Some people say Arabic is like the ocean; others, a dark and bottomless well
After my History of Syria and Lebanon teacher withdrew from his post under mysterious circumstances, my classmates and I unanimously decided to cancel the class rather than looking for a new history professor. I elected, after perhaps an equally mysterious thought process, to join an 8 am grammar class. It proved to be a huge improvement over the history class, which is saying something since the grammar class, though perversely enjoyable, consists of learning grammatic rules so arcane that I have to create two categories in my mind: grammar for the grammar class and grammar professor, and grammar for everyone else. The professor is obsessed with what he considers to be Widespread Grammatical Mistakes that include such “neologisms” as في نفس الوقت, في الوقت ذاته, بشكل عام، بشكل خاص, and many more that most college-educated Syrians consider perfectly acceptable, provoking regular academic arguments among the CASA teachers as to just which usages they should allow in our writing assignments. Its sort of the equivalent of an English teacher stringently preventing her or his students from splitting infinitives, only much worse, since all the guy’s proof of his grammatical rules come from sources that are at least 1000 years old, literally. Oh, Arabic.
Jonathan said,
March 7, 2009 at 10:45 am
How are those neologisms? My understanding was that neologisms were more like
جوقلة
جيوسياسي
So maybe في الوقت would count, but what are the others concatenating?
Sarah said,
March 8, 2009 at 7:18 am
sorry the expression got split cause of the formatting, that was supposed to be
في الوقت ذاته
which the grammar prof says is wrong, he says you should only say
في الوقت نفسه and definitely never في نفس الوقت
as for the other ones, he says شكل should only be used to describe outward appearances and it’s a mistake to use it metaphorically in بشكل عام or بشكل عميق or what have you, even though that is the prevailing usage and i’m certainly not going to stop saying it because of him.
and anyway, for this guy a neologism is any construction thats not found in the qur’an, jahili poetry, early classical poetry….he accepts the entrance of new words into arabic to describe new things, but not new expressions. the guy is quite a character; he really loves grammar and has written about 60 books on the subject.