One of them’s really unlucky and foul-mouthed and is always swearing
la2u faanuus sa7ri raa7u w farrakuu
They found a magic lamp and rubbed it
Out came a huge genie. He said to them ‘your wish is my command!’
2aam Télé3-lon – 2aam means literally ‘get up’, but here doesn’t have much of a meaning independently – it continues the narrative and is stuck on to the following verb.maared – a maared is a type of genie (jinni). Usually the genies in stories with magic lamps are maareds.
shabbeek labbeek – meaning ‘your wish is my command’. shabbeek as far as I know is a nonsense word not used elsewhere, but labbeek is sometimes used to mean ‘we obey you’ (or something along those lines) in set expressions like لبيك يا حسين.Tlébu – the plural imperative of Talab/yéTlob ‘ask for’, ‘request’. The singular masculine is Tloob.
tmannu – the plural imperative of tmanna ‘wish for’. Although complications of pattern make this less clear, this is from the same root as umniye ‘wish’ (m-n-w – umniye is on the same pattern as ughniya ‘song’).
They were scared and didn’t know what to say, so he said to them I’ll give each one of you three small eggs. Each one has a small genie inside who’ll grant one wish.
2aam – again meaningless. Notice that it doesn’t agree with the plural here.tlabbaku – ‘they were confused’ or ‘they didn’t know what to say’.
kéll beeDa fiyya maared – every egg in it (is) a genie. This is basically the same as saying في كل بيضة مارد. fii is like 3énd and ma3 in that forms with pronoun suffixes often act a bit like conjugated verbs – ékhti 3énda ‘my sister has…’ il2ooDa fiyya kéll shi ‘the room has [in it] everything!’
Each one took three eggs and they went their separate ways
raa7 éshshakhS él3aadi kasar 2awwal beeDa Télé3-lo lmaared 2él-lo béddi 2amwaal maa btékhloS 2éllo 7aaDer w 3aTaa 2amwaal @ktiir
The normal guy went and broke the first egg. The little genie appeared to him and he said I want endless money. He said ‘very well’, and gave him lots of money.7aaDer – an affirmative response to a command or request, i.e. ‘OK, sure, I’ll do it’.
kasar éttaanye 2él-lo béddi 2akbar 2aS@r bi-l3aalam 3aTaa akbar 2aS@r
He broke the second one and said to him I want the biggest palace in the world, and he gave him a huge palace
w kasar ittaalte 2éllo béddi 3ézz w jaah w SalTa w 3aTaa yalli béddo yaa
He broke the third one and said I want power and glory, and he gave him what he wanted
yalli béddo yaa – béddo yaa means literally ‘he wants it (masculine)’ – the -h manifests as lengthening on the final vowel of yaa. This yaa- (derived from classical Arabic إيّاه) is used to carry pronouns when they cannot attach to the main verb or verb-like expression. In the case of béddo, the main ‘verb’ is not a verb and already has a pronoun suffix to indicate the subject (-o ‘he’), so we need something else to carry the object. The object itself refers back to yalli – yalli béddo yaa ‘what he wants [it]’ – which is required in Arabic but not in English.Note that this is present, whereas in English we would have to put the verb ‘want’ into the past to match ‘give’ (‘gave him what he wanted‘). This reflects a much broader syntactic ~thing~ in Arabic where the main verb of a sentence (here 3aTaa) sets the tense for the sentence as a whole and other expressions are generally left in the present, taking their tense from the main verb.
The years passed by with the guy living a great life enjoying all of his blessings
marra maashi biTTarii2 2aam shaaf waa7ed shéklo métl éshsha77aad 3am yéshtéghel bi-taSlii7 élbisikleetaat
One day he was walking along and he saw a guy who looked really poor working repairing bicycles
He looked at him again and said ‘By God, that’s my friend who was with me when we got those eggs!’
Strange! Why is he so poor? I’ll go and see him.’ He went up to him and said ‘aren’t you the guy who got the eggs with me?’
The guy said ‘yes’. Anyway, they recognised one another and they said hi and they sat down to talk. He said to him why are you in such a bad state? What did you do with your wishes?hadaak – literally ‘that one’, used to mean ‘the other guy’.
mohumm – who knows why, but in Syrian mohimm is often pronounced mohumm. élmohumm ‘the important thing’ on its own often means ‘anyway’ or ‘in any case’ and is used to move the narrative along.
3érfu ba3D – 3éref in the past tense doesn’t mean ‘knew’ but rather ‘recognise’ or ‘come to know’. maa 3réftak means ‘I didn’t recognise you’.
sallamu – sallam originally means ‘to say as-salaamu 3alaykum‘, but now means (more broadly) ‘greet’.
I mean, I’m living in luxury with my power and wealth – why are you working here? Tell me.
leesh heek inte? – The closest English translation is probably ‘why are you thus?’ or ‘why are you like this?’ but this is not very idiomatic for the context. heek is ‘like this’ or ‘in this way’.
He said man, you know how my luck is. I went home and was about to break the first egg.2abu shariik – literally ‘father of partner’, but generally a friendly term of address similar to ‘man’ in English.
7aZZi w-bta3@rfo – literally ‘my luck, and you know [how] it [is]’.
éjiit béddi éksir… – literally ‘I came wanting to break…’ béddi éksir here indicates the future again, but the action is simultaneously in the past – i.e. the futureness here is relative to the time described in the story (I was going to). éjiit is an alternative form of jiit ‘I came’ and here helps move the story along.
It slipped out of my hand and I got really annoyed and said ‘diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiicks!’ The genie came out and said ‘your wish is my command’ and turned my whole body into dicks from top to bottom.wé23et ménni – we’ve seen this in the meaning ‘I dropped it’ before.
3aSSab@t – I got really angry, I got really annoyed. m3aSSeb (the active participle) means ‘annoyed’, ‘angry’.
saawaani kélli 2yuura – literally ‘made me all of me dicks’. saawa (sawwa in some areas, including Palestine and Jordan) is largely a synonym of 3émel and means ‘do’ or ‘make’, including in the sense ‘make X into Y’. The object is obviously -ni ‘me’, which is then reinforced by kélli ‘all of me’. This structure is very common.2yuura – the plural of 2eer is 2yuura. This plural pattern – f3uule/f3uula – occurs with a few nouns Levantine, although it has no equivalent in MSA. Three other examples are bank/bnuuke (‘bank’), kart/kruute (‘card’), and fard/fruude (‘gun’). Although my friend has spelt it with an alif, this –a turns into -t in iDaafa.
Straight away I broke the second one and said I beg you, take all these dicks off me! He said ‘your wish is my command’ and took all of them, including the original.
taba3i l2aSli – again like Egyptian bitaa3, taba3 can be used as a euphemism for dicks (‘my thingy’, I guess?). This video suggests that it is also used by (some) women. In this case, anyway, it means ‘my original dick’.
kamaan – probably derived from kama 2anna (‘in the same way’ or ‘and as well’) in CA, means ‘as well’ or ‘also’. You’ve probably encountered it before. Amusingly a homophone of kamaan ‘violin’.
2aam kasart éttaalte w 2élt-éllo rajjé3-li 2eeri w tiiti tiiti mét@l ma ra7ti mét@l ma 2éjiiti
So I broke the third one and said ‘give me my dick back’ and there I was – right back where I started.rajja3/yrajje3 – ‘return’ (transitive), ‘put back’, ‘bring back’ etc. The causative of réje3.
tiiti tiiti mét@l ma ra7ti mét@l ma éjiiti– this is a set phrase which means something like ‘right back where I started’ – tiiti tiiti, you went like you came. The repetition of mét@l here would be impossible in English (‘like you came like you went’), but in Arabic it’s similar to the structure métli métlak ‘like me like you’ which means ‘I am like you’. The -ma here (pronounced short, unlike negative ma) turns the preposition into a conjunction which can be followed by a sentence rather than just a noun. Mét@l ma in this sense is the equivalent of kama in MSA (which if you think about it is just ka- ‘like’ plus -ma).