Thoughts on Tunisia: where it all began
Sunday, 24. July 2011 17:43
I was in Tunisia for two weeks and had a chance to compare how things are moving there to the situation in Egypt. I like Tunisia and I like the Tunisian dialect, which is getting more comprehensible to me on each trip! This time I realized that a ‘y’ is added to the plural form of many verbs, so that ‘we build’ becomes nibnyu. Little realizations like that suddenly open up a lot of what you’re hearing. They don’t have the ‘k’ as a marker of the present tense that you find in Moroccan and Algerian Arabic, which eases things a bit if you’re a Mashreq Arabic speaker. Who can’t love famma and mafammash (from Classical Arabic’s thammata with the connective fa- in front) from ‘there is/isn’t', which are just as logical, if not more so, as the feeh/mafeeh, feeh/mafeesh and aku/maku of dialects to the east. [...]
Category:Commentary, Published articles - 2011 | Comment (0) | Autor: admin
