Unfriend (noun)

Plus Arabic lemmas & other language stuff

Hi from Palermo

One of my favourite Swedish words is ‘ovän’, literally un-friend — an enemy, but not as strong as ‘fiende’. Many other Germanic languages have similar nouns, which made me wonder why English doesn’t.

It turns out that for a long time we did. The word appears in the Middle-English epic poem Layamon’s Brut, written in the late 12th or early 13th century: ‘we sollen … slean houre onfrendes’, resolves the speaker. ‘For, sir, we parted unfriends’, says the moderately stage-Irish Bridget Fitzgerald in Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1856 short story ‘The Poor Clare’. Gaskell does pull off something not every English person manages with Irish English, namely correct usage of the verb-as-reply. Bridget responds to a question beginning ‘And your husband was …’ with ‘He was’. That’s because you have to repeat the verb in Irish; it’s ungrammatical to answer any other way. (Sadly, as the Yanks neo-imperialise us ever more, you hear this kind of answer less and less in Irish English. Cúis níos fearr fós le Gaeilge a labhairt.)

I’m not sure why the noun ‘unfriend’ has now been taken over entirely by the Latinate ‘enemy’, while its verb form has been granted the rather less glamorous territory of social media disunion. But so things stand.

Of course I would have already known all this if I’d paid attention to the Old and Middle English modules in my undergraduate degree. But I only ever saw them as hoops to jump through so I could get to the good stuff: literary theory. I’ve never been especially fascinated by English as a language. As an auxiliary tool I find it serviceable enough, and since I am using it, I want to use it well. But a huge part of what draws me to other languages is their music: I love hearing different sounds, different intonation, even when it’s just in my head while reading. That’s why I’m obsessed with canúint.ie and why I’m already listening to Arabic podcasts without understanding very much: because auditory difference to English is a source of physical pleasure for me, regardless of what’s even being said.

I now know that Old English did in fact have phonemes not present in modern English, and possibly different intonation too, but either they didn’t tell us this or I didn’t take it in because I had pre-emptively checked out of what I thought would be a language where you don’t get to learn new sounds. Either way, my assessment as an intellectually overconfident teenager was this: Old and Middle English required the hard part of language-learning (cramming vocabulary) without the most immediately accessible pleasure (sonic novelty). I like new words, too, once I can pick them up from context — but I despise learning them by rote.

This brings me nicely to the fact that I am currently learning 3,000 words by rote in Arabic.

*

Arabic lemmas

‘Lemma’, incidentally, is fun to say.

Context: my main purpose in learning any language is to read literature in the original. I happily take any other skills that I happen to acquire along the way, but the ability to speak is just a pleasant — and rather more practical — bonus that emerges pretty much of its own accord once I’ve read enough novels. The one exception was German, where speaking was important in itself for me because I was living in the country and it would have felt disrespectful not to make the effort. But all my other languages are ones I aimed to read and wound up able to speak. (This also means that my definition of ‘speaking’ a language includes being able to read its major works of literature without a dictionary. If I dropped this from the definition, I could claim to ‘speak’ quite a few more than I do — but then the definition would no longer encompass my main goal, so what’s the point?)

All that to say: if your primary goal is to have conversations in Arabic, this might not necessarily be the right method for you. But I think it’s the best one for me. My number one aim is to read Modern Standard Arabic. Down the line, I also want to understand spoken Levantine and especially Palestinian Arabic, but the ballpark estimate I’ve got from talking to people is that I’ll be able to acquire that from maybe a few hundred hours of listening once I have a solid base in MSA.

Hence reading first.

In all my European languages, before I tackled literary novels — the good stuff! the grail! — I started with the news. It’s an accessible mini-goal for many reasons: relatively limited vocabulary, literal as opposed to abstract, easy to fill things in from context when the topic is familiar, short articles so frequent dopamine bursts from finishing things. So I’ve decided to make reading Al-Jazeera news articles my first big goal in Arabic.

To do this in even a perfunctory way, I will need to understand approximately 3,000 lemmas. Ironically given its meaning, ‘lemma’ can signify fairly different things in other fields, but in linguistics it’s a set of word forms with — broadly — one meaning. ‘Have’ is the lemma that contains ‘had’, ‘has’, ‘having’ etc. With 3,000 of these bad boys under my belt in Arabic, I will be able to understand the gist of Al-Jazeera articles, at least if I am strategic in which ones I choose. Arabic is a highly inflected language, so I might not instantly recognise the lemma I’ve learned in its various forms, but I should be able to figure it out over time. It still won’t be easy reading. But it will put me in broadly the position I was in when I first started reading Italian and Swedish: understanding enough for it to be a fun puzzle, not torture. In both those cases I already spoke two sister languages, so of course I’ll have to do a fair amount of work to get up to the same starting point in Arabic.

Here’s exactly how I’m going about it. Every day I’m going onto the Al-Jazeera website, choosing a prominent article, picking some of the shorter sentences from the article, plopping them into Google Translate and then putting them into the Anki flashcard app. On the first side of the card goes the sentence in Arabic with one high-frequency lemma bolded. On the other goes an English translation of that word only, and a transliteration of the pronunciation. (I can read Arabic, but filling in the vowels is still often tricky for me.) I pass the card if I remember the meaning of that one word. The rest of the sentence is to give me enough context that I’ll remember how it looks in context, too.

I choose which word to bold by looking for a lemma that a) is not already in the deck, and b) seems like something that will often come up.

There will be mistakes in Google’s translations and transcriptions. But it’s close enough to get me reading independently, and once I’m able to do that, sheer exposure will sort out the rest over time. No way was I pronouncing everything correctly in my head when I learned to read in English. My mother recalls 7-year-old me referring to Stacey McGill of The Babysitters’ Club fame’s ‘dee-a-bets’; I meant ‘diabetes’. It sorted itself out eventually, and in the meantime I got to enjoy a lot of books.

Right now I’m only doing 10 lemmas a day because I have a lot of deadlines and other commitments. I think 30 is probably the most I can meaningfully retain anyway, so it will take minimum 3 months even when I have more time.

*

‘Which app do you use?’

Number one question people ask me about Arabic. I have to be very gentle when responding and break the news with great caution: I did not learn my languages on Duolingo.

When someone has amazing abs, my assumption is that they consistently give more priority to it than I do, not that they’ve discovered one weird gamified trick. If I could easily have a visible six-pack, absolutely, sign me up, but I’m not willing to do what it would actually take because other things are more important to me. It’s fine to admit this to oneself about language-learning, too! Just don’t assume the reason you haven’t cracked it is that you haven’t found a magic tech solution.

I speak a lot of languages because I put in thousands of hours over decades. Some of this time went on directly studying grammar and vocabulary, some on listening, reading, writing and speaking. There’s no grand heist.

That said, if you have personally learned Arabic to genuine proficiency using an app, absolutely do recommend it to me. I’d be as delighted to believe this as anyone else.

‘What language do you think/dream in?’

Another one I’ll tackle while I’m here.

The short answer is: whatever language I’m speaking in; English/Irish mostly when on my own; random fragments of the others (‘Jag behöver det inte’ I thought when an infuriating beep kept going off at 2am.) I hardly ever remember my dreams so I’m unsure about that one, but I did sometimes get somniferously yelled at in German when I lived in Berlin.

To expand: every few months on the internet, a new wave of people discover that not everyone thinks the same. A false binary parsable in 140 characters emerges of ‘people who think in full sentences’ and ‘people who think in images/intangible associations/vibes’. The reality is almost certainly that we all use a combination of both. When I make myself think in a second language in order to practice it, the full sentences one after another feel pendulously slow compared to how I actually think; so does making myself do it in English. I am nonetheless the kind of person ‘thinks in full sentences’ is actually trying to categorise: someone on the ‘intermittent internal monologue’ end of the spectrum. The sentences are there. There’s just a massive complex of non-verbal associations linking each cluster of words to the next, and when I try to reduce all that to sentences alone, I can’t think nearly as fast.

It’s still fun cycling through the different languages in my head, but I don’t think it’s the optimum way to practice fluency. Externalised production is much better for that, i.e. speaking and writing.

Re: the English/Irish mix, it’s a bit of a mess. ‘Táim ag éirigh sách productive leis an forced insomnia seo’ I thought when, up at 2am anyway thanks to aforesaid beep, I got a few of Gramsci’s prison letters read.

One thing I’ve noticed recently is that I reflexively start answering texts/emails in my head in Irish, regardless of the language they’re actually in. I don’t know why Irish has overtaken English as my default language in this domain. It could be simply that I’m far likelier to think ‘I will choose Irish because this person speaks Irish’ than ‘I will choose English because this person speaks English’, and the subconscious gives priority to whatever we tell it to. In dumb, imprecise ways: the command was use Irish when it will be understood, not willy-nilly! But clearly what my dark Id took from ‘Irish > English when the person speaks Irish’ was ‘Irish > all other languages, always’. And did it stutter?

Anyway.

I’m hugely enjoying the Gramsci prison letters, even with the beeping, and next on my list are Goliarda Sapienza and Maria Messina. There’s the odd thing in Gramsci’s Italian that makes me very grateful to be able to read him in the original: little details remind you that he’s writing in a second language, albeit one he grew up with, under pressure and with great urgency, often reluctantly asking friends and relatives to help him out with basic needs. If I were reading Gramsci in English translation, it would be better than not reading him at all — but I’d be at the mercy of the translator to footnote his Italian, and of the publisher to let it stand. (Publishers hate footnotes.) It’s a useful reminder of why I’m bothering with these godforsaken lemmas: so that reading Arabic can one day be what reading in Italian is for me now. Not only an unalloyed pleasure, but a way to encounter fellow minds without the mediation of anglophone curators and gatekeepers.

Anyway. This has got quite long, so I’ll stop now. Have a good one. Define your own ‘one’.

N

*Update: the example I originally used for this was his writing ‘cosí’ rather than ‘così’, but having done more digging on it, I don’t think it was necessarily a Sardinianism; people were still debating ‘così’'/‘cosí’ in the first half of the 20th century, with ‘così’ winning out in — broadly — 1939.