It's good of you to bring this excellent narrative to a wider audience.
Beth's writing (and being) is a treasure.

It may seem churlish to find fault with this delightful gentleman's explanation of the pronunciation of the ain, but I hope he explains to his students that it is a fricative, quite unlike the plosive glottal stop, and hence can be sustained as long as your breath lasts. In my experience, beginners in Arabic almost universally assume it's a plosive, which holds up their progress for months. The strange thing about the ain is that it's almost inaudible to European ears, in the sense that they don't recognise it as a phoneme. Teaching them to HEAR it is most of the battle. Good luck to those who try.

Jonathan Wright, that is a rather sad view of things. With all the grace on offer, you quibble at the absence of the word "fricative"?

Pedantry, toi?

I wonder what ambience the word bougainnvillea posess in Arab mind. Apparently, tropics or desert makes no difference...

Richard F. Burton used the same al-Mutanabbi couplet as a sort of personal signature; it's quoted at the beginning of volume 1 of his famous 16-volume translation of the Nights. Of course Burton gave it his own style; he would never use a ten-cent word when a five-dollar one would do:

Dark and the Desert and Destriers me ken
And the Glaive and the Joust, and Paper and Pen.

Jonathan, his "explanation of the pronunciation of the ain" is not given -- only his firm denial that it's like "a glottal stop in Hebrew" and his repeated demonstration. On that basis, I'm not sure what your concern stems from. Since he's been explaining such things for years, he's probably got a handle on it.

'Tis a great thing that he doth do , he can still pass on his knowledge, unlike moi and the other 20 million ancients, i am but an awl that has very little that is needed to help the generations of the future, I be no acorn of knowledge that can provide another shade from the blaring blasts of mankind, except that i can and do rite on blog sheets. thanks.

Dungbeattle, after reading that post I can only say that you underestimate yourself.

Nuts. The al-Mutanabbi couplet turns up missing at the front of the Nights. So I must have seen it in the beginning of Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, which, alas, I cannot put my hands on. I couldn't have made up that flowery Burtonic English. Sword and spear would have been better than glaive and joust, I think. Maybe decades of associating with Egyptians made Burton think that g and j were alliterative.

Yup, I just checked my copy of Personal narrative, and there it is at the end of the table of contents. But if you couldn't find your copy of the book, how did you quote it so exactly, capital letters and all? (And I think "Sword and spear" would have been far too pedestrian for Sir Richard.)

I'd love to claim credit for such a perfect memory. But no. Google "dark and the desert and destriers", and "I'm feeling lucky" takes you to an online edition of Personal narrative. Which leaves open the question of why, just after having done so, I misassigned it to Nights.

Senility, dear boy. Senility.

LH, thank you so much for sending your readers my way and for quoting my story here. In answer to Jonathan, I'm not a linguist or an Arabic speaker at all, but I think that difference is exactly what my father-in-law was trying to get across to his granddaughter. I can affirm that none of us were able to reproduce it, and in fact, that exactly what he was doing was very difficult to hear.