Welcome to "belmaṣri", a podcast introduction to Egyptian Arabic. My name is Karim, and I want to help you get acquainted with one of the most beautiful languages in the world, and one that is spoken by hundreds of millions of people on the planet.

I know it's been a while since the last episode. I need to put more time and make sure to dedicate time on a regular basis. You don't have to tell me. I know :-)

So in our last episode we started to speak some Egyptian. We learned how to say "good morning" and how to respond to this, and we also discussed some concepts, sounds, and structures that came out of that.

In the book, there are some more greetings mentioned. However, I would rather move on to something different. What I will do is to give you some of the greetings mentioned in the book quickly, just by saying them and telling you what they mean, then we will move on to a different topic.

So we already did "ṣabāḥ‿elxēr" (good morning) and the response to it, which is "ṣabāḥ‿ennūr". There are equivalent greetings for the evening, which are "masā'‿elxēr" (good evening), and "masā'‿ennūr"...and, yes, "masā'" means evening. The sound represented by an apostrophe is important. In Arabic that is a kind of letter (not exactly, but similar), and it's called a "hamza". It sounds kind of like if you were going to say a word that starts with the letter "a", but you were interrupted :-) That letter sometimes comes at the end of the word, and sometimes in the middle. At the beginning of a word it cannot come alone, but rather on top of the letter "alef", which is the equivalent of the letter "a". The sound is the same. For example, you may have heard the name "Ahmed". This name starts with the letter "alef" with a "hamza" on top of it. In our notation, it could be written "Aḥmad".

There's also other greetings and common phrases such as:

"Salāmo‿𝜀alēkom" which means "peace be upon you". This comes from the Islamic greeting "Assalāmu‿𝜀alaykum", but is generally used in a non-religious context. The response to this is "w‿𝜀alēkom‿essalām", which means the same thing, but with the words in the reverse order...so it would be something like "peace be upon you", and the response "and upon you be peace". The "w" is the letter "wāw" in Arabic, which, on top of being a letter, also means "and", and is often attached to the words around it so that it seems almost like a way to join words rather than a stand-alone word/letter...you can remember it like this. It means "and", and it brings words together.

Around eating and drinking there are also comon expressions you should know.

When you bring someone something to drink, and they drink it, you can say "haneyyan", which is a way of saying "I hope you enjoyed it". The response to this is usually "Allā‿yhannīk" (when talking to a male) or "Allā‿yhannīki" (when talking to a female). "Allāh" means God, and yehanni means to make someone happy/satisfied...so it something like "may God keep you happy and satisfied"...the expression and the response actually both come from the same root "hanā'", which means happiness/contentment/satisfaction. When we join "Allāh" to the following word, we kind of drop the "h" sound at the end, although it's not a strong sound in this case anyway.

Before you eat you can say "belhana‿w‿eṣṣefa". This is the equivalent of "Bon Apetit" or "enjoy your meal". "Belhana" goes back again to the same word used before for drinks..."hana". As discussed in episode 1, the "b" at the beginning means "with". "El" means "the" and "hana" means happiness/satisfaction. "Ṣefa" means healing...or health in this case I would say...so the phrase really says "with (the) enjoyment and (the) health", or "may you enjoy the food, and may it be good for you". The response is the same as before..."allā‿yhannīk(i)".

You may have noticed at the end of each podcast that I say "ma𝜀‿essalāma". That is another important phrase. It means good bye. Actually, literally it means "with safety" or "may you be safe" or "may you be well". The word "ma𝜀" means with, and "essalāma" means "the safety". Here you can see another example of replacing the "l" of "el", or "the" with the first letter of the word, so instead of saying "elsalāma", we say "essalāma". That's because the "s" sound, or the letter "seen" is one of the letters that are affected by the rule we discussed in episode 2.

OK. One more phrase. A nice thing to be able to say to someone is "congratulations". In Egyptian this is "mabrūk" and can be used in many situations (wedding, exam result, new job, new child...etc.). To emphasize this we can also say "alf mabrūk". The word "alf" means 1000, so it's something like "1000 congratulations". The response to this is "Allā‿ybarek feek(i)"...depending on whether you are speaking to a male or a female...or even "allā‿ybarek fīkom" if you are speaking to more than one person. This means, loosely translated, something like "May God bless you". You may have noticed a similarity between this structure and the one discussed above around food "Allā‿yhannīk(i)". The "y" here is just the conjugation of the verb in the third person singular present...but that's a story for another episode :-)

Well, I think that's going to be it for today...so I hope you are enjoying your journey learning Egyptian so far and, till next time, ma𝜀‿essalāma!

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to send me an e-mail to belmasri@posteo.org.