Friday, January 26, 2007

Misc. News

Ok, here is some variety news at my neck of the wood.
News for single colleagues in USA, Michel Salookeh, a friend of mine have just finished a visit to Syria, in which he got engaged. Those of you reading this blog (you know yourselves) you should think of coming here more frequently and join the rest.
Over the past few weeks I have read a book called “أبو نضال، بندقية للإيجار” about the famous Abu Nidal and his organization by Patrick Seal (not sure of the spelling). It gives an insight to the relationship between different Palestinian organizations and the wars between them, and how the author concluded that Abu Nidal was either a Mosad agent or he had Mosad agents highly ranked in his organization. A scary book worthy of reading.
I also read again Firas Al-Sawah famous book “مغامرة العقل الأولى” about ancient myth among different civilization. I always enjoy his writings.
I try now to read a book about Camu and Sartre. I hate modern philosophy, but I have to give it a try.
I watched “The Departed” in theatre. It was a very nice movie, violent but this is natural for a Scorsese movie. If they don’t give him an Oscar this year, I am sure he will commit suicide.
On the other hand, they removed the booth “كشك” in Ghassani, the rumor says they will remove all booths. That is one sad thing, this booth has been there for ever and we had many memories with, and near it.
The minister of health said that he issued an order not to accept any new medical specialties, so this means I have done well withdrawing my application before they say No :-p
And by the way, does anyone know why we use the feminine words such as داعية، رحالة، علامة and others as adjectives to male persons??? This was a topic of a heated debate today. We got nowhere yet.
And finally, I will be lecturing on how to search medical literature Sunday after next.
That’s all folks

1 Comments:

At Tue Jan 30, 01:02:00 PM GMT+2, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Bassam, long time no comment :) Just concerning your question about the use of feminine nouns to designate certain male professions: I have been told that actually the ta marbuta ending in Arabic originally had two uses: feminine and augmentative. Augmentative means that the meaning of the word is emphasised. This way, داعية for example is not just any old داعٍ but an esteemed one. The same goes for the other examples of augmentative that have survived in modern language. If you look at the words, you'll see that they all mean something quite lofty. On the other hand, grammatical gender rules are not always respected if the sex of the person conerned is obvious from the context (cf. using masculine-looking forms for women, such as المرأة الحامل for example). And in other languages you can sometimes find nouns that are feminine in gender designating people of both sexes (such as personne and victime in French).

Greetings to Syria,
Sampsa from Finland

 

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