Lunar Threads

Eid Mubarak! Happy Eid-ul-Fitr everybody! KF

You know, every time I feel vaguely intimidated by Japanese writing, I should look at that artwork. I can know that it's supposed to represent words and be unable to imagine reading it at the same time.

Alunissage wrote:You know, every time I feel vaguely intimidated by Japanese writing, I should look at that artwork. I can know that it's supposed to represent words and be unable to imagine reading it at the same time.

Well on one hand, Arabic calligraphy is very stylized, so it's really difficult to read it unless you already know what it's saying (and thus how to follow the letters/words). Regular Arabic is much easier / more straightforward. Without the stylization, it would be:
عيد مبارك

Though on the flip side, I find Arabic much harder to read than Japanese (even after accounting for the fact that I'm way more familiar with one than the other): (1) normally you don't write the short vowels, so unless you're familiar enough with the language it's very hard to read (the image in the first post has short vowels, the text above does not); (2) the differentiation between some letters is very slight, so you have to train yourself to focus on a lot of details -- e.g., the letters b/t/th/n/y only differ based on dot placement and number; (3) half the consonants have no English equivalent, and there're still 7 or 8 sounds I cannot pronounce; and (4) there are different forms of many of the letters for initial/mid/final (this part is relatively easy to learn though).

If you're curious:
ع = 'e' (actually 'ayn', which doesn't exist in English); the line underneath = i
ي = 'y' (so it makes a longer ii sound)
د = 'd'
م = 'm'; the mark above = u
ب = 'b'; the line above = a
ا = 'a' (so it makes a longer aa sound)
ر = 'r'; the line above = a
ك = 'k'

KF

7 or 8 sounds you can't pronounce? Damn! I'd be happy enough just to be able to roll my R's. Turns out that's not easy to do when you wait until you're nearly 30 to bother with it.

It seems like some things can't be self-taught with programs and require more of a hands-on approach.

Heck, I couldn't roll my Rs when I was ten. Never did get it.

I actually learned how to read Arabic on my own (well, using books/audio). Actually learning to speak it as a language though is another matter and something I'd go to classes for (...though I'm actually not very motivated to learn it; there are three other languages higher on my list of priorities).

I went through and counted, and I may have exaggerated slightly. I count 10 (out of 29) letters whose sounds have no similar equivalent in English, and 4½ that I really can't pronounce.

These 10 are:
1) ح = ḥ (h pronounced further back in the throat)
2) خ = kh (k+h sound pronounced further back in the throat)
3) ص = ṣ (harder S sound??)
4) ض = ḍ (harder D sound??)
5) ط = ṭ (sounds like a hard TH??)
6) ظ = ẓ (sounds like a hard DH??)
7) ع = ‘ (hard to describe; it's like a voiced ḥ)
8) غ = gh (like a voiced kh)
9) ق = q (k pronounced lighter and a little further back in throat)
10) ﺀ = ' (glottal stop)

So, (3), (4), (5), and (6), are the ones I can't pronounce; (7) is the one I can pronounce with practice but it's really hard to pronounce in the middle of words. (This also isn't getting into regional dialects where some of these are pronounced differently depending on the time and place.) The rest are relatively easier.

BTW also my name in Arabic (قيصر) also uses two of these: qaf (9) and sad (3) -- I can pronounce the qaf but I just use a regular soft s for the other sound. KF

There are glottal stops in English, they just aren't written, and of course vary by dialect. In what I think of as more or less standard American English (which is, of course, the one that's around me, heh), it tends to show up between /t/ and /n/ in unstressed syllables. Examples: the second syllable of kitten, mitten, beaten. In at least some British dialects it's in the second syllable of "bottle" and presumably similar words.

Alunissage wrote:Heck, I couldn't roll my Rs when I was ten. Never did get it.

And that sucks because it screws you out of A LOT of languages. There are tricks people talk about online, but I think I would need a form of speech therapist working with me for me to have any hope of getting it down. I CAN do it but not with consistency and pretty much only with words that begin with R. They say you gotta get that down before you move on to trying to do it in other portions of words.

The languages I'd like to learn are French, German and Greek.

So Kizyr.. tell us about the holiday this thread was originally gonna be about!

Alunissage wrote:There are glottal stops in English, they just aren't written, and of course vary by dialect.

Yeah, the way I learned to pronounce the hamzah was literally by listening to a Cockney accent. ...I actually often still pronounce "settlers" with a glottal stop instead of a t.

Alunissage wrote:Heck, I couldn't roll my Rs when I was ten. Never did get it.

That seems to be hit or miss... I could / still can roll Rs, and can pronounce individual words with no problem, but it's when I'm speaking entire sentences that it's hard to fit in rolling Rs without, like, pausing the entire sentence. (So, like, just saying ferrocarril is fine, but if I'm like "Estoy en mi carro en la carretera cruzando el ferrocarril"... yeah, no.)

Leo wrote:So Kizyr.. tell us about the holiday this thread was originally gonna be about!

Oh yeah, that!

Eid-ul-Fitr was the holiday. It marks the end of Ramadan (which is the month of fasting -- we don't eat/drink and avoid other things from dawn to sunset for the month). Ramadan is also is a month of heightened spiritual enlightenment or awareness... different people have different ways of interacting, reflecting, and dealing with the month, so the holiday is kind of both a celebration and a farewell to the month. In our culture, it's usually celebrated by prayers in the morning, and then going around and visiting a bunch of your family; when we were younger also gifts were involved, though I'm right at the middle age where I don't have an obligation to give gifts but also don't actually get gifts from anyone (which is fine for me, but probably won't be the case for that much longer). KF

Kizyr, I loved that story you told on Facebook. I don't really believe in God, but your story of brotherly love is way stronger evidence of God' s presence than anything I've seen in the church I have grown up in.

Edit: Something language related: I pronounce Hanukkah, Challah, any Spanish word with a jota with a super throat-y "h" sound. My sister (speech language pathologist) says that it's going to give me nodules. But I ignore her.

So do you guys have an enormous meal the day after?

Portuguese has a lot of rolled R's too... even my last name has them... and I still can't quite do it unless I overdo it on purpose...

Hope you had a very happy Eid. I can't help but feel sorry for any Muslims living anywhere north of the Arctic Circle this year though...

I kid, I kid...

Well I can get the roll going and use it at the beginning a bit better now, but a lot of the time I go to roll the R and it just blows air past my tongue and sounds retarded. I (hopefully) just need to focus my stubbornness on this.

If there are tricks to do it at all and get it started, then surely there are also tricks to being able to keep it consistent and be able to use them naturally without it being a damn hurdle. I don't want to stumble my way through sentences. Maybe keep R's rolling, interrupt them with different sound and try to return to the rolling as quickly as possible? Hmm... I'm unsure I can get this done entirely on my own..

Werefrog wrote:Kizyr, I loved that story you told on Facebook. I don't really believe in God, but your story of brotherly love is way stronger evidence of God' s presence than anything I've seen in the church I have grown up in.

I have a stupid aversion to the book of face which I should get over someday, but in the meantime would you mind posting a link? I would like to read this.

It's perhaps unrelated, but one of many memorable moments at Kizyr and Jenner's wedding was the talk the...crud, I can't think of the right word, the religious leader?...gave about marriage. Well, okay, I can't remember the details of what he said, but I know I appreciated it as being both honest and joyous. (It was also the first time I'd heard the Qu'ran [sp?] quoted; I hadn't realized that it was a pitched/sung language, and it was just lovely.)

Kizyr on the Facebook said:

"Eid Mubarak everyone!

I want to relate an incident that happened the last day of Ramadan. On the way up to my sister's place, my car got a sudden flat tire (literally 30 minutes after we picked it up from repairs), and we had to call AAA to get the spare put on and inflated. It was 8:00 by this point and it looked like I was going to miss ifthar and would have to break fast at the gas station there, so I wasn't too pleased.

Though, the guy from AAA who came by happened to be Muslim. I grabbed a couple bottled waters from the gas station and meant to offer him one, but he kind of beat me to the punch and said "don't worry, we still have a couple minutes left" then handed me an extra bottled water he had in a cooler smile emoticon . (FYI, it's a barakat to help someone else break their fast, so we both had the same thing in mind.) After he helped us out, we broke fast, wished each other Ramadan/Eid Mubarak, and parted ways.
That kind of made my day, honestly. Yeah I didn't get to spend the last day of Ramadan with my sister, but these kind of interactions are really nice reminders of how, well, pleasant it is not being the only Muslim around, and knowing there are random people here and there are doing and celebrating the same things as you. It's so different from when I was growing up.
Anyway, I don't necessarily believe in signs from God. But I do believe that we're given the means to interpret events how we choose, and there are certain things that happen to us that, should we view them in the right way, can be incredibly enlightening.

That's all. Eid Mubarak everyone and enjoy your celebrations."

Sorry to plagiarize your story.

Ooh, sorry I hadn't gotten back to this earlier. I've been busy going to / recovering from a wedding last weekend in Columbus. Anyway...

Leo wrote:So do you guys have an enormous meal the day after?

Oh yes, I forgot the most important detail! I mentioned that our culture's tradition is to go around and visit different relatives -- for us, that also means eating and eating at everyone's house (I would have to get skillful with appearing to eat more than I really did, because you don't want to fill up at the first 1-2 places you go). These days, since I have less family in the DC area than the Nashville area, me and my sister go to morning prayers at a place in Northern VA, hit up a restaurant for breakfast, then visit a few of our relatives in Maryland for lunch and early dinner.

There's a second Eid ("eid" just means day) called Eid-ul-Adha, where we do some of the same things. We may go down to Nashville for that one.

Dragonmaster Lou wrote:Hope you had a very happy Eid. I can't help but feel sorry for any Muslims living anywhere north of the Arctic Circle this year though...
I kid, I kid...

Oh that is tough actually, but Muslims that far North don't fast on a purely daylight-based schedule. There are various fatawa (plural of fatwa, which means religious opinion) on the subject -- the most commonly-followed ones are that once the daylight hours go above 20/day (or some other high level), you can either follow the schedule of the closest city due South that has enough daylight or follow the schedule in Mecca. Fasting isn't meant to be a hardship, so after the first 2-3 days it should be possible to acclimate regardless of where you are, hence the exceptions.

Werefrog wrote:Kizyr, I loved that story you told on Facebook. I don't really believe in God, but your story of brotherly love is way stronger evidence of God' s presence than anything I've seen in the church I have grown up in.

First, no problem on copy-pasting the story here. I'm actually pleasantly surprised that so many other people found it interesting or uplifting. {^^}

Alunissage wrote:It's perhaps unrelated, but one of many memorable moments at Kizyr and Jenner's wedding was the talk the...crud, I can't think of the right word, the religious leader?...gave about marriage. Well, okay, I can't remember the details of what he said, but I know I appreciated it as being both honest and joyous. (It was also the first time I'd heard the Qu'ran [sp?] quoted; I hadn't realized that it was a pitched/sung language, and it was just lovely.)

Ah, that was my cousin. (He's currently director of one of the masajid in Nashville, although not a religious leader per se. There aren't many words for religious leader that are analogous to Christian or Jewish tradition; imam comes closest but that can be anyone who leads a prayer, though it's usually also the term for permanent staff who are also sought for guidance and run various programs at a masjid.) Qur'an recitation does have traditions around pronunciation and intonation (called tajwid); I never learned them, so my pronunciation is all monotone and poorly accented, but I know several people who have learned various tajwid methods.

Glad you enjoyed {^^}. He also spoke at my niece's (or second cousin, depending on how you use terms) wedding last weekend. KF

It sounds a lot like Thanksgiving except you go hungry for a good while first and thus can get more out of it.

Argh. I knew the term imam. But didn't want to use it inappropriately.

Thanks for the context on the story. Although I hope you'll forgive me for having a snatch from a Simpsons song called to mind from it: "Now here's a tip from Blanche you won't forget / A stranger's just a friend you haven't met!"

Alunissage wrote:Argh. I knew the term imam. But didn't want to use it inappropriately.

Thanks for the context on the story. Although I hope you'll forgive me for having a snatch from a Simpsons song called to mind from it: "Now here's a tip from Blanche you won't forget / A stranger's just a friend you haven't met!"

A Streetcar Named Marge is a great episode.

STELLA!!!
STELLA!!!
Can't you hear me yell-a?
You're puttin' me through Hell-a?
Stella, STELLA!!!!