The Washington Post names Janine Zacharia of Bloomberg News to take over its Jerusalem office:
Janine is as comfortable in the Middle East as she is in Washington, having begun her career in Jerusalem as a correspondent for the Jerusalem Report and Reuters. She speaks fluent Hebrew and has some knowledge of Arabic.
Headline and tip from Sean Lee.
Maybe Lisa Goldman will have something to say about this? Maybe she has something to say about Ethan Bronner’s “cutting the grass” statement, NPR’s feeling to not quote a Palestinian POV, because it is predictable. Isabel Kershner’s Israeli background coloring bias at the Times?
Considering that Hebrew and Arabic are closely-related languages, it’s not at all difficult to have “some knowledge” of one if you are fluent in the other. The radical difference between their alphabets is the hardest part.
In addition, you can have knowledge of classical or MSA Arabic, and be really bad in the regional dialect. The description of “some Arabic” is rather unhelpful.
That is incredibly true Bob.
As someone who has spent years learning Arabic, I can attest to the simple fact that Modern Standard Arabic and the various colloquial forms of Arabic are virtually separate languages as distinct from each other as Spanish and Italian in some instances. (Moroccan Arabic as to say Iraqi or Egyptian Arabic, all 3 of these dialects are virtually unintelligible from the next).
Finally, the statement “Some Arabic” is also incredibly vague. What Arabic are they referring to? Does she know some Modern Standard Arabic? If so, that would make her totally useless in Jerusalem. Or does she know a few phrases of Levantine Arabic? like how to order coffee or hail a taxi. It really does make a big difference to specify what she does or doesn’t know when it comes to Arabic, because the term “Arabic” is in itself non indicative in identifying what someone “actually” speaks.
Finally, Hebrew and Arabic are similar, but they are also incredibly different, this is largely due to the large amount of Yiddish structure and vocabulary that has entered modern Hebrew.
Now if modern spoken Hebrew had stuck to its purely Semetic roots, then the cross over between Arabic and Hebrew might not be so difficult =P
There are very few Yiddish words that have entered the modern Hebrew language.
As I recall, Zionists went to great pains to eradicate Yiddish language and culture in order to manufacture a modern Hebrew language and Israeli culture. Something similar was done to Middle Eastern Jews and their language and culture when they arrived in Israel. Ethiopian Jews? Well, Israel didn’t consider them “real” Jews until they were “converted.”
They even went so far as to counterfeit their names — Golda Meyerson to Golda Meir, for instance.
Even the Nazis were never quite that successful in erasing Jewish culture. Kind of a sick, twisted irony, isn’t it?
There are very few Yiddish words that have entered the modern Hebrew language.
Actually, WJ, you are right about that.
There actually seems to be more of an Arabic infusion if anything.
Read Ghil’ad Zuckerman’s Israeli, a Beautiful Laguage: Hebrew as Myth. There is far more Yiddish (and Russian and Polish) in Modern Hebrew (or “Israeli”, as Zuckerman calls it) than you might think. Some linguists have even gone as far as to classify Modern Hebrew as an Indo-European, rather than Semitic, language.
Shmuel, et al: Have you ever read the autobiography of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, (who invented modern Hebrew)? It is truly a remarkable story of a remarkable man, and also quite revealing, as when he arrives in Palestine and plunges into depression when he discovers people already living there. I also was astonished to learn that he often imported Arabic words into modern Hebrew when he couldn’t find anything he could use from the ancient language? One state solution, anyone?
Ben-Yehuda actually favoured Arabic – as a close “living relative” of his comatose Hebrew patient. He is reported to have boasted to someone once that he had discovered an entire book filled with potential Hebrew words, and then proceeded to take out an Arabic dictionary.
Of course vocabulary isn’t everything in determining linguistic influence, and there are a lot of Modern Hebew words with disguised Yiddish roots, but …
On a winter’s day, an Israeli might get up in the morning, put on a pair of gatkes, hold his pants up with shleikes, have a shluk of coffee and a bis of toast with konfitura, and head out for the office. At work, he will have to put up with his shvitzer of a boss (a real tzatzke), and a client who is a nidzhes and a kuter, and try to make it through the day. On the way home, he’ll sit in traffic (what a broch), and dream of the lovely supper his balebuste will have waiting for him, but tachles he won’t have an appetite, with that shlumper of a son of his sitting opposite him at the table, in those shmattes he calls clothes. What that kid needs is a good flik. But he’s a chevreman and will make sholem with the tachshit, because, after all, the things they fight about are nothing but pitchefkes, and there is nothing more important than mishpuche.
Note: Some of the above words have Hebrew origins, but entered Modern Hebrew directly from Yiddish.
Another good, important point. There are quite a number of regional dialects in Arabic. They are all mutually intelligible, but having “some knowledge” is not nearly good enough for an inexperienced second language speaker to navigate them easily. I speak with some personal experience, here — having taken two semesters of Arabic, I qualify as having merely “some knowledge” of it myself.
Exactly, Chaos. I too remember being just a college student learning Arabic, and thinking “holy shit” when I found out that after 2 years of learning Modern Standard Arabic I was completely useless on the streets of Cairo.
Then again I was hit with a feeling uselessness after learning Egyptian Arabic, and spending time in Palestine, only to learn that these two dialects are almost unintelligible from each other.
Just to give a few examples.
The Word for “What” is dramatically different in each dialect of Arabic.
Matha = Modern Standard Arabic.
Shu = Levantine (Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian)
Eh = Egyptian
Shin = Libyan
Even the word for “Yes” is dramatically different.
Naam = Modern Standard
Aye = Levantine
Aiywa = Egyptian
In fact the only words I tended to find that stayed the same throughout, were words that were rarely used in normal everyday conversation.
This is not to say that an Egyptian and a Lebanese person could not communicate… they could, but their ability to communicate in a fluent manner is largely due to the predominance of Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese media in the Middle East, which has in a sense created a sort of lingua franca amongst Arabic speakers.
Finally, these large dialectal differences between Arabic speaking peoples flies in the face of the Zionist notion that all Arabs are the same and that Arabs have 22 different countries they can all live comfortably in. The truth is that the Arabs like the Europeans are an incredibly diverse group of people who share a few cultural, religious, and linguistics traits, much like modern day Europeans do today.
I guess my point is that we don’t tell Italians to be comfortable in Spain, just because Spaniards also speak a Romance language do we? =P
I’d like to add that Spanish and Italian are a damn sight closer to each other that Hebrew and Arabic. Just like you, I had one hell of a time with MSA to a regional dialect. I was completely unintelligible.
Spanish and
ItalianPortugese, rather. (French and Spanish is another story.)
I think thats a bit of an exaggeration, James. Although the regional dialects have considerable differences, a solid grounding in Modern Standard Arabic and/ or Classical Arabic can get you where you need to go with almost any Arab with at least a Middle School education.
The problem is not the dialects themselves, rather it is that Western institutions teaching Arabic are just not that good. I know of classically trained students of Islamic Sacred Knowledge from the Indian subcontinent who are able to hold conversations with Arabs of any country almost without a hitch. So what’s the problem?
If the differences between the regional dialects of the Arab countries are as profound as the differences between Spanish and Italian, then Arabs would not be able to watch the same films, news channels, and T.V shows. But of course, this is not true. They view (and understand) the same Al-Jazeera, listen to the same Um Kulthoom and Abdel Haleem, and watch the same sitcomes and dramas (“Bab al-Hara” is a good example).
Put simply, the differences between the Arabic dialects are more analogous to the English of the American South, Scotland, Ireland, and Australia. The differences are noticeable, but its still the same language.
Although the regional dialects have considerable differences, a solid grounding in Modern Standard Arabic and/ or Classical Arabic can get you where you need to go with almost any Arab with at least a Middle School education.
Olive, I never argued that.
What I stated was that the regional dialects have quite a few differences from each other. I’m not arguing that Arabs can’t use MSA to communicate with each other, which they do. Which is largely thanks to MSA training at school and through MSA being dominant in Arabic print and news media.
But to argue that the Arabic regional dialects are as similar to each other as Southern American and New York American is under stating the issue, while also arguing that they are different languages over states the issue.
In any case my point was to clarify that the people who identify as Arabs are not the large monolithic entity that they are portrayed to be, but rather that each region in the Arab world has cultural and linguistic differences that help to create unique Arab identities.
I made the point because it flies in the face of Zionist mythologizers who claim that the people who identify as Arabs today are one single ethnic group who all came from Saudi Arabia. They then use that mythology to justify pushing the Palestinians into other countries simply because “All Arabs are the same right!” “Palestinians would LOVE to live in Jordan!”
Thanks for clarifying your point. My response was less againts your points and more of an oppurtunity for me to vent because I always encounter Western students of Arabic viewing the various dialects as seperate languages. Now I’m all “vented” out!
Actually you do have a right to vent, I just reread what I wrote and realized how I did not clarify my position very well =)
In any case your totally right, us western students of Arabic do believe at least at first that if we had learned a regional dialect of Arabic we would be having a better time with the language. When in reality having a foundation in MSA does help out a lot more in the long run.
In any case its gotten to the point where they offer “Egyptian” and “Lebanese” Arabic courses as opposed to just “Arabic.”
Which I guess is fine if you plan on visiting a country as a tourist… =P
“I know of classically trained students of Islamic Sacred Knowledge from the Indian subcontinent who are able to hold conversations with Arabs of any country almost without a hitch.”
Chinese people who speak very little English, but who have scientific or engineering training, hold conversations with Americans and Britons without a hitch, just as long as the conversation and vocabulary stay within their field of expertise. It doesn’t mean that their English is fluent, and neither is the Arabic of Pakistani and Indian Islamic scholars fluent outside of religious discourse.
“If the differences between the regional dialects of the Arab countries are as profound as the differences between Spanish and Italian, then Arabs would not be able to watch the same films, news channels, and T.V shows.”
Arabs from one country can understand media from other Arab countries through repeated exposure, not through mutual intelligibility of their respective dialects. Second generation Arabs in the west for example usually speak and understand their parents native dialect perfectly but are completely lost when hearing other dialects. On the other hand Spanish and Italian do have a certain level of mutual intelligibility, from the way I’ve seen Italians and Latin Americans interact.
“Put simply, the differences between the Arabic dialects are more analogous to the English of the American South, Scotland, Ireland, and Australia. The differences are noticeable, but its still the same language.”
I disagree. Accents from within the same Arab country differ as much as American and Scottish English for example. If you consider dialects from different countries, then the Spanish/Italian/Portuguese analogy is more appropriate. The issue is confused first by the media exposure which makes people more familiar with other dialects, and the fact that native speakers of Arabic usually mix their own dialect with MSA with continuously varying proportion depending on the level of formality required. That means that when two Arabs from different countries meet, they will water down their native dialects with MSA, creating an illusion of speaking the same language.
Italians and Spaniards basically understand one another, and even converse (on websites or the streets of Rome or Madrid), each speaking their own language. As a matter of fact, each consider the other language somewhat of a joke – their own language with a bunch of weird effects.
Nothing like Hebrew and Arabic. Spoken Portuguese is a little more difficult for an Italian, French a little more (although most Italians take it at school), and Romanian is virtually incomprehensible (although I’m told that Romanians generally understand Italian). As all of these languages use the same alphabet, the gist of any written Romance language can usually be made out by a literate speaker of any other Romance language.
As a fluent Hebrew speaker with “some knowledge of Arabic” myself, I can usually only recognise the similarities once they’ve been pointed out. For example, Zuckerman (see my comment above) cites an Arabic folk etymology for the international word “influenza”, interpreted as “anf al-’anza” – “goat’s nose” (wet and drippy). In Hebrew, nose is “af” and goat is “‘ez”, but I would probably never have figured out the meaning of the phrase – even though I know that Arabic often has that “extra” “n” in there (as in the words for pig – H:”hazir” A:”hanzir”). I’ve tried to read some Judeo-Arabic (Jewish Arabic dialect written in Hebrew characters), with only slightly more success (and a strong background in Classical Hebrew).
By the way, said reporter could easily claim “some knowledge of Ugaritic”, which is far closer to Hebrew (biblical) than Arabic ;-)
There are significant semantic differences however, and though I can’t speak with as much authority, I suspect there are notable grammatical differences as well. Hebrew and Arabic are closely related… but then, so are German and English. Speakers in one language do not find the other mutually intelligible, not nearly so much as the relationship even between, say, Spanish and Portuguese.
I can’t help but think that some of these comments of ‘mutually unintelligible’ are coming from non native speakers ;)
I grew up in the USA and learned all my arabic from my parents (Iraqi dialect) and I can still understand most everything despite not being immersed in Arabic media. There may be points where I get confused, but worst case would be 1 week of adjusting to the style. Hell, I took a trip to Sudan (uh oh, I feel I might now be identifiable on the internet lol) and it only took me a few days to pick up the vast majority of what they were saying. Its usually just different words, modified version of a word, or different phrases.
I honestly see it as an exaggerated version of living in rural texas and then going to visit the bronx. Or maybe a more complicated version of soda vs pop…
I can’t help but think that some of these comments of ‘mutually unintelligible’ are coming from non native speakers ;)
Perhaps, but I’d wager that Libyan or Moroccan dialects would be extremely difficult for you. MSA or TV (Cairo) Arabic can be mutually intelligible, though.
Perhaps not immediately, but give me a week Bob and I guarantee you I’ll be sweet talking all the women in their local style ;)
That might be true AM, I am not a native speaker of Arabic, so for me each dialect was a hurdle.
At the same time though, many of my native Arabic speaking colleagues (mainly Egyptians) have said that they cannot have fluent conversations with Moroccans, Algerians, or even some Iraqis unless they revert to Modern Standard.
Well, at least Shater (clever) is the same everywhere I’ve went =P
link to youtube.com
To be fair, I characterized the Arabic dialects as mutually intelligible, where as any flavor of Arabic compared to Hebrew, is not. Unless your experience contradicts that?
Perhaps not immediately, but give me a week Bob and I guarantee you I’ll be sweet talking all the women in their local style ;)
:) Maybe. I picked the dialects that have a significant infusion of Berber vocabulary, so It might not have been fair for MSA to Levant Arabic.
Nonetheless, your point on non-native speakers relates better with the Journalist here, and “some knowledge” is a rough and descriptive term for the non-native speaker in this article. It does for me as well, as I am most certainly not a native speaker.
AM,
I am a native speaker (Tunisian), and I agree with the “mutually unintelligible” thesis to some degree. I am fairly certain that you would have a hard time with Maghrebi Arabic Dialects (and I have a hard time with Levantine Arabic). You have to remember that Arabs from different countries ‘water down’ their vocabulary when speaking with each other. I also think that Sudanese Arabic is a bad example (the exception that proves the rule), because for some reason (probably the fact that Arabic is more of a lingua franca for them than a true native language), their Arabic is really clear and close to MSA. It took you a few days to pick up the Sudanese dialect, but it also takes an Italian only a few days to pick up Spanish.
This is just another continuation of bad orientalism, which has actually been bad since the beginning, but has really deteriorated even from that low perch. Everybody is an Arabic scholar if they know a few words and have visited all of the tourist traps, and especially if they can talk bad about the people.
So essentially this means two things:
1). Relation to the anything having importance in the Middle East, the people who are predominant there, is not the main concern. Only Israel is of importance;
2). Since the above is the case (point 1), and we all know how Zionists excel in the vilification of the people in the region, this will be the prominent note of any reporting coming out of the region from the MSM and Washington. To fuel the fires of the bogus “war on terror,” and to make sure that the little pariah state feels safe and secure in their atrocities.
As an example of some of Janine’s “reporting,” as the Washington Bureau chief for the Jerusalem Post. Note how she fawns all over Paul Wolfowitz –
WOLFOWITZ ON IRAQ
Thank you for bringing up Orientalism.
Is it me or is it Israeli Zionist scholars who have not only not abandoned this method of study but have actually vigorously pursued it.
James Bradley, your welcome, of course it is not only predominant in the news but in many universities, and ME think tanks (stink tanks). What we need is a general catharsis.
Why reinvent the wheel? There was plenty of racism against Arabs to draw upon even before the Zionists needed a way to exploit Western culture.
To be honest, I don’t think Orientalism has died out. Read the work of Bernard Lewis, if you want an example of what I’m talking about.
Everything I need to know about the health of Orientalism came in the form of an Africology professor at my university who is apparently racist against Arabs. (He is also a white South African. And at one point proclaimed himself to be a practicing Jew, to his class. I kid you not.)
Needless to say, people dropped his class like a cartoon anvil. If it weren’t already hard enough to take credence in him, considering the whole package, his class was structured such that it was impossible to pass the tests. Seriously. Literally impossible. Like, multiple choice tests with no right answer. Which is a shame, Africology is an important subject and I’d hate to see the department wither because of one stupid man driving all the interested students away.
To be honest, I don’t think Orientalism has died out. Read the work of Bernard Lewis, if you want an example of what I’m talking about.
That’s very true, but I recall Bernard Lewis being a citation we all tried to avoid using as an undergrad.
I think Orientalism still predominates in the mainstream media and in the minds of academic hacks like Daniel Pipes. However, I do believe that many contemporary academics do try to go out of their way to avoid looking like an orientalist.
This does not mean Orientalism is no where to be seen in the academic setting, but the word has taken on a very negative connotation amongst academics.
Although… there are movements and even other mainstream scholars like Lewis who have tried to not only defend Orientalism but make it a legitimate form of study.
But in Israel, it seems like Orientalism is alive and well, and if you need a quick lesson on contemporary Orientalist academics there is no better place to be.
You know, after watching people like Mordechai Kedar on Aljazeera a couple of times (most recently debating with Ali Abunimah), I am more than willing to believe that Orientalism is alive and kicking in Israeli universities.
Now if only Muslims can develop Occidentalism………
in my experience, when anybody tells you they have knowledge of ‘some arabic’ it means that they barely know any arabic whatsoever and are trafficking on the complete ignorance of those around them to make themselves sound more qualified than they really are. this is sadly true for almost all middle-east experts that one sees on t.v. and in the media in this country. the whole business of middle eastern expertise operates on the principle of in the land of the blind men, the one-eyed man is king.
i once saw barbara walters interview a failed palestinian suicide bomber on a news program on ABC news. he was in an israeli prison. she asked him something like, ‘didn’t you ever want to get married, have a family, raise children?’ his response in arabic was very clearly in the affirmative. something like, ‘yes, i did.’ and then they cut off the rest of what he was saying with a voice-over translation. i have no idea what the rest of his response was, but judging on the translation, i had no reason to believe that i could trust ABC. rather than say, ‘yes, i did,’ the translator began with, ‘no, i wanted to kill jews.’ i wrote to ABC news about it complaining and also contacted the ADC, but never received responses. this is the state of middle eastern expertise in this country. i think thomas friedman probably relies on MEMRI for his information on the arab press.
any palestinian that she talks to will speak better english than she will arabic. if she actually encounters somebody who speaks no english, she’ll have an interpreter. no question.
i once had an ancient greek teacher tell my class that everybody goes through three stages of learning greek. you are a beginner for a year, intermediate for 30 years, and then advanced. arabic is at least as hard as ancient greek.
this emperor has no clothes, but then again, i’m not sure than any of them do.
There are Arabic forms that make intuitive sense to a Hebrew speaker such as the pronoun suffixes. However modern Hebrew is very different from Biblical Hebrew. It was conceived by Eastern European Jews. The so-called father of Modern Hebrew was a native Russian speaker who came to Hebrew and Zionism later in life. Modern Hebrew’s sentence structure and idioms are still heavily influenced by Slavic languages and Yiddish.
I remember the loud call of the Arab scrap merchant in Jerusalem with his donkey and cart. “Al Tezah-KHEHN”. Sounded like pure Arabic to me. He was actually saying “Alte sachen”, “old stuff” in Yiddish. He’d picked up the Yiddish call from Jewish scrap merchants.
And the Yiddish call Alte sachen came from the German.
Linguists are still arguing over whether Yiddish is a Germanic language with Slavic, Hebrew and Aramaic influences, or a Slavic language with German, Hebrew and Aramaic influences. All agree however, that most of the Yiddish vocabulary comes from Middle High German.
“Some Arabic” or a “little knowledge” is a very dangerous thing – as they say. There is no shortage of anti-Christian and anti-Arab literature. In Arabic one can find anti-Islam literature to satisfy his/her buds. However, many non-Arab readers don’t know that Arabic translation of the Bible – like Holy Qur’an begins with the “praise of Allah” – I guess to fool the Arab-speaking people.
To prove my point – let’s consider the western concept of women-rights in Muslim societies. In June, the CFR’s Senior Fellow, Isobel Coleman, projected to be “a leading expert on women’s issues” said that since a large number of women took part in protests in favour of the West’s hoax of ”election fraud” – is an indication that “if Ahmadinejad’s victory stands”, people will see more restrictions on both the Reformist and Women Rights movements because they’re intertwined.
Now, I guess, it would be a waste of time to enlighten the “leading Women’s Rights expert” – that women also participated in the Islamic Revolution (1979) more than they participated in any western revolution and since the establishment of the Islamic State – the number of women graduates has out-numbered many of western countries – and that Ahmadinejad’s administration has one female Vice-president, Fatemeh Vaez Javadi PhD, a position women still has to achieve in the US, France, Australia, and Russia……..
Iran and the women’s rights “Expert”
link to rehmat1.wordpress.com
I think that you are all missing the point. I see this as a willful strategy to ignore the elephant in the room, the Palestinians. Why bother speaking their language, they simply don’t exist. It’s like the US army going into Iraq or Afghanistan without the least bit of knowledge into the local mores and cultures. Almost all the local Palestinians (as opposed to the diaspora), i.e., inhabitants of the West Bank, East Jerusalem (the few that remain) and Gaza speak fluent Hebrew. Not many Israelis speak Arabic.
I studied modern Jewish history with Prof. Menahem Brinker (Israel Prize laureate in Hebrew literature). According to Brinker, Hebrew had its first mass revival in the mid-19th century. It was the literary language of the first generation of Jews who left the ghetto. Scientific and academic tracts were written by them in the only alphabet they knew. Towards the end of the 19th century, modern Hebrew was losing its readership (as measured by the circulation of Hebrew language newspapers in Eastern Europe).
In fact, per Brinker, the first generation of Zionist pioneers (in the 1880s) developed an “Israeli” Hebrew that was subsumed by that of the second wave of immigration to the Land of Israel/Palestine. The second wave had continued to develop their Hebrew in Eastern Europe independently of “Israeli” Hebrew and they brought that to Palestine.
This places modern Hebrew far from Arabic.