Ba finally understands why there are so many problems in the Middle East. They speak Arabic there. No wonder they're so angry.
I thought it was the extremely hot a dry weather combined with an irrational dislike of alcohol and other such things that relax you.
And there was I thinking it was just Roman's fault... Maybe if all concerned parties were left in the freezer for a while before the next peace talks it would work better ?:bunny:
Now, now, Ba, we've already discussed this one. No one actually speaks the Arabic that Ba is currently studying - Modern Standard Arabic is the language of universities, diplomats, and is generally reserved to the high society of yesterday's Arab elites. It was a rather vain attempt at restoring and codifying Classic Arabic to create a regional meta-identity, utterly ignoring the fact that people actually developed diverging language branches over the centuries. Egyptian Arabic and Iraqi Arabic, for example, are no more dialects than Ukrainian and Russian are dialects. Ba will have to unlearn quite a bit before he'll actually be able to speak any of the local languages. But on the bright side, he will at least be able to mingle freely with Cairo's rich and famous. Or Syria's Ba'ath officials. Whichever he prefers. But in any case, Ba would have reached a similar conclusion had he but browsed the Arabic repertoire of curses, swearwords, and otherwise insulting expressions. There are so many of them... Ba should really look on the bright side, though! Once he's done studying Modern Standard, he has so many more regional Arabic languages left to study! And of course, Ba will find it much easier to study Hebrew.
Ba has learned enough to know that the dialects are improved mostly by losing the dual form. They are still Arabic. And why would Ba want to learn Hebrew? The only thing he could do with Hebrew is speak to Roman.
