Blather

The golden mist was gone. A shower rinsed off the funky residue of being sweaty all day long. We all had a bit of time before sleep. I loaded my language CD into my laptop, took a cigar and went outside. There was a stack of sandbags that looked promising. I set the laptop on the sandbags and lay down next to the laptop with my freebie-from-the-plane headphones. The sky was dark and primordial. Yes, primordial. The air was warm but not oppressive. The cigar didn’t impede my diction.

Stress and duration seemed critical in pronouncing Arabic. Though the sequence of words seemed illogical, I only wanted to hear the sounds and practice the morphemes, so if “machine gun” came after “left,” and English homonyms “here” and “hear” weren’t clear, the sounds of Arabic were finding a linguistic home in my ears. That’s how I learn- through my ears. I practiced the sounds. Curiously, the word or phrase was spoken at a normal pace first, then repeated slowly, for diction and clarity. And sometimes the vowels seemed to blend. But the sounds were there.

The night heard my efforts at making Arabic sounds. By the time my cigar was done, I’d reached some limit of hearing and making sounds. My hour on the sandbags was pleasant, making me wonder what would happen if I slept there. I’m not much of a sleep-under-the-stars kind of guy, but I’ve spent a couple of evenings in Iraq where this seemed like a good thing to try.

# posted by rich @ 5:24 AM