Intro: alphabets and mother tongues
In life, it is super cool for people to be capable to express themselves in several languages. However, no place like home: the first and most basic need to express oneself is in one’s own mother language, both orally and in writing. For this sake, nations have dedicated writing systems for their spoken languages, with alphabets being the most common form. Some mother tongues even have several writing systems, to write the exact same words. This phenomenon is called synchronic digraphia, e.g. Serbian or Punjabi languages. Meanwhile, other mother tongues have no dedicated nor adapted writing systems at all. This is the case of mine: the Lebanese language.
Just don’t write it: the substitutes for my tabooed mother tongue
As an author, the need for writing is an urgent one. But here comes the essential question: how can I write my own language? And how come I haven’t even seriously considered it earlier, like when I was a child? The answer can be summarised by two misinformation engraved in our souls as Lebanese children:
- Lebanese is corrupted Arabic language, so why would one want to write a corrupted language, even when it’s the mother tongue?
- Writing Lebanese is an absurd act of uneducated people who probably can’t write Arabic, or are just Arabo-phobes/Nationalists.
So, growing up fascinated by the world of science and literature, and needing to write, I started sticking to the languages of books I read: French and Arabic, and later on an average English. Using my mother tongue was never an option to express myself in writing. Those in school who were not gifted in learning foreign languages and literature were found with no tools to write their thoughts and feelings. How many authors and poets had their talents repressed and decimated due to this, nobody can tell!
When I needed to write, I had to pick between the French and Arabic languages. What was it like? Reading French books and teachings, they were focused on freedom, arts, science, curiosity, modernity, individualism and diversity. Arabic teachings and content, on the other hand, mostly reflected rigid tradition, parroting, homogeneity and longing to a past that is not even mine yet forced to identify with. So I basically picked French as a substitute to my forbidden mother tongue. Although French expressed better the diversity of my thoughts and feelings, I still wrote sometimes in Arabic, cause knowledge is passion, but also because “I should treat it as my mother tongue, should be proud of it and master it without complaints!” I even stopped finding it weird that I needed six hours of schooling per week in order to acquire and understand a so-called “mother tongue”!
Outside of academy walls, in real life, people would speak only Lebanese, and our iconic songs and oral-transmitted literature — jokes, proverbs, poetry, stories — are by large majority in Lebanese. But to us, this language was “only” good for singing and oral transmission. You got it by now: just don’t write it!
Just write it!
With telecom bringing chatting and instant messaging, Lebanese people starting naturally texting the way they speak: using Lebanese! In the absence of formalised writing, they had two choices: the Latin or the Arabic scripts[1]. Needless to say that none render the language properly, but since in Lebanon people spend their academic lifetime mastering both scripts, they did not have much trouble gossiping and making memes in any of them. However, whenever the text becomes longer, they would need to record an audio message or switch to another language totally.
Talking about longer texts, back to my personal experience as a passionate author, I continued writing books in French and Arabic. In 2016, inspiration casually knocked on my door, uninvited as always, transfigured as always, and we met around a poem: Inspiration initiated that meeting in Arabic. So I thought to myself: “well, it’s going to be a collection of Arabic poems this time”. The second poem, however, came out in Lebanese, very naturally and unexpectedly so. It was the first time that Inspiration and I exchanged in Lebanese. But I took it with a smile “why not?”. I quite enjoyed what I thought is a once-in-a-lifetime accident. I wrote it down using the Arabic letters, thinking: “Anyway the following ones will be in Arabic”. Well all the next ones came only in Lebanese. And thus a new collection of poems entitled “Fdiyét Bashariyé”, Lebanese for Human Sacrifices, was born. A tiny collection written in my one, only and true mother-tongue: the Lebanese. Writing never felt as honest!
Reviewing my Human Sacrifices, I evaluated the choice of the script. My criteria are not the same as Whatsapp users, for example when my sister texts to say she’s on her way and arriving in ten minutes, for the second time in the past hour. Whether she writes it in English/Latin or Arabic scripts, we will understand directly that basically she’s flat lying, again.
So when I evaluate the Arabic script, which itself descends from old Canaanite, or old Lebanese, one major and striking flaw is that it has no vowels, only optional diacritics, rarely used. And even if forced to be used, a lot of Lebanese phonemes are still simply missing, such as “o”, “p”, “é”, “v”, “g”… while other letters are completely useless, such as “th[2]”, “dh[3]” and most of the emphatic consonants. These irrelevant differences for texting become major flaws when writing poetry: they are simply pure distortion of the original text and kills as well all the musicality within. It also sends the reader guessing several words. The effort to understand sentences or verses, especially when elaborate and abstract, is exclusive to geniuses willing to lose their time.
This is when I decided I needed a proper script to write Lebanese. After deeper technical and linguistic reasoning, lots of trial-and-error, I started preferring a script that is closest to the most widely used one in the world right now: the English/Latin one.
However, there was another question popping up in my mind: aren’t there other authors who wrote in Lebanese? Which scripts did they use? And how is like to read them?
[1] In order to keep it “short”, I did not mention the few cases where people mixed both in order to compensate for the lack of phonemes and the impossibility to transliterate the Lebanese speech in only one of the two scripts
[2] Voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative
[3] Voiced dental fricative
Choosing a script and publishing Lebanese
After doing some research and hunting for books in hidden corners in Lebanon and on the web, I found out about several authors who wrote and published in Lebanese, and I am speaking about latest-centuries Lebanon, not Canaanite antiquity!
Here are some examples of literature written in Lebanese[i], along with the year they were written and the script used:
- Gabriel Ibn Al-Qilai: various poetry (Syriac script, 15th and 16th century)
- Yusif Naimy: The Stories of Arandes (Arabic script, 1936)
- Said Akl: Yara (Latin script, 1961)
- Najib Jamal Ddin: Lebanese translation of Nahj al-Balāghah “The way of Eloquence” by Imam Ali (Latin script, 1971)
- Maurice Awad: The Lebanese Anthology: Poetry from the 3rd millennium BC until 1982 (Arabic script, 1983)
- Jinane Chaker Sultani and Jean-Pierre Milelli: Dictionnaire français-libanais libanais-français (Arabic and Latin scripts, 2010)
- Roger Makhlouf: English-Lebanese Lexicon (Latin script, 2018)[1]
Technically speaking, the adapted versions of Latin script indeed reproduced the Lebanese words most accurately. This statement becomes even truer with time, as Lebanese language evolves by mostly loaning and incorporating words from English. Arabic scripts attempted to catch up with this evolution by its tail, with average technical success and no popular success. Since Lebanese language itself was never standardised, authors wrote it as they please, according to their own preferences.
All this being said, how do I properly transcript my poetry then? Should wait or fight for some standardisation is more of a political project than a linguistic one, including in academies, and even more so in the Semitic-speaking realm. I had to think of other meaningful criteria. And I drew my criteria list for the script I wish to adopt.
As an author, I wanted a script that:
- is as close phonetically speaking to Lebanese language as possible
- easy to adapt and evolve, just like it is the case for the Lebanese language itself
- is as common as possible, locally and internationally, so that my Lebanese speaking nephews abroad can read, and by extension Lebanese diaspora, and friends of Lebanese from diverse nationalities
- allows to read directly in Lebanese without requiring mental translation from other languages
This is why I opted to start using a script that is based on the current “Scriptura Franca”: the English alphabet. Come to think about it: the absolute majority of websites are entered using “English alphabet” [2]. And online publishing is the easiest and quickest way to reach people everywhere. So one can conclude that this alphabet is by far the most widely used and known, including by people who do not speak English! So, I completed it with missing sounds. The result was an alphabet that is pretty close to the one Roger Makhlouf used, in the previously mentioned lexicon book.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07G9PJTQ2/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_m0h9FbVTY84JJ
[2] More precisely, website domain names are based on ASCII symbols coding, an American invention
[i] These were example of paper books, other authors publish online, e.g. Jad Abdallah
The freedom of being: thinking and writing
And now, I can express my creativity in my mother tongue, whenever I wish to. No overthinking, no worrying, no shaming, no… nothing. I have an actually working tool. Free as true spirits. Maybe in the future this script and my words won’t outlive their author, I could not care any less: the texts will live and evolve with me. And should they accompany me to my epitaph, they are most welcome.
Every mother language should be encouraged to be written. It should even be a right! Instead of wasting years looking for ways to directly write our thoughts just the way we think them, people should be capable to write in their mother language without having to be language engineers. Nobody’s cultural identity should be replaced by another, be it from within or outside. Or both.
