colloquial arabic (levantine)

154 Pages·2003·0.56 MB·English

COLLOQUIAL
ARABIC
(LEVANTINE)
The Colloquial Series
Series adviser: Gary King
The following languages are available in the Colloquial series:
Albanian Korean
Amharic Latvian
Arabic (Levantine) Lithuanian
Arabic of Egypt Malay
Arabic of the Gulf Mongolian
and Saudi Arabia Norwegian
Basque Panjabi
Bulgarian Persian
*Cambodian Polish
*Cantonese Portuguese
*Chinese Portuguese of Brazil
Croatian and Serbian Romanian
Czech *Russian
Danish Slovak
Dutch Slovene
Estonian Somali
Finnish *Spanish
French Spanish of Latin America
German Swedish
Greek *Thai
Gujarati Turkish
Hindi Ukrainian
Hungarian *Vietnamese
Indonesian Welsh
Italian
Japanese
Accompanying cassette(s) (*and CDs) are available for all the above titles. They
can be ordered through your bookseller, or send payment with order to
Routledge Ltd, ITPS, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants SP10 5BE,
or to Routledge Inc., 29 West 35th Street, New York NY 10001, USA.
COLLOQUIAL CD-ROMs
Multimedia Language Courses
Available in: Chinese, French, Portuguese and Spanish
Forthcoming: German
COLLOQUIAL
ARABIC
(LEVANTINE)

Leslie J.McLoughlin

Routledge
London and New York
First published in 1982
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Plc
Routledge is an imprint of the
Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
© Leslie J.McLoughlin 1982
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
McLoughlin, Leslie J.
Colloquial Arabic (Levantine).
1. Arabic language—Spoken Arabic
2. Arabic language—Grammar
I. Title
492´.783421 PJ6307 80–42071
ISBN 0-203-13615-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-17570-0 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-05107-X (Print Edition)
ISBN 0-415-01854-4 (cassette)
ISBN 0-415-00073-4 (book and cassette course)
CONTENTS
ABBREVIATIONS vii
INTRODUCTION 1
PART ONE THE LESSONS 13
1 Nouns and adjectives; basic sentences 13
2 Possession and pronouns 18
Appendix: Numbers 21
3 Verbs, word order and demonstratives 24
4 Verbs, conjunctions and elatives 33
5 Participles 40
6 Hollow verbs and ‘to be able’ 44
7 Verbs, defective and doubled 50
8 Assimilated verbs, conjunctions and ‘for’ 58
9 Relative pronouns, verbal nouns and possession 63
10 More verbs, verbal phrases and whenever/whoever 69
11 Conditional sentences 73
12 Idioms 76
13 Terms of address and reference 86
14 Proverbs 92
15 Courtesy expressions for various occasions 97
16 A story 101
17 A miscellany 105
18 Concepts in society 112
19 Abuse 117
v
vi CONTENTS
PART TWO APPENDICES
Key to exercises 121
Grammar, indexed by lesson 127
Vocabulary 129
Bibliography 145
ABBREVIATIONS

adj. Adjective
BRP British Received Pronunciation
c. Common (of gender)
CA Classical Arabic
coll. A. Colloquial Arabic
f. Feminine
lit. Literally
m. Masculine
n. Noun
pl. Plural
prep. Preposition
pron. Pronoun
sing. Singular
vb Verb
v.n. Verbal noun

INTRODUCTION
Arabic is the language of daily communication for between 150 and
200 million people, and the language of worship for many hundreds
more millions of Muslims. It is the original language of the Koran,
which in Muslim belief is incomparably excellent, since it is the
direct word of God (kalaam allaah). Arabic is the language of prayer
for all Muslims, and the language of the muezzin who summons the
faithful to prayer the world over five times daily. It is now an official
working language in the UN and many international agencies. Its
script is used in many other languages—Persian, Ottoman Turkish
and Urdu among them—and since the Koran is possibly the world’s
best selling book the Arabic script may well be the second most
used script after Latin. The Arabic written language is almost
completely uniform throughout the Arab world. Moreover the
language of radio and television is uniform to the same extent, since
it is simply the written word of modern Arabic being read aloud.
There is a direct line of descent from classical Arabic, the language
of the Koran, to modern Arabic; so that across 1,400 years (in the
Islamic calendar) the script is recognizably the same, the grammar has
changed remarkably little (by comparison with, for example, German
or English) and even the vocabulary has shown an astonishing integrity
and consistency. It is the Koran which has preserved the essence of
written Arabic, and it is also the elevated status accorded to the
original language of Islam which has prevented the Arabic dialects
from becoming as far apart from each other as the dialects of Latin.
Whereas Italian and French are not now mutually comprehensible,
the speakers of dialects of Arabic over an enormous area can
understand each other. Peasants from Muscat and Morocco
1