Archive for 'Vocabulary'
Expressing Worry in Arabic Posted by aziza on Apr 30, 2009
The emergence of swine flu has caused a lot of concerns and worries for many people around the world, including me. I check the news websites every few hours to know if new cases have been discovered and I hope and pray that this situation is resolved before more suffering happens. I am worried and…
Swine flu Posted by aziza on Apr 28, 2009
News media is nowadays dominated by swine flu (انفلونزا الخنازير). The World Health Organization (منظمة الصحة العالمية) has issued alerts and raised the level of alert in response to the increasing number of people contracting the disease and dying by it. It is tragic and worrying! In this posting, I present an excerpt from the…
Family Vocabulary in Arabic Posted by aziza on Mar 8, 2009
Terms used to express family relations in Arabic are more explicit than in English. This may reflect the importance of family and relations in the Arabic society. An example of the more explicit family relations terms in Arabic is that the term ‘uncle’ in English has 2 Arabic terms distinguishing ‘maternal uncle’ (خال) and ‘paternal…
Buying Food in Arabic Posted by aziza on Mar 3, 2009
If you want to buy food in an Arab country using the Arabic language, you need to use one of the colloquial dialects because it would be very odd to use Modern Standard Arabic in this context, since it is too formal and sellers may not even be able to understand. In this posting, I…
Calendars used in Arab countries Posted by aziza on Feb 23, 2009
In the Arab world, there are different calendars in use. The most common one is the Western calendar which is used in most countries of the world. The names of the months are different from one region to another. The following table gives 3 common ways of naming the twelve months of the year in…
Colors and Nature in Arabic Posted by aziza on Jan 23, 2009
In Arabic, many words referring to colors are derived from things that are found in nature and that have the color as pertinent to them, e.g brown is derived from coffee beans, pink is derived from flower, golden is derived from gold, and so on. These words are formed by adding a (ي) at the…
Greeting in Arabic Posted by aziza on Jan 19, 2009
The most common greetings in the Arabic language areأهلاًandالسلام عليكم أهلاًmeans hello, welcome, hi and how do you do? السلام عليكمis used for both hello and goodbye. People at different countries use variations of these expressions, e.g. in the Gulf countries, “هلا” is used as a local variation of أهلاً. This table shows…