On the 4th of March, the United States celebrated its National Grammar Day (for English, naturally) and I continue to follow news, through American newspapers and websites, about this occasion. Most of these items have detailed common mistakes, as The New York Times did, or the worst mistakes, as The Huffington Post website did. There is a western journalistic tradition that a news agency or newspaper has a style guide that is distributed to employees; it might even be sold in bookstores. The style guide contains items of linguistic benefit, such as what is correct or incorrect, and includes an index of places and names around the world, and their preferred spellings, so that the name of an African president is not written three different ways on three successive days. I once thought of ending this column every day with two, three, or four lines, containing items of linguistic benefit and recording errors in the Arab press of that day. Then I changed my mind, because I also make mistakes, and because I was unsure about the readers' interest in such a topic. When the Americans were celebrating English grammar, I noticed that a website asked readers to record what bothered them most about linguistic errors in English. I found that half mentioned the use of subject-verb agreement. Linguistic errors are not translatable from language to language, but if I can mention what bothers me most in our language, I will choose the usage of pronouns. Every day, I read sentences and paragraphs that begin with “For his part, so-and-so stated,” or “on his part,” so-and-so said,” or “after his arrival, so-and-so announced.” These are all mistakes of agreement in Arabic; it is correct to say “after the arrival of so-and-so to London, he stated…” There is an exception, namely words denoting “God” or “the world.” But Arabs have been ignoring this one lately. There are common errors whose spread is justified by some people. I will try to respond by searching for evidence from the Quran to settle the debate. The word for “some” in Arabic, for example, appears dozens of times in the Quran without the definite article. I searched for the reason, which has to do with the word being part of an implied two-word phrase (because “some” actually refers to the idea of “some people”). Another is the use of the word “all” in Arabic, which should be followed by an object or verb in the singular, and not the plural. Speaking of singular and plural, there is a rule about forming the relative adjective from the singular root, but there are many exceptions. We can use the plural to form this word, on occasions, but I do not agree with the use of “Jamahiriya” as the official name of Libya. Jamahiriya is not a plural – it is a plural of a plural. I once said this on television, and the Libyan media responded. Some writers informed me about other examples, in which the plural is used for the relative adjective. Most of these names are for horses, and after all, people cannot Arabicize their family names and “correct” them. In the Quran, we find the following: “He said: ‘Will ye exchange the better for the worse?” which is a clear question of repudiation. We say “France exchanged the Franc for the Euro,” while “The Franc was exchanged” is an error. While following the National Grammar Day celebration, I noticed that many readers who said which errors bothered them the most chose spelling mistakes, not grammar mistakes. We suffer from such mistakes too, especially in the writing of the letter hamza. But when I gathered all of the grammar related to this letter, it came out to less than a single page, meaning it is not as difficult or complicated as some people believe. In the dictionary, Rida is spelled one way, but I have seen a variant spelling several times in the famous book by Abbas Mahmoud Aqqad, “The Genius of Omar.” I do not know if he wrote it that way, or whether the printers, or proofreaders, were responsible. Not everyone is a genius in language, but people can master their native tongue, at least to the extent of avoiding mistakes, if they want. [email protected]
