V. Arabiy maghrebi: Understanding twelve

Arabiy maghrebi Moroccan Arabic
20 September 2009

I’ve been having an hour long Moroccan Arabic lesson every day since I arrived, and I’m making some progress but barely. It’s a struggle because it’s so different. Yesterday, I told my teacher, Latifa the nice that I might as well be learning a whole new language because I frequently see no connection between the Egyptian Arabic I know and what Moroccans say.

Moroccan Arabic is very different in terms of accent, but also in vocabulary and grammar. The similarities are that many words have the same root, but the Moroccans contract them so that there are four or five consonants together with no vowels, so I have a dreadful time pronouncing them, much less remembering them. I used to be proud that I could pronounce the five unpronounceable (to English speakers) Arabic letters, but when I put together two or three of them in Moroccan Arabic, my tongue gets tied in knots.

The good news is that there are some of the same words, BUT it seems that often they mean something different! For example, in Egypt, the word for room is ouda, the word for house is beit, and the word for the world (or a seaport) is dar. In Moroccan, dar means house and beit means room. No wonder I’m confused. And they conjugate their verbs completely differently. I can see that it might be simpler once I get it down, as they use helping verbs for the present and future tenses. But in the meantime, I’m always putting the wrong pronoun with the verb; she when I mean me or we when I mean her.

The other good news is that they use a lot of French words for things, which makes it easy since French comes naturally, but I have to remember when they use French and not use the Egyptian word!

Today I went on a brief shopping foray to buy food. The Feast for the end of Ramadan is tomorrow, and there will be no meals served at the guesthouse after breakfast, and presuming that the only restaurant open will be at the big hotel, which is rather expensive, I will be fixing my own lunch and dinner. I tried out my semi-Moroccan Arabic, and the vendors semi-understood me. At least I got cilantro when I asked for it; I only got 4 eggs and not a dozen. And the bread vendor understood me and even gave me the millime change for the 1 ½ dirham that a little loaf of bread costs. I’m not just a tourist!

The trouble came when it was time to pay. The vendors seem to use French for numbers, maybe because they think I wouldn’t know the Arabic numbers…which I probably know better than anything else as they are the same except for two and nine, just with a slightly different accent. Then I get confused because I think I didn’t understand.

I went to the same fruit and vegetable vendor that I went to two days ago with the cook, and he helped me some with the Arabic…but he wants to practice his English. I asked him in Arabic how much my produce purchases cost, and he told me douze dirham. I assumed I hadn’t heard him right or I didn’t understand him, even though in a French conversation, I would know perfectly well that douze means twelve. So, then he tried English, but he said 20. So I asked him 20? in Arabic. So then he said, “no, no, ten plus two” (in Arabic)…so I said itnashar, which is twelve in Arabic, and finally we were on the same page! Almost the same thing happened when I bought eggs at the chicken shop. So I need to learn to hear the number in whatever language and translate it. At least they would all be in languages I understand, even if it’s not what I am expecting to hear!