In a recently posted article entitled Stone Free, Ron Lewis, a longtime contributor to this website, included scraps of dialogue in Spanish and Arabic, attempting, I suppose, to impart local color.  Unfortunately, the fact that most of the phrases are erroneous spoils the effect.  I didn’t pay attention to the story line, however. Perhaps the errors were intentional.  If that is the case, I hope Lewis will forgive me these comments.

In his Spanish phrases, Lewis neglected to include various features of Spanish orthography, including these symbols: ¿, á, é, í, ó and ñ.  It may be the case that Lewis doesn’t realize that these symbols are available on Microsoft Word.  Click on Insert in the toolbar, and on Symbols in the dropdown that then appears.  There you will find all of these symbols.  If that was the nature of the problem, I hope that this information will be useful.

Lewis includes this snatch, “Si, senor, tu esta muy macho.”  Ordinarily, the verb would be ‘eres’ instead of ‘estás’, but ‘estás’ is not wrong if the meaning is that he is now being very macho, instead of being generally macho all the time.  In any case, “esta” or “está” is absolutely wrong.  The sentence should read, “Sí, señor, tu eres muy macho.”  But even this is dubious, as “señor” goes better with “usted” than “tu”.

Later, Lewis has, “Que paso?”  I presume he means, “¿Qué pasó?”  Concluding the same quotation, Lewis says, “donde esta su nina poquita?”   ‘Poco’ and ‘poca’ mean ‘little’ in the sense of ‘not much’, as in ‘poco dinero’, which means ‘little money’.  This is likewise for ‘poquito’ and ‘poquita’.  For ‘little’ in the sense of ‘small’, one should use ‘chica’, ‘chiquita’ or ‘pequeña’ with a feminine noun.  Thus we might have, “¿Dónde está su niña chiquita?”  Notice the accent mark on ‘Dónde’, mandatory in a question.

Lewis uses the Arabic greetings “Sabah il Kheer” and, “Sabah il Noor”, but the more correct Arabic forms are “Sabah al Kheer” and “Sabah al Noor.”  This can be readily substantiated by typing both versions of each phrase, one at a time, in the Yahoo Search box, and comparing the number of search results, which run about 50 to 1 in favor of the versions I have stated.  The discrepancy arises because some people use slightly modified transcriptions.  Actually, “Sabah al Kheer” is the accusative, denoting a direct object, while “Sabah il Kheer” is the genitive.  The accusative is what is suggested, as the phrase means, “(I wish you) a good morning,” where ‘good morning’ is the object of the implied words, “I wish you...”.  Also, it would be a nice refinement to change ‘al Noor’ to ‘an Noor’, as the ‘l’ in ‘al’ assimilates to a following ‘n’.

As for “il-hamdu-Allah”, it should be “al hamdu lillah”, which means, “Praise be to God”.  Without the definite article, we have also the phrase “hamdu ’llah”, where the ‘u’ of ‘hamdu’ replaces the ‘A’ of ‘Allah’, but this phrase, which is a common name, is usually written as a single word, “Hamdullah”.  One may compare this with “Hizbullah”, usually transcribed “Hezbollah”.  This is from ‘hizbu’, which means ‘party’, and ‘Allah’, which means ‘God’.  The formula is this: hizbu + Allah = hizbu ’llah = hizbullah.  The different transcriptions arise because the Arabic vowels are midway between ‘i’ and ‘e’ in once case, and ‘u’ and ‘o’ in the other.

In no way should this essay be awarded any prize, unless it’s for garbling dialogue.

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