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Yankee go home!

In my Arabic class right now we are working on how to say "I am from ___" and "Where are you from?" We started out going around the room and saying "أنا من Ann Arbor", etc., but now that we're learning how to say and spell the names of places in Arabic (including the ever useful ويتشتا, or Wichita), we have all been assigned a country and city that we are to pretend to be from, from now on. And where am I from? Mouse over for the translation!

أنا من بغداد في العراق

srah - Tuesday, 26 September 2006 - 5:27 PM
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Comments (3)

gravatar cari - September 26, 2006 - 6:11 PM -

Isn't Arabic right to left? Does your sentence "I am from Ann Arbor" make sense? Is there a way to Spanglishize Arabic?

gravatar srah - September 26, 2006 - 6:50 PM -

No, it doesn't make much sense, but it's hard to find a sense-making way to write it while still getting the point across that the words "Ann Arbor" were said with absolutely no attempt to Arabicize them. ان اربر؟

gravatar Sarah - September 26, 2006 - 7:26 PM -

Dude, this rules! I once had a fleeting, disgusting and torrid love affair with a Kuwaiti engineering post-doc and we never made it past random religious phrases...which he would then burn, as per the rules of the Koran...and then he would spend the rest of the night smoking pot, as all good Muslims do.

Seems my interest in the Arabic, well-intentioned though it was, would've been better served in a classroom and not a mildewy Milwaukee basement apartment.

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