It’s
common for Christians to sing worship songs in most church services, and
services in Nazareth are no different.
Since everyone here speaks Arabic, the songs are usually done in Arabic
as well. Which is great, because
the songs are beautiful and it would be weird to sing in a foreign language
that no one understood. However,
trying to sing in Arabic is a linguistic challenge for a
non-native speaker.
One
of the hardest problems is reading the words to the songs, whether in a hymnal
or on a projector screen. I can
read Arabic reasonably well, but I’m still a slow reader unless I
recognize words. Trying to sound out the words while carrying a tune is really
difficult. The font can also be a problem. Sometimes it’s just that the font is
too small for me to see easily.
Sometimes the dots over or under letters are too faint to read (try to
imagine reading English without any horizontal lines. You can’t tell if a letter is a ‘t’ or ‘f’ or ‘l’). Sometimes the letters are ‘stacked’ on
top of each other, kind of like fancy calligraphy, except that certain fonts do
it of their own accord.
To make it even more difficult,
Arabic doesn’t write vowels*. You
know how some people use text message speak to make a text shorter? (not me,
because I’m weird and like to spell out ‘okay’, but plenty of other people) “Text message” becomes something like
“txt mssg”, because you get rid of all the vowels. That’s how ALL Arabic works (except for religious texts, which have them so that you can’t mess with the
meaning by changing the vowels).
In daily life this isn’t really a problem, but it can be when you’re
singing. Songs are in this funny
region between really fancy formal Arabic and the daily dialects, except they
will sometimes mix the two together to make the words fit the tune better, in a
similar way to how ‘ever’ gets shortened to ‘e’er’ or extra syllables get added in hymns. The pesky case
endings system I had to learn in college, which is only useful if you become an
Al-Jeezera news broadcaster, actually matters sometimes. It’s not as simple as using case endings in one
song but not in another. You have
to pay attention to what everyone else is singing, and follow them.
An added complication is that one letter
can indicate several different sounds. It’s because different Arabic dialects
have undergone different sound changes.
For example, there is one sound written with one letter that is
generally pronounced like the first sound in ‘judge’. Unless you’re from Egypt, in which case every single
instance of that ‘j’ sound is produced like the first sound in ‘goat’. So jamila
‘pretty’ becomes gamila, and it means
that same thing. That doesn’t seem
to too hard. Except that in other
places, a different letter becomes a ‘g’. In daily life, pretty much everyone speaks the same dialect, so this isn't really a problem and allows you to easily tell where people are from. Songs are often in different dialects (such as singing Egyptian songs in Nazareth) or even in
standard Arabic, but they are all written with the exact same alphabet. So one word, written in the exact same
way, could be pronounced three different ways, depending on where the song is
from. Those three ways are also
without the case endings. So in
addition to trying to read quickly and figure out the vowels, you also have to
identify the dialect and revert to the correct pronunciation of the sounds,
because it won’t fit the music correctly otherwise.
I also find it hard to pronounce some
sounds in Arabic. There are at
least 7 sounds that Arabic uses that aren’t found in English, and they’re all
produced at the back of your throat. (If you were thinking of learning Arabic,
I hope I haven’t scared you off) I was trying to explain one of them at the
dinner table and another volunteer thought I was choking. I can produce most of them in
isolation, but it’s still hard to use them in the middle of a word. Trying to make them while I’m singing
is next to impossible. Especially
when I’m trying to make sure that I use the right version of the weird sound
and pretend I can carry a tune, all at the same time.
On top of all of the linguistic
difficulties of singing in a foreign language, there are also musical hurdles. I’m not a musician (I can barely carry
a tune), but Arabic singing has a different type of sound. The notes are the same (I think), but
there is something different about it.
If you want any more explanation, you’ll have to ask a musician. For me, it means trying to match an unfamiliar way of singing. The structure of songs can also be
different. If a song in English
has a chorus, we sing the first verse, and then the chorus, and end with the
chorus after the last verse. In Arabic
songs, you seem to begin and end with the chorus.
On the plus side of this craziness,
I’m getting a little better. My
reading skills have gotten much faster, though I'm still hopeless without the dots.
I now even prefer to read the song in Arabic instead of transliterated
into English letters. I understand the words better this way, and seeing the morpheme
boundaries helps me figure out the tune. There are songs that I recognize and can even sing bits
of them without the words written out. Now fast songs and long words are the problem, but perhaps that'll improve too. Still, I'm waiting for the day when I can sing in Arabic (with all that involves) and clap at the same time.
* That’s an
oversimplification. Arabic has two
types of vowels: long vowels and short vowels. Long vowels are written, but they seem to be a fairly small
percentage of vowels (no I have not counted, I’m not in school). To be totally true, short vowels in
Arabic aren’t written.
