Miscellaneous

Trivia

There’s a very obvious direct equivalent to my name in Arabic — إبراهيم (Ibrahim) — but I don’t go by Abraham in English, so I wanted to find an Arabic-compatible name that sounded like Abe. Unfortunately, there’s no direct equivalent to the English “ey” sound in Arabic. The closest-sounding equivalents are:

1. أب (‘ab), which means “father” and is not a name.
2. عيب (^cayb), which means “shame.” Mothers yell it at their kids when they’re misbehaving. Also… not a name.

So I eventually swallowed my pride and went with Ibrahim.

I’ve been to 33 countries, including one partially-recognized state that no longer exists (Artsakh, aka Nagorno-Karabakh) and one that still does (Kosovo).

Levantine Arabic Resources

Arabic, especially Levantine Arabic, is in my unbiased and objectively correct opinion the prettiest language in the world. Sentences have a beautiful, melodic flow that I really love. Plus, it has some cool features, like broken plurals and verb forms, that will fascinate you even as they cause you to tear your hair out.

The best way to learn Arabic is to take a class. There’s no substitute for immersion. I absolutely loved my two summer intensives at the Sijal Institute in Amman, Jordan. Sijal teaches Modern Standard Arabic (الفصحى) and Levantine Arabic (العامية الشامية) as an integrated whole, which I think is a great approach. My experience there, in terms of language immersion, cultural exposure, and interaction with teachers and staff, was excellent from beginning to end.¹

But learning at home can also work well, and it’s somewhat more practical in post-college life, where you might never have the opportunity/financial aid availability to jet off to the Middle East for a summer.

The resources I’d recommend for Levantine Arabic home study are:

• J. Elihay, Speaking Arabic

  J. Elihay was a French monk who moved to the Galilee and became passionate about the languages of the Levant. The Speaking Arabic textbook, which comes in four volumes, is simply the best spoken language resource I’ve ever used.

  After Elihay died in 2020, the Arabic professor Suha Taweel Kadry published a very thoughtful op-ed about her conflicted feelings on the man and his work. “The characters in his books are weak women, chauvinistic men, children who fight and hit each other, and educationally dysfunctional parents,” she writes. When she met him at an event, she “asked him if he still kept in touch with Palestinian friends he had spent years with in his distant past in the Galilee. When he answered me in the negative, I asked him if he had Arab friends anywhere, and again I was saddened to hear the answer no.” But, she writes, “he was a kind person who loved the Arabic he researched and was endowed with generosity and a love of mankind.”

  I think she’s correct in her criticism and her praise. For a textbook, Speaking Arabic is very raw and personal, and there’s a lot of Elihay’s sense of humor, opinions, and limitations in there. He was a Frenchman who moved to Israel and lived mainly with Israelis in the 20^th century, and his representation of Palestinian society is outdated and one-sided.

  But even with its faults, Spoken Arabic is irreplaceable. If you’re a similar kind of learner to me, you’ll come away with a better knowledge of Levantine colloquialisms and pronunciation than you would’ve thought possible from a textbook. You’ll come to love Elihay’s humor even as you cringe at some of his dialogues.

  Physical copies can be expensive, but there are a few publishers that still seem to carry them. If you’re digitally inclined, you might be able to find PDFs and audio files without too much trouble.

• #TeamMaha

  A great blog about the quirks and intricacies of Levantine Arabic (and bits about Egyptian and other dialects).

  The original #TeamMaha domain has been down since 2024, but the Wayback Machine has most of the site archived.

• Living Arabic Project (Lughatuna)

  A dictionary for Arabic dialects. Generally reliable and comprehensive, with a nice interface. It’s available on the web and via apps for Android and iOS.