This is an episode of the excellent dark comedy أمل ما في There’s No Hope, which takes the form of short three minute dialogues between two unnamed characters dressed, for unclear reasons, like fishermen. Perhaps these outfits are read differently in a Syrian context, or perhaps fishermen are just famously miserable bastards. In any case. There’s no puns in this one, but it does have a positive take-home message and an upbeat theme tune you’ll be humming all day!

ما رح يزبط معك
maa ra7 yizboT ma3ak
It’s not going to work for you

يزبط zabaT/yizboT is a very useful verb which basically means ‘work’. Its causative, زبّط, means ‘sort out’, ‘fix’, ‘make work’.

ما في حدا يسمعك
maa fi 7ada yisma3ak
There’s nobody to hear you

يسمع doesn’t have a b- here because it’s in a relative clause with an indefinite noun (7ada). Generally speaking in constructions like ‘somebody to love me’ or ‘a window I could escape from’ we use a relative clause with a b-less verb: واحدة تحبني waa7de t7ebbni, شباك اهرب منه shibbaak ihrob minno.

يمكن ما في أمل!
yimkin maa fii amal!
Maybe there’s no hope!

بيعملو مؤتمرات… ما بيخلو مصروع الا بيبعتوه عليها
bya3milu mu2tamaraat… maa bikhallu maSruu3 illa byib3atuu 3aleyya
They do conferences… There’s not a single madman they don’t send to them.

مصروع is from صرع ‘madness’, which is also the medical term for epilepsy.

The second half of the sentence reads more literally ‘they don’t leave a single madman except that they send him to them [the conferences]’.

بيعملو bya3milu – the vowel in the prefix before 3ayn tends to change from i to a (so instead of byi3milu which probably some people say, you get bya3milu).

مؤتمرات شو؟
mu2tamaraat shu?
What conferences?

مؤتمر الغذاء العالمي. قال متخذين قرار بتخفيض عدد الجوعانين بالعالم للنص من هون للألفين وعشرة
mu2tamar ilghazaa2 il3aalami. 2aal mittakhiziin qaraar bi takhfiiD 3adad iljoo3aaniin bi l3aalam la nneSS min hoon la lalfeen w 3ashara
The World Conference on Food. It says they’ve decided to reduce the number of starving people in the world to half [their current number] between now and 2010.

متخذ is obviously from MSA اتخذ and means ‘having taken’. The ­prefix is mi-, though, which is an 3aamiyye form. Also notice that neither of the two men pronounce ذ ث ظ properly.

قرار – in Lebanese قرار is pronounced with a hamza, but in Syrian it always has a q. There are a few quite colloquial words like this: وقح weqe7 ‘rude’ for example (also pronounced with a hamza in Lebanon), or قنع qana3 ‘convince’ (and all its forms, pronounced with q in Lebanon as well).

من هون لـ min hoon la – in English we can’t use ‘here’ in the sense of ‘now’, generally, but you can in Arabic.

النص inneSS ‘half’. In Arabic numbers, figures and amounts like this tend to be definite – the English equivalent would be ‘reduce it to half’. This is probably the same reason that there’s an الـ on 2010, and the same reason that in that camel video she says ما بيسرع فوق العشرين ‘he doesn’t go above 20’.

ممتاز. شو اللي زعجك بهدا القرار؟
mumtaaz. Shu illi za3ajak bi haada lqaraar?
Great. What’s annoyed you about this decision?

مستحيل. مستحيل يتم تخفيضه للنص.يعني اذا قدرو يحافظو على عددهن هلأ, اي ممتاز! بس مستحيل, ما بتزبط.
musta7iil. Musta7iil ytamm takhfiiDo la nneSS. Ya3ni iza 2edru y7aafZu 3ala 3adadon halla2, ee mumtaaz! Bas musta7iil, maa btizboT.
Impossible. It’s impossible for it to be reduced by half. I mean, if they manage to maintain the number now, yeah, great! But it’s impossible, it won’t work.

مستحيل يتم تخفيضه – a fun mixture of MSA and colloquial constructions. Even if you’ve only dipped your toe into media Arabic, chances are you’ll have encountered the tamm passive before. But يتم here is conjugated as a normal 3aamiyye verb, and doesn’t take a b- because it’s after مستحيل.

اذا قدرو – normally اذا is followed by a present tense in colloquial, unless the reference is actually past (اذا طلعو امبارح ‘if they set off yesterday’) or if the speaker wants to add a tinge of uncertainty to what they’re saying. Saying اذا قدرو implies that it’s not very likely, but is probably not as straightforwardly hypothetical as لو قدرو.

لأ لأ, بتزبط بتزبط.
la2 la2, btizboT btizboT.
No, no, it’ll work, it’ll work.

مستحيل. لا تقللي استصلاح الأراضي الزراعية واستثمارها
musta7iil! Laa t2illi istiSlaa7 ilaraaDi izziraa3iyye w istismaarha
Impossible! Don’t tell me reclamation of and investment in agricultural land…

لا تقللي laa t2illi – we’ve mentioned before how hollow verbs get shortened before certain suffixes and how long uu becomes that mysterious neutral vowel that sounds different in different contexts before. Both لا and ما can be used to negate the imperative, and I don’t think there’s much of a difference in their meaning.

لأ, مو شغلة استصلاح الأراضي.
la2, muu sheghlet istiSlaa7 ilaraaDi.
No, it’s nothing to do with reclaiming land.

شغلة sheghle is a very useful word to know. It basically means ‘thing’ or ‘thingy’. In constructions like this, it can also mean ‘it’s a matter of’ or, as here, ‘not a matter of’.

ولا تقللي الدول الغنية بدها تعطي مساعدات للدول الفقيرة لإنه أصلا هاي الدول الغنية صارت غنية على حساب الدول الفقيرة.
w laa t2illi idduwal ilghaniyye bidda ta3Tii musaa3adaat la dduwal ilfa2iira, la2enno aSlan hayy idduwal ilghaniyye Saaret ghaniyye 3ala 7saab idduwal ilfa2iira
And don’t tell me rich countries are going to give assistance to poor countries, because in the first place the rich countries [only] became rich at the expense of poor countries.

بدها – although we’re taught بدي first and foremost, and perhaps exclusively, as a translation of ‘I want’, it’s probably used as much or more to add a range of different colourings to verbs. One sense is future, as here, where it translates as something like ‘going to’, and all of its other meanings are basically derived from this: شو بدي اعمل هلأ؟ shu biddi a3mil halla2?  What should I do now? بدي كون نسيت biddi kuun @nsiit ‘I must’ve forgotten’, شلون بدي افتحه؟ shloon biddi ifta7o? ‘How do I open it?’

لإنه la2enno – possibly slightly more formal or emphatic than using مشان or any of its relatives, but still perfectly 3aammi.

لأ مو بالمساعدات. لإن بحياته الفقير ما بيقتنع بالحسنات
la2 muu bi lmusaa3adaat. La2en bi 7ayaato lfa2iir maa byiqtane3 bi l7asanaat.
No, not through assistance. Because the poor man will never be convinced by charity.

لإن la2en is a variant of لإنه la2enno.

بحياته bi 7ayaato and the more common عمره, combined with a negative verb, are used to express ‘never’, ‘not in one’s life’.

بيقتنع byiqtane3 – some verbs have passives formed on form VIII instead of form VII. Also I told you قنع always had a q!

ولا تقللي من طريق حل النزاعات المسلحة وتحويل ميزانيات السلاح لميزانيات الأغذية… لأ, ما حتزبط! لإنه تجار الأسلحة مخططين لست ميت حرب أهلية لقدام لحتى ما يقعدو بلا شغل.
w laa t2illi min Tarii2 7all innizaa3aat ilmusalla7a w ta7wiil miizaaniyyaat issilaa7 la miizaaniyyaat ilaghziyeLa2, maa 7a-tizboT. La2enno tijjaar ilasli7a mukhaTTaTiin la sitt miit 7arb ahliyye la-2eddaam la7atta maa yi23odu bala shegh@l.
And don’t tell me by solving armed conflicts and transferring the arms budget to the food budget… No, it won’t work. Because the arms merchants have planned for six hundred civil wars in the future so they don’t [have to] sit around unemployed.

أغذية aghziye is the plural of غذاء and is maybe one of those cases where nouns that only exist in the singular in English have singulars and plurals in Arabic. It probably expresses there being a lot of something. أسلحة is the same deal – why not سلاح? I don’t really know, but تجار الأسلحة is a set phrase.

ست ميت حرب sitt miit 7arb – in colloquial the numbers are much simpler and less annoying. ميّة miyye becomes ميت miit when it is followed by a noun, and the forms of 3-10 without ـة appear almost exclusively before nouns, whilst the ones with ـة generally appear independently.

لحتى la7atta – used for both la- and 7atta (conveniently), which in any case are basically synonymous with one another in colloquial, both being used for ‘until’ and ‘in order to’.

ما حتزبط maa 7a-tizboT – you were probably once smugly told that in the Levant they use رح and in Egypt they use prefixed حـ, but in Levantine dialects حـ exists as a rarer variant of رح and, in parts of Syria, لح la7. In fact, almost all of the basic words you learn as characteristic of Egyptian are also used, albeit sometimes in much narrower contexts, in Syrian too.

قعد بلا شغل ‭‭2e3ed bala sheghl is a very common translation for ‘be unemployed’ or ‘be doing nothing’.

لأ مو حل النزاعات المسلحة لأ…
la2, muu 7all innizaa3aat ilmusalla7a la2.
No, not by solving armed conflicts, no.

طيب… رح يصنعو أدوية ويوزعوها ع الجوعانين يسفوها وتسد نفسهن ويبطلو جوعانين؟
Tayyib… ra7 yiS@n3u ad@wye w ywazz3uwwa 3a ljoo3aaniin ysiffuwwa w tsidd nafson w ybaTTlu joo3aaniin?
OK… they’re going to produce medicines and hand them out to the starving that they can down and they’ll lose their appetites and stop being hungry?

يصنعو – the underlying form here is yiSna3u, but Syrians have a predilection for rearranging consonants and vowels. Because there’s a suffix which begins with a vowel, the vowel previous to the suffix, yiSna3u, is dropped. But because it’s difficult to produce a three-consonant cluster, a new helping vowel is inserted between S and n to make it pronounceable. The stress stays where it always was, on the first syllable. This process can happen whenever a suffix beginning with a vowel is added, even if it’s -ak-ek or -o.

ادوية ad@wye – this is basically the same process as above. The underlying form is adwiye, with stress on the first syllable; w and y are contracted together, and then a helping vowel has to be inserted before w.

يوزعوها ywazz3uwwa – I vaguely remember learning وزّع either from al Kitaab or from an entry-level news article in the sense of ‘distribute’. It’s also used in colloquial in the same sense for ‘hand out’. The initial h of pronoun suffixes is dropped quite consistently by most Syrians and Lebanese people; when placed after a final long vowel like -i or -u, the vowel turns into a double consonant: –iyy-a-uww-a. There’s no b- because it’s following رح (not directly, of course, but  ‘distribute’ and ‘make’ are both future verbs here).

يسفوها ysiffuwwa – سف (saff ysiff) means ‘take without water’ or more generally ‘gulp down’. I think there being no b- is because this sentence is a relative clause of أدوية, like ‘they’ll distribute medicine to the poor that they can gulp down’.

سدّ نفسهن sadd nafson – سد (sadd ysidd) means ‘block’; you may have encountered the same word, if you’re particularly interested in north African  geopolitics, in the context of the Ethiopian Nile Dam (also called a سد). The word نفس nafs here isn’t ‘self’, but ‘appetite’ – مالي نفس maali naf@s means ‘I don’t feel like it’, ‘I’m not hungry’. This same word in Egyptian is pronounced nifs. سد نفسي is the term for loss of appetite. Literally, this sentence is ‘[the medicines] will block their appetite’.

يبطلو جوعانين ybaTTlu joo3aaniin – بطّل baTTal means ‘to stop [completely]’, ‘to stop being’ or ‘to no longer be’. It can take a verb in the subjunctive (يبطلو يشربو ybaTTlu yishrabu), a masdar (يبطلو شرب ybaTTlu sher@b) or, in the sense of ‘stop being’, a noun (يبطلو سكيرجية ybaTTlu sikkiirjiyye). In his next line he says يبطلو يصيرو جوعانين ‘they’ll stop becoming hungry’.

لأ مو شغلة أدوية مو شغلة أدوية
la2 muu sheghlet adwiye, muu sheghlet adwiye.
No, it’s nothing to do with medicines.

The second guy pronounces adwiye in a more MSA-ish way. He generally speaks a bit more MSA in this whole clip, possibly to emphasise his (albeit pessimistic) wisdom.

بيطلع ساحر, بيقول هرو مرو ، هرو مرو، ما فاتوها بيقومو وبيبطلو يصيرو جوعانين بسحر ساحر هيك؟
byiTla3 saa7ir, bi2uul herru merru herru merru maa faatuuha bi2uumu bibaTTlu ySiiru joo3aaniin bi se7r saa7ir heek?
A magician will appear and say abracadabra and they’ll all stop becoming hungry by some magic spell, something like that?

بيقومو بيبطلو bi2uumu bibaTTlu – 2aam ‘to get up’ is often used in this sort of narrative sense. It doesn’t really mean anything per se; it’s a bit like ‘went’ in ‘he only went and switched the light off!’

لأ ما شغلة ساحر لأ.
la2 maa sheghlet saa7ir la2.
No, nothing to do with a magician, no.

Although مو is as a rule much more common to negate nouns and adjectives and ما to negate verbs, ما can sometimes negate nouns, too. In certain dialects (like that of Latakia, or, apparently, the Sudan) this is basically the rule.

طيب شلون؟ كل شغلة لأ لأ لأ! شلون!
Tayyib shloon? Kill sheghle la2 la2 la2! Shloon!
OK, so how? Everything is ‘no no no!’ How?

يا سيدي, مؤتمر الغذاء العالمي ما اتخذ قرار بتخفيض نسبة الجوعانين إلى النصف… مؤتمر الغذاء العالمي أعلن خبر.
yaa siidi, mu2tamar ilghazaa2 il3aalami maa ittakhaz qaraar bi takhfiiD nisbet ijjoo3aaniin ila nniS@f. Mu2tamar ilghazaa2 il3aalami a3lan khabar.
Look, man, the World Conference for Food hasn’t decided to reduce the percentage of starving people to half. The World Conference for Food has announced some news.

يا سيدي yaa siidi­ – often used at the beginning of a declaration to a friend or a social equal, even though it means ‘sir’; I guess it also means ‘Mr’ (although calling someone ‘mister’ in English is either flirtatious or infantilising).

شلون خبر؟
shloon khabar?
What do you mean news?

مؤتمر الغذاء العالمي حسبها من هون للألفين وعشرة… بيكون النصف الأول من الجائعين بالعالم أكل النصف التاني. وهيك بتنزل النسبة للنص.
mu2tamar ilghazaa2 il3aalami 7asabha min hoon la lalfeen w 3ashara… bikuun inniSf il2awwal mn iljaa2i3iin bi l3aalam akal inniSf ittaani. W heek btinzil innisbe la nneSS.
The World Conference for Food has worked it out that from now up to 2010, the first half of the starving people in the world will have eaten the second half. And that’s how the percentage will drop by half.

حسبها ‪7‪asabha – the -ha is a meaningless ‘it’, referring to the situation.

بيكون… أكل bikuun akal – ‘will have’ is intuitively formed by the future of ‘to be’ plus a past tense verb.

جائعين jaa2i3iin – this is very MSA. You probably learnt جوعان for ‘hungry’ from al Kitaab, but the forms with -aan – تعبان etc – are generally frowned upon in proper MSA writing. The real participle of جاع ‘get hungry’ is جائع.

العمى!
il3ama!
Damn!

العمى literally means ‘blindness’, but it’s really just a general, not-very-sweary ‘damn!’. I guess it’s probably originally contracted from العمى بقلبك il3ama bi 2elbak ‘blindness in your heart’ whose wording does not do justice to the long and fertile intellectual tradition of Arabic medical science.

أبدا
abadan
Exactly.

Apparently أبدا (which you may know from MSA can also mean ‘forever’) can also mean ‘precisely’.

ولله ما عم تخطر على بال الجن الأزرق
waLLa maa 3am tikhTor 3ala baal iljinn ilazra2
You wouldn’t have thought of it in a million years.

I hadn’t encountered this expression before, though I had heard references to the blue genies before, and it can be used in fuSHaa with the appropriate grammatical changes. Apparently, nobody knows what the blue genies are, and so saying that something ‘would never occur to’ (ما بتخطر على بال) a blue genie – when blue genies themselves have supernatural powers, and are a symbol of unknowingness, means that you would never have thought of it. Another similar expression is لا… ولا عرفيت أزرق laa… walla 3ifriit azra2 ‘neither… nor a blue genie!’ which means ‘neither that nor anything at all!’

لكان شلون
lakaan @shloon
You’re exactly right.

لكان is a really useful word you should learn as soon as possible in Syrian and Lebanese (in some dialects, la3aad is used instead, though this may now be dated). It means ‘that’s how it is’ or ‘if that’s how it is’ or ‘if that’s not how it is, then how is it?’ This sentence hovers somewhere between the second and third usage. It can also be used on its own in the first and third usages:

هنن مصريين؟ – hinen maSriyyiin? – Are they Egyptians?
لأ مو مصريين – no, not Egyptians.
لكان؟ – then what?

In this sense, Jordanians (and maybe Palestinians) say willa? ‘Instead?’ instead. Instead instead instead.

Or:

هنن مصريين؟ ‪– Are they Egyptians?
لكان! – yes, exactly!

أخي ما في مشكلة الا بيلاقولها حل. فورا
akhi maa fii mish@kle illa bilaa2uulla 7all. Fawran
Brother, there isn’t a problem they can’t find a solution for. Straight away.

لقى يلاقو la2a ylaa2u is an irregular verb which acts like a form I in the past and a form III in the present. Here it has a suffixed -lha or, in his pronunciation, -lla, which means ‘for it’.

مشكلة mish@kle is another example of the same lose-a-vowel-gain-a-vowel process – mushkile > mishkile (because the stressed u becomes the neutral vowel, which here is pronounced i), then the i is dropped because there’s a vowel after the last consonant of the root, then a helping vowel is inserted to make it more pronounceable, but the stress remains in the same place. Mishkile exists as a variant.

This song – one of my favourite Lebanese songs – is, like many things which come out of a country I am increasingly convinced is populated entirely by DJs, totally ridiculous; it’s also full of very useful expressions and vocabulary, as well as a couple of puns (and who doesn’t love puns!). The slightly awkwardly written English description explains that this song, and the accompanying music video, are poking fun at the self-contained bourgeois bubble of Downtown Beirut through a little bit of absurdism, i.e. riding the eponymous camel around and generally causing chaos. The incident made the Lebanese press – which slightly surreally explains that nobody would have had a problem with a horse, since horses are generally considered to be in keeping with the high level of culture in the city centre (?), but that a camel just wasn’t on. The lyrics themselves make the politically critical nature of the song pretty clear, so I won’t bother explaining it further. The sentences are obviously scrambled a bit syntactically for the purposes of rhyme and rhythm, so perhaps don’t copy the word order exactly, but the expressions and words are all perfectly normal.

أنا بدي كزدر ع الجمل بوسط بيروت
Ana baddi kazder 3a ljamal bi wasaT beeruut
I want to go for a ride on my camel in downtown Beirut

Baddi is Lebanese and coastal Syrian; normal pretty much everywhere else in the urban Levant is biddi. Kazdar (or tkazdar, form V) means something like ‘joyride’, ‘wander around’, ‘cruise around’ (from Turkish gezdirmek). There’s no prefix indicating the subject (except the absence of a prefix… make u think), because there’s only one consonant at the start of the stem. In Palestinian and Jordanian, this would be akazder.

ع الجمل – Camel is definite here because it’s generic – ‘by camel’, similar to بالتكسي ‘by taxi’.

خلي اللي ما معه حق بنزين يصير عنده أمل
khalli lli maa ma3o 7a22 benziin ySiir 3indo 2amal
Let those who don’t have the money for petrol have some hope

خلّى here is first-person singular (not clear from the translation), and is lacking a prefix for the same reason as kazder. Like almost all causatives in Arabic (including form IIs and IVs), it can mean either ‘make’ or ‘let’; which is meant has to be worked out from context (here either ‘let them have some hope’ or ‘give them some cause for hope’ both work I think). As you can see, the verb after it does not take a b- (and khalli itself takes no b because it’s following baddi).

اللي ما معه – literally ‘he who does not have’, but the intention here is gender neutral (trickier to do well in Arabic than in English).

حق is ‘the price of’ (literally ‘the right’), or more like ‘the amount of money which should be exchanged for…’, since you can’t really say ‘he doesn’t have the price of petrol’.

يصير ‘become’ doesn’t really translate nicely into English, but it’s much more idiomatic to use it here than تكون because there’s a change of state implied (from not having any hope to having some hope).

خلي الاجانب بنبسطو واخيرا شافو الجمل
khalli l2ajaanib yénbasTu, w2akhiiran shaafu jjamal
Let the foreigners be happy – they finally saw a camel!

انبسط من (nbasaT yinbasiT) means ‘be rolled out’ in MSA, but for some reason means ‘enjoy’ or ‘be happy’ in colloquial (in the same way that مبسوط ‘rolled out’ means ‘happy’). Ajnabi/Ajaanib means ‘foreigner[s]’, but it tends to be code for ‘white people’ or more generally non-Arabs (Arabs don’t tend to be included, even incomprehensible ones like Moroccans).

وأخيرا – ‘finally!’

In 3aamiyye, j is (optionally) a sun letter, which means the l- of the article assimilates to it (this is the same in Egyptian, where word-initial g and k optionally trigger assimilation). The sisters alternate between treating it as a sun letter and not throughout the song.

خلي كل أصحاب المحلات يعملو بانيك
khalli kill 2aS7aab élma7allaat ya3@mlu baaniik
Make all the owners of the shops panic

I’m pretty sure 3imil baaniik is a quintessentially Lebanese expression, with baaniik obviously borrowed from French. These sisters have another song called ‘Panic in the Parliament’ which illustrates its usage nicely. That said, it’s worth mentioning that 3imil is pretty much the go-to verb for foreign nouns that can’t easily be turned into a verb using the normal pattern derivations: عملله ريستارت, that is, 3mello riistaart, is a common expression for ‘restart it’, for example.

وكياس الشوبينك توقع من ايد العالم الشيك
w kyaas ésh-shoping tuu2a3 min 2iid él3aalam ésh-shiik
And [make] the chic people drop their bags of shopping

عالم (literally ‘world’) for ‘people’ is very common in all Shami dialects; it usually takes (although you can’t see it here) either feminine singular agreement or plural agreement, like naas. Tuu2a3 here is also losing its b- under the influence of a previous khalla, although there’s no khalli in this line. Also! Iid il3aalam – the hands of the people. Colloquial Arabic, like French but unlike English, uses the singular in this sort of construction where you’re talking about things belonging to people that they each have one of, like body parts: قلبكن ‘your hearts’.

وقع من (wi2i3 yuu2a3) is the most common translation for English ‘drop’, though it literally means ‘fall from’: وقع منك مصاري ‘you’ve dropped some money’. Generally speaking in 3aamiyye ‘assimilating’ verbs (those with a w or y as their first root consonant) do not lose it in the present but have a long vowel there instead (like yuu2a3), although some speakers drop them, especially with more elevated language like أثق فيك asiq fiik ‘I trust you.

كيس (pl. كياس) – in Egyptian this seems to be used for all bags, but in Syrian at least it generally has a narrow scope and is only used for shopping bags, plastic bags etc. شنطة  shanTa or شنتة shanta is used for backpacks, suitcases etc.

The use of English (or French) words like this is common everywhere in Lebanon (and to some extent other Levantine countries), particularly by wealthy urban sorts; bliiz seems to have practically replaced other alternatives for ‘please’ and there are many nativised recent borrowings, as well as a lot of resorting to whole sentences in English when somebody wants to make a point or show how clever they are.

والمسيور الفخامة يفلت من تمه السيجارة
w él-monsieur élfakhhaame yéflot mén témmo éssiigaar
And [make] the fancy monsieur drop his cigar from his mouth

Literally again ‘make the cigar fall out of the fancy monsieur’s mouth’. Falat yiflot is used a lot for things escaping – its participle, فلتان, is used for runaway dogs and in the feminine form as a term for a ‘fallen woman’. In a more similar sense to its usage here, you can use it for words slipping (unwittingly) out of your mouth: خايف تفلت من تمي كلمة بالسياسة ‘I’m afraid that I’ll let slip some word on politics’. فخّامة, incidentally, is one of a set of adjectives known as ‘exaggeration expressions’ in Arabic grammar; the taa marbuuTa is not a feminine marker but a further emphatic addition (these types of adjectives didn’t, in Classical Arabic at least, generally vary for gender).

تِمّ (in some more hicksy dialects, ثِمّ) is the normal word for ‘mouth’ in Levantine. Ditch that فم.

مامي مامي حصان! يصرخو الاولاد الصغار
‘maami maami 7Saan!’ ySarrkhu léwlaad léSghaar
‘Mami mami, a horse!’ scream the small children

صْغير (sometimes written زغير, since the saad is voiced and not emphatic) has a consonant cluster at the beginning, as does its plural, صغار. Lots of colloquial adjectives have plurals formed on this pattern; more than in MSA have plurals formed with fu3aal (like kubaar). Nouns and adjectives with consonant clusters at the beginning, like Sghaar, tend to take the li- form of the adjective instead of the il- form, but when the consonant they begin with is a sun letter, like saad, you can also go with the normal form with il- (so both li-jdiid and ij-jdiid exist).

أنا بدي كزدر ع الجمل بوسط بيروت وخلي كل الناس تغار
ana baddi kazdir 3a jjamal bi wasaT beeruut w khalli kéll énnaas @tghaar
I want to go for a ride on the camel in downtown Beirut and make everyone jealous

وسط بيروت
wasaT beeruut
Downtown Beirut

بجملي بدي فوت
bi jamali baddi fuut
On my camel I want to go [in]

فات يفوت means ‘go past’ in MSA and occasionally in colloquial, as in اللي فات مات ‘let bygones be bygones’, literally ‘what’s gone is dead’ and السنة اللي فاتت ‘last year’, but in urban Levantine dialects it is also by far the most common word for ‘enter’, ‘go in’, ‘come in’ etc. Ditch that دخل, you can start shouting اُدخُل at people again once you’re a high-ranking officer in a regional Syrian police force (living the dream).

وبين السيارات الجمل يكزدر مبسوط
w been éssiyyaaraat éjjamal ykazder mabsuuT
and for my camel to cruise between the cars, happy

Ykazder has no b- because it’s going back to baddi.

وسط بيروت
wasaT beeruut
Downtown Beirut

نزلت كزدر ببيروت ع ضهر الجمل
nzél@t kazder bi beeruut 3a Dahr iljamal
I went for a ride in Beirut on the back of the camel

You can put a verb of motion followed by a verb without b- and it means ‘I went in order to…’

The way this woman says ضهر sounds to me more like دهر, though my ajnabi ear is not the most reliable on this distinction. That said, emphatic consonants turning into non-emphatic ones is not unheard of – an example that comes to mind is اتدايق tdaaya2 ‘become annoyed’ and various related words, which are all transparently related to MSA ضاق. At least a little bit of confusion seems to happen in all dialects.

بشوف ويتر عم بيحط سالاد بأفخم مطعم ببيروت
bshuuf weeter 3am bi7aTT saalaad bi 2afkham maT3am bi beeruut
I see a waiter putting a salad [down] in the fanciest restaurant in Beirut

Whilst in English ‘put’ can’t generally be used on its own without a place or at the very least some kind of description of direction (put it down, put it on the shelf) you can use حط in Arabic on its own, generally meaning ‘put down’.

مش عارف هنيك بالذات بجملي بدي فوت
mésh 3aarif huniik bizzaat bi jamali baddi fuut
Not realising that that’s precisely where I’m going with my camel

مش عارف – Most (or maybe all) Lebanese dialects, like Palestinian and most Jordanian, use mish instead of muu, and don’t have very many participles formed with –aan (like 3arfaan, the Syrian equivalent of 3aarif).

هنيك huniikhniik is the Syrian and Lebanese equivalent of هناك hunaak/hinaak/hnaak used in Jordan, Palestine and Egypt. It might get you a few funny looks if you use it in Egypt in particular because it sounds uncomfortably close to ha-niik ‘I’m going to fuck’, but it’s a perfectly servicable word in the Levant.

بالذات bizzaat and its synonym بالضبط/بالزبط biDDab@T/biZZab@T do not always line up exactly with English ‘exactly’ in that they can be used a little bit more broadly: انت بالزات مالك فوتة ع المدرسة inte bizzaat maalak foote 3a lmadrase ‘as for you, you [definitely] aren’t allowed into the school!’

وجملي معتر وتعبانضارب ببطنه الجوع
w jamali m3attar w ta3baan Daarib bi baTno jjuu3
My camel is worn out, tired, feeling the hunger in his stomach

ما هو جمل! ما فيك تقلله عن ولا شي ممنوع!
ma huww jamal! Maa fiik @t2éllo 3an wala shi mamnuu3
He’s a camel! You can’t tell him that anything is forbidden

ما – This is the ma referenced here. I’d guess that structures like this (ma huww jamal!) originally started as rhetorical questions and developed into an emphatic structure. Huw[w] is a short, alternative form of huwwe which appears (like hiy and hin for hiyye and hinne) in a few different contexts, particularly, it seems, after particles like ma and laa.

ما فيك – this is a pretty Syro-Lebanese expression meaning ‘you can’t’, formed either straightforwardly with the normal forms of fii (fiyyi/fiyye, fiik etc) or with the stem fiin- (probably a back-formation from fiina or fiini, the latter of which is an alternate form for fiyye: fiinak, fiinik etc); the second form (maa fiini) appears later in the song. It’s not only used in the negative either: fiini ‘I can’. This entire sentence – whose order is scrambled a bit for rhyme – literally means ‘you can’t tell him about anything [that it’s] forbidden’.

ولا شي – wala here is a negative which always appears in double negative constructions, like here (you can’t tell him nothing is forbidden). Not to be confused with waLLa (with a dark, doubled l) which you probably already know as ‘by God!’.

تقلله – although قال is obviously a perfectly normal MSA verb, you could be forgiven for not recognising it in this mess of unexpected vowels and consonants. First of all, and reasonably obviously, the prefix is t- rather than ti- because it precedes only one consonant instead of a consonant cluster (Levantine can’t really cope with three consonants in a cluster except in some specific contexts and with some specific consonants), making the form without -lo تقول t2uul, which so far seems very reasonable. When the -li, -lak, -lo etc suffixes are added to hollow verbs, the long vowel in the root is shortened, making the expected form t2ullo – and this is exactly what it would be in most Palestinian and Jordanian dialects, and some Syrian and Lebanese ones too. But as mentioned here, and i merge in Syrian and Lebanese in stressed syllables. Since the stress is now on the /u/, it turns into this merged vowel é, which in this context – without any emphatic consonants – sounds like ‘i’.

والناس تعيط وتصرخ تركض ببعضها تفوت
w énnaas t3ayyeT w @tSarrekh térkoD biba3Da tfuut
While the people are shouting and screaming, running, banging into one another!

Mostly pretty boring and straightforward, except that it includes the uncomfortably sexy expression ‘entering into one another’ which is the normal way of saying ‘knock into one another’ (fuut bi-ba3D). The verbs are subjunctive because they’re talking about repeated action in the past (see the list of subjunctive triggers here).

جملي لعوس السالاد ع مهله مبسوط
jamali la3was éssalaad 3a mahlo mabsuuT
My camel ate up the salad in his own time, happy

ع مهلك – in your own time. Often shouted at people going too fast in doing things, or breezily said to waiters as a passive-aggressive (or, more charitably, friendly) indication that you don’t mind them taking a while.

أنا ع الجمل نزلت كزدر وبوسط بيروت!
2ana 3a jjamal nzél@t kazder w bi wasaT beeruut!
I went for a ride, on a camel, and in downtown Beirut!

فجأة بشوفني الدركة وبيوقفني ع اليمين
faj2a bishuufni ddarake w biwa22éfni 3a lyamiin
All of a sudden, a policeman sees me and pulls me over on the right

فجأة – فجأة in Fusha would have tanwiin in this meaning, but like many similar nouns (صراحة ‘to be honest’) it can appear with or without one in colloquial.

دركة – A darake is a member of the darak, Lebanon’s gendarmerie, who are responsible (among other things) for traffic; the feminine ending is I guess making a singular out of a collective (like… تفاحة?) and the darake here is masculine. The fact it’s definite – along with various other definite nouns with indefinite translations in English – has deep and mysterious implications about the nature of Arabic information and discourse structure. Probably.

بيقللي ع الجمل بوسط بيروت مفكرة حالك مين؟
bi2élli 3a jjamal bi wasaT beeruut? Mfakkra 7aalek miin?
He says to me, on a camel in downtown Beirut? Who do you think you are?

حالك – the normal Levantine replacement for نفسك.

مفكر mfakkir is of course a participle, and can be used very similarly to its verbal counterpart بفكّر bfakker, though mfakker is narrower in scope. It means either ‘[X] thinks [Y to be…]’ or ‘[X] has thought of/about’, depending on whether it’s reflecting the ‘think someone to be’ meaning of فكّر or the ‘think about [doing]’, ‘think about [something]’ meaning (which takes the preposition بـ). In this sense it means ‘[who do you] think [yourself] to be?’

قلتله يا حضرة الدركة سمعني شو بدي قول
2éltéllo 7aDrit éddarake sma3ni shu baddi 2uul
I said to him, sir, listen to what I have to say

حضرة, which you may know from the more common ­­حضرتك, literally means ‘presence’ and is used to be respectful (although to be honest in my experience it’s far more commonly used sarcastically with people acting as if they’re better than everyone else).

أنا بعرف حضرتك عن أمن المواطن مسؤول
2ana ba3ref 7aD@rtak 3an 2aman élmuwaaTen mas2uul
I know that you’re responsible for the safety of the citizen

On a slightly dorky syntactic point, you can do something with عرف that you can’t really do with English ‘know’, which is that you can have the subject of the following sentence (normally standing on its own after ‘that’) be the direct object of عرف: بعرفك مشغول ها الأيام ‘I know you’re busy these days’. I guess the closest equivalent in English is ‘I know you to be busy’.

بس ما أنا كمان مواطنة وحقي فوت ع ها المدينة
bass ma 2ana kamaan muwaaTne w 7a22i fuut 3a halmadiini
But I’m a citizen too and it’s my right to enter this city!

I think I mentioned before that many Lebanese people pronounce final ـة as i. The maa here is the same one we saw earlier with maa huww jamal. You can say حقي + b-less verb to mean ‘it’s my right to’.

ما the same ma as above.

وأنا من عيلة متواضعة وبلا ها الجمل ما فيني
w 2ana mén 3eele métwaaD3a w bala haljamal maa fiini
And I’m from a humble family, without this camel I can’t!

We’ve already seen fiini. Note that mitwaaD3a has mi- not mu-, which is also found in Egyptian and many other dialects. Annoyingly for the learner of colloquial, some high-prestige adjectives + nouns unpredictably take mu- (muwaaTin for example, not mwaaTin) and some appear in both forms; in more ~elevated~ forms of speech the prevalence of mu- and more MSA-esque forms like mutawaaD[i]3a increases. But mi- is still probably the most common way of forming participles.

جملي مواطن صالح وبيوقف ع الاشارة
jamali muwaaTen Saali7 w biwa22ef 3a l2ishaara
My camel is a good citizen, he stops at the traffic lights

We saw wa22af in a causative sense ‘make stop’, i.e. ‘stop someone’, above; it is also very commonly used in a non-causative sense, like here, as a synonym for the form one wi2if (which can’t be used with a direct object).

ع الإشارة – ishaara ‘sign’ is the normal word for ‘traffic lights’ in the Levant. One of the many uses of ع or على (these women never say على, but for many speakers على is only shortened to ع before il-) lines up nicely with English ‘at’, as in ‘at the traffic lights’, ‘at the red line’, and ‘at the door’ (ع الباب).

ما بيدوبل ما بيزمر وبيقطع المرة الختيارة
maa bidoobil maa bizammir w bi2aTTe3 élmara élkhityaara
He doesn’t overtake, he doesn’t beep his horn and he lets old women cross the street

دوبل dawbal or doobal is from French doubler and means ‘overtake’.

زمر zammar is the verb from زمور zammuur or zmuur ‘horn’.

قطع ‭2‮ 2‭aTTa3 is a great example of a causative you might not think exists; the normal way to say ‘cross the road’ is 2aTa3 ishhaari3. The form II verb either means ‘make [x] cross’ or ‘let X cross’, in this case I think the most obvious interpretation is ‘let cross’.

مرة mara is a swearword in Egypt but the normal word for ‘woman’ in the Levant (its plural نسوان is also apparently a swearword in Egypt, so avoid them both and stick to ست if you don’t want to be beaten up by an old woman on a microbus. Trust me.).

ختيار khityaar is ‘old person’, it can be used as a noun or an adjective. There is also a verb, ختير khatyar, which means ‘to get old’; ختيرنا على… khatyarna 3ala… means ‘we’re too old for…’ For those who are weird about etymology, it comes the same root as اختيار, but was borrowed into Turkish as ihtiyar, acquired the meaning of ‘old’ via ‘people who choose the mukhtaar‘, and then was borrowed back into Levantine Arabic as khityaar.

جملي بيخفف ع الطبة وما بيسرع فوق العشرين
jamali bikhaffif 3a TTabbe w maa byésra3 foo2 il3ashriin
My camel goes slowly over speedbumps and he doesn’t go faster than twenty

خفف khaffaf and its opposite تقل ta22al are sometimes causative and sometimes not; they often mean ‘go light’ and ‘go heavy’, as here. خفف بالعشى means ‘don’t eat too much dinner’, ثقل بالعشى means ‘eat a lot/too much’.

‫وركبتله نمرة وأصلا ما بيصرف بنزين!
w rakkabtéllo némra w 2aSlan maa byiSrof benziin!
I’ve put a licence plate on him and he doesn’t use petrol!

نمرة is obviously from… well, I’d guess French nombre and seems to be used in the sense of a ‘set of numbers which comprise a unit’, like registry and licence numbers and phone numbers.

أصلا aSlan is a very useful word to start using, though what it translates to is not entirely clear to me; it generally means something like ‘to start with’, ‘anyway’.

اطلع فيا الدركة ما حب جملي من الأساس
TTala3 fiyyi ddarake, maa 7abb jamali mn élasaas
The policeman looked at me, he didn’t like my camel one bit

اطّلع بـ TTala3 bi- is the normal word for ‘look at’ in the Levant. Generally speaking the preposition fii has been largely lost in Levantine dialects and replaced with bi-, but bi- does not have any pronominal forms and uses the forms of fii- instead (some speakers are exceptions to one or both rules).

بس مش حاطة سانتور جاوبني بحماس
bass mésh 7aaTTa ceinture, jaawabni bi 7amaas
‘But you haven’t put a seatbelt on!’ He answered with zeal.

حاطّة is from حطّ (the masculine will either be حاطّ or more commonly حاطِط) and means ‘having put’; this is one of the many participles that expresses the state of being post-action (hurr hurr) rather than being mid-action (hurr hurr hurr), like آكل ‘having eaten’ or عامل ‘having done’.

Ceinture is obviously borrowed from French, and is a common term for seatbelt in Lebanon, at least. Other terms used include حزام أمن (the Fusha term) 7izaam (aman), زنّار zinnaar (which just means ‘belt’; you can hear it in another Lebanese song here), and probably also قشاط, pronounced 2shaaT, which is another normal term for belt.

جملك رح ياكل زبط وما تجربي تقنعيني
jamalek ra7 yaakol zab@T w maa tjarrbi ti2ne3iini
‘Your camel’s going to get a ticket; don’t try and convince me’

ياكل زبط – the idiomatic use of أكل here is going to be important later on in the song, so pay attention. أكل is not only used in Levantine Arabic for eating, but also as a kind of ‘bad passive’; you eat punches (أكلت ضربة ‘I was hit’), kicks, and, apparently, parking tickets. أكلها akala ‘he ate her’ on its own means ‘he messed it up’. A زبط is basically a ticket you have to take to a police station and pay a fine for. I should probably come up with a nicer way of writing this meaningless inserted-4-sound vowel I keep writing [i].

جرّب jarrab generally means ‘sample’, ‘try’ (in the sense of tasting something to see if you like it, rather than attempting), but it can be used in this sense too, I guess in the sense of ‘attempt [to see if it succeeds]’; ‘don’t even bother trying to convince me [otherwise]’.

قللي بشواربه السود وبضحكته اللئيمة
2élli bi shwaarbo ssuud w bi Da7@kto élla2iime
He said with his black moustache, and his nasty smile

As long as Levantine speakers carry on using plural shwaarib to refer to this particular type of facial hair (it takes plural agreement too as you can see) I’m going to carry on translating it as moustachioes in my head.

قللي you would expect, following the normal process of vowel shortening, to be pronounced 2al-li, and I’m pretty sure this is how it is pronounced in the eminently more reasonable dialects of Jordan and Palestine. Both exist as variants in Syria and Lebanon.

ضحكة – means both ‘laugh’ and ‘smile’ in colloquial (the same for the verb)

قلتله حضرة الدركة اللي بتقوله ع الراس
2éltéllo 7aDrit éddarake, élli bét2uulo 3a rraas
I said, ‘sir, whatever you say,’

اللي بتقولو – ‘what you say’, ‘that which you say’.

ع الراس is a probably slightly more polite way of saying ع راسي ‘on my head’, which means ‘highly respected’: you can tell someone they’re على راسك to mean you really respect them. على راسي and على عيني, along with the perhaps more polite تكرم and تكرم عينك and the then more subservient حاضر and أمرك, is a way of agreeing to a request, similar to ‘no problem’ in English; what she’s saying here is ‘of course I will do what you are asking me to’.

أصلا مين بيسترجي يقللك لأ
2aSlan miin byéstarji y2éllak la2
Anyway, who would dare to say no to you

This is one of the times when a general statement which is expressed most naturally with ‘would’ in English uses a present tense verb in Arabic. Another example is أنا نفسي ما بدفع عليه ولا ليرة ‘I myself wouldn’t pay a single lira for it.’

ما ع جنبك في رصاص!
ma 3a jambak fii rSaaS!
When there’s a gun at your side!’

same ما again. rSaaS is bullets, literally ‘lead’.

عطيت الزبط للجمل شافو ورقة ما فهم شو هي
3aTiit izzab@T laljamal shaafo wara2a maa féhim shuu hiyye
I gave the ticket to the camel; he saw it as a piece of paper [that] he didn’t understand what it was

3aTiit (instead of 3aTeet) is a Lebanese form.

شافه ورقة – ‘he saw it [as a] piece of paper’, ‘he saw that it was a piece of paper’

قام لعوسه ع مهله بلعه بكل شهية
2aam la3waso 3a mahlo, bala3o bi kéll shahiyye
He ate it up in his own time, he swallowed it with all appetite

قلتله حضرة الدركة متل ما حضرتك طلبت
2éltéllo 7aD@rtak éddarake mét@l ma 7aD@rtak Talab@t
I said to him, ‘sir, as you ordered,

جملي نفذ الأوامر وأكله للزبط!
jamali naffaz él2awaamir w 2akalo lazzab@T!
my camel carried out the orders and ate the ticket!’

أكله للزبط – I told you you should keep that dual meaning in your head! Whoa! Puns galore! This construction with -o la- (and similar constructions with other pronouns) are used quite a lot anywhere suffixed pronouns can be used: with verbs (as here) and with possessives (أخوه لمازن ‘Mazin’s brother’). It’s difficult to pin down exactly what difference there is between this and the simpler construction; sometimes it seems to be an afterthought to disambiguate. Probably the best approach is to try and imitate natives’ usage. One gloriously superfluous construction – where the la- is followed not by a noun but by a second pronoun echoing the first, as in سأله لإله s2alo la2illo ‘ask him’, is used to emphasise the pronoun.

هلأ كنت بحب ضل معك أكتر بس وقتي مضغوط
halla2 ként @b7ébb Dall ma3ak 2aktar bass wa2ti maDghuuT
Now I’d’ve loved to stay with you longer, but I’m pressed for time

كنت here is conditional. There is a general rule, though not universally followed and probably dialect-specific, that كان takes verbs without b- when it is used to put a continuous construction into the past and takes verbs with b- when it is hypothetical, as here.

وقتي مضغوط – ‘my time is pressed’, i.e. limited.

بدي انزل كزدر بالجمل وبوسط بيروت!
baddi 2énzel kazder bi jjamal w bi wasaT beeruut!
I want to go and cruise, on the camel, in downtown Beirut!

 

يدغدغ

ydaghdagh

As I was discussing Arabic grammar over some Stellas with friends the other day (before you think to yourself ‘wow this girl is a total nerd’: 99% of you have done this before. do not lie.), I said that during my year with CASA I discovered a love for words with 4 letter roots in Arabic, like يهمهم and يوشوش (both onomatopoeias for whispering) as well as يدغدغ (MSA for ‘to tickle.’ not entirely sure how this came up in a graduate level Arabic class, but. you know.). Then my friends informed me that in Egyptian, يدغدغ means ‘to smash’ as in ‘I’m going to smash your head in.’ Probably something you wouldn’t say in an actual fight, but definitely lies within the realm of siblings threatening to beat each other up.

Via arabicproblems.tumblr.com

    Via arabicproblems.tumblr.com

So what is the takeaway here? LEARN. DIALECT. Imagine yourself telling a small child that you’re going to tickle them and watching them burst into tears BECAUSE THEY THINK YOU’RE GOING TO SMASH THEM. Obviously you won’t get it right all the time, and learning a dialect is process, but don’t be the guy that says ‘I’m only interested in learning MSA because I just don’t have the time to learn amiyya.’ Because what you’re really saying is: ‘I can’t be bothered to learn how to interact with actual human beings. I would rather bury my head in books and listen to speeches and watch the news. Oh, and I also suck.’

If you’re interested in learning the basics of any dialect of Arabic, you’d be wise to start here or here.

Shami and Egyptian are not so far apart. In fact, thanks to Team Maha and my own adventures in Egypt, I’ve discovered to my disappointment that many of the expressions I thought were quintessential Syrianisms were in fact perfectly normal Egyptianisms as well. Since going back through all the posts ever and editing them to include a section about their Syrian relevance would be a lot of effort, this post is intended to be a super quick one-stop shop for all of the expressions that have turned up on here which have direct Shami equivalents.

Enlarge your brain

In the Levant (or Syria, at least), كبر عقلك, kabbir 3a2lak.

دماغ is not generally used for ‘brain’ in the Levant – مخ mukhkh, mekhkh and its plural مخاخ mkhaakh are used instead with basically interchangeable meaning. But the equivalent of this particular expression doesn’t use دماغ but rather عقل, which you may recognise as a Fusha word. You could write a whole, probably quite interesting post about the different bits of the mind in Arabic, but generally your عقل is your rational bits – I guess it’s something like your superego. So كبر عقلك means something like ‘control yourself!’, ‘enlarge your superego!’ ‘CONTROL THAT ID!!!’

Father of moustache

This usage of أبو, and of ام imm for women, is also found in Levantine, though such prodigious moustachioes would be referred to as shwaareb شوارب in Syrian, not شنب. أبو and ام in many cases can translate English ‘the one with’ or be used as a colloquial equivalent for MSA ذو and ذات, with abu and imm being used even for inanimate objects depending on their grammatical gender:

الكولا ام الميت ليرة ilkoola imm ilmiit leera – the 100-lira cola (as opposed to the one for 200 liras)

ابو النضارات abu nnaDDaaraat – the guy with the glasses

ام الازرار imm lizraar – the one with the buttons

A lovely example of how unintuitively (or intuitively?) they can be used is the expression ناس ام وجهين naas imm wishheen ‘two-faced people’. Why is it ام? Because ناس often takes feminine singular agreement.

It would be missing a great opportunity to not to mention Mashrou’ Leila’s song Imm ij-Jaakeet here.

أبو plus various root-and-pattern based deformations of names are also used as nicknames by young men: أبو اللول abu lluul and أبو صطيف abu STeef are nicknames for men called Waa2il and MuSTafa respectively.

Fashkh

My etymological explorations around this word have found some interesting results. The word فشخ (fashakh, yifshakh, fashkha) also exists in Syrian and Lebanese, at least, but as far as I’m aware it has no swear-y or NSFW connotations whatsoever – it means ‘step’. In fact, in Hans Wehr it says it means ‘take a large step’, ‘open wide [one’s mouth]’, or ‘spread apart one’s legs’. It’s probably not that difficult to work out from here how it ended up becoming a catch-all profanity, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used in this sense in Levantine. فشخة فشخة, which I suppose would be somewhat offensive in Egyptian, means ‘step by step’.

Any speech

أي كلام is also used in Syrian: هاد مو باسبور أي كلام ‘this isn’t just any old passport’. A synonym – whilst slightly less silly – still doesn’t make an enormous amount of sense to an English speaker: كيف ما كان or كيف من كان kiif maa/man kaan, ‘however’. The slightly more standard maa can be replaced by من in many Syrian dialects when saying ‘however’, ‘whatever’ etc. Note that it doesn’t conjugate:

هو مترجم كيف من كان – huwwe mtarjim kiif man kaan – he’s a mediocre translator

هي سيارة كيف من كان – hiyye siyyaara kiif man kaan – it’s a pretty rubbish car

Another similar expression is هات ايدك والحقني haat iidak wil7aq-ni ‘give-me-your-hand-and-catch-me-up’:

ترجمة هات ايدك والحقني – a bad translation

I will not know you again

The most similar expression to this is:

ما لح اتعرف عليك maa la7 it3arraf 3aleek

Another more idiomatic equivalent is:

انت من طريق وانا من طريق inte min Tarii2 wana min Tarii2  – you go your way, I’ll go mine’

A related expression with a similar meaning is لك ما عرفتك! Lak maa 3rift-ak! ‘I don’t know you!’ This might more idiomatically be translated as ‘who are you and what have you done with…’ in response to an unexpected behaviour from your friend.

Give a mouth

Ba22 ybe22 is a slightly folksy way of saying ‘spit out’ in Syrian. Although you might hear it in dramas from very Old-City-Damascus men – especially be22 meaning ‘spit it out!’ in the metaphorical sense of ‘say what it is you’re not saying!’ – I am informed that it’s a bit dated and not used much by young people. The equivalent of ‘give me a bite’ is the sensible هات شواي or the more… unusual هات شئفة haat shi2fe ‘give me a rag’ (شئفة is used for small pieces of anything).

A cold came to me:

Syrian Arabic does not generally use برد in the sense of ‘getting a cold’ (although people might understand it), and neither does it use ‘came to me’. Instead, it tends to use ‘I have’ (معي or عندي) with illnesses:

عندي كريب – ‭‭3indi griib – I have the flu

معي سكري – I have diabetes

For ‘catch’, you can use the catch-all change-of-state verb that Syrian loves so much: صار (there will probably be another post on صار at some point):

صار معي كريب – I caught flu

صار معي سكري – I developed diabetes

For colds specifically, there is a different word, رشح rash[i]7, which comes with its own verb rashha7 and active participle mrashhi7:

انا مرشحة – ana mrashh7a – I have a cold

رشحت – rashha7[i]t – I’ve caught a cold, I’ve got a cold

You can say أخدت برد akhad[i]t bard but it means something like ‘be out in the cold’ – I actually think that ‘catch cold’, in English, originally has this meaning – so it makes perfect sense to say:

اخد برد وقام رشح – akhad bar[i]d w2aam rassha7 – he was out in the cold and got a cold

This is a thing and this is a thing:

Eitherهاي شي وهاي شي or هاد شي وهاد شي (depending on the gender of the thing in question), or sometimes هاي شغلة وهاي شغلة i.e. a literal translation between the dialects.

He is sitting walking:

قعد is not as much-beloved by Syrians as it apparently is by Egyptians. It exists in the meaning ‘stay’ (with someone or at someone’s house, for example), and in the meaning ‘sit down’; قاعد means ‘sitting down’ or ‘sitting’. Its conjugation is 2e3ed yi23od, and if you want to sound Syrian or Lebanese, you should get used to dropping that hideous hamza-3ayn combination in the imperative and shouting insistently 3ood ya zalame 3ood 3ood whenever anyone tries to get up and leave. Another usage which makes sense but might not immediately seem obvious to English speakers is the use of قعدة in the sense of ‘atmosphere’ (in a café):

نروح على <<علاء الدين>> القعدة أحلى هنيك – nruu7 3ala 3alaa2uddiin il2a3de a7la hniik – let’s go to Aladdin [café], it has a nicer atmosphere (a nicer sitting)

قاعد يمشي is used in Syrian, but less commonly than in Egyptian – in fact I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it from a Damascene. It’s also found in other Levantine dialects.  قعد is also not used in the sense of ‘last’ for batteries or lightbulbs, for which بقي (bi2i yib2a) or ضل (Dall yDoll) – both meaning ‘stay’, are used instead:

البطريا ما لح تضل خمس دقايق حتى – ilbaTariyya maa la7 itDall kham@s da2aayi2 7atta – the battery won’t even last five minutes

You broke the world

خربت الدنيا kharrabt iddinye. Also used in a similar sense is قومت الدنيا, pronounced 2awwamt iddinye. قوم here is from 2iyaame, قيامة, which you might recognise as the word used in يوم القيامة ‘resurrection day’, one of the names of Judgement Day in Arabic. 2iyaame means ‘chaos, bedlam’, and the verb 2awwam derived from it hence means ‘ruin, mess up’.

What is behind you tomorrow?

Used in pretty much exactly the same way in Levantine: شو وراك بكرا shu waraak bukra, وراك شي؟ waraak shi?

He screwed me over

ضحّك علي Da77ak 3aleyyi. Or تضحك علي tDa77ak 3aleyyi. The same, pretty much. Form I, form II and form V can be used; Da77ak is used in Syrian for both the standard ‘make laugh’ (هالشي بيضحك ‘this thing is really funny’) and also in the sense of form I, for some reason.

Towards the metaphorical end, there’s also the somewhat rude خري علي khiri 3aleyyi ‘he shat on me’ and the very Syrian (???) كتالي مي باردة kattaa-li moyy baarde ‘he poured cold water on me’.

There are also a few other synonyms: the generic غشني ghassh-ni ‘he cheated me’ (ghassh ygheshh) and the Syrian خورفني khooraf-ni and خاوزني khaawaz-ni. The former – which I thought was from خرافة, ‘fantasy’ – is apparently actually derived from the word for sheep, خروف kharuuf, and literally means ‘slaughter’.

He is a seer of himself

The same expression exists in Levantine, but the reflexive pronoun is normally حال, not نفس. So we say شايف حاله shaayif 7aalo. ‘Arrogance’ is شوفة حال shoofet 7aal ‘sight of oneself’ – بالعاصمة في شوفة حال bil3aaSime fii shoofet 7aal ‘in the capital there’s a lot of arrogance’.

He hits hash

Yep, also used in Levantine.

I don’t know how to sleep

Also used in Levantine, though in Levantine it’s more common to use a continuous verb – ما عم بعرف نام, ما عم بعرف احكي, ما عم بعرف افتح الباب. Other Levantine expressions for ‘I couldn’t sleep’ include the Damascene ما احسنت نام maa a7sant naam ‘I was not good at sleeping’ (a7san byi7sin is used for ‘be able to’) and the pleasantly folksy ما عم بيجيني نوم maa 3am bijiini noom ‘sleep isn’t coming to me’.

You do not have an invitation

This seems to be an equivalent to مالي علاقة بـ maali 3alaa2a b- in Syrian, ‘I have no connection with’ = ‘I have nothing to do with’. If you want to pointedly tell someone to keep their nose out, there’s always شو دخلك بالموضوع؟ shu dakhalak bilmawDuu3? – what’s your entry (??) in the issue? Or شو خصك؟ shu khaSSak? – what’s it to do with you?

She is lacking

مو ناقصني muu naa2iSni. You can be lacking specific things, too: مو ناقصني مصايب muu naa2iSni mSaayib! I don’t need any more problems!

We were in your biography

كننا بسيرتك kinna b-siirtak – we were talking about you

لا تجيب سيرتو laa tjiib siirto – don’t bring it/him up!

ما تفتح معي السيرة بنوب maa tifta7 ma3i ssiire bnoob – don’t even mention that to me

على سيرة – on the subject of…

I die in you

Also used in Levantine.

Drink a cigarette

You drink cigarettes in Levantine, as well as shisha (known as various variations on the word أركيلة argiile in the Levant) and, in some dialects, medicine: شربت دوا؟ shrib[i]t dawa? For shisha the Syrian equivalent to the Egyptian verb shaayash ‘smoke shisha’ is أركل ‭2argal:

بتأركل شي؟ bit2argil shi? – do you smoke shisha?

The world is crowded:

الدنيا عجقة iddinye 3aja2a. دنيا is in fact a convenient stand-in for the meaningless ‘it’s’ in a lot of expressions in English – ‘it’s crowded’, ‘it’s night’, ‘it’s cold’, ‘it’s Ramadan’ (الدنيا رمضان). In Palestinian and Jordanian, ازمة- literally ‘crisis’ – is used for traffic and crowding.

How’s the weather?

جو joww can also be used to mean ‘girlfriend’ in Syrian slang, although it might not be as widespread as in Egyptian.

The weather is fire

Also used in Syrian. Note though that نار often also refers to prices – لندن غالية نار ‘London’s bloody expensive’.

Cultural films

In Syrian the phrase أفلام اجتماعية aflaam ijtimaa3iyye ‘social films’ is used to refer to porn.

Hey pilgrim

Yep, a respectful way to refer to older men in Syrian, too. But in Syrian it’s not usually حاجّ but حجي, that is, 7ajji (Hajj-ist or something literally). The feminine, though.

Two asses in the same pair of trousers

Also used in Syrian! طيزين بلباس Tiizeen b@lbaas ‘two arses in the same pair of trousers’, i.e. peas in a pod.

 

Guest Post by Christ Hitchcock for #TeamNisreen

This expression – اسم على مُسَمّى – is apparently found everywhere in the Arabic-speaking world and is an excellent go-to compliment – as long as the person you are speaking to has a nice name. It basically means ‘your name describes you exactly’. If you meet someone called نادرة (rare), وسيم (handsome), باسم (smiler) or جميلة (beautiful), this will probably go down pretty well. I wouldn’t suggest citing it in response to a surname like عدوان (aggression), though, or to someone called غيث (light rain). I’m still working on finding out if this proverb was used in the days when people were called things like معاوية (bitch in heat).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3FU4YrOJU8

Above is a video of the omnipresent Lebanese comedian Adel Karam beginning his talk show Hayda Haki (هيدا حكي) with a skit based on this saying. He introduces the section, as is usual for him, with a brief conversation with the frontman of his house band, Chady Nashef (a famous guitarist in his own right):

شو عدولة؟
Shu 3adduule?
What is it, Adel?

3adduule (also 3adduul, 3addaal, etc) is an affectionate nickname for someone called 3aadil – this pattern is used with lots of names (7ammuude, 7ammaad, 7ammuud).

سارد عليك هيك عم اطلع فيك
saarid 3aleek heek 3am iTTali3 fiik
I’m just lost [listening to your music], you know, looking at you

سارد means ‘lost in thought’, or ‘away with the fairies’.

اطّلع بـ means ‘look at’, and is the normal expression in Levantine. Bi- almost never appears with pronoun suffixes, being replaced with fii (as above) in most Levantine dialects.

خير؟
kheer?
What’s up?

This question is a useful one used when somebody looks ill or upset – it means something like ‘I hope everything’s all right?’ or just ‘what’s up?’

حبينا نسألك شغلة
7abbeena nis2alak sheghle
We want[ed] to ask you something.

7abb can be used in past and present in basically the same meaning: حبيته ‘I love him’. The first person plural is often used when a speaker is really only referring to themselves: ما تواخذنا maa twaakhiz-na ‘please excuse me’.

شغلة sheghle – thingy, thing

قول
2uul
Ask away!

هلأ كل بيت الناشف متلك هيك وجههن بشوش ومهضومين؟
halla2 kill beet innaashif mitlak heek wijjon bashuush w mahDuumiin?
Are all the Nashifs [his surname] like you, with smiley faces and friendly?

بيت beet plus a surname, or in some places in the Levant دار + surname, refers to the extended family of that surname. I guess in a Game-of-Thronesy context, ‘house of X’ can be used the same way in English. بيت مين؟ or من بيت مين؟ are very common ways of asking ‘what’s your surname?’

وجه wijj or wishh is almost never, if ever, pronounced as wajh in the Levant; it’s either pronounced with a double j or a double sh. It’s singular here, and has a singular adjective, بشوش, agreeing with it, even though in English we say ‘their faces’, not ‘their face’. These sorts of constructions, where there are multiple people who each possess one of one thing, are generally singular in colloquial Arabic (like French): قلبكن, حياتكن… When you want every person to only raise one hand, you can say رفعو ايدكن! rfaa3u iidkon! ‘raise your hand(s)!’

كلهن مهضومين بس أنا اهضم واحد
killon mahDuumiin bass ana ahDam waa7id
They’re all friendly, but I’m the friendliest.

It’s often claimed by Arabic teachers that af3als can’t be formed from non-simple adjectives. This isn’t true in MSA and it’s not true in colloquial either!

عن جد؟ اي بس إنه… ما في واحد وجهه ناشف؟ منين اجت؟ يعني بيت الناشف…
3an jadd? Ee bass inno… maa fii 7ada wissho naashif? Mneen ijit? Ya3ni beet innaashif…
Seriously? Yeah, but I mean… isn’t there anyone whose face is grumpy? Where did it come from? I mean the name Nashif.

ناشف naashif – the first pun of a long, long string of bad puns. ناشف means ‘dry’, but it also means, of a person, ‘cold’, in the sense of keeping people at a distance. Somebody whose face is ناشف is someone who is unfriendly or austere.

هاي ما بعرف… جد جدي يمكن… بس لأ كلهن بشوشين
haay maa ba3rif… jidd jiddi yimkin… bass la2 killon bashuushiin
That I don’t know… maybe my great great grandfather. But no, all of them are smiley.

A lot of the puns are not really that funny and largely target Lebanese politicians and singers (it’s always possible that if I knew more about the careers of these individuals I’d find them funnier) but some highlights include:

1:00: أو مثلا… سعد حريري مية بالمية لا بوليستر لا خيطان نايلون
Aw masalan… Sa’d 7ariri miyye bilmiyye laa bulyester la khee6aan naayloon
Or for example… Saad Hariri is one hundred per cent neither polyester or nylon thread

حرير is silk. حريري means ‘made from silk’.

1.03: عندك تمام سلام عليكم بلا زغرة آدمي وتمام
3indak Tammaam Salaam 3aleekum bala zeghra aadami w tamaam
There’s Tamam Salaam Aleikum, without any disrespect, friendly and good

Tammaam and tamaam are of course nearly homophones; the rest of the joke is predicated on turning his surname, salaam, into a greeting (salaam 3aleekum).

آدمي (pronounced in Lebanese like eedami) is obviously from آدم and means ‘friendly, polite’. Its plural is أوادم awaadim. 

بلا زغرة is ‘without disrespect’ – زغرة is from صغير (you may have noticed that it is pronounced zghiir in colloquial; I guess before the advent of mass literacy this left its root open to being reinterpreted as z-gh-r). بلى زغرة, depending on who you ask, is either outdated and only used as a joke or very common. To me it’s associated with quite a conservative style of politeness. You can ask, for example, مين انت بلا زغرة؟ if you want to remove some of the directness of the question.

ليش عند مثلا جورج عدوان تموز
leesh… 3indak masalan juurj 3adwaan tammuuz
For example, you’ve got Georges Adwan Tammuuz.

عدوان تموز – the ‘July aggression’ (I’m not sure this is the typical English translation), a term for the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

1.13 أو زميله مثلا بطرس حرب الإلغا
aw zamiilo masalan BuTros 7arb il-ilgha
Or his colleague, for example, Boutros [Harb] Dissolution War.

I don’t think حرب الإلغاء actually has a Wikipedia article in English, but there’s a short explanation in Arabic here. The joke is extended by the similarity or closeness implies by ‘his colleague’ and the closeness of the two concepts.

عندك علاء حكيم وفهيم ومش لئيم
3indak 3ala 7akiim w fahhiim w mish la2iim

عندك حكمت ديب ولا عفنا الغنم

1:31: أحمد فتفت الجفصين
A7mad fatfat ijjafSiin!
Ahmad [Fatfat] took off the plaster [cast]!

This pun is probably based on Ahmad Fatfat’s previous career as a doctor.

فتفت fatfat is derived from فتّ ‘crumble’ on the pattern fa3fa3, which normally – along with a number of other patterns that are used to produce new verbs, like fa3wal, foo3al etc – either produces a meaning of ‘doing X again and again’, or lessens the impact of the verb.

جفصين jafSiin is the Lebanese word for ‘plaster’ (the stuff you put on a broken arm – in Fusha جِصّ and in Syrian جبصين jabSiin).

خالد ظاهر من الكتلة
khaalid Daahir min ilkitle

غازي زعيتر وزيت مع بصلة هيك وورق نعناع
ghaazi z3ayter w zeet ma3 baSle heek w wara2 na3naa3

أميد رحمة من السماء
amiin ra7me mn issama

وأمين جمايل وغزايل وجبايل بيي
w amiin @jmaayel w @ghzaayel w@jbaayil bayyi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrIXhCPUwfs

2:00: ميشيل فرعون الأشرفية مش الجيزا
Misheel Far3uun ilashrafiyye mish ilgiiza
Michel [Pharaon] is Pharaoh of Achrafieh not of Giza

One for the Egyptians. Achrafieh is a famous area of Beirut. Pharaon’s family are very rich Christians; Achrafieh is, I think, a predominantly Christian area.

علي عمار الحوري هينين ككوبل
3ali 3ammaar il7oori hayyiniin ka kuupl

 

2:12: عندك… الياس بو صعب هين؟
3indak… Ilyaas bu Sa3b hayyin?
There’s… is Elias Bou Saab easily overcome?

هين is ‘easy’ (not promiscuous but easy to deal with or ignore – don’t misunderstand if someone describes someone else as سهل, either).

عندك خالد حدادة وبويا  وش بوليش
3indak khaalid @7daade w buuya wijj poolish

2:22: سليمان فرنجية بيلعب محبوسة
Sleemaan Franjiyye byil3ab ma7buuse
Suleiman Frangieh plays mahbuseh…


Ma7buuse and franjiyye are different kinds of backgammon.

2:25: أو علي بزي… طبيعي مش سيليكون!
aw 3ali bazzi… Tabii3i mish silikoon
Or Ali Bazzi… natural, not silicon!

بزي evokes بزة bazze ‘breast’, and for some Lebanese people they’re homophones. As one of the world’s biggest centres of cosmetic surgery, Lebanon really has the market cornered on breast implant humour (no, really).

هلأ هي القصة مش بقى وفقت بس ع السياسيين يعني… في الفنانين
halla2 hiyye il2iSSa mish ba2a wef2et bass 3a ssiyaasiyyiin ya3ni… fii lfannaaniin

الفنانين كمان نفس الجو… لبستهن اساميهن لبس
ilfannaaniin kamaan nafs ijjoww… libsiton asaamiyyon lib@s

2.43: قليلة كاظم الساهر ليلية؟  بيبجبجو عيونو يا شيخ
2aliile kaaZim issaahir leeliyye? Bibajbju 3ayuuno yaa sheekh
Doesn’t Kadhim al-Sahir stay up late? His eyes are swelling up, man

قليلة aliile is literally ‘a small amount’ or ‘not worth considering’. It’s used a lot in contexts like 2aliile yitzawwaj 3aleyyi? ‘[are you saying it’s a] small thing that he should marry [a second wife, having married] me?’ – it is used, generally, in questions, with a rhetorical ‘it certainly isn’t a small thing!’ kind of meaning. Here it’s being used with the following pun kaaZim issaahir leeliyye to mean ‘isn’t this name very accurate’/’isn’t this pun very appropriate’?

سهر sahar (yishar) is ‘to stay up late’; ساهر is its active participle, so Kadhim al-Sahir literally means ‘Kadhim who stays up late’, which is the basis of the joke.

ليلية leeliyye is a Lebanese expression meaning ‘every night’. This completes the name – kaaZim issaahir leeliyye ‘Kaazim who stays up every night’.

بجبج bajbaj is ‘to become puffy’, of eyes, either from sleepiness or crying too much. It’s plural here agreeing with ‘eye’. It took me ages to work out what he was saying because bibajbiju is contracted to bibajbju and then has a vowel reinserted to become bibajibju, with the stress staying in the same place, which messes with your perception of word boundaries.

2.52 هيفا وهبة أعضاءها بعد عمر طويل
heefa wehbe a3Daa2a ba3d 3omr Tawiil
Hayfa [Wehbe] has donated her organs after a long life.

The pun here is based on وهبة, which is related to the word وهب ‘to donate’. The normal term for ‘organ donation’ is وهب أعضاء wehbe sounds like the active participle waahbe ‘has donated’.

3.16 راغب علامة عالية… عجب كبير
Raaghib 3allaame 3aalye – 3ajab kbiir


Ragheb Alama – described by Wikipedia as a Lebanese ‘singer, dancer, lover, fighter, composer, television personality and philanthropist’. Raaghib is ‘desiring, wanting’, and 3allaame is a mark – as in a mark in a test.

Incidentally, Nisreen نسرين is a kind of beautiful flower, and Maha مها means ‘wild cows’. Yeah, that’s right. Just mull that over.

 

 

 

الجو نار

el gaw nar

Sometimes I’m not even sure that this one is an exaggeration because there is literally no other explanation for how hot it is right now.

cairoweather

A7777a.

كبر دماغك

kabbar dma3’ak”

How about some guesses as to what this actually means for those unfamiliar with the phrase? Perhaps a concise statement about the value of education, maybe a colloquialism praising the benefits of expanding your mind…something logical like that, right?

Nope, nerp, incorrect, not even a little bit close. It actually means, “take it easy.” Even Google Translate (!!!) was able to figure it out, and they’re usually pitiful with anything even remotely dialect related.

Nice job trying to figure out the meaning based on the words actually used in the phrase (LOL what were you even thinking??). M3lesh, better luck next time.

Today’s guest post includes a very exciting announcement made by our new friend Chris.

Nisreen frustrated about the perennially high degree of humidity in her native New York

Nisreen frustrated about the perennially high degree of humidity in her native New York

This is Nisreen. Nisreen is a chronically lonely Syrian-American living in New York, with a Syrian father and a Palestinian mother. She is, in fact, Maha’s doppelganger – and Maha’s falling in love with her cousin out of sheer loneliness, and Nisreen’s parallel love story with her own paternal cousin, might well have been avoided if they’d only managed to meet one another instead of spending all their time looking woefully into a camera and monologuing about their respective misery.

In case you hadn’t guessed or seen her before, Nisreen is Maha’s Syrian double from the super rare Levantine edition of the عامية videos from al-Kitaab, the Arabic resource everybody loves to hate and hates to study from. Nisreen – poor, neglected, Nisreen – has been forgotten for too long. I am not Team Maha. I am, proudly, Team Nisreen! In this spirit, I’ll be contributing some Levantine posts to this blog, trying to give Levantine colloquial expressions some of the same great exposure Caitlyn has been giving to Egyptian.

Of course, Levantine is spoken in Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, and encompasses a huge number of local accents and varieties. A lot of words – especially slang, but also very normal terminology – have several different local variations. And some words, as you might expect, will not even be understood in other parts of the same country (try calling a curtain a jlaale to a Latakian and see how far it gets you). The dialects I’m most familiar with are those of urban Syria and Lebanon – which are more similar to one another than they are to urban Jordan and Palestine, generally speaking – but I’m going to try and include stuff from as many major dialects as possible, and point out specific regionalisms and features of particular dialects. As a rough guide and for people who are familiar with only one Levantine dialect or not at all, here is a list of the major differences:

  • Kint vs kunt: most Lebanese and Syrian urban dialects (there are exceptions, like Homsi) do not have distinct i and u sounds in stressed syllables. Words like كنت are pronounced kint, قدام as eddaam, شفت as shift. Exactly what the vowel here sounds like depends on the consonants around it and the dialect of the speaker – some Lebanese people, like the lead singer of Mashrou’ Leila, pronounce kint more like Most Jordanians and Palestinians, meanwhile, have distinct vowels and say kunt, shuft etc (an exception to this is Galilee Arabic).
  • -a vs -e vs -i: With the exception of people from the southernmost areas of the Levantine area, most urban Levantine speakers pronounce final ـة not as –a, but as some kind of –e sound. Some speakers, particularly of Lebanese dialects – see Marcel Khalife or Feyrouz, for example – pronounce it –i. This also applies to some –a sounds which are not, in MSA, ـة – شتى is shite or shiti (have you heard the song حبيتك بالصيف by Feyrouz?), for example, and some people say soode or soodi for سودا. Some speakers who pronounce the –i say something closer to –e for ـي to keep the sounds separate! Also, many Syrians and Lebanese use inte for their masculine ‘you’, and some Lebanese say ane for ‘me.’
  • Aa vs ee: Aleppan and many Lebanese dialects have very ee-ish long aa sounds similar to a long version of the e in English pet – Egyptian has a similar sound – and these are sometimes so similar to ee that they can be rhymed with long e, as in the Mashrou’ Leila rhyme:

واذا كنتو اتنين يا اهلين شي فلتان w-iza kentu tneen ya ahleen shi falteen ‘and if there’s two of you, oh wow! What a scandal!’

  • Byiktob vs biktob – most Palestinian and Jordanian dialects, and some Syrian dialects (e.g. Homsi) use aktob/baktob and yiktob/biktob for ‘I write’ and ‘he writes’. Most Syrian and Lebanese dialects, meanwhile, use iktob/biktob and yiktob/byiktob. This can be very confusing at first when meeting speakers of other dialects. Most Syrian and Lebanese dialects also drop the ‘I’ prefix before single consonants: biddi ruu7 ‘I want to go’.
  • I6la3 vs 6laa3 – most Syrian and Lebanese dialects have an imperative of form one verbs which works by lengthening the internal vowel – طلع becomes طلاع, كتب becomes كتوب ktoob and نزل becomes نزيل nzeel! Jordanian and Palestinian dialects, however, form the imperative in the same manner as MSA.
  • The qaaf: most urban speakers pronounce the ق as a glottal stop, but many Ammanis, particularly men, pronounce it with a g sound, as do many speakers of non-urban dialects. Some Palestinians instead pronounce a k, whilst Druzes and Alawites often pronounce it as a q! Almost all speakers preserve a qaaf in some words, like ثقافة or موسيقى, although even here there are exceptions (especially for Lebanese people for some reason).
  • -aan words: All of us who have studied al-Kitaab or Egyptian 3aammiyyah are familiar with words like تعبان for ‘tired’, even if they’re not strictly speaking proper MSA. Levantine dialects have a lot more of these than any other dialect, particularly in the Syrian/Lebanese area, and within that, most specifically within parts of Syria itself, where many, many verbs form their active participle this way. Some specifically Syrian examples are وصلان for واصل, عرفان for عارف and my personal favourite, فطران fa6raan for فاطر – i.e. ‘having had breakfast.’
Upset because she’s not fatraane

Upset because she’s not fa6raane

That’s all from Team Nisreen for now – but stay tuned for more guest posts (ان شاء الله) that will finally give Nisreen the platform she’s been forced to concede for so long to her sinister Egyptian doppelganger.

Back when I first decided to study abroad and realized that my FusHa would soon be absolutely useless, I stumbled on www.thearabicstudent.com, a blog that dissected media from a solid cross-section of dialects. I loved the way the author pulled out helpful vocabulary words, provided pronunciation videos, and generally explained grammar, syntax, and idiomatic constructions in colloquial Arabic. It was one of the only such resources I could find at the time.

Unfortunately The Arabic Student seems to have stopped blogging now, but I recently recalled this post, which was one of my first introductions to Egyptian dialect. The author uses a clip from the Arabic version of Monsters Inc to provide a helpful introduction to Egyptian for beginning and intermediate students (while incidentally referencing the Father of Moustache construction we recently wrote about). Check out the rest of his posts, too–he was quite prolific (and skilled!) when it came to Lebanese & Levantine lessons.