 My name is Wenxin Ouyang, I'm the convener of BA Arabic at SAWAS and we have prepared some presentation for you to introduce you to the Arabic program at SAWAS which I will take us through bit by bit. So I will start and then my colleague Mr. Zaid will give you a presentation of on the Arabic alphabet and followed by my colleague Dr. Neda Zir who will provide you with the taster of what Arabic sounds like and then we'll round out our presentation with Professor Hugh Kennedy. So and then towards the end of my presentation which I hope will take about five minutes I will introduce you to all the colleagues in the Arabic section whom if you come to SAWAS next year you'll be sort of like you will encounter and work with. So let me start my presentation on the Arabic in the world. Arabic is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. It's the lingua franca of the Arab world and it is the liturgical language of 1.8 million Muslims and it is the fifth most spoken language of the world with 422 million speakers. The Arabic language emerged right between the first and the fourth centuries through linguistic encounters with other languages. It has influenced and has been influenced for example by Persian, Turkish, Hindustani including Hindi and Urdu, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Malay, Indonesia, Malaysian, Maldivian, Kashdur, Punjabi, Armenian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Sicilian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian, Tagalog, Sindhi, Odia and Hausa just to name a few. And it developed and continues to develop into intercultural exchanges and this is the context through which we teach Arabic at SAWAS. So we have two kinds of programs in which Arabic are included at the undergraduate level be it Arabic whether as a single subject or joint degree and this is a four-year degree including a third year abroad in one of the Arab countries. It is also part of BA languages and cultures Arabic pathway and this program can be three years or four years right if you're in the four-year degree you will be eligible to go to year abroad as well right so we teach Arabic in three contexts right in the Arabic language culture and literature and from past to present we do classical Arabic as well and also we look at the development Arabic around the world so it's not just the Arab world itself and we look for the following learning outcomes knowledge of the region and language sphere i.e. the Arab world and the part of the world that speaks Arabic or uses Arabic where in the global south in the Middle East right and this knowledge will be based on experience of living in the region this is the function of the year abroad right and at the end of the program you'll pick up language and linguistic skills in addition to disciplinary skills and literacy in Arabic culture and literature and culture of course and literature include history as well cinema as well right so the Arabic program and now let me introduce you to the member staff who sort of like teach on the Arabic program we have professor Hugh Kennedy right could you wave your hand Hugh right Professor Hugh Kennedy and if you're interested in knowing about our research you're welcome to google us now you have our names spelled out there for you and then the followed by me Wenxin Uyang and professor of Arabic and comparative literature and Dr. Marley Hammond you might not be able to see her right she should be with us somewhere and she works on Arabic popular culture and literature and we have Dr. Chris Lucas who works on Arabic linguistics he's on leave this year but you'll be back in fall and you'll be able to see him and Mr. Mohamed Said please wave your hand Mohamed he's a senior lecturer in Arabic and Dr. Neda Zir I don't know whether you can see her but wave your hand Neda right she's a lecturer in Arabic and who will be speaking to you in a little while Mahal Collingson lecturer in Arabic and Mr. Ahmad El-Khashem senior lecturer in Arabic and Ms. Muna Hamad senior lecturer in Arabic and also Mr. Wa El-Oda senior lecturer in Arabic and we have three presentations today we'll start with Mr. Mohamed Said followed by Dr. Neda Zir and then followed by professor Hugh Kennedy and after our presentations there'll be an opportunity for for you to ask us questions and we hope to be able to answer them to your satisfaction so thank you very much for coming and Mohamed Said right it's yours the floor is yours thank you now we all ask ourselves when we see the Arabic script written when we see it what is the origin of this language this script this writing now let's go back to the languages before they were written languages started oral as we all know and we have received many oral literature which was written maybe centuries after it started the very advanced and elaborate and complicated way of writing we see nowadays did not start like this started in a more simple forms if we go to the ancient world like for example ancient Egypt we may see what they call hieroglyphic which is mainly drawings on temples and other archaeological sites but experts and Egyptologists can interpret these drawings into proper messages and meanings also after the drawing there was another form of expressing before the the development of real letters and real writing experts called it the cuneiforms this was used in Musabitonia the Sumerians and the Assyrians mainly the Sumerians developed the cuneiform writing it's simply if I want to simplify what's cuneiform it's a way of using a sharp knife or a actually in Arabic it's called a mismaria a mismar a kind of very sharp pointed instrument in which they used to sort of scroll on clay and maybe put this clay in ovens and preserve it then mankind always developing a suddenly some kind of what we call nowadays letters started to evolve and here's a very nice story I heard it a long time ago on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean during the 20th of the last century there was an illiterate peasant plowing his field and when his plow turned the earth he saw a small stone with things kind of inscribed on it he picked it up and put it in his in his pocket because he was inquisitive and took it with him back home the whole village had one man who could read and write these men in these villages used to be everything used to be the teacher if they teach and the sheikh he would lead the prayer and if anybody needed to write a letter or a form to fill a form to the government he writes it for them so this kind of semi-literate man the the the the peasant took it to his sheikh the man and the sheikh looked at it and said well I don't know what language is this I think we should take it to the captain now who's the captain down the road from that village there was in the 20s the French were occupying the Syrian and the Lebanese coast and the Syrian and the Lebanese coast is the land of the Phoenicians as we know so he said let's take it to the captain the captain should be able to explain that maybe it's French they took it to the captain the captain looked at it and he was bemused he didn't understand the thing he said we should send it to the general in Beirut it was sent to the general in Beirut and when it reached the general in Beirut it was robbed and sent in very very guarded diplomatic post to Paris and it ended up in the Louvre I'm talking about the Phoenician alphabet now is the Phoenician alphabet the mother of all the let's say Semitic alphabet Semitic means the languages of the Middle East I'll talk about them later before I give my opinion I will refer you to go and visit a very nice small room in the British Museum when you join us in Saoas next door to Saoas we have the British Museum one of the most you know attractive things in London I think every student in Saoas whenever they have an hour any afternoon instead of spending it in the junior common room playing billiard they should go to the British Museum okay if you go there and search for this room the writing the the history of the writing you will see the history of all the alphabets and you may see which alphabet was the the first I'm not going to claim I would like to claim it is the first because I come from that part of the world but I'll leave that to you to discover now then of course there were other discoveries which were as as important maybe more important than discovering the Rosetta Stone which is also in the Louvre now from that we started to notice and see many other forms and shapes evolving from these letters now the oldest Arabic script we can see is not really manuscript it is writing on headstones of of you know graves in the desert there is a stone called an Amara stone it was discovered in the Syrian desert it belongs to the fourth century AD but it was before the development of the dots and the signs on on top of letters and before even connecting the letters it needs an expert to read it but what I'm going to show you now on the screen is the kind of the full advanced form of the Arabic letters and let's call them alphabet and later I'll tell you why we call it alphabet I'm going to read you these letters and I'm not expecting you to go having memorized them but I want you to feel the sound and I want you to see the shape and the kind of the flow from right to left the first letter is unique on its own it doesn't belong to a group of letters we call it in Arabic elif each letter has a name and a sound the sound is usually the first part of the name so if I call it elif means the sound is up the second group three letters they share the shape but they differ in the either the number or the place of the dot the names are ba ta tha the third group jim ha ha you are going to hear some sounds you're not familiar with it's our job when you join us to train you to master these sounds the fourth line now the sound is very interesting for you who speak English you have this sound but to express it you need two letters you put t and h to produce one sound Arabic doesn't put two letters together to produce one sound each letter has a sound and each sound has a letter let me carry on I don't want to to slow you down ra zain seen sheen interesting in English the sound h depends on the sound s in Arabic there are two different letters but they're sister letters our letters feminine or masculine brother letters scene and sheen saab and daad you can hear the emphatic sound of some of the Arabic letters saab and daad ta and daa ayn and ghayn I think that's uniquely Arabic you know you say Arabs we don't say Arabs we say arab hear that that very interesting sound very strong sound arab ayn ghayn fa qaf now he's very interesting group I want you all to hear it and and I am sure had I been giving this talk in a classroom I would have stopped and asked you a question now I'm going to ask the question and answer it myself fa qaf qaf lam meme noon let me repeat qaf lam meme noon I wonder if among the people listening to this webinar if anybody knows any language which doesn't have these four letters in this very order as far as I don't know many languages but all the languages I know they have k l m n in this order calf lamb meme noon the interesting thing all the groups before they share the shape and differ either in the existence or nonexistence of dots and the number of dots but these calf and lamb and meme and noon they don't share a shape as if they are unique on their own now the last line is another very interesting line and I don't know why the Arabic alphabet delayed them to the end I will give my opinion why it's ha wow yeah let me repeat and hear them how soft ha wow yeah I think you will agree with me those of you who have English as a mother tongue that wow and yeah are vowels you may argue with me that the h is not a vowel I think it is a vowel say clap and see how you swallow it it's not a strong consonant but all these letters can be consonants can be vowels that depend on their position in the world now why we call it an alphabet an alphabet in Arabic is called ab jadiyah let's read these four green letters vertically alif ba jim dal ab jad ab jad so an alphabet is ab jadiyah while in greek alphabet the gamma alphabet is an alphabet now this is now the arabic alphabet is it only used by arabic as my colleague said in the beginning professor oyang when she mentioned the influence of arabic on other languages well many of the neighboring languages are currently using and some of them used to use the arabic alphabet Persian Urdu even Ottoman Turkish used to use the arabic alphabet but they stopped using it in the 1920s when they converted the Turkish language into the latin alphabet but you can still see the influence of some of these letters even on the current Turkish words and nouns even if they are not writing them in this script this has developed and recently now we don't rely on writing and handwriting now if you look in any old library in any museum most of the arabic we inherited from the arabs of say from the 6th to the 14th or 15th century were or 16th century even 17 were manuscripts handwritten but what developed the arabic writing further is the invention of the printing now the arab the arabic printing is widely spread now and recently now we are very lucky we have the digitization maybe we only have to talk and the machine will convert our talk into writing there's a very quick taster of the arabic alphabet and the arabic writing i hope you will all you will all join us in september where i will be teaching you how to link these letters and turn them into words and how to organize these words into sentences and how to develop your sentences into paragraphs and how to develop the paragraphs into text and essays thank you very much i am happy to answer any question at the end thanks thank you muhammad nada where are you i am here can you hear me yes okay good hello everyone thanks for coming i'm nada erzir my colleague professor uyang has already introduced me i'm a lecturer of arabic at soas and today i'm going to talk to you about one of the most fascinating aspects of the arabic language which is idioms or set phrases these are imageries you have them in every language in arabic we have a lot of them across the dialect every dialect has its own there are also some that are common what is an idiom or a set phrase it is when you express something with an image rather than with direct words for example in english you'd say i am under the weather instead of saying i am unwell and i became very interested in idioms especially colloquial ones because they are more threatened than the written ones when i became old enough to be interested in spending time with my grandmother and by then i was already i mean my inclination was always languages since i was little and i was schooled bilingual bilingually and when i started spending time with my grandmother and my teenage years i noticed that she speaks very differently to us she uses more metaphors and more images but they were not her own they were already existed in the language but my generation wasn't using them and then i started worrying about these phrases disappearing and i started collecting idioms that i don't hear much used by my generation and then i started doing it for other dialects like the egyptian dialects the syrian dialect which is very close to ours i'm from lebanon by the way and i live i grew up very very close to the syrian border i could walk into syria so today i think rather than do something formal again idioms are something we have in written arabic and in spoken they are slightly different i'm going to take you through small idioms nothing very creative but like short set phrases that refer to the human body and we were going to look together at what they mean and please if you'd like to have a guess what everyone at each of these idiom means you can either put your hand up i don't know if that's technically possible if not you can write in the in the window in the in the chat window what it means so i'm now going to share my screen where is it there it is can you see the list so on the left of of course you've got them written in arabic i've got the transliteration in the middle column and then what they mean literally which is doesn't mean anything of course you're going to try to guess what they mean so if we say about a man this is the lebanese pronunciation very similar to the syrian one that means his arm is long can you guess what someone whose arm is long is what what does that mean if your arm is long or your hand is long anyone i'm not sure i can see the chat window anyway it means that you are likely to steal this is someone with an inclination for stealing but if you say idu taile both idu tauile tauile means like tall it is like tall tall tauile and taile it's from the same root it means it can reach fa if you say idu tauile he's a thief if you say idu taile it can reach fa it means he's a powerful man with connections so he can get things done by using his connections if your arm is far reaching they also have a proverb where you say the idu asira the arm is not far reaching it's short and that means you don't have money and you can't afford things my favorite one is next if we say about a woman aina miliani aina miliani it means her eye is full and what that basically means is that this is someone who grew up in a good home they are not greedy they don't drool over material possessions you show them whatever they're not gonna stoop low to have it they are a bit lofty and proud and they don't drool over stuff so this is if your eye is full but if your eye is empty aina fadi then you are the opposite nothing will fill your eye in arabic means that you always want more you are never satisfied greedy and you really would humiliate yourself for to have anything that's where aina fadi but fadi is it's the colloquial pronunciation of empty there is another pronunciation which is if you look at these two words here the only difference between them is that the top one has a stick that's the a the elif that my colleague mr. sarin just introduced this is just one pronunciation of it and once you take the second pronunciation and say her eye is empty the meaning is that her eye is full so again this is someone who wouldn't stoop low so your eye is full and this your eye is empty mean the same thing but this your eyes empty means the opposite how this came to be the case i don't know but it's very interesting and it brings me to the next one where we say about someone somehow his hearing khafif his hearing is light if someone's hearing is light that they don't have a lot of hearing it's very light it means they can't hear well so what is some out he's hearing is heavy it should mean that he can hear well but it also means he can't hear well so whether your hearing is light or heavy you can't hear well and then this is my absolute favorite and a staple of my childhood it's one of my mother's favorite things to say to us it says it means so this is now incorporating the face to be wearing your face upside down this is when you're grumpy and not smiling at anything you're wearing your face the wrong way means you are grumpy we have a lot a lot of expressions to do with blood i've only got three of them here so we say someone her blood is cold we could also say her blood is light or we could say that her blood is heavy we could also say that she doesn't have any blood at all so what do they mean if your blood is cold it means you are unimpressionable there is nothing that will spur you into action basically you're not easily impressed but it's in a way that frustrates people nothing will like you will watch any atrocity or something bad happening you don't care people will insult you you don't care it is hard to move you if as opposed to cold your blood is light that means you are a funny person with a sense of humor nice funny not funny but if so this is if your blood is cold if your blood is light if it's heavy it means you are a lot to take it is these people when they're talking and you can't wait till they get to the end of the sentence they're just too much to bear their blood is heavy we will do the bloodless one some other time it's enough now negativity let's go to finish on a nice note for example if you say someone a note here that I say that's the colloquial pronunciation this letter however in Arabic is and it's one of the hardest letters to pronounce which is why the various dialects except in North Africa have found ways to pronounce it that don't require them to say in the Levant in Lebanon part most of Lebanon and most of Syria we say as they do in Egypt in the Gulf they say in Morocco they still say so if someone's heart is thin that is that means this is a kind person who is easily moved by what they see they are emotional and nice and you can get a reaction out of none as opposed to bella al without a heart which is the same in English it is heartless person um yeah that's all from me I hope you enjoyed that I'm now going to give way to my colleague professor Kennedy who will take you on a tour around historiography so enjoy that so I just want to say that we've got about 10 to 15 minutes left and we've got to have the little Q&A session as well just to let everyone know yeah bro okay well hello to everybody and it's very nice that you've all come and what we're trying to do is introduce us of you of course to various aspects of Arabic studies and one of the things you get by having a university degree in Arabic studies as opposed to simply going to a language school is you get a range of different sorts of Arabic and you see Arabic through the centuries the whole richness of the way in which it's developed in different places which is something that that nada has just been talking about but the whole way in which it develops through time and so on and I am essentially a historian I write history books and I write history books using classical Arabic sources i.e the chronicles that were written sometimes a thousand years ago but which we still use as the foundations of our study now classical Arabic is a bit like Shakespeare's English is to modern English i.e a lot of the grammatical forms are the same a lot of the words are the same there's a long continuity over a thousand years between words for gum and go and things like that on the other hand if you really want to understand what's going on just as if you're reading Shakespeare if you really want to understand what's going on in his place you have to do a bit of research you have to acquire a different sort of vocabulary and a different way of expressing the grammar and so on and that's what I like to teach people and encourage people to experiment with and as the great advantage of this or the benefits of this is that you get access to a fantastic historical literature great chronicles recording deeds good and bad of people through the centuries from the time of Prophet Muhammad really in the 630s right through to the 20th century but you also get an insight into why these people thought what their concerns were what their anxieties were what they thought was good conduct and what they thought was bad conduct they make judgments and so by reading the historical material you just don't you don't just get all sorts of names and dates of rulers and sometimes a numerous names and dates of rulers can seem a bit overwhelming but you get an insight into why people thought what they were anxious about how they interpret their world how they tried to make things better for themselves and the communities they were living in and so by looking at the classical Arabic you get a much richer understanding of the language but you also get a much richer understanding of the people who spoke it and used it through the centuries now one of the fantastic things about coming doing the study at Zahas is that it has the most wonderful library and it is the most wonderful library probably because it's got a huge variety of Arabic texts Arabic books available to you but also as a first year undergraduate you can go in there a first year student you can go in there you can look along the shelves you take books off the shelves and see what they're like in many libraries in universities and other libraries you have to book in advance you have to know what you're going to do and blah blah blah Zahas it's all open for you you can just spend an afternoon at random almost finding out what there is to read and so on so as I say I think that the teaching that we do in the department amongst other things and we talked a lot about the language and then a lot of the things is to encourage you to explore the whole richness and variety not just of Arabic language itself but Arabic thought and the thought of Muslims and non-Muslims who've used Arabic through the centuries and the way they've seen their world and interpreted their world and I think it's totally fascinating and I hope lots of you can get fascinated by it as well and we look forward to seeing you inshallah as the Muslims say in October thank you now we pass over to the Q&A brilliant that was great um so we're just going to move on to the Q&A portion like I said you can put your questions in the chat function if you want to or alternatively we have the Q&A section where you can put in your question and our academics or our student ambassadors can answer the questions that you might have we've just had a question come in um hopefully one of our academics can answer it is um so two of the very same questions which countries are allowed on the list for the year abroad and again similarly where are students going for their year abroad right now we have two destinations and Najah University Nablus in Palestine and Qasid in Jordan in Amman Jordan but we hope to be able to sort of increase those to five maybe one in North Africa and one in Egypt as soon as COVID-19 is over and we can travel um right now um students are doing their Arabic year abroad online but hopefully as soon as everybody's vaccinated and travel is permitted they'll be able to travel to Jordan and Palestine lovely um we've had a question that's asking would it be ideal to have an A-level in Arabic to do the program I can come to that uh now obviously not everybody joining us in September is an absolute beginner what we have we call it the placement test we'll give you a placement test we'll take it to consideration if you have a GCSE or an A-level in the language and according to the placement test we choose the right level for you and the right modules for you my kind of guess as early as now if you have an A-level in Arabic you are likely to be in our level we have six levels one two three four five six if you if you already have an A-level in Arabic a good A-level in Arabic i.e. B or A or A plus A star we are likely to be either in level three or level four directly that doesn't mean we don't have enough levels for you throughout your course say you do in your first year level three then in your second year level four then you go do the year abroad you come back either to level six or even if level six is below your level we can give you translation the projects we can give you language use modules yes we have had many people who are coming with A-levels but let me tell you something people who are doing A-level currently GCSEs and A-levels don't have enough grammar they are based mainly on language comprehension so if you want us to sort of to be impressed with your A-levels I recommend you push up your grammar before you come to the placement test it might make a difference between going to level three or level four but does not mean you shorten your degree from four years to three years you still need to do four years I hope I answered it brilliant I think one very similar to this I'm just going to answer before Nadir goes on to the next question is do we need to have an A-level in any foreign language or is it okay if you don't have one okay I can put my other hat now I am the admission tutor I have if you applied I have read your application from if you haven't I'm going to read it we look at other things as well we look to what we call language learning background language learning experience doesn't have to be a full A-level you can tell me I grew up in a bilingual house you can tell me I traveled in the Arab world you can tell me I learned French by myself a GCSE a good GCSE in a foreign language is good but we are not going to penalize the students for this sorry to use this word we are not going to penalize the students for the stupidity of the government which has stopped making foreign languages compulsory in in most secondary school in this country so if we say we insist on an A-level in the language we mean we don't take anybody because most of the state schools now don't teach well they teach foreign languages but up to year 10 in the year nine and they don't teach it further i.e. a GCSE in the foreign language is not compulsory so we we we want to give opportunity to people to learn languages but they have to show us language interest language background language aptitude etc so no you don't have to have an A-level in Arabic or an A-level in French we like it if you have it it might make a difference between offering you AAB or ABB but no you don't need it we look in your personal statement for other signs of language ability or language interest thank you so many the questions in the chat box how was the year abroad structured in terms of lessons and social life they're structured around both so every week when you go on year abroad you have about 15-16 hours of lessons and then the rest is immersion so you're encouraged to let's say live with the family and do things and enablers at Niger University actually organize social events for you and take you out on tours and so on so forth and you have further questions please write them in there too we teach two dialects at the right now Levantine and Egyptian and maybe one day we used to teach Gulf as well but maybe one day we can bring this back as well okay if I may come if I may come if there are no questions to this to the student wait a second there are questions in the sort of Q&A if you do Arabic as a double program right does this effectively double your workload not at all you'll have exactly the same workload as you would do a single degree let's say you know every year you have to do 120 credits so if you do a single degree you'll do most of them in in Arabic and in the department languages and cultures but if you do a double degree you'll do 60 credits in our department in Arabic and 60 in another subject and classical Arabic is incorporated into our syllabus so we have classical Arabic at not in the first year but in the second year there'll be classical Arabic modules for you to choose from and in the fourth year there'll be classical Arabic modules for you to choose from for example professor Hugh Kennedy teaches a module called Reading Classical Arabic Historians so that will be classical and I teach Dr. Hammond and I alternate in teaching culture society and politics in classical Arabic literature and in the second year module part of it there's a part that's classical Arabic literature as well or classical Arabic writing uh so on the year abroad the students stay with both students but students can stay with families if they find host families or student accommodation if that's what they prefer to work doing there would you advise uh Muhammad would you advise uh would you be advise students to work during the year abroad for living cost yes yeah let's talk about this as you all know when you are uh not as citizens from a certain country and you want to work you may need work permits but that doesn't need you can't find part-time jobs or you can't volunteer with NGOs or you can't teach English as a foreign language to kids many many of our students when they go abroad and I'll introduce Grace in a second uh they do find jobs but I don't think you will find jobs with income full enough to sustain your cost but remember cost of living in the Arab world is cheaper than London but I wanted to say before we finish the time because no questions have been addressed to the student trip I want to introduce one of our brilliant students Grace Iliad and can you Grace say something even if they are not asking you anything yeah hi so I'm now a third year Arabic student so I'm studying at Pasad Institute in Jordan but I'm studying virtually so I have quite a different um experience then hopefully you guys will have I guess um I see a lot of people asking about like the level of language proficiency so right now I've been studying Arabic for two and a half years I can read everything even if I don't understand the word of it I can read fluently I can write I can hold conversations with people now um the first year was really just focusing on learning the alphabet and um reading and getting some basic vocab and then in the second year you start to build up a bit of confidence with listening and with speaking but really now um in your year abroad I think is when you're speaking proficiency probably increases the most um in terms of um dealing with two uh two degree courses I did start off doing Arabic and French but to be honest with you I enjoyed Arabic a lot that I changed to um just Arabic but of course I could manage and balance quite easily Arabic and another language or I'm sure you can do that with Arabic um and like business and law and things like this um I think that really the teaching at SOAS is is really amazing to be honest and I'm really enjoying it and really enjoying my year abroad as well it's nice to have a break in the middle just to mix up the start of teaching and stuff definitely um I'm just a bit conscious of time because I think we should be wrapping up in the next couple of minutes um just a question for the academics is there any way for the students to reach you if any of their questions haven't yet been answered from the Q&A session just because I don't think we'll be able to get through everything yes uh Amani if you share the PowerPoint I prepared right there's a list of our names our titles and our email addresses as well okay fabulous so that'll be circulated after the taste today may I add to that please uh candidates and potential students when you write to me as the admission tutor can you start your email by saying I've been to the inside there and I still have a question when I see the sentence the beginning of the email I give you the priority thank you okay lovely well I just want to say thank you to all the academics that have joined thank you to Grace as well and thank you to everyone that's attended I hope that this has been a useful session for you and again we'll be circulating the recording and hopefully the presentation as well after the session if you do have any more questions so yeah thank you very much