Ahlan Wa Sahlan: Functional Modern Standard Arabic for Beginners.

• Author: Kaye, Alan S.
• Position: Brief Reviews of Books

Ahlan Wa Sahlan: Functional Modern Standard Arabic for Beginners. By MAHDI ALOSH. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2000. Pp. xxv + 585.

This Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) textbook of thirty lessons differs considerably from those using a traditional grammar-translation approach in that it is "functional" in orientation. As Alosh explains in the introduction, "the focus, therefore, is on performing language functions using the language forms learned, not on analyzing them grammatically" (p. xviii). The book does not assume a linguistically sophisticated student but there are places in which the learner must wrestle with non-functional subject matter; e.g., when the articulatory phonetics of MSA is presented, including a midsagittal view of the speech tract (pp. 26-27), and the further diagrams showing the opposition of pharyngealized /s/ vs. /s/, and /d/ vs. /d/ (p. 42). Although on the whole accurate and not excessively intricate, one may quibble with some technical details: e.g., the consonant jim is not "usually pronounced just like the s in pleasure" (p. 27), but rather is most often realized throughout the Arab world as a voiced alveo-pala tal affricate. A word of caution to instructors: many a student's grammatical background might be inadequate for such concepts as [fa.sup.[subset]]il 'agent' and [na.sup.[subset]]ib [fa.sup.[subset]]il 'deputy agent' (p. 316).

One of the book's strengths is the presentation of culturally germane subject matter. For example, two pictures of traditional Arab male headgear are offered with a discussion of the kufiyya or yutra 'headeloth' and the [iqal.sup.[subset]] 'circular black band'. Students will also appreciate the material dealing with the modern Middle East, such as the story about an Arab girl from Qatar (pp. 230-32). Far less effective pedagogically are the numerous texts dealing with American themes.

Let me now turn to the tome's vocabulary. Unfortunately, Alosh has occasionally chosen rare items and forms: e.g., 'the woman' (twice on p. 121) is [al.sup.[contains]][imra.sup.[contains]]a (the first glottal stop is, in any case, erroneous since that hamzat ulwasl elidest (1)), when, in fact, [almar.sup.[contains]]a is far more frequent. We encounter maqsaf 'cafeteria' (pp. 204, 213, et passim), which is not given in N. S. Doniach's Oxford English-Arabic Dictionary of Current Usage (Oxford...