بَحْث
root: ب-ح-ث / form I verbal noun / definition: searching, looking
It’s Thursday and we’ve been busy translating clauses from Hittite laws in class and for homework. And my mind, exhausted but enriched from a second intense week of ancient language learning, can’t stop running.
As well as concreting my love for dictionaries (order is a beautiful thing), this course has so far taught me a few things about myself. And one of them is that I love searching for Meaning (capital M) in dictionaries, rather than just meanings.
What do I mean by that?
Well, for one, part of me loves the idea of interlingual connections. I like to let myself believe there’s some significance to them—or perhaps a more honest evaluation is that I like finding things I can attach significance to.
Like how I scrolled through the Akkadian dictionary to see if my name holds any meaning in that language. (It doesn’t.)
Or how, when I learnt that the Hittite word ḫappinešš means “to become rich”, the two sides of my brain began lazily fighting over whether its purely coincidental similarity to the English “happiness” is paradoxical or metaphorical.
(On another note, why is the Arabic root ب-ء-س linked to both bravery and being miserable?)
And it’s strange—I thought I’d be so preoccupied with new languages that I wouldn’t think too much about Arabic (proof to the contrary can be found in last week’s post Some Arabic-Akkadian Lexical Observations).
But today, in our mid-class break, I felt a sudden pang of deeply missing Arabic; the antidote of choice was to grab an Arabic novel from my shelf and spend a few minutes reading out loud from the start of a random chapter.
For a moment, writing that, I thought how odd it is that I find comfort in something as abstract as language. But then I thought: language is the most human thing there is.
.في أمان الله
Follow The Arabic Pages on Instagram and Twitter, and find out how you can support this blog!
If you’d like to receive email notifications whenever a new post is published on The Arabic Pages, enter your email below and click “Subscribe”:
The Arabic Pages 
One thought on “Searching for Meaning in Language”