Language Johnson
Arabic
Playing with Mubarak's name
Feb 11th 2011, 16:41 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
(Note: Just as this post was completed it seems Mubarak is resigning. Congratulations, or mabrouk! See below for the pun.)
I'M LOOKING forward to the piece Ben Zimmer says he'll be writing for this weekend's New York Times on the creative uses of language in the anti-Mubarak protests. We've seen signs in Hebrew, possibly intended to convey that that's the only language Mubarak understands. And Victor Mair found a variant in Chinese: perhaps if Mubarak doesn't get irhal ("leave!") he might get the Mandarin chufa.
But one thing that Mr Zimmer notes—a contest to make Mr Mubarak's name a verb—is going to be hard in Arabic, and this game may have to be played in English. In English, it's easy to make anything a verb: simply put whatever word you like in verb position. I pwn you, Google Mountweazels Bing, go Cheney yourself, and so forth. Conjugation isn't hard; just add "s" or "ed" where needed.
Arabic has a much more elaborate verb paradigm. As I mentioned yesterday, native Arabic words are built around a three-letter root with a general area of meaning. (ktb="writing", slm="peace", and so on). To make verbs (and other forms), you prefix, suffix and insert various consonants and vowels from well-established patterns. These can be simple (kataba, "he wrote") or complicated (yaktatibouna, "they make a copy"). Arabs can create new three-letter roots from unusual sources; I read the other day of yblisi, "he wounds", in Moroccan Arabic. Can you guess the source? French blesser, from which the Moroccans abstracted a faux-Semitic root, bls, and ran it through the paradigm.
The problem is that you can't abstract a nonce root from Mubarak, because it already has an honored and traditional one: brk, or "blessing". "Mubarak" means "blessed", mubaraka is a congratulation or well-wishing, and so on. You could say "abaarakak, Mubarak!", or "I congratulate you, Mubarak!", and play with the brk root and Mubarak's name in many other ways. But it certainly wouldn't be straightforward to "make Mubarak a verb" in Arabic, because it's already a verb (or, more properly, the passive participle of a verb).
Incidentally, many Egyptians in Tahrir Square don't seem to be getting the White House's increasingly pointed messages telling Mr Mubarak to head for the exit; yesterday on CNN I saw a few more who still seem to think Barack Obama is supporting the dictator 100%. That would make for some puns. As Mr Zimmer wrote several years ago, "Barack" comes from the Swahili "baraka"—blessing, borrowed from the Arabs. Take it away, Egyptian punsters.
Update: See the excellent comments on how Mubarak might after all be made into a productive Arabic root.
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I would disagree with you as to the reason that Mubarak can't be made into a verb in Arabic. I'll give the example of "markiz" meaning center. The word is derived from the root rkz, which connotes balance, focus, etc. However, there is verb that is derived from "markiz" as opposed to the root rkz, and that's "tamarkaza," which means to center or to focus.
The reason that Mubarak cannot be made into a verb is simply that the verb would have five radicals (probably something like mbwrk), and there are simply no quinqueliteral verb patterns in Arabic.
Forgot to add: the root of the word tamarkaza is also different from the root of markiz. It's no longer rkz but rather the quadriliteral mrkz.
Don't underestimate the derivational resources of Arabic or the ingenuity of its users. Mubarak could quite easily be turned into a quadriliteral verb, most likely of the second pattern: tamabraka. Foreign words are quite often placed into such morphological molds—ta'amraka (to become Americanized), tahatlara (to act like Hitler)—and "native" Arabic words can be as well (just like tamarkaza, as Shikaakwa notes). There is no reason, however, as Shikaakwa's second paragraph suggests, that Mubarak would require a quinqueliteral verb: the long ā (alif) in his name can readily be discarded as a vowel from the pattern (i.e., a form III passive participle) rather than from the root. Now we just have to decide what tamabraka would mean…
Thanks, and would you please go on, R.L.G, Shikaakwa and Fiorentino 97?
I'm greatly enjoying this introduction to Arabic as a web debate.
Interesting language. The simple root structure of the words and the writing based mostly on consonants must make it a bit fuzzy and certainly good for poetry.
Verb or no verb, one can still have great fun with Mubarak. Consider the phrase youm mubarak. As an indefinite noun-adjective clause, it could be translated as blessed day. Many Egyptians would see yesterday like that.
On the other hand, Youm Mubarak could also be read as an idafa, a genitive clause, that would translate to the day of Mubarak, which yesterday certainly wasn't. Context makes the meaning.
A great potential for puns might be that through an unbelievable coincidence, the names of Mubarak and Barack Obama are from the same root (بارك or bāraka, "to bless"). In Obama's case the name comes through Swahili, which has many Arabic loanwords due to the influence of Arab traders on the east coast of Africa. The name of Swahili is also of Arabic derivation itself, from ساجل sāḥil meaning "coast". (The Sahel is also the name given to the edge of the Sahara that is a transition zone between North and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Obama also noted the similarity between his name and the Hebrew word ברוך baruch (also meaning blessed and cognate with the Arabic word) when speaking to a Jewish group; I forget which.
@Florentino97: Good point! I didn't think of it that way.
In the same way that "tahatlara" means "to act like Hitler," I would think "tamabraka" would most likely mean "to act like Mubarak," or in other words "to refuse to take a hint" or "to hold on to something longer than you're supposed to." :)
Let's not forget the newest ubiquitous hybrid Arabic verb: tafasbaka (to mess around on Facebook).