Okay, so every once in a while I ask myself why in the world did I decide to learn Arabic??
It's such a difficult language and the type of Arabic I am learning (fous'ha) is a formal Arabic that no one (besides in Qur'anic contexts) ever uses !So I was looking for a new picture to put as my desktop picture to reinforce/inspire me to do my HW and I came across this one on Flickr.
This makes me sooooooo sad because it is ABSOLUTELY COMPLETELY wrong!!!
First of all, the LETTERS are NOT connected!!!
In Arabic, the letters have an Independent form, a beginning form, a middle form, and an end form.
For example, the letter "Ayn" looks like this independently : ع
like this at the beginning of a word : عمل
like this in the middle of a word: تعمل
and like this at the end of a word: استمتع
Okay this is not going to turn into a lesson but basically, this person got an "Arabic" tattoo and it is completely wrong, the are not even words, because the are not connected. Also, they are going the wrong direction. In Arabic, we go from right to left, (sooo much better that way!). Lastly, this whole thing does not really make sense in actual Arabic, this person translated directly from English to Arabic but the structure between both languages are not parallel, so it is very difficult to translate directly. Oh and they wanted to say soft and it was directly translated to 'suft' (cause there is no 'O' equivalent in Arabic).
Sadly, this person is stuck with this tattoo and it makes me feel so bad. I guess I only care cause I actually love Arabic. I guess this just gives me the inspiration/reinforcement I was looking for? Now back to my Arabic vocab.
The Beatles "Dear Prudence"
-melidee
