Writing Contest Winner: Babble On by Nailah Hayward

Posted by Mike Collins on Sep 5, 2010 in Destinations, Featured | 4 comments

Babble-On

by Nailah Hayward

(Photo taken by Nailah Hayward, Beirut, June, 2010)
I love foreign languages. The sound of them, the cultural influences on them (and the influences they have on the culture), the way they look hand written on a page. Maybe it was ingrained in me when I was little and my mother would listen to Sergio Mendes albums non-stop. I heard those songs so often that the strange Portuguese words also somehow seemed familiar to me. Or maybe it was because one of my first friends was a little girl from Denmark who used to tell me jokes in Danish – even though she never knew how to translate them into English for me. Whatever the reason, I love languages. Listening to them calms me a bit, even if I don’t know what is being said.

As a person fascinated by languages, Lebanon was a perfect location to visit. I had assumed that I would spend most of the time lost in a heady haze of beautiful Arabic peppered by occasional lyrical French phrases to satisfy the Western visitors. I actually like being in that state of mind at times. Where you find yourself trying to understand a conversation in a language you have absolutely no background in as if you have any chance on picking up the basic meaning. Its a weird brain reflex to always try and make sense of what you are hearing. Sometimes you get lucky from gestures and contextual clues and guess correctly at what’s going on. Other times you end up laughing to yourself because the lovely song you thought was about romance was actually about going to the bathroom (true story).

To my surprise, there was nearly an even mix of Arabic, French and English in Lebanon. In Beirut, I’d even say that French was a distant third among the conversations I caught in the street and the billboards I saw along the main roads. Wow! I was in luck. I could understand much of what was going on by hearing the English, but still enjoy the foreign sounds and expressions of French and Arabic. The best part of it was that most of your Beiruti citizens spoke all three languages…in the same sentence. Fantastic! That also helped a novice to the language because they would say the same thing in all three languages at the same time. “Shukran. Thank you. Merci.” Awesome – I just got an unexpected language lesson.



(Photo taken by Nailah Hayward, Beirut, June, 2010)
Of course Arabic is a fantastically difficult language to learn. Not just the sounds and the writing are different from my native English, but the language itself differs greatly from one country to the next. Egyptian Arabic? Lebanese Arabic? Moroccan Arabic? All pronounced differently and from what I understand, often unintelligible from one country to the next. Still that’s not going to stop me…I am going to find a class here in LA and jump in with both feet. (Note: If I write it here it means I’ll do it…I don’t want to lie on my own blog). It won’t be easy, but that’s not a good enough reason to not do something. And if I can go back to Lebanon next year with even a couple of good phrases, and understand the meaning behind a few song lyrics, I’ll be ahead of where I was this year. A little progress is better than none at all.

Author Bio: I’m an African-American woman in my mid 30′s living in Los Angeles and working simply to support my travel habit.  I realize I’m not big on oral story telling (I’m a little shy for that), but I do like to write and after 40+ countries, I’m pretty sure I like to travel, so I decided to capture my trips, stories, advice and photos in this blog. http://theressomuchtosee.blogspot.com/