Tuesday, October 12, 2004

English speakers have feelings too you know.

Hello Dudes and Dudettes,
I am glad to announce that I have started blogging in Arabic at ihath-losing myself bel arabi. Thanks to Muhammad for providing the inspiration to get me to start writing in Arabic. Before I started this blog I tried to search around for other Arabic blogs in order to get inspiration, sadly I found very few. The only one that I found and liked was moodless, a blog of a young Kuwaiti fellow. His writing style is poetic and reflective in nature...very interesting. Through his blog I discovered the Kuwaiti Blogosphere, who knew? Exploring that a bit, most of the blog are in English as well.

It seems that we Arabs suffer from englishites blogarism, the uncontrollable desire to blog in English. Perhaps one of the many, many doctor Iraqi bloggers can prescribe a cure.

I also have been exploring the Iranian Blogosphere and found a bazillion of blogs and most of them are in Persian with only a few in English. A good starting point to the Iranian blogosphere is hossein derakhshan. It seems that Iranians are less prone to englishites blogarism disease. Must be all the chello kebab they eat.

10 Comments

#10/12/2004 09:20:00 pm Assalam Aleikom Blogger liminal

Yea, ihath, I want to do it too, but my concern is that the information that needs to be shared the most is this dialogue from Iraqis (say) to the West. I believe, though, the next step (and you'll be one of the many pioneers in this respect) is to strengthen the exchange of information among Arabic speaking peoples on the internet. This will be only to our great advantage, but I am feeling that Iraqis speaking Arabic and writing in English on blogs is where we are now. And that's a pretty great place. The more, the better.

Also, I haven't figured out how to do it with the system I have now. So, perhaps it's just laziness. Annnnd, there's the fact that I am scared and embarrassed as to what state my Arabic is in to be quite honest. Faiza didn't approve of some of my wording many moons ago when I tried to help her. And that kind of scarred me because I worked quite hard on it. Of course, I could have done it better, but she had a deadline for me...and I was rushing. yada.

Oh boy...but, I'll try to work on doing one, too. Count me in...when I have the time. :)

Lim

 
#10/12/2004 09:45:00 pm Assalam Aleikom Blogger ihath

Dear Liminal,
I am embaressed about the state of my arabic too. I haven't written an arabic essay since high school. That is long long long time ago. Even back then I was good in science and math but not so good in arts and composition. My husband read my latest arabic essay and his only comment was "it is not as strong as your english essays". Even learning to type arabic on a keyboard took long time to get used to. I think if just write my skills will get stronger with time. In the end, a bridge works both ways, from Iraq to the west and from the west to Iraq

 
#10/12/2004 10:00:00 pm Assalam Aleikom Blogger liminal

yes a bridge does work both ways...funny huh? but where is the dialogue missing the most? i mean, us arabic peoples, we sit around all day and talk amongst ourselves over gahweh and chai, (and in saddam's time we had to even be weary of what we said in private) bess' what is missing the most forming the base-architectural idea of the bridge (if I may extend the metaphor even further) has been the Iraqi person's voice period. And that's why if there are not legitimate elections, Iraq will be lost. We need 100% of Iraq to be voting, or else we are screwed. And no bridges will ever be built. I hate to sound so gloom, but it's really our only chance. And I'm putting all my hope on this now. Because things are spiraling downward at too fast a pace.

(breath in)

(out)

okay

yada,
lim

 
#10/12/2004 10:10:00 pm Assalam Aleikom Blogger ihath

يا سيد ليمينال
لازم نتعلم نتكلم بينا وبين بعضنا
أنا زمان لما كنت أقابل واحد عراقي كنت أخاف منه. يمكن بعثي, يمكن جاسوس
لأول مره في حياتي أشعر إني ممكن أتكلم مع أي شخص بحريه
في كلام كثير وقصص كثيره ممكن نحكيها لبعض لأول مره

 
#10/13/2004 04:53:00 am Assalam Aleikom Blogger Rob

No! Don't create a cure for the Englishites Blogarism disease! If that happens then I won't be able to read the great blogs from Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and all the other countries out there.

No cure! No cure!!

:)

 
#10/13/2004 11:23:00 am Assalam Aleikom Anonymous Anonymous

hi ihath, i must admit: my arabix counts just about five words now... but we also are trying with the streamtime-site to have arabic as well as english. working on it. we have a beautiful group of iraqi artists here in the netherlands. poets, painters and actors. one of the poets will teach some of us iraqi arabix! so i hope one day i will be able to recite a long selfmade poem! but you are right to start up a blog in arabic. as lim says, it is important to have or create communication from iraqis to 'the west' (and what about the chinese??), but i think it is at least as important, or maybe even more important, to create communication between iraqis in iraq and the ones in the diaspora. this was the original idea and reason for www.streamtime.org to come to existence. i hope we will manage to make a radio-stream from amsterdam next sunday, the poets here will give a presentation in arabic of their work. (with dutch translation!). if we can manage the tech-stuff i'll announce it more specifically. i just want to say: this seems the way to go. using both languages, and some persian too (chinese! chinese!). but indeed, until our arabic isn't perfect, please keep on blogging in english too and don't hurt our sensi-feelings too much. :)

 
#10/13/2004 11:31:00 am Assalam Aleikom Anonymous Anonymous

sorry, that was me: cecile

 
#10/13/2004 02:28:00 pm Assalam Aleikom Blogger emigre

Wonderful. A great motivation to increase my vocab beyond "assalam aleikom" and "maa asalama". From a purely aesthetic point of view, characters in other languages always look beautiful to me.

Btw, tried the link to bel arabi but can only see your source code? (another language i'm not especially fluent in lol).

 
#10/13/2004 07:06:00 pm Assalam Aleikom Blogger ihath

Thank you Emigre, I think I fixed the problem now. Can you please check it again and let me know if it is working for you.

cheers

 
#10/14/2004 12:35:00 am Assalam Aleikom Blogger moodless

salam
thank you ihath for the nice comments about my blog :)

it was a challenge in the beggining to write in arabic, but since my english doesnt help me to write what i want, so i returned to arabic, its kind of related to what u read, if u read arabic u will find ur self catching new words..

emigra,
i noticed that to, but it happens only with mozilla firefox, it works fine in Internet Explorer
maybe becuase the file it self doesnt have an extension like .htm or html or php..

 

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