I went to sign in to blogger today, and my sign-in page was in Arabic! So when I got through (since my account is, of course, set to English), Blogger staff had announced that they had just launched the Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian language support.

Having been here for a while now, it's funny to me that the release was on the same day. Plenty logical for them, of course, but funny to me. But maybe this is a "you have to be here" kind-of thing.

Finally, tiny little bits of Arabic are starting to seep in to the point where I hear words out in town and I'm starting to pick up on a few. Last night I was out with a friend, and went into the restroom where there were two Arabic women at the sinks, and I thought they were talking to eachother at first. It turned out the one was on her cell phone and the other just waiting for her, but the one kept saying "he fainted? he fainted? and then he fainted?" all in English but with a heavy accent, and then suddenly, "Oh, mooskine!" the Arabic word that can mean things like "Oh, I pitty him!" or "I feel so sorry for him!" or "Poor baby!" (As with many languages, the ending denotes the gender of the subject, and therefore it's one word for males and add an ah for females. The Arab woman I know says the feminine to me all the time, but I recognized the masculine when I heard it because of those two things, the word itself and knowing the gender rules.)

Since (and I got this from my parents, by the way, both of them .. Mom and Dad, you know it's true) I have something of a tendency to say "poor baby" whenever anyone says something remotely whining, I think I'll just start saying the Arabic version instead. With that same tone of voice and pouty lip, I'm sure the meaning will come right across!

I've picked up a few other words here and there, and often pick up one from the Arab woman for at least a few hours, but it doesn't usually stick for long. This one stuck because she says it to me ALL THE TIME. If I stub my toe, if I'm frustrated with the dude at work that everyone hates, if I'm too busy to figure out where to start on something.... "Oh, mooskina!"

(The spelling is mine, by the way. Like other languages whose alphabets do not used roman-based characters, there is a "romaji" (for Japenese) or roman-style spelling where someone hears a word and writes down approximately how it would be spelled if it were in a roman-based language, which is why you see variations all the time, like Ashura and Ashoora for the New Year celebrations they're currently wrapping up. I'm not sure how all else folks would've spelled mooskin(a), but I knew I didn't want to use the u as in muskina because people would say muh-ski-n(ah) instead of moo-ski-n(ah), and they don't even have the uh sound over here in the same way.)

I've only come to recognize one Arabic character in writing, though, which is "no" or the negativizor. I noticed when watching English-language TV (which all has Arabic subtitles here) that anytime someone said "No! No!" that character came up twice, and also that when someone had a sentence that included words like don't, won't, can't, shouldn't, anything with a negative word or implication in it, that character was there as well. It's not unlike the character for the Japanese syllable "to" (pronounced "toe"), so it grabbed my attention for that reason first, and then I started noticing the association pattern with the English dailogue.

More Adventures in Arabic to come, I'm sure!