Woods wrote:With one word (and while keeping in mind that I'm not getting into that debate), it's one thing to have women being paid less on average because of historical reasons, societal tendencies and whatever subjective factors make it that they land more senior positions less often, they are less good at negotiating their salaries and so on, and it's another thing to have ongoing practices of horrible traditions and even the legislation of the country arranged in such a way as to make them inferior to men in many ways.
I'm not sure I really agree, but you've said twice that you don't want to get into a debate about it right now, so okay, I'll at least agree to disagree.
By the way I just read that Egypt made female genital mutilation a felony in 2016. It took them quite some time, but you seem to be right that things are going in the right direction!
Yeah, even hardline conservatives in Egypt seem to be very much against FGM, and a law was passed last year requiring at least five years' prison time for anyone conducting it.
Hopefully sometime soon women will be equal to men in Arab countries. When do you think this is likely to happen?
I don't think women are "equal to men" anywhere or will be anytime soon, and I find terrorist organizations a huge impediment to women's rights and human rights in general even in the most progressive Arab countries.
When dubbing TV-programmes and movies, do some countries choose Modern Standard Arabic and other - their local dialect?
My understanding so far has been that a lot of media throughout the Arab World is broadcasted by
MBC Group, which is owned by the Saudi government, and that different kinds of media are dubbed into different varieties of Arabic. If I remember correctly, American shows are usually dubbed in Egyptian Arabic, Turkish ones in Syrian Arabic, and Korean ones in Hijazi Arabic or something, but there has been a growing push from viewers to dub in MSA instead.
Syrian would be a good option for me, because the first few words that were taught to me in Arabic were taught by Syrians - it's kind of personal
I picked Syrian for somewhat similar reasons myself. When I was in graduate school, three of the people in one seminar I attended were Arabic students who all studied Syrian Arabic. Opportunities to practice Arabic are rare here, so their department has a policy requiring them to speak exclusively in Arabic whenever they see each other so they can practice. They'd talk to each other in Syrian Arabic, I'd try to see how much I could understand (not much), and I asked them for help learning it and started talking to them in Syrian Arabic as well.
vijayjohn wrote:Syrian and other Levantine varieties of Arabic don't seem that different from Egyptian Arabic, either.
Oh, they do! So I asked a Syrian 'how do you say "how are you"' and he said /ki:fa halyk/. Every Arab from every country understands that. I asked an Egyptian (come to think of it, I've actually met one, it didn't come to my mind until now!) and he said /äämɛl äl harda/. Nobody has been able to decipher that yet.
That's like saying American English and British English are completely different languages just because a Brit said "how do you do?" and an American said "sup?" It's just one greeting, not the whole language, and neither of these seems to be the most common greeting in either variety of Arabic. In Syrian, I would expect something more like [ˈkiːfək], and in Egyptian, something more like [ʔɪˈzəjjək].