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Dear Mark,<br>
You've started an interesting thread re. writing Egyptian Arabic that has
partly to do with diglossia and partly, as Misty pointed out with the
case of Corsican, to do with attitudes towards writing
minority/vernacular languages more generally.<br>
<br>
In Morocco both issues come into play when writing Tashelhit and other
varieties of Tamazight (or 'Berber'). The diglossic relationship in
Morocco is between Standard Arabic on the one hand and Moroccan Arabic
('derija') or one of the Tamazight varieties (Tashelhit, Tamazight or
Tarifit) on the other hand. As for models for writing vernacular
Arabic, there is poetry for sale in the market even today (eg Mejdub, who
coined many of the proverbs in circulation) going back around 6
centuries. I imagine that there is some verbal art in Egyptian
aamiya as well (at least there is in the Syrian Arabic, eg plays that
students could read in class as examples of vernacular languages in
print). <br>
<br>
The thorny issue in Morocco is with Tamazight, an umbrella term for a
variety of languages forms that are in the throes of being standardized
for the purposes of writing as well as radio use. This is a project
both indigenous rights activists and linguists have gotten involved
in. Writing Berber suggests sympathy with a political project that
to some smacks of anti-establishment and anti-nationalism -- dangerous
allegiances indeed.<br>
<br>
I encountered a resistence to writing Tamazight quite frequently while
working in SW Morocco over the past 4 years. This resistence came
in several forms that might interest fellow Arabists as well as
non-Arabists.<br>
<br>
First, there was the common-sense assumption of the person on the street
that a way of speaking that did not already "have" a written
component was not dignified enough to put into writing. Writing, in
this part of the country where a majority of people are not literate, was
an honor reserved for only a few languages.<br>
<br>
Second was an issue more relevant to my own transcription work. My
assistant, who holds a university degree in English linguistics and is a
native Tashelhit speaker but had never written Tashelhit before,
constantly found herself trying to approproximate conventions for writing
Arabic when we transcribed Tashelhit. We used the Arabic script,
which she was more comfortable with and which I thought more appropriate
since there was so much borrowing and code-switching into Arabic. (French
ethnographers and linguists overwhelmingly use Latin script and have set
the conventions for many Moroccan Berberist scholars as well.) My
assistant and I encountered two notable problems: diacritics and
religious language. <br>
<br>
Re. diacritics: when a sound resembled one found in classical
Arabic, she wanted to write it according to Arabic conventions -- eg the
IPA sound "i" she wanted to transcribe with an alif (and would
put the hamza underneath). My convention was to use the y letter in
arabic to avoid the necessity of diacritics (which of course the alif
required). <br>
<br>
For me, avoiding diacritics was an ideological choice as well as a
practical one. One of the arguments frequently launched against
writing Tashelhit/Tamazight at all is that without diacritical marks
these language varieties are not comprehensible. Since it is
difficult to use extensive diacriticals for small print (newspapers
etc.), this amounts to an argument against writing in the vernaculars at
all. I developed a system whereby diacritics were not
necessary. But to my transcription assistant, the conventions
flouted common sense about how you're supposed to write (based of course
on approaches to text she was socialized into in Arabic).<br>
<br>
Re. religious language: Moroccans both Arabic and Tashelhit speakers
pepper their speech with frozen forms from classical Arabic, praises to
God and the prophet and other religious invocations, sometimes
assimilated into Tashelhit. My desire to capture the phonological
contours of these phrases, especially when they differed from classical
Arabic, was not shared by my devout assistant, who found this
blasphemous. After going round and round on this issue for months,
I gave up. Capturing those particular phonological contours in the
end was not as important to my research as working in a way that allowed
my assistant to retain her dignity and piety -- she had worked hard to
master classical Arabic for religious devotation, and I seemed to be
asking her to deface it. From that point on, whenever we ran across
a classical Arabic phrase that I wasn't sure how to write in
"proper" Arabic, I passed the notebook and pencil to her to
record the phrase as she knew it should be written (including all of the
proper diacriticals).<br>
<br>
There is no ideology-free transcript. We pick our battles.<br>
<br>
Katherine Hoffman<br>
Visiting Assistant Professor<br>
Department of Anthropology<br>
UCLA<br>
<br>
<br>
At 01:25 PM 3/25/00 +0200, Mark A Peterson wrote: <br>
<br>
<blockquote type=cite cite> <br>
<br>
I had a very interesting class discussion on diglossia the other day and
I m hoping some of you can help me sort it out.<br>
<br>
In my undergraduate fieldwork methods class the other day, I was trying
to explain why I wanted them to each produce a verbatim transcript of one
of their interviews. <br>
<br>
One of the students said, "But my interviews are in colloquial
Arabic. Shouldn t I translate the words to proper Arabic?"<br>
<br>
Sighing, I once more explained that I wanted verbatim transcripts, so
that we could compare transcripts with interview notes as an exercise
when we looked at transcripts (and read some things by Moerman and
others). I went into a short, canned diatribe I keep handy about the
argument that colloquial isn t real Arabic (convincing an American
English teacher that AAVE is a "real" dialect of English is
nothing to convincing most Egyptians that Amayyah is "real"
Arabic of a sort)<br>
<br>
But my student shook her head and said she had no problem with the idea
of transcribing as being proper. Her concern was more practical:
"How will I be able to read it?" she asked. Several other
students were nodding their heads.<br>
<br>
What I had thought was an argument about "correctness" (Fusha
is <i>real</i> Arabic and Amayyah is not) turned out instead to be a very
practical and pragmatic argument about diglossia, and specifically about
the relationship of high and low codes to the media of transmission. The
student was concerned that if she transcribed the interview exactly as
spoken, she would be literally <i>unable</i> to read it, at least not
without a great deal of effort.<br>
<br>
"Well, we are going to put a great deal of effort into reading
these," I replied. "Anthropologists deal with unwritten
languages all the time. So just do it."<br>
<br>
So much for the pedagogical problem. The linguistic problem is more
complex. It is not enough to simply argue that there are rules about what
code to use in what situation, as most descriptive sociolinguistic
studies do. My students have no problem with my assigning them work that
violates social rules. They re used to it. <br>
<br>
What they are complaining about is a problem with language perception and
comprehension. Written amayyah, they claim, is literally
<i>unreadable</i>, however common it is to speak.<br>
<br>
I have run into similar claims in India with regards to different
languages. One woman told me, "If I was sitting on a train and was
bored and really wanted something to read, and there was a Hindi
newspaper sitting abandoned on the seat next to me, it would never even
occur to me to pick it up." This woman spoke Hindi at home and read
(or used to read, it s not clear from the interview) romantic novels in
Hindi but newspapers (and "technical reading" like textbooks)
she said had to be in English. I have lots more examples like this and
have handled this Indian data in terms of connecting genres and language
ideologies. It strikes me, however, that there is something different
about the diglossic argument my students.<br>
<br>
I would welcome any comments and references to relevant literature.<br>
<font size=2>Mark Allen Peterson<br>
Asst. Professor of Anthropology<br>
The American University in Cairo<br>
PO Box 2511, Cairo 11511 EGYPT<br>
<a href="mailto:peterson@aucegypt.edu">peterson@aucegypt.edu</a></font><br>
<br>
<font size=2>"Laughter overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions,
no limitations. Its idiom is never used by violence and
authority."<br>
-- Mikhail
Bakhtin</font></blockquote><br>
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