Today is Friday, my day off. Seeing as it is my one day to myself, naturally, I have to go and visit with people. This isn't always the case, sometimes I get the day to myself. With all this time I have to myself I have been thinking about Jordan and that I haven't actually told you anything about this wonderful place that I have been living in for the past four months. I think the only appropriate place to start is the beginning. Let's begin with the alphabet, shall we?
This is it, in all of its glory. 28 letters and they all have three ways of writing them depending on if they come at the beginning, middle, or end of the word. Those dots above and below the words are called nukta (which if said in a slightly different way means "joke"). Arabic is read from right to left and there books open accordingly. I much prefer this picture of the alphabet...
All of these letters are connected into something that looks like this...
Typically people use just the diacritic dots (sometimes they don't). The vocalization marks are called harakat. They help you pronounce the words, the are the short vowels of arabic and they look like this.
How the letter 'ba' is pronounced with each harakat is on the bottom line of the picture. These are used in the Qur'an because the pronunciation needs to be specific and correct as it is the central religious text of Islam. However, in everyday life there are many accents of Arabic. Moroccan arabic is different from Jordan arabic which is different from Egyptian arabic. 'Keifik'(how are you) one places could be 'Keifich' another place. Whatever pronunciation is used you are always welcomed with a soft hand hold and a kiss to the right cheek and umpteen kisses (typically 3 where I live) to the right.
XOXO
Laura
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