Beginner - Levantine: How to eat thyme

@ Sierra & Elias

The Arabic word "za'tar" has already found its way into English, where it is spelt "zaatar" or "zatar". Although "za'tar" is rendered as "thyme" in all the bilingual reference works I have consulted, there seems to be a difference between "za'tar" and "thyme". One author describes it as "a greenish, coarsely ground Middle Eastern herb" and says "it is a bit like thyme, but more pungent". Another author, an Englishman who lives in Beirut and may be one of your acquaintances, describes "za'tar" as "a Middle Eastern herb a bit like thyme" and says it is eaten with "manoosh" (see the BBC website for a definition).

@ Sierra & Elias

The Arabicpod website has disappeared three times today. I'll try to post this comment before it does another disappearing trick.

It is interesting to note that "basiita" has a feminine ending. The rule seems to be that an adjective which constitutes a one-word sentence can have a feminine ending.

In the podcast entitled "She goes elsewhere" the adjective "ghariiba" also has a feminine ending, and "ghariiba", like "basiita", constitues a one-word sentence.

Ehab says that in such cases the adjective may be masculine or feminine (cf. Ehab's comment on "She goes elsewhere"). Do you know any reference books where this grammatical phenomenon has been discussed?

In the second to last line the Arabic says "should I mix the za'tar and oil first?" but it's translated as "should I mix the za'atar and oil together?" How exactaly would you say "together" in this case? For instance, if you were giving directions like "...then mix the oil and za'atar together" ?
By the way, I'm so curious about how to express "I would have" or "I wouldn't" in Arabic. A lesson with those phrases would be great!
Thanks for another practical and fun Levantine lesson! :)

@ hexagonmoon

You're right. There is a mistake here, but it can easily be corrected.

I suspect that in this particular instance it is unnecessary to translate "together". Let's hear what the native speakers have to say.

Word combinations like "I would have bought" aren't easy to translate. Let's suppose you want to say "If I had had some money I would have bought a car." In Arabic this is "law kaana ly maalun lashtaraytu siyyaaratan." "Law" is used to introduce the protasis, while "la" is placed at the beginning of the apodosis. Both the verbs are in the past tense. "Law" is a subordinating particle, while "la" is an untranslatable affirmative proclitic particle. Elision is obligatory here because the verb "'ishtarayt" begins with a vowel ('ishtarayt > lashtarayt).

If you want to negate an unreal conditional clause you use "law lam" and change the tenses.

It remains to add that no distinction can be made between sentences that refer to the present and sentences that refer to the past. The example sentence I have cited could also mean "If I had some money I would buy a car."

In the vocab, the transliteration of ( غطس ) dip seems to be imprecise ( 3’a66i9 ) and should possibly be corrected since, after listening to the podcast, I also do not hear a SAD but a SIIN in what Elias is saying.

A nice and informative lesson, by the way, and with a much lower background noise than in earlier lessons.

Bravo,
Tau

Hello from Chicago!
My daughter and I are loving this lesson.
Thanks for the program!
Kate & Olivia

im sure they will be another way of saying it also you should speak arabic in different accents please

Sorry I've been traveling in Istanbul for the last week =) Will now get to your comments.

As I understand it, Desmond, the wild plants "zaatar" and "thyme" are essentially the same - the Latin name is Thymbra spicata. However, there is also a variety of spice blends that go under the name of za'atar/zaatar/zahtar and vary from country to country/region to region. Here's more info: http://www.theepicentre.com/Spices/zaatar.html

Your welcome, hexagonmoon. Desmond is right in this case. We've used the word "together" in the English equivalent because it sounds more natural but it is not necessary in the Arabic and wouldn't be used.

Desmond's also correct when it comes to the conditional. لو...لَ is used for contrary-to-fact conditionals like the example sentence cited. With Arabic, it is usually necessary to read the exact meaning of the sentence from the context as much as the words in the sentence. If the difference (such as between the two possibilities that Desmond mentions) were important then it is likely that the author would clarify the usage, for example, by adding another time marker like "last year" or "now." Hope that helps!

Thanks for commenting, Tau. You may have heard a س rather than a ص because, in spoken Arabic, it is common for some (but NOT all) native speakers to soften the letters. Glad you enjoyed the lesson.

Glad to hear that you and Olivia are enjoying the podcasts, Kate. Thanks for writing!

Sakina786, I'm afraid I don't quite understand your feedback. Will you please expand on what you've written a little?

Desmond, I checked with a professor friend about the grammar behind the feminine ending on "basiita" and here's what he said:

"Feminine is the default gender when there is a dummy subject or object of the type represented in English by the word "it". There is, of course, no word "it" in Arabic. So what one is saying with words like ma3ūla?, basīṭa is "can it really be...?" "it is no big deal". You find it even in longer expressions like wa'tā (or Egyptian sā3at-ha) or yōm-ha 'at that time', and even in verbal expressions like xalī-ha 3alee-na 'its on me' and zawwadū-ha 'they have overdone it', or bi-tmaṭṭar (or here bi-tšatti or the Egyptian variant bi-tišti, found especially in Alexandria, where it actually rains a lot in winter, like Beirut) 'its raining', involving a non-specific subject or object. McLoughlin's Levantine Arabic discusses this on pp 110-111, a good reason to endorse thet book, which is otherwise pretty thin, both in size and content (as a textbook). "

@ Sierra

This website is becoming more and more interesting as it expands. Thank you, Sierra, for all the useful and interesting information you have provided.

I guessed it wouldn't be necessary to translate "together" in the case mentioned by hexagonmoon. "Together" is frequently overused by native speakers of English. I often hear people saying "meet together" and "co-operate together". I just say "meet" and "co-operate", and I never use adverbs like "basically" or "actually" unless they add something to the meaning of the sentence.

I don't understand sakina786's comment, but I think it would be interesting to deal with some of the problems posed by accents and dialects. As you know, "lahja" can mean both "dialect" and "accent", and native speakers of Arabic nearly always use "dialect" and "accent" incorrectly. I think it is important to draw a distinction between situations where Arabs speak dialect and situations where they speak Modern Standard Arabic with a regional accent. When Mubarak delivers a speech on national television he does not speak dialect. He speaks MSA with an Egyptian accent. He says "gaysh" instead of "jaysh" (army) and "gumhuuriyya" instead of "jumhuuriyya" (republic).

You might present two or three Arabic dialects in one of your lessons and then list the vowels and consonants that are subject to variations. The "ta marbuta" in "hanafiyya" (water tap) is a case in point. Elias pronounces the final vowel like "eh" even when he is speaking standard Arabic.

I recently listened to an interview given by a Tunisian journalist. I was able to understand almost everything he said, but I was immediately struck by the way he pronounced words like "yawm" (day). The vowel was almost like the "o" in Ger. "Ober".

Finally, I'd like to make a suggestion for one of your future lessons. When I read articles about recent events in Tunisia and Egypt I often come across the word combination "al-hashuud al-dakhma", which presumably means "the huge crowds". Could you fit that word combination into one of your texts? I think that would help listeners who are anxious to improve their listening comprehension so that they can understand reports about recent events in the Arabic media.

Nothing to do with the Arabic lesson, really. But just to say I spend the weekend in Jordan and had a marvellous time, in Amman, in Petra and at the Dead Sea. I also had dinner one night at that upper class shawarma joint, zaatar w zeyt. So there's the link to the lesson :)

You Jordanians out there ... you have a beautiful country !