Egypt - miSr

Wow. I was away for just over a week and I come back to 61 emails. Not including Facebook messages and the like. I'd also scheduled a blog post to be published on the 15th for Blog Action Day, however I had to manually do it once I got back. I must have missed something - I'm still new to this publishing software.

Anyway, yes, I'm just back from a week in Egypt! I had a really great time, it's a fascinating country. I took a course in Arabic last academic year, which really helped. The course I took was in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) (Arabic: فصحى fuṣḥá, literally "eloquent"), while in Egypt everyone speaks colloquial Egyptian Arabic, so there was some adjustments to be made to how I spoke and so on, but it wasn't too rough. This post, however, isn't intended to be a description of the sociolinguistic situation in Egypt (or indeed in any Arabic-speaking country), as fascinating as it may be. (Briefly though, if you're interested: the situation is one of diglossia: with a prestigious literary language (MSA) that is mainly written, used in all realms of officialdom, and formal contexts; and with a low-prestige local language (Egyptian colloquial) that is used in all everyday and informal contexts. The colloquial is learnt as a native language; MSA is learnt through school education.)

As you may or may not know, Arabic is written right-to-left (the opposite of English), and does not usually mark vowels. This is slightly untrue - long vowels and word-initial vowels are written with the letters ’alif, wáw, and yá’, however the latter two can also be used to represent consonant sounds. Short vowels are almost always not marked - only in children's or learners' texts and the Qur’án do you commonly find the diacritics used to mark the short vowels.

As such, there is a knack to reading Arabic. You have to learn the vowels for each individual word - for example that كتاب is kitáb (book) and that مدنة is madinat (city). Fortunately, Arabic has a number of patterns that words stick to, so it's more a matter of learning which pattern a word takes - for example, رجال is rijál (men, the plural of رجل rajul), the same vowel pattern as kitáb. After a while, you get used to the common patterns and become fairly proficient at sounding out unfamiliar words.

This can cause a problem when reading foreign words loaned into Arabic. There are a number of tourism companies with English names that are borrowed straight into Arabic, or even just foreign brand names. These names have to be altered to fit Arabic phonological structure - for example, (Modern Standard) Arabic has only three vowels - /a, i, u/ (plus long versions). As such, Coca-Cola becomes كوكا كولا kúká kúlá. Arabic also has no /p/ sound - consequently, Pepsi becomes بيبسي bíbsí. They're not all this easy to read, however, and often regional dialects have to be taken into account. When confronted with سبرينج, I first read it as something along the lines of sabrínaj (almost sounding a little like a certain teenage witch). It took me a while to realise that it was meant to be read as sbrinj, i.e. spring. Arabic dislikes word-initial consonant clusters, whereas in English, things like spr- aren't all that uncommon. Also, in Egypt, the letter <ج> (which I have transcribed as <j> after its classical pronunciation of [dʒ]) is pronounced as [g], which explains the final consonant.

As well as lacking /p/, Arabic also lacks /v/ and /tʃ/ (the first and last sounds in the word "church"). This isn't a problem for Arabic, but it is for the languages that feature these sounds who adopted the Arabic script for writing - such as Kurdish¹. To solve this, new letters were added to the alphabet: پ for /p/ (styled after the letter ب bá’); ڤ for /v/ (styled after the letter ف fá’); and چ for /tʃ/ (styled after the letter ج jín). While these letters are not present in Arabic proper, I saw them used infrequently in Egypt, for example "riviera" rendered as ريڤييرا, and also "7 Up" rendered as سڤن أپ. Interestingly, because in Egypt the letter <ج> is pronounced as [g], the sound [dʒ] (the first sound in the word "James") I saw represented in Egypt by <چ>, for example بريچ bríj for "bridge".

It should perhaps be noted, however, that the use of these letters in loans was, as far as I could see, relatively rare. Big western brands like Pepsi, Hilton, and Mercedes (for example) generally adapt their names to fit Arabic phonology, rather than resorting to the use of unusual letters². Smaller, local brands, that were using English names either out of trendiness or to attract a tourist clientele, were far more likely to use these letters.

It's at times like this when I wish that I knew more about this - about how common these letters were in, say, Egyptian newsletters, or the number of Egyptians who know how to read these letters correctly (and if so, then where do they learn them?). Going to Egypt may have satiated my wanderlust, but spending just a week there has only given me a tiny glimpse into a larger world. And that's just linguistically speaking - I could go on about the sociohistorical dynamics, the contemporary political and economic climate, the persecution of the Egyptian Baha'is (and other minority groups), and the vast swathes of desert that characterise the majority of the country. But I won't. Instead, I'll leave you with this picture of sunset over Egypt's Eastern Desert. Being a lot closer to the equator than Scotland is, sunset is a relatively speedy affair in Egypt - less than two minutes after I snapped this the sun had disappeared behind the mountains. Looking at the sky alone in this picture, it looks like daytime. Looking at the mountains and sun, it looks like sunset. And looking at the ground, it looks like dusk, turning into night. Appearances can be deceptive in an unfamiliar land.

¹ To be honest, as far as I understand it Kurdish is most often written in the Latin or Cyrillic scripts, but I have chosen it in particular over other languages like Urdu, Dari, and Persian because it exhibits all three of the new letters I wish to talk about.

² 7 Up is the obvious exception here, which is odd as it is owned and operated by PepsiCo.