14th July 2021
Lucy showed me the online Arabic course that she’s following. Just getting to grips with the alphabet looks hard enough! Like with Hebrew (or so people tell me!) short vowels aren’t separate letters but instead they’re indicated by squiggles above or below the consonant letters. But then there are long vowels which are separate letters (Alif, for example, which corresponds to a long “a”). All the letters are written cursively (what we called “joined up writing” when I was in Primary School) with the result that they look different (sometimes a lot different!) depending on whether they are at the beginning, middle or end of a word or not joined up at all. So that’s up to 4 different symbols for each sound. Some letters only differ from others by one or two dots above or below them, which makes it really easy to confuse them. And a lot of them correspond to sounds that we just don’t have in English.
I wish Lucy well with her endeavours, but I’m sceptical that she’ll become fluent. If there are the same sorts of issues in Hebrew, then it’s no wonder that academics argue about the correct translation of passages in the Old Testament!