How to increase the number of military personnel in the U.S. that speak Arabic
Monday, September 29, 2008
Valletta, the capital of Malta. Malta speaks a language that is basically an Arabic base with a ton of Italian influence, and a lot like the Arabic spoken in Tunisia.
An idea I've had for some time now fleshed out in some more detail:
Ever since September 11th 2001 you can see every once in a while about how the military or the CIA or some other part of the government is having troubles creating fluent Arabic speakers within its ranks. The main problem here is a simple one: Arabic is hard to learn. It's easy to give up on Arabic, not because it's impossible to learn, but it can give that impression to people for the first few months before everything begins to click as eventually languages do. Here's one article from the New York Times yesterday about this:
Three years ago, the Defense Department set out to increase sharply the number of military personnel who speak strategically important languages. Progress has been slow, and the military has not determined how to reach its goal — or what exactly that goal is.In short, there's some progress but progress is slow. The other problem with Arabic is that it's not really one language either:
Figures from the department indicate that only 1.2 percent of the military receives a bonus paid to those who can speak languages judged to be of critical importance for the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other areas of strategic concern.
...
He noted that after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the United States urgently worked to develop a cadre of Russian speakers and scholars. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, neither the military nor other government agencies executed a similarly ambitious program for Arabic speakers.
The services have adopted a number of programs that have had some success. The Army developed a program to recruit native speakers of strategically important languages to serve as translators; so far, more than 600 have graduated.
The proficiency test was extremely rigorous -- the one thing people don't understand about Arabic is that it is not one language, but rather several different mutually unintelligible dialects resting under a literary language which is completely divorced from all of them. The literary language alone takes up to ten years to fully master. To gain even a passive understanding of these dialects takes several more years of intensive study.In addition to this, the difficulty of conducting background checks on people that have Arabic as a first language makes it harder than would be expected to find good translators:
Many of these applicants still have relatives abroad, often in countries that raise alarm among security officers. Former intelligence officials say that besides the problems of conducting thorough background checks in those countries, the agency also worries that recruits could be blackmailed if their families were vulnerable.So what is needed then is some way to make Arabic easier to learn for those that don't have it as a first language, and at the same time it can't just be standard Arabic either, and thus should incorporate learning regional varieties at the same time, a tall order.
So here is an idea to make this process somewhat easier. One four-year Arabic language training program for the military could be devised as follows:
- First four to six months: train the students in Interlingua for the first month or two, then spend the next months going over relevant texts about the Middle East to give the students a good background knowledge of what they are about to get into. Why Interlingua? Because the next step is to:
- Learn Maltese. Maltese is basically Arabic plus a huge amount of Italian influence (some 52% of the vocabulary comes from Romance sources) in the same way that English is a Germanic language plus a huge amount of influence from Latin and French, and is similar to Tunisian Arabic. The students, having already learned Interlingua (Interlingua is a constructed language that is a lot like Italian without any complicated grammar) will now be familiar with most of the vocabulary that comes from Romance languages (thus almost 50%) and will have a head start in learning it. Note that it also doesn't use the Arabic alphabet so there's no problem there. They then study Maltese for six months in class and then are sent to Malta for a year of intensive training. Malta is an island and a part of the European Union, which also makes it safer and less of a culture shock (it's 98% Roman Catholic for example) for the students who will still only be starting their second year.
DemografijaFrom this paragraph alone can be recognized the words demographics, population, drastic, quota (?), mill-period (probably millennium), process, accelerate, capital, centre, administrative, commercial. Some Italian words in there too like sviluppo (development).
Il-populazzjoni tal-Belt Valletta naqset drastikament matul is-snin, u illum il-ġurnata l-kwota naqset għal madwar terz mill-perjodu bl-aktar popolazzjoni. Dan il-proċess aċċelera aktar wara t-Tieni Gwerra Dinjija hekk kif żvilupp ġdid fis-subborgi ra lill-popolazzjoni timxi 'l barra mill-belt kapitali, però l-Belt xorta baqgħet u għadha bħala ċ-ċentru amministrattiv u kummerċjali ta' Malta.
- Now the students are familiar with a semitic language, and have a strong practical foundation that will enable them to understand through actual experience how regional varieties of Arabic differ from standard Arabic. Now they come back to the U.S. and learn standard Arabic, in an immersion setting like this one perhaps. The students will already know Maltese and will adapt very quickly to standard Arabic. Do this for a year or more. Then finally:
- Give the students training in one other regional version of Arabic, depending on which area they will be expected to start working in. By this time they should already have an idea of where they could make themselves most useful, and a decision will be made in accordance with that and which region has the largest need for them. Depending on the facilities available this could be done in the U.S. or may require sending them abroad.
These four years won't be enough to make the students capable translators from the start (translators need years of cultural experience anyway and this can't be rushed), but it will accomplish two things:
1) Make the language less intimidating by gradually moving towards standard Arabic only after Interlingua and Maltese instead of starting from day one with standard Arabic, complete with a different script and grammar and culture and everything else that combines to give the student the impression that "Wow, I'm seriously never going to learn this; time to give up and think about working in another field".
2) Give the students a better background in regional varieties of the language. There are a ton of articles that explain the problem agencies have with recruiting people that know Arabic but have no familiarity with any regional varieties, and are less useful than expected when listening to recordings / translating and analyzing documents.
Finally, Persian/Farsi is not as much of a problem considering how much easier it is to learn. The only problem there is the impression that Persian is as hard as Arabic, so this fact just needs to be made more clear when thinking about trying to train more people in the language in the long term. Persian is basically a language of no great difficulty, masked in a difficult-looking exterior.
17 comments:
I have long been convinced of the benefit of a gradual approaching to a target language, and that is one of the main reasons I like Interlingua (in the context of learning Romance languages or English).
Unfortunately, the idea of "learning one language to achieve another" is a hard sell to those who are not language geeks, since it is a study method with counter-intuitive results on what concerns time and effort spent. It is hard to conceive good arguments to change the mainstream feeling on this issue.
Maybe many more studies with hard statistical data would be needed to make people less skeptical of that.
I would usually agree with that when talking about other languages, but when training people in Arabic these agencies need them to learn one or more other varieties of Arabic anyway so they will actually be learning two or three languages anyway. That's why I think it would be best to start with the easiest variety of Arabic, move to regular Arabic and then maybe one more. Interlingua wouldn't be strictly necessary of course, so that's where we would need more hard statistical data because it's possible that going straight to Maltese would be faster.
A couple of points: I live in Riyadh. I don’t agree that Arabic is “not really one language” at all. Sure, there are different dialects, but a Moroccan or a Tunisian does not need an interpreter to speak with someone from the Gulf or from Jordan. The biggest obstacle in learning Arabic—until this year—was the alphabet. But now there is a generally accepted Romanization, and that was never the case before. It’s interesting that Ataturk imposed the use of the Roman script over the Osmanli script and did so within a year. The year after, I’ve read, no books were published in Turkey. The new script in Arabic is called “arabizi.” This is somewhat confusing, because the word “arabizi” also refers to mixing Arabic and English. “Arabizi” is the use of the Roman alphabet plus certain numbers to express the language on mobile phones and on computers when you don’t have an Arabic-enabled operating system. The word for lawyer, for example, is written “mu7ami.” This grew up out of necessity, but what’s fascinating is that there’s general agreement on how to use it. That means that everyone can read it. This makes learning so much easier. It’s unrealistic to expect that someone can learn the Arabic alphabet in three days. Given the forms of the letters, there are really 72 of them, in the same way that there are 52 letters in the Roman alphabet (Aa,Bb,Cc etc.) Not all of these letters are like “c”, that is a smaller version of the capital.
Finally, I disagree that learning Maltese as a gateway to Arabic is a bad idea. The one advantage that Maltese had was its use of the Roman alphabet and the basic grammatical structure of the language (sun letters, moon letters, use of verbs, etc.). My Saudi friends tell me that on their visits to Malta, they can communicate, with some difficulty, with a Maltese speaker. It’s true that much of the vocabulary is different, but then, much is the same. On that note, few people realize how pervasive the sharing of vocabulary is between Arabic and Spanish. There are over 5000. Most know about the words that begin with al- but there are many more. Even the formal word for you, “Usted” in Spanish, comes from the Arabic ustedun, “sir” or “teacher.” The Guadalquivir river is wadi al-kabeer, or “big river.” The word macabre, which our etymologies tell us comes from French, is actually taken from the Arabic word for cemetery, maqbara. Arabic can be pronounced like Spanish as well. The results aren’t perfect and a few sounds are very different, but people nevertheless understand.
Once the textbooks are translated into Arabizi, the task will become much easier.
Just my two cets.
About the Arazibi you've mentioned: I guess it is a similar phenomenon to the grassroots emergency of widespread conventions of alternative spellings and abbreviations for English ("netspeak"), Portuguese ("internetês") and many languages around the world for communication through chatrooms, instant messengers and mobile phones, isn't it?
About the Spanish word "usted": it wasn't taken from Arabic. Actually, it is a contraction of "vuestra merced" ("Your Mercy") that changed a bit over time ("vusted" -> "usted"). You can see the same in the Portuguese language (another Iberian-Romance language influenced by Arabic), which has the word "você", a contraction of "vossa mercê" ("Your Mercy").
But I agree with you that Portuguese and Spanish have a lot of words taken from Arabic, many of which not starting with "al" (such as Portuguese "açougue", meaning "butcher", from Arabic "assok"/"as-suq").
I know about the supposed provenance of "Usted", but I don't believe it. The penultimate edition of the Royal Academy's dictionary failed to reference insh'allah when defining ojalá, the Spanish word follows the Arabic. The similarities between Ud. and ustedun are simply too obvious to be mere coincidence, and Ud. is too dissimilar to the formal "you" in the rest of the Romance languages, though I don't know much about Romanian. Let's not forget that there are political and religious issues as well. At least as recently as four years ago, meetings of the Royal Academy began with an invocation to the Holy Spirit, not the call to prayer.
I have also heard that Greek kids will text each other using the Roman alphabet, but that's probably going too far. The Arab kids often don't have a choice.
You are definitely correct when you say that Spanish "ojalá" and Portuguese "oxalá" come from Arabic ("in sha allah").
But the similarity between Spanish "usted" and Arabic "ustedun" is simply a coincidence. As I have said, the Portuguese word "você" (Vossa Mercê) has the same origin as the Spanish word "usted" ([V]uestra Merced). There are old documents written in Spanish which use the older form "vusted". There are other variant pronouns which were formed analogously to "(v)usted", such as "vusía" (Vuestra Señoría) and "vuecencia" (Vuestra Excelencia) -- nowadays rarely used but they can be found e.g. in the classical Spanish book "Don Quijote". The pattern "Vossa/Vuestra Something" is a common pattern of formal pronouns in Iberian-Romance languages.
Search "você" in the following the Portuguese language dictionary:
http://priberam.pt/dlpo/definir_resultados.aspx?voc%EA
Still not convinced. Unless you can show the form in a 8th century text--and what we call Spanish really wasn't around until the 10th century, if you've ever tried to read El Libro de Buen Amor--the borrowing from Arabic makes more sense. "Merced" simply doesn't contract to "usted." What happened to the "r" phoneme? The second "s" sound, whether Castilian or Andalucian? Spanish in Bogota often uses "su merced," even today, alongside Usted. Not to mention that generally, Spanish is not a language of contractions, though, perhaps influenced by the Internet, words like "porfa" have been cropping up more frequently.
That Ud. comes from "vuestra merced" is accepted wisdom, but wrong.
You can believe in whatever you want. But the fact is that the mainstream etymological work (I mean scientific etymology, not folk etymology) says that "usted" comes from "vuestra merced". If you want to convince others that your etymology is correct in order to change the mainstream view on the matter, then the burden of proof is yours, not mine.
By the way, contractions in Spanish are not rare at all. For instance "al" = "a el", "del" = "de el", "otrora" = "otra hora", "entrambos" = "entre ambos", "donde quiera" = "doquiera", "hacia" = "*face a", "desde" = "*de ex de".
And equivalent words to Spanish "su merced" also used to exist in Portuguese, in contracted forms "suncê" and "assuncê". Where did the "r" from "mercê" go in "você" (Vossa Mercê), "suncê" (Sua Mercê) and "assuncê"?
Good luck in trying to change the mainstream etymological view. You will need very solid evidences for that. But, as I said, you can personally believe in whatever you want.
The "mainstream view" is simply ill-informed due to centuries' effort to suppress Arabic's influence on Spanish. The fact that the Royal Academy's dictionary entry on "ojalá" failed to mention Arabic is simply one symptom of this.
I do not pretend to comment on Portuguese, my comment is with respect to Arabic and Spanish only.
There are a few contractions in Spanish, such as the ones you've highlighted. But the language simply doesn't have a preference for them. Though here "netspeak" does have an influence, with terms such as "porfa" being used to meet the 160 character limit.
Again, saying that "ud.=vuestra merced" is a "mainstream" view or that "everyone knows this is not sufficient. Usage prior to the invasion would be definitive proof, but what was spoken then wasn't Spanish.
The word "Guadalquivir," I maintain, is prime evidence for this linguistic ignorance in Spanish. This terms clearly comes from the Arabic but the "mainstream" is clueless about its origins.
But the Royal Academy's dictionary does not fail to mention the Arabic origin of "ojalá". Type "ojalá" here:
http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/
I do not know of any anti-Arabic bias in the lexicography work of the Real Academia Española. What is provably of Arabic origin is clearly marked as such. In that same dictionary, see the origins of "aceituna", "loco" and "quintal", for instance.
See also this page (which makes a comment about the Arabic influence on the word "usted", which actually has a Romance origin, as mentioned in the article and as I have said):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_influence_on_the_Spanish_language
Look at the penultimate printed edition.
An interesting list, with more than a few omissions. Vacarí is listed, but not vaca=al bakarah. Or is this also a coincidence? Since this is also the title of the first sura of the Koran, it is unlikely that Spanish came first.
"{M}ay also have" and "happens to be pronounced": Really. What a coincidence.
"mill-perjodu" means "from the period". It has nothing to do with millenium.
"mill-perjodu" means "from the period". It has nothing to do with millenium.
Still not convinced. Unless you can show the form in a 8th century text--and what we call Spanish really wasn't around until the 10th century, if you've ever tried to read El Libro de Buen Amor--the borrowing from Arabic makes more sense. "Merced" simply doesn't contract to "usted." What happened to the "r" phoneme? The second "s" sound, whether Castilian or Andalucian? Spanish in Bogota often uses "su merced," even today, alongside Usted. Not to mention that generally, Spanish is not a language of contractions, though, perhaps influenced by the Internet, words like "porfa" have been cropping up more frequently.
That Ud. comes from "vuestra merced" is accepted wisdom, but wrong.
You are definitely correct when you say that Spanish "ojalá" and Portuguese "oxalá" come from Arabic ("in sha allah").
But the similarity between Spanish "usted" and Arabic "ustedun" is simply a coincidence. As I have said, the Portuguese word "você" (Vossa Mercê) has the same origin as the Spanish word "usted" ([V]uestra Merced). There are old documents written in Spanish which use the older form "vusted". There are other variant pronouns which were formed analogously to "(v)usted", such as "vusía" (Vuestra Señoría) and "vuecencia" (Vuestra Excelencia) -- nowadays rarely used but they can be found e.g. in the classical Spanish book "Don Quijote". The pattern "Vossa/Vuestra Something" is a common pattern of formal pronouns in Iberian-Romance languages.
Search "você" in the following the Portuguese language dictionary:
http://priberam.pt/dlpo/definir_resultados.aspx?voc%EA
Look at the penultimate printed edition.
An interesting list, with more than a few omissions. Vacarí is listed, but not vaca=al bakarah. Or is this also a coincidence? Since this is also the title of the first sura of the Koran, it is unlikely that Spanish came first.
"{M}ay also have" and "happens to be pronounced": Really. What a coincidence.
You can believe in whatever you want. But the fact is that the mainstream etymological work (I mean scientific etymology, not folk etymology) says that "usted" comes from "vuestra merced". If you want to convince others that your etymology is correct in order to change the mainstream view on the matter, then the burden of proof is yours, not mine.
By the way, contractions in Spanish are not rare at all. For instance "al" = "a el", "del" = "de el", "otrora" = "otra hora", "entrambos" = "entre ambos", "donde quiera" = "doquiera", "hacia" = "*face a", "desde" = "*de ex de".
And equivalent words to Spanish "su merced" also used to exist in Portuguese, in contracted forms "suncê" and "assuncê". Where did the "r" from "mercê" go in "você" (Vossa Mercê), "suncê" (Sua Mercê) and "assuncê"?
Good luck in trying to change the mainstream etymological view. You will need very solid evidences for that. But, as I said, you can personally believe in whatever you want.
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