"Bueno"

When I first got to Syria I experienced an added bit of linguistic confusion over one word. Whenever Syrians answered their phone, I was convinced they were saying "Bueno?" Most Arabs I have ever met answer the phone with "'Alo" (that's an approximation of "Hello," for all my slower readers) at least 50% of the time, so I wondered if this was like that maybe...

After all, I knew some French words have made their way into everyday Syrian parlance, thanks to centuries of French colonial influence and the lingering domination of the French language in Syria's richer, more cosmopolitan sister-country, Lebanon. Then again, Spain has absolutely no colonial history in or near Syria. Nonetheless, I was sort of excited about this evidence of cross-cultural linguistic pollination.

Turns out, this is a great example of my ear hearing whatever the hell it wants to hear--a recurring theme in my life, it would seem. Eventually I figured out that it was the combination of the Syrian word for "where" ("wein") and the pronoun for "you" (just a "k" added to the end of the word) which, pronounced in the Damascene way, sounds like "weinaaaaaaaaaaaak," meaning something along the lines of "where you at?" That's it.

It's a pretty lame language geek story, I know, but language geekery is really all I have left.

That, and I think I'm moving to Egypt in about three weeks for an indefinite period of time of at least a year. Nothing is for sure yet, but I've written some about all that a little already, so I'll post more soon as soon as I edit it.