Rulez is rulez

Arabic is a wonderfully insane language. It reminds me of Calvinball from Calvin and Hobbes. The only rule of Calvinball is that you can make up the rules on the spot, and you never play with the same rules twice. If you score a goal, the other team might have secretly switched the goals, so they get a point – unless it’s backwards day, of course, when the goals switch back. Every rule has exceptions, and those exceptions have exceptions. Finishing a game is just about impossible.

Arabic is similar, except all the rules were invented centuries ago by overly-intellectual scholars who apparently had nothing better to do than come up with ever-more obscure rules to complicate their language.

First you have the letters, which are written differently depending on whether they’re at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. Then you have case endings, which change the endings of some (but not all) words depending on the role of the word in the sentence. There are twelve pronouns, each with its own set of conjugations. Then you’ve got plurals, which are much more than just adding an “s” to the end of a noun – you change the word completely, sometimes based on a regular pattern but usually not, so that every for every single noun you have to memorize two distinct words, the singular and the plural. There’s also a special form you use for a group of two.

Numbers in general have their own special neuroses. You use the singular form for one, the dual for two, the plural for between three and ten, then for anything larger you go back to the singular, adding a few letters at the end just to make sure it doesn’t get too easy. Nouns and adjectives agree on gender, just like French and Spanish, except for numbers, which reverse agree – but only between three and ten. Also, any group of non-human nouns, like “books” or “chameleons”, gets treated like a single feminine noun. If the sentence starts with a verb, though, there’s no number agreement at all. If the moon is waxing, all verbs are in the masculine form until sundown, unless there’s a menstruating cat within a hundred steps of your house.

And I’ve only scratched the surface. I’m studying Fus’ha, also known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is the language of business and the media. It’s based on Classical Arabic, the language of ancient poetry and scripture, which is so complicated that Muslim scholars spend their entire lives untangling its grammar.

I imagine a group of crotchety old men sitting around a mosque fifteen hundred years ago, striving to outdo each other to invent the craziest rule.

“All right, all right, I’ve got one. We’ll make them conjugate a verb differently if it’s used in a request instead of a command.”

“Yeah! And if it comes after a pronoun instead of a noun!”

“I like it. Hard to remember, easy to screw up – you’ve got style. How about we get rid of the vowels?”

“What, all of them?”

“Most of them.”

“Don’t we need vowels?”

“Not for reading. Don’t write them down, just let people guess”

“But so many of our words are almost identical! How will people know what they’re reading if they’re not already familiar with the language?”

“Exactly.”

“Ooh. I just got shivers.”

Here’s the thing, though – there’s a method to the madness. Arabic is a constructed language, logically and lovingly fashioned according to a specific plan. Each word is based on a root of just three letters, with a template to specify the meaning.

Example: the word “kitaab” means “book”, and “maktaba” means library. “Darassa” is lesson, and “madrassa” is school. To create a word meaning the place for something, you take the root letters and stick them into the “ma_a_a” template. You can use this to make any word. If I know “play” is “la’ib”, I can make “playing field” just by throwing the template on to make “mala’iba”.

Isn’t that cool? It’s an incredible tool for prose – you can invent a new word on the fly, and anyone coming across it will immediately know what it means even if they’ve never seen it before. It allows Arabic to be a truly living language, growing and evolving as old tools are used to create new ideas. The system makes so much sense you wonder why every language wasn’t built this way.

This same devotion to logic can be seen in Arabic artwork, too, particularly the tilework. Wander into an older, upscale building and you’ll see beautiful, convoluted tile patterns festooning every wall. They’re not just for show – each color has a meaning, and the layout of the tiles is strictly determined according to a geometrical progression. If the center holds a twelve-pointed star, then there will always be six sections radiating out from it, and within those sections will be six-pointed stars, six-sided shapes, and infinite variations on that theme. You’d think such a rigid structure would repress creativity, but it’s like a haiku or a sonnet - art is enhanced by discipline.

I’m told that Islam itself carries a similar zeal for logic. It certainly has a thing for numbers – five prayers a day, five pillars, the mathematics of the calendar, the 99 names of Allah. During Ramadan in the Gambia, when people fast all day and eat after sundown, the official fast-breaking time was precisely one minute later every day (which was funny, because it was the only time I ever saw a Gambian care about the exact time). My Muslim friends say that logical thought is one of the cornerstones of their faith, and one even claimed to be able to logically prove the truth of his religion.

I love the idea of a language, a culture and a faith built on logic, and I can’t help feeling some regret when I think about it. It’s hard to look around and make the honest case that the modern Arab world has kept its ancestor’s devotion to logic. None of the dialects that are actually spoken on the street have the root and template pattern of Fus’ha – no more inventing words. Artists either copy the works of their forebears or work in new styles that are more free and open, without any connection to mathematics or geometry. And while you could call modern Arabic society many things – evolving, passionate, complicated – logical isn’t the first word that springs to mind.

I say all this with a deep respect and affection for the culture (I’m living here, after all), and I say it knowing that many Arabic intellectuals agree with me. My professor, a brilliant and intimidating bullet of a man named Abdelhafid, spends a good fifteen minutes out of every lecture bemoaning the loss of Fus’ha in everyday speech and the loss of logic in everyday thought. The civilization that invented algebra, chess, and inoculation is struggling to catch up to a world that leapfrogged it long ago.

In the 9^th century, Mulim scholars not only knew the world was round, but calculated its circumference to within less than 200km. Now that the world is flat, competitive, and looking more every day like one big game of Calvinball, it’s time to remember how to make new words.