( 9 reviews )
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Posted: May 14 2008
This book is ok for looking up words in english and finding the iraqi pronounciation. It is useless for looking up words in arabic and finding the english (unless you want to learn a whole new transliteration language.) Know this, there is NO ARABIC SCRIPT in this book. You are expected to learn a transliteraiton system that is as difficult as just spending two weeks and learning arabic script. Really dumb guys. Next time, include the arabic. This book isn't terribly useful.
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Posted: Jan 10 2008
This dictionary was written by linguists and is an essential tool for anyone who wants to become proficient in the Iraqi dialect of Arabic. The transliteration can be an obstacle at first, but there are only five or six letters that are different from English, and anyone who has learned any Arabic can learn those as well. As has been stated in other reviews, the transliteration is essential to representing the sounds of the language. The big problem is NOT just the three consonants in Iraqi that are not found in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) (ch, p, and hard g)--an even bigger problem is how the short vowels float around in the Arabic dialects when different suffixes are added. There is also assimilation of some consonants where they are pronounced other than written. When people who know the Arabic script see Iraqi written that way, their tendency is to pronounce the words in the MSA way, which is often wrong. The examples are worth their weight in gold. As for the order in which the words are listed in the Arabic-English section of the book, they follow the Arabic roots. A serious student just has to master that system early on. By the way, Iraqi IS written now, A LOT. Young people in the Arab world, like elsewhere, are heavily into e-mail, blogs and chatrooms, and much of that is written in dialect. The spelling is not standardized, either in roman or Arabic script, just like blogs and e-mails in English.
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Posted: Nov 22 2007
As a university graduate in Arabic and as a teacher of Arabic I can say that this dictionary is a great help for learners of Iraqi dialect. As other customers have stated before, it must be stressed that this is a DIALECT dictionary and not a MSA (Moern Standard Arabic) dictionary. Arabic idalects are hardly, if ever written, except maybe in folk stories collections aimed at investigators or in the odd proverbs compilation, and are much more written by foreigners than by Arabs. In fact molt of the Arabs simply don't know how to write their own dialect (if they ever have thought it should be written). In view of this, the use of Arabic script in a dialect dictionary is totally a waste of time and effort, because it means you must adapt a system which is well suited for Standard Arabic to the dialect which functions in quite a different way phonologically and morphophonologicaly. The Iraqi dialect has at least 3 phonemes that do not exist in Standard Arabic (ch, g and p) and a lot of emphatic spreading (as other dialects) which cannot properly be represented using Arabic script except if we add lettters taken from Persian. But then where's the difference from using the Persian alphabet or using a Roman transliteration except that transliteration is almost the norm when dealign with dialects (even among many Arab linguists)? Nearly all the material on Arabic dialects is in transliteration, so a learner does not need to go through Arabic script when he just wants to learn to speak a dialect so he can straight concentrate in speaking, while advanced students of MSA dealing with dialect can easily transfer transliterated words to Arabic scripts (when they exist in MSA) so I do not understand the problem with romanization. Another reviewer deplored the lack of guidelines on prosodical information (the music and rythm of the language) so useful to learn ro speak, but it must be stressed that nobody learns to speak using a dictionary, to learn to speak in any language you must (first of all of course hear it spoken and try to speak it) use a coursebook or other pedagogical material, which a dictionary IS NOT, a dictionary is reference material to help you expand your vocabulary, but it's uselless if you havent' the basics of a language which you must acquire in a language course(book). My only complain is that, in fact, this dictionary is the sum of two different independent dictionaries written by different hands. So entries in the E-A part do not match entries in the A-E section (which is much larger), and also as the E-A part is based on an earlier English-German dictionary there are some entries which aren't culturally and socially useful in Iraqi society (such as blondette) while other words for important items in Arabic society (clothes, food) do not appear in the E-A section. Except for this inconsistencies (which appear in the other Arabic dictionaries of this serie) this dictionary is a great useful tool for learners of Iraqi dialect.
