Sammy: And what I remembered was pretty good…Beautiful…Beautiful…I wish we lived in Arabia. Daisy: What? Sammy: Arabia… (He drifts off)
-In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, Stephen Adly Guirgis
We sat around that seminar table in Jones Hall as if we’d been invited to a surprise party, but what would they be serving? Champagne? The Jussive? Broken plurals, hollow verbs, sun letters, dagger alifs? We didn’t hear anything about Comparative Semitics until second year, when Hamori said, And surely you see this case ending as the lost Akkadian locative. Locatives, vocatives, substantives in construct…If I’d remembered my 9th grade Latin, maybe I wouldn’t have drifted off that first day of Arabic when Udovitch greeted us with, Al-Maktūb Maktūb, The Written [has been] Written.