Turning the tables

In the mornings, I meet with other students headed to school and we take a taxi together. Today we were trying to see if one other person was coming (turned out she was at school already) and while we were standing there a group of Moroccan teenagers walked past. One of the boys asked us (in arabic) if we could take a picture. We could tell by the looks on his friends' faces that he was kind of messing with us, so we said we didn't have a camera. (I bet none of us actually did.) Then he was like, 'no, we have a camera.'

We were still confused at what was gonna happen, but he called his friend with a 'camera' (a handheld game - maybe an old sony one? Or nintendo ds before the ds? I recognized it as old.) Then he started to act like he was going to take a picture WITH us. As in him & his female friend standing goofily with us with the other boys watching. And I told him "whoa, no, no, we will take a picture of you, but not with us in it." (K, don't know how much of that actually got across with my major lack of words.) Understanding well or not, they laughed and walked away.

While it was kind of odd, I am pretty sure that is what tourists here do to people sometimes and it was pretty funny that the kids decided to do it right back. I suppose we could have just taken a picture with them, the other girls may have been willing, but since it just seemed like a big joke, it didn't seem worth it.

Another interesting thing this morning was a comment my teacher made in class. One of the girls got our morning teacher to go off on a tangent that was actually pretty cool. He was talking about the purity of the Arabic language and how there is a saying that basically says you can tell who someone is by the way they talk (meaning whether they speak a language well, I think.) He also said that he judges news and television channels first by the language and second by the content - that if it's 'bad' Arabic he just can't listen to it no matter what, but if it's fluff news presented well, then it's fine.

The fact that the language used in the Koran is seen as the 'pure' language gives the people a really different relationship to it, and I'm still surprised by it at times. The teacher said that a king or president of an Arab country would never give a speech without reading it directly unlike American or European presidents (I sort of wanted to bring up teleprompters, but was enjoying his little diatribe too much.) He also said that if a king or president started speaking 'bad' Arabic or Darija (dialect), he would turn it off no matter what the topic or proposed program was because it is not the 'right' way to speak. I know from some of my research that in Tunisia the former president would sometimes give speeches in Tunisian Arabic, so now I'm curious what people here and there thought of it. And what language the speeches for the upcoming elections are in. He said that even the parliament uses 'pure' Arabic speeches, often written by someone else, so show how educated they are.

It's so hard to think of being required to change your language THAT much. If someone was raised without learning 'standard' Arabic, they would understand some words, but not really get the tenses or a whole lot of information. I can't figure out a good comparison, but maybe as different as Spanish and Italian - definitely some words in common, but different pronunciation. Some grammar similarities, but plenty of differences. You know, some dialects may even be more different. But don't tell that to some native speakers. For religious and political reasons, they're all considered the same language. K, I'll quit being a nerd now.