Roots

On my last day in Dahab I got a sweet tattoo. Now I generally view henna tattoos as unacceptably tourist-y things to have, and getting an Arabic one in an Arabic-speaking country is no less so, but after watching all three of the girls get cool ones from our personable jokester of a henna artist, I let them convince me to get one too. The girls got these:


I think it's fair to say that for the $2-6 those each cost, those are pretty cool. Thus, in a move that reflects either my excited dedication to this blog, or a lack of creativity on my part, I got a henna translation of this blog's title on my arm:

The transliterated Arabic reads something like "Inta huna aydan, ya nakhla, fee hathihee al-ard al-ignabiy..."

Besides getting a pretty badass (in my own opinion) tattoo, I learned something interesting about Arabic when the Egyptian henna artist was drawing my tattoo. To explain, I have to get into a little bit of the nuances of written Classical Arabic, so bear with me.

When Arabic is written, the letters all look different depending on if they are in the beginning, the middle, or the end of the word. Furthermore, as in aydan the third word of my tat, the first letter is an "Alif" which can also change depending on the complex Arabic rules of voweling. When this letter isn't doing crazy stuff like turning into an entirely different letter (Arabic is confusing), it sometimes gets a squiqqly thing, called a "hamza," written above it, below it, or not at all. Now in the word aydan, which means "also," I had only ever seen it written with the hamza on top of the Alif, and so I accordingly had written it thusly when telling the artist what I wanted. As a result, I was confused when he wrote it with the hamza below for no reason apparent to me. Besides changing the pronunciation from what wikipedia tells me is a "near-open front unrounded vowel" A (as in "apple") to a short "close front unrounded vowel" I (as in "little"), this could also change the meaning potentially as in this case it did, though not in a way our non-grammarian henna artist could explain very well.

Basically, according to the artist, Aydan is written with the hamza below when it is meant to connote a fundamental addition of sorts. It's sort of like italicizing the word "too." All he could really say is the hamza had to be the roots of the alif here, because we were talking about really being something too. I just liked that they had a way of conveying the sense of "rootedness" with a slight change in the writing of the word. This is the kind of stuff that gets you excited when all you do is sit around trying to learn a language.

Either way, I found it fitting that the I should learn something about the roots of Arabic writing, in the process of getting the words at the root of my trip engraved on my body. More about the rest of my trip coming soon!

(Edit: I asked my Arabic teacher about the whole hamza above-versus-below thing for emphasis, and she summarily dismissed the whole notion. When I explained that the guy had done it deliberately, she brushed it off and declared "he does not know Arabic." So that more or less negates this whole post...except for the pictures of our cool henna tattoos...!)