grammar chart kills puppy

I often wonder about my interest- can I say it's a passion?- in learning Arabic. It's not something I fully understand. I sometimes think people take to other cultures, languages, and countries because they find something kindred in them. (Or because they spend a semester in Africa after 20 or so years lived in the suburbs and are struggling to figure out how to assimilate their abroad experience into their American life and cognitive dissonance makes them a bit black and white, rejecting the strip mall and longing for the village.) I don't think that's true for me and Arabic, or Egypt. If anything, it's the foreignness that draws me- learning something so different from what I know and learning to take part in it.

Then there's desire. I have a real desire- and desire is such an interesting, mysterious force- to learn and speak this language. I don't mean desire in the way that we can casually want something, such as wanting the bus to come on time. I mean desire as in appetite, as in craving, as in getting close to something and wanting to get closer.

And you thought French and Italian were romance languages. Anyway, it's a mysterious feeling but today, after reading an Amazon review of an Arabic-English dictionary, (hello, internet-inspired expansion of "the canon" and that which is deemed quotable!), I think maybe studying this language appeals to both my need for structure and logic and my need for relationship and mystery and art.

Because language is all of those things. This Amazon review spends a bunch of paragraphs describing how the set-up of the dictionary mirrors Arabic grammar. Which must be tremendously boring, almost unreadable to anyone but the few of us wired to find something to desire in learning Arabic grammar, and which I'm refraining from describing. And then the author busts out this:

"This dictionary strips the patterns of the Arab language bare. This incredible semantic superstructure is one even many native speaking Arabs are mostly unaware of. Still, sometimes - okay, maybe often - this dictionary (like scientific things can so often do) kills the puppy, dissects it, and gives you a chart. But the essence of that puppy isn't in the chart. It's a more metaphysical reality. A living, breathing, wriggling thing, one that requires much more intuition than logic to understand.. The Arab language is just such a reality. Another semantic universe, truly exotic to an English speaking mind, a vivid poetic wonder.

You know, studying Arabic is a real pleasure. It's truly sublime."

Grammar? Amazon reader reviews? It's true- mystery and desire live even there.

riverbend, where are you?

Ok, seriously, I'm starting to miss Riverbend.

And I haven't even been reading her for that long.

She's the Iraqi who started blogging when the war started in 2003. Her entries have been published in two volumes, in multiple languages. She's won journalism awards. She's humanized the war for many Americans. She's one of the reasons to have a tiny bit of hope about the internet and journalism. She left Iraq last year and her blog Baghdad Burning hasn't been updated since last October, when she wrote about living in Syria.

Anyway, Riverbend, I check your blog at least once a week, and I'm wondering where you are, and I want you to let us know. It's funny, this dependence we develop on certain voices. At least me, I'm drawn to those people who say things that are true and sharp. I count on them.