Intermediate - It's in the past

A lot of things need to be explained in more detail. Let’s begin with “kunt fy 'ukkaaz”. How many crutches has the man with the broken leg? According to the English translation he has two. According to the Arabic text he has only one, unless the singular noun ﻋﻜﺎﺰ can be used for two crutches.

The next problem is posed by the vocative “yaa ammy”. The noun ﻋﻢ means “paternal uncle”. We’ve already had a lot of podcasts where men call each other “brother” although they are not blood relatives, but I think this is the first podcast where a young man addresses somebody as “yaa ammy”. Is there any difference between “yaa ammy” and “yaa akhy”? And what about the word ﺨﺎﻞ, which means “maternal uncle”? Do young men also call each other ﺨﺎﻠﻲ?

The saying “illy faat maat” also calls for several remarks. Let’s begin with the highly complex grammatical relationships between the three words. ﺍﻠﻠﻲ is an Egyptian relative pronoun which can mean “who”, “which”, “what” or “that”. ﻓﺎﺖ is the past tense (3rd person singular, masculine) of a verb which, among other things, can mean “elapse”, “go by” or “pass by”. ﻤﺎﺖ is the past tense (3rd person singular, masculine) of a verb which means “die”. The utterance-initial pronoun means “what” and is the subject of the verb ﻓﺎﺖ. “Illy faat” is therefore a relative clause which functions as the subject of the verb ﻤﺎﺖ. If this were not the case it would be impossible to provide a plausible explanation for the juxtaposition of the two verbs.

Literally, “illy faat maat” means “What has passed has died”. If the saying is intended to express forgiveness, its most natural English equivalents will be “Let byegones be byegones” or “Forget it”. (Nobody would ever say *“Whatever’s in the past is as good as dead”.) If the saying is intended to express the notion of irrevocable loss or irreparable damage, the best English translation equivalents will be “It’s no use crying over spilt milk” or “What’s done cannot be undone.”

The use of rhyme (“faat maat”) is a characteristic feature of proverbs in many languages, but the presence of the pronoun ﺍﻠﻠﻲ suggests that the saying under discussion originated in Egypt and then spread to other Arabic-speaking countries. Judging by what I’ve seen on the Internet, it is in current use throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

Hi Desmond,

عكاز means a crutch, so the plural form was a mistake in the transcripts, we have fixed that little error.

يا عمي - Yaa 3ammy: Although this literally means oh uncle (father’s side), it’s a very common expression used as a respect with a much older man. For example, it’s common for young children to call their father’s male friends as uncle...; Now the dialogue in the lesson reflects the reality of local Arabic today, this phrase yaa 3ammy is sometimes used between close friends as a sign of respect. It’s also useful to note that the female equivalent “3ammaty” is used in similar situations, but I have never heard female friends call each other this. خالي – 7’aaly on the other hand is not used between men.

I couldn’t have explained “illy faat maat” any better. I guess the reason why we went for the translation “Whatever’s in the past is as good as dead” is that we didn’t want to go too far off the literal translation out of fear of confusing some people. Like you rightly mentioned, it is a very common phrase and it probably originates from Egypt.

Thanks for your input Desmond

Dear Mohamed,

Thanks for your rapid response. “Kunt fy 'ukkaaz” can be rendered in various ways in English, e. g. (a) I was on a crutch, (b) I went around on a crutch, (c) I walked with the aid of a crutch. You can’t say “in a crutch” unless you’re talking about some object or substance which is inside the crutch. If you run a few Google searches with inverted commas you’ll see what I mean.

There is another mistake that needs to be corrected. ﻨﺬﻞ can’t be rendered as “low-life”. The noun phrase “low life” isn’t a term of abuse. It means “the life and behaviour of people who are outside normal society, especially criminals” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary). The adjective “low-life” collocates with nouns like “bar”. A low-life bar is a bar that is frequented by criminals, drug addicts, prostitutes, and the like.

An appropriate equivalent for ﻨﺬﻞ would be “bastard”. In contemporary English this word is used to insult a man who has been rude, unpleasant or cruel (like the young man who stole his friend’s sandwich and put toothpaste in the poor fellow’s hair).

I was surprised by the use of the word ﻋﻢ because the two men are very young. Arabic vocatives would constitute a fascinating topic for a podcast. The problems associated with these forms of address concern not only the choice of the nouns that follow the vocative particle (harf (ﺤﺭﻒ) al-nidaa'i (ﺍﻠﻨﺪﺍﺀ)), but also the case ending that has to be attached to the “munaadaa” (ﻤﻨﺎﺪﻯ) in formal or classical Arabic.

The translation problems posed by “illy faat maat” are quite prickly. A word-for-word translation (e.g. “What has gone has died”) is bad English, but at least it might help learners to understand the syntactic structure of the Arabic proverb. A free translation such as “Let byegones be byegones” may obscure the structure of the Arabic original, but it is good English, and it brings out the meaning clearly. Both free and literal translations can be used effectively in foreign language teaching.

Translators who have to deal with linguistic units like proverbs sometimes fall between two stools. They obscure the structure of the original sentence and at the same time fail to bring out the meaning clearly. If you opt for a solution like “Whatever’s in the past is as good as dead”, the meaning isn’t sufficiently clear, and there is a real danger that learners will be completely bewildered. They will look for an Arabic noun corresponding to “past”, an adjective corresponding to “dead” and a phrase corresponding to “as good as”. They will wonder how all these elements have been packed into three words, and they may even be so discouraged that they will give up. In the case under discussion a further complicating factor is the mysterious Egyptian pronoun which looks like a noun that has been merged with the definite article (al-ly)!

As a native speaker of Arabic you understandably find it hard to imagine the enormous difficulties faced by people who have never learnt Arabic at school or studied Arabic at tertiary level. Many of the sentences in the Arabicpod texts pose problems which are no less intricate and challenging than those which have to be resolved by advanced students of ancient Greek and Latin.

that which is yesterday is dead and gone.....taking the hidden tense changes into consideration in the yesterday.
an arabic question ,,,,,there is a word similar to nadél meanimg waiter...could you let me know what it is? I do not wish to call waiters names...

“Waiter” is ﻨﺎﺪﻞ. It is pronounced “naadel”.

shkrn lk.

In the little discussion about colloquial forms of the future at the end, you talk about an h- prefix for the future. Here in Saudi Arabia, people use b- . So they say bashufak ... I'll see you. Or even they put the b- after the alif indicating "I" and say abshufak.