Mother Tongue by Christine Gilbert

Author:Christine Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-28T10:54:30+00:00

To read it, I just counted the dots and the positions from right to left. Once you know it, it’s quite simple. Yet the script was so elegant that writing in it felt like I had mastered a kind of calligraphy. I wanted to write everything in Arabic. I would point out signs to Drew and tell him the letters. I often didn’t know what they spelled, or even how to pronounce them, because written Arabic on the street almost always leaves out the vowel markers because fluent people know that byt is bayt. This seemed impossible to me at first, but if you think about it, a fluent English speaker could still read English if you dropped some vowels, such as the letters i, e, and o:

A flunt nglsh spaker culd stll rad nglsh f yu drppd sm vwls. . . .

So written Arabic on the street would skip the vowels similarly, for efficiency.

But it was the writing, not the reading, that amazed me, the way Majed drew lines from Arabic poetry into a knot of intertwined letters. I noticed that the logos of many businesses are just the Arabic letters written creatively. Like the news organization Al Jazeera: Their logo looks like an artful rendering of a flame, but it’s also their name spelled in Arabic. I practiced my writing every day, trying to copy the little flourishes that Majed put in or the way they draw two dots as a single line, little handwriting tricks that make it flow even more easily.

Given the disparity in written versus spoken Arabic, it was not surprising then that unlike other languages, written Arabic isn’t processed on the same side of the brain as when it’s spoken; the left side of the brain handles the written language, while the right side handles the spoken. Researchers suggest this is because the right hemisphere processes letters in words in a global sense, but because you have to count dots and be concerned with specifics in Arabic, the task shifts to the left hemisphere, the same way it would if you were solving math problems. Most other languages like English or even Hebrew (which is also written right to left) are handled in the right hemisphere for both written and spoken.

• • •

ONE THING I DIDN’T EXPECT from learning Arabic (although in hindsight perhaps it should have been obvious) was how much it would be tied to Islam. Remember, Arabic is triglossic—there is the spoken dialect, the written language (Modern Standard Arabic), and then there’s classical Arabic, the Arabic of the Qur’an. For Muslims, even those living in Asia or Africa, everything religious is done in Arabic, from reading the Qur’an to their daily prayers to the Shahadah, the acceptance of Islam:

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