Ill Communication

I recently had the misfortune of helping a Libyan University student of English with an assignment on something called Contrastive Analysis. The Contrastive Analysts were a school of linguists who emerged in the 1950s, buoyed with a familiar, depressingly quixotic idealistic belief that they were going to change the world. The Contrastive Analysts claimed that learning a language could be done by simply identifying the differences between the learner's native language (L1) and the language being learnt (L2) and subtracting them, thus leaving the "differences" as the only thing that needed to be learnt. Thus, if Icelandic was your native tongue, and you wished to learn, say, Ancient Aramaic, then all you needed to do was identify the differences between these two languages, subtract them and thus you would be left with the sum total of all that you needed to learn. I often find myself returning to George Orwell's quote that "only an intellectual could believe that because no-one else could be such a fool" when I come across these sorts of things but to cut a long story short, the days of Contrastive Analysis were heady ones, but they did not last. Indeed, Contrastive Analysis is a complete load of wrong-headed nonsense that was kicked into what must be an overflowing global academic waste-paper bin over fifty years ago. However, that apparently does not seem to merit its exclusion from the English syllabus at Al-Fateh University, the land's highest institution of learning. An institution where it is not uncommon to send your father in to thrash things out when a dispute with a lecturer arises. To avoid such an eventuality, I had a tricky tight-rope to cross in helping someone make an assignment factual, while simultaneously not upsetting whatever time-warped premises the lecturer concerned anchored himself to when he presumably did his PhD many decades ago. Maybe he hasn't stayed abreast, maybe he can't be bothered and maybe he just doesn't know about the fate of the Contrastive Analysts, academically buried alive as they were by newer, more streamlined schools, with the great Noam Chomsky administering the final karate chop of death. Evidently though, Chomsky has not been able to eliminate perhaps the final, clinging outpost at Al-Fateh University, where the last Contrastive Analyst clings to his creed, like a Japanese soldier still fighting the Second World War on some Pacific island while his compatriots are inventing the walkman. Although long since discredited, Contrastive Analysis did identify (and I use identify in the sense that social scientists and other such academics mean it, to give a fancy term to something which everyone already knew existed) the linguistic phenomenon of interference. Interference is the term given to the practice of incorrectly using a linguistic structure in your native language in the language that you are learning. It accounts for an Italian learner of English saying "I have hunger", translating directly from the Italian "Ho fame" and for the English speaker interpreting "Ho Fame" as "I am famous" I don't know if interference may in some part explain a Libyan taxi driver yesterday telling me that "Elton John is no man", adding "And George Michael, no man. Yes? Elton John and George Michael together. Yes? (accompanied by hand gesture). Both no man." Though the language is garbled and broken, you strain your brian and somehow, against all the odds, the message comes through. And an important message it was in this instance.
I have often found this the case even though I think that my main problem with speaking Arabic is not interference. I have no difficulty with the concept of subtracting the differences between the two languages. It is just learning the differences that I have a problem with. Not that I haven't improved. Gone are the tentative attempts of the early days when 'Can you drive me to a vet's?' came out as "Please, you take me to the doctor of the cat and of the dog?' and 'It's raining' was 'The water it comes down from the sky.' An even more desperate attempt went something along the lines of, "The man, the black man, not black man but his clothes it is black, oh or maybe yellow now, maybe even green. This man, the boss, he is not good." Which was my way of trying to say, "The referee was crap." Although many Libyans speak surprisingly good English, these days I find myself able to conduct semi-coherent conversations in Arabic, although about what can sometimes be a problem. The lack of cultural references can be as big a barrier to communication as the language itself. Despite the taxi driver's impressive knowledge of homosexual English pop stars, very few have heard of Elvis, the Beatles and even the name David Beckham will receive blank faces from women. Noel Edmonds is definitely a non-starter.
Religion can be a bore to speak about and indeed, proselytizing is an important tenet of the Muslim faith. Politics is best avoided, although I did once find myself tricked into speaking about it by my friend Bashir, who casually asked if I had seen Saddam Hussein arraigned in court on TV the previous day. I told him that I had and he asked what I thought of him, to which I answered with what I thought was the diplomatic, yet truthful, "I think that he is not a good man." Bashir replied, with some measure of anger, "But what about Sharon? Is he a good man? Why isn't he arrested?" Unwittingly, I had found myself in at the deep end of a heated, unwanted contrastive analysis of the relative merits of Saddam Hussein and Ariel Sharon. Luckily, I had no moral problem with stating that I thought that Sharon was also a bad man, so I managed to find an exit strategy out of the discussion. Often it is not wise to pursue a debate analytically as depth of feeling usually outweighs intellectual discourse. The belief that Ariel Sharon is the devil incarnate is accepted as fact and should not normally be challenged. As the same Bashir put it, in a rather un-Muslim fashion on the eve of Eid, the celebration at the end of Ramadan, "Eid is here and Sharon is dying. It is a great day!"
The Arab trait of replying to a question in the affirmative with the fatalistic "Inshallah" (if God wills it) often incurs the wrath of Westerners, suspicious that it indicates individual willingness to assume personal responsibility. Although I think that is perhaps a slightly paranoid, unfair reading it is not that surprising that the inability to extract the word yes from someone can be frustrating. As I experienced myself when asking a Libyan if next Thursday, Jamahariya Day, was a public holiday.
"Is next Thursday a public holiday?"
"Inshallah"
"Is it definitely a day off?"
"Inshallah"
"OK so, God willing, if HE wills it, next Thursday, we do not have to come into work then?"
"Inshallah"
You just can't win sometimes. Libyan Arabic has many charming traits in its lexicon, such as the common, greeting 'Shini gew?' literally "How is your weather?" You can reply to this by using the pan-Arabic 'miya miya' (one hundred one hundred, or 100 per cent fine). If you wish to go for an extended greeting (and often greetings in Arabic seem to extend from the simple 'How are you?' and 'How's your family?' to the extremities of 'How's you cat?' and 'How's your toaster?') then you can reply to 'Shini gew?' with 'Behhi'(Good), at which point your interlocutor may feel obliged to add 'Gul behhi, jigik is-shehi' (If you are good, your tea will come), which I think is something along the lines of everything comes to he who waits.
If you don't have a car, it is colloquial to say that you have a Renault 11, with the two 1s representing your legs. There is often recourse to some more flowery, purple in expressions like "The sun has melted the butter of the stars" and Arabic is also rich in idioms. 'In the eyes of the monkey's mother, it is a gazelle', a testament to the unwavering power of maternal love, is one of my favourites. In its universality presumably it applies even to Ariel Sharon's mother.
Even Saddam Hussein's.
Even Elton John's.
Even the mother of the Contrastive Analyst at Al-Fateh University.