Steg asked <<Are you sure about that? I thought that _Hamd(u)_ was a noun, the cognate of the Hebrew word _hhemed_ (if such a word exists; the pattern is that Arabic XaXX usually corresponds to Hebrew XeXeX, similarly the Arabic word _quds_ corresponds to Hebrew _qodesh_, with s=sh.>>
Ilana I can't be 100% sure - I learned it too long ago and I *know* I don't pay contious attention to muadzin when I hear him. I am trying to hear in my mind, but I don't hear _alHamdu_. :-( _hhemed_ here is neither verb no noun - it's description, but it *can* be both, although verb has different meaning - to desire something that is not yours (the one from 10 commandments? :-) ) Steg <<Let me check my notes... yup, here it is, the last line of my first page of Arabic 101 notes: _bixayr, alHamdu lilaah_ = _tov, barukh hashem_.>> Ilana _barukh_ is verb, _ha_ of _hashem_ is like _the_ or Arabic _al_. Steg <<(for people other than Ilana reading this, whenever cognates or parallel constructions are at work, I write my Arabic class notes with translations in Hebrew instead of English; _tov_ means "good", and _barukh hashem_ is the idiomatic equivalent of _alHamdu lilaah_) It also has the _al-_ in the sheets that the professors handed out. I thought that Babelfish didn't recognize it because it's Arabic transliterated into the Latin alphabet.>> Ilana Don't you use Windows? They *have* Arabic script. :-) I forgot something important about Arabic. :-( What kind are you learning? There *is* pretty big difference between speaking and literature languages (bigger than between speaking Arabic of different countries). The one I learned at 7th grade was Jordan literature one - enough to puzzle news broadcast or to understand something in newspaper, very helpful added to bits of English in understanding "Space 1999" series - far from enough to understand people on the street. :-( Ilana from Israel
