A Blog by the Editor of The Middle East Journal

Putting Middle Eastern Events in Cultural and Historical Context

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Lameen Souag Analyzes a Ramadan Greeting

Algerian linguist Lameen Souag has a dialect post for Ramadan: "Grammatically analysing "Sahha Ramdankoum!," a standard Algerian Ramadan greeting.

Sahha is the Arabic word for health, and the meaning of the greeting isn't that obscure, but he's a linguist, remember, and he's speculating on whether it's functioning as a noun, a verb, or something else here. For those of you who always wanted to diagram sentences in Arabic dialects, this is he post you've been waiting for. It was also his way of passing Ramadan greetings to his readers, of course.

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