming! Love em!

مع تحياتي
تومز

One of the characteristic features of Arabic is the presence of a large number of doublets – pairs of nouns denoting objects which can be considered both collectively and individually. Examples:

ﺒﻴﺾ / ﺒﻴﻀﺔ : egg
ﺠﺒﻦ / ﺠﺒﻨﺔ : cheese
ﻋﻠﻚ / ﻋﻠﻜﺔ : chewing gum
ﺪﺠﺎﺝ / ﺪﺠﺎﺠﺔ : chicken

The underlying pattern is clear. The collective nouns are masculine, while the unit nouns are feminine. But what about the noun ﺪﻜﺎﻦ, which denotes a small shop, and which has already found its way into the Arabicpod dictionary? In this podcast Elias uses a feminine form of this word (ﺪﻜﺎﻨﺔ) when he talks about the small shop where Sierra buys her sandwiches. In this case I cannot see any semantic difference between the masculine and feminine forms.

What's up with sandwiches? You guys deserve cake! Congratulations on 300 great lessons.

Andreas

Recently I had to explain the colour ginger to an email acquaintance in Jordan and, as often is the case when learning a foreign language, I discovered more about my own. Although, nowadays, understood to describe hair (or cats!) of a reddish orange/brown colour, it seems it originally meant the sandy brown colour of the spice it gets its name from. In an dictionary, I found the Arabic equivalent to be أصهب but this was not recognised by my Jordanian friend and I wondered whether another word was more commonly used to describe cats or hair?

Although 'prefer' works for some or the فضل derived forms, I reckon 'favour' works for more of them, specifically من فضلك = by your favour.