Would you like to know how the boys and girls talk in Arabia? If you have read “Topsy Turvy Land” you will remember how they write their words backward and begin to read at what we call the end of the book. Their talk as well as their writing seems to us at first very topsy turvy. Of course, I need not tell you how much they talk, for in that respect they are just like the boys and girls in America. As they speak a language, however, very different from English, I am sure you would like to hear a little about it. Arabic is one of the oldest and most beautiful languages, and also one of the hardest to learn. It has so many words that their name for a dictionary is “Kamoos,” which means “an ocean.” They have five hundred different names for a lion and two hundred words for serpent. It is said that there are one thousand different terms in Arabic for sword, and eighty different words for honey.
Like English the Arabic language has grammar with many rules (and more exceptions) and the boys dislike it just as much as some of you do. They have a severe struggle with the alphabet because each letter has three different forms, as it is used in the beginning, the middle or the end of a word; and then there are but fifteen conjugations and twenty different ways of forming the plural, not to speak of all the moods and tenses and the irregular verbs.
Some people think that Arabic is the most difficult language in the world. Keith Falconer, the first missionary to Arabia, said, “Arabic grammars should be strongly bound because learners are so often found to dash them frantically on the ground.” Another missionary said that he would rather cross Africa from Alexandria to the Cape of Good Hope than undertake a second time to master the Arabic speech.
I shall never forget my early struggles with the language, nor the place where I sat down to learn my lesson with Dr. Cornelius Van Dyke. He was a master of Arabic and with Dr. Eli Smith translated the whole Bible into the Arabic speech. Here it was in the shade of his beautiful veranda at Beirut, Syria, that I began to learn the irregular verb. It takes a long time for grown-up people to learn a new language, but it does not seem hard for the Arab boys and girls.
Beside the proper talk of grown-up people there is baby talk in Arabia which mothers teach the little brown toddlers before they walk out of the mat-huts and the black, camel-hair tents into the wide world. Yes, and there are also slang words which the camel drivers and the donkey boys use with and on each other.
The baby talk is much like English. Father is baba; dog is wowwow; pretty is noonoo; stop is tootoo; chicken is kookoo, and when baby falls they say baff!
The language of these little angels and the grown-up ones in Arabia is very poetical. The Arabs, because they live in the desert and look up into the big, blue sky and far out to the horizon where the mirage paints desert pictures every day, are full of imagination and live in an atmosphere of poetry. They love jingling words and proverbs and pretty sayings and figures of speech.
A mosquito has only a sting in New Jersey. In Arabia they call him aboo fas, which means “father-of-an-ax”! In America a tramp is a tramp, but the Arabs call him a son-of-the-road. And what could be prettier than their name for echo, bint-el-jebel, “daughter of the mountain”? Why, there is a whole fairy story in that one word! And if you go down the columns of the Arabic dictionary you can find many a story locked up in some word and only waiting to be opened.
In North Arabia when they say, “How-do-you-do,” the proper expression is, “What is the colour of your condition?” This may be philosophical, but it does not make good sense in English. Strawberries are called French mulberries, and the name given to potatoes when first brought to Bahrein was aliyeywellam; why this name was given, I cannot tell. Where could you find a better name for wine than the Arab um-el-khabaith, “mother of vices”? No wonder all the Arab children are staunch prohibitionists. And you will know more about the nights in Arabia when I tell you that the common name for jackal is “son-of-howling”!