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How do you say “he amazes” in Arabic? I suppose the word is spelt ﻴﺪﻫﺶ, but I can’t guess the vowels (yadhash? yudhash?).

I have a couple of questions about the Arabic words for “synagogue” and “temple”:

In Arabic translations of the New Testament ﻤﺠﻤﻊ (majma’) is used in the sense of “synagogue”. I am aware that “majma’” can also mean “academy” and “college”, but I’m not sure whether it is now obsolete in the sense of “synagogue”. Are “kaniis” and “majma’” ever used interchangeably in the Arabic media?

I’ve often heard the word ﻤﻌﺒﺪ (ma’bad), but I’ve also encountered ﻫﻴﻜﻝ (haykal) in Arabic translations of the Bible and in videos about Egypt and Greece. Are “ma’bad” and “haykal” interchangeable?

Is anyone else finding that the audio for this lesson won't load at all?

@ hexagonmoon

I've just carried out some spot checks. Here in Germany everything (including the videos) seems to be working normally at present. A few days ago, however, I was unable to listen to certain podcasts. The word "loading" appeared in the middle of the blue bar, but I couldn't hear anything.

This kind of problem arises from time to time. One often has to wait for a couple of hours before the audio begins to function normally again.

where I am(belgium) no problem at all

To highlight some of the points mentioned above,

Saying (he amazes) is (yudhish يُدهش) and if you want to say (he amazes me) then of course that would be (yudhishuny يدهشني).

The word (synagogue) is (kanees كنيس) and never heard of it to be (مجمع), and the word (هيكل) is specific word used for the Temple that is thought to be in Jerusalem and not any other temple because the word (temple) in general means (ma3bad معبد) which describes any place of worship other than the the Abrahamic religions places (masjid, kaneesah and kanees), so to describe a hindu temple one would use (ma3bad).

About the loading issue, as far as we are aware, the servers of the company that we deal with are fine and we have not observed any problems recently, however, sometimes high traffic on the website causes some delays. If anyone faces any issues with loading then just email us and we will report it to our service providers.

Thank you for this very useful information, Ehab. It isn't always easy to find information about Arabic synonyms and the present tense forms of Arabic verbs.

إعادة بناء
if this is idhafa why there is not el binaa'?

@plop

An i9’aafah can be simple (made of two nouns) or complex (made of more than two nouns). An i9’aafah can also be indefinite or definite. Only the last noun in the sequence takes the definite articleال , to make the whole i9’aafah definite.

إعادة بناء = a reconstruction (simple indefinite)
إعادة البناء = the reconstruction (simple definite)
إعادة بناء كنيس = reconstruction of a synagogue (complex indefinite)
إعادة بناء الكنيس = the reconstruction of the synagogue (complex definite)

Hope this explanation helps.

Thanks, vinod, for chiming in with the clear explanation!

If you have a construction (I think it's called past-continuous) like كان يذهب and it means "he was going" then would it be proper to translate the second line of this podcast as "Why were you surprised? There were once thousands of Jews living and thriving in Lebanon" ??

thanks vinod - issue settled for ever - got it

@ hexagonmoon

I'd suggest an entirely different solution: "Why were you amazed? Lebanon was once home to a thriving Jewish community numbering thousands of individuals." "Amazed" is more accurate than "surprised", and expressions like "to be home to" and "a thriving Jewish community" are in conformity with normal English usage. If you run a few Google searches you'll see that I'm right.

Literal translations generally sound awkward and are pedagogically questionable because they convey the impression that the source and target languages follow the same conventions. A word for word translation should always be followed by a free translation which is in strict conformity with normal usage.

I'm more curious about the particular function of past-continuous constructions in the Arabic. As a native speaker of English, I'm less interested in the English translations on this website sounding "normal", and more concerned with the basics of Arabic grammar.

I think you both make good points, Desmond & hexagonmoon. At ArabicPod, we try to sound natural in English while also making clear the literal meaning of each word/expression. In this case, I think either surprised or amazed work, but surprised sounded a bit more natural in English to my ear.

@ Sierra

"Why were you amazed?" and "Why were you surprised?" are both perfectly correct English. In the present instance I opted for "amazed" because "dahasha" is rendered as "amaze" in all the Arabic-English reference works I could find on the Web.

I think it is amazing (not merely surprising) that a synagogue is being restored in a country where anti-Judaism has been fuelled by Nasrallah's fanatical rantings and by Israel's bombardment of Beirut.

When I started to teach myself Arabic and looked for Arabic videos on YouTube one of the first things I discovered was a dreadful Lebanese video entitled "Al mawt li israel". If a were a Jew living in Beirut I wouldn't feel very safe.

Moving now to the question of translation, I believe that both free and literal translation have an important role to play in language teaching and language learning. Word-for-word translations can be used to help learners to understand the relationships between the elements of a sentence which at first sight appears more or less incomprehensible. Once the meaning has been made clear, however, one should attempt to produce a sentence which is in conformity with the norms of the target language. The free translation will make the learner aware of the lexical and syntactic differences which separate the source and target languages.

Take "basudfa", for instance. This does indeed mean "by chance", "by accident" or "coincidentally" (an extremely rare word!), but the most natural English equivalent is the verb "happen" (e.g. I happened to see the book on the table.). "Basudfa" can be rendered literally in German as "zufällig", but in English a literal rendering rarely sounds natural.

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