The First Lesson                 id-ders luwwil (lule:ni)

Dialogue

A: 3asle:ma!                                                 A: Hello!

B: Ehle! Shna7we:lik? Lebe:s?                      B: hi (welcome)! How are you doing? Ok?

A: il 7amdille, winti sa va?                            A: thank to God, and you, (are you ok)?

B : sa va !                                                     B: ok!

Grammar points :

-          ‘3asle :ma’, the true word is 3ale essele :ma, which literally means ‘on safety’, i.e. welcome as you came from that journey. Now it is used to mean ‘hello’. But, when you come to a place in which people are gathered together, it would be better and accurate to use the Islamic expression ‘essele:m’ (means peace), or in a more ‘Islamized’ way ‘essele:mu 3aleykom’(peace on you). Tunisians some times, just to kid, might say ‘essele:m 3ale menn radde essele:m’ (peace be on whom says back peace).

-          ‘ehle’(welcome), it is an Arabic word, and the whole sentence for that is ‘ehlen we sehlen’, so Tunisians, might say one of the following expressions; ‘ehle’ or ‘ehle u sehle’, another word to say welcome in Tunisian is ‘mar7be’ . So when to greet someone in Tunisia, you have a multiple choice of greeting expressions to use. They might, sometimes, differ in some occasions, but the most used one is ‘ssele:m’.

-          ‘Shna7we:lik’, is a combination of shnowwa (what) + a7we:l (state pl.) + ik (your), which means ‘what is your state?’, how are you doing?

-          Be careful, the possessive adjectives are always put after the word they determine. In English we say ‘your state’, but in Tunisian we say state/your, which is a7we:l+ik => a7we:lik.

-          Winti, it is w + inti, which is and you?

-          Sa va, it is a French word, ‘ça va’. It means ‘every thing is ok’. But this word can change the meaning according to the intonation of the sentence, so when asking about somebody’s health or state, one might use this expression, as well as he can used to answer back.

-          ‘lesson’, in Tunisian is ‘ders’ . but to say ‘the lesson’, it is ‘id-ders’. The article ‘the’ in Tunisian is ‘il’ or ‘l’, but it is used just before the words starting with the following letters (e, b, 7, 5, 3, gh, f, q, k, l, m, h, w and y). so we can say; the book = il-kte:b or l-kte:b, but to  better facilitate the pronunciation we say li-kte:b. finally to say il-kte:b or li-kte:b, both are right, but li+noun is the most used one, as for il+noun, it is used when spelling, insisting or explaining.

-           More than this, [li-] is followed by a noun starting with two consonants like the word “kte:b”, and if the word starts with only one consonant and this one consonant is followed by a vowel, so we do not use the article [li-], but simply [l-].

See the following examples with some words:

li-mra (the woman)

li-ble:d (the country)

l-be:b (the door)

l-ka:r (the bus)

id-da:r (the house)

it-tayya:ra (the airplane)

is-sme (the sky/ the heaven)

in-nse (the women)