knock knock ૮₍˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶₎ა
kiara . . . imagine kaiser as a dad ૮₍˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶₎ა ( a girldad specifically . . . he has three-four little girls :< )
i could swear to god that he had never considered being willing to have children in his life. having experienced abuse as a child, he veered away from the concept of a family and even from love itself. kaiser who’s not interested in building a family because he doesn't know any better and has never experienced a stable family. in fact, he doesn't even consider ending the trauma; he just doesn't give a damn anymore. he has no faith in love or miracles.
but suddenly, he found himself here, with three beautiful daughters who looked at him with eyes full of love and admiration. they were a constant reminder of a life he had never imagined for himself, and yet, they filled a void he hadn’t known existed.
he watched as his youngest daughter, barely three years old, toddled towards him with a giggle, her tiny hands reaching out for him. he gently scooped her up, fearing it might break, but her warmth against his chest soothed him down. her laughter was infectious, and despite himself, a smile tugged at his lips.
your voice called out from the kitchen, “michael, can you help with the twins? they’re arguing over the crayons again.”
kaiser sighed, but there was no real frustration behind it. “alright, i’m coming, mein liebling,” he replied, setting down the youngest and heading towards the living room where the chaos was in full swing.
when you joined him in the living room, you gave him a knowing smile. “you’re doing great, you know.”
but he shook his head, his eyes reflecting the turmoil of his past. “i never thought i’d be here,” he admitted quietly, showing another vulnerability of his. “i never thought i’d have a family, let alone be any good at this.”
you took his hand, squeezing it gently. “none of us know what we’re doing at first. but look at them, mein mann. they’re happy, and they love you. you’re their hero. du bist unser held.”
a lump formed in his throat, and he swallowed hard, unable to speak for a moment. “i just… i never had this,” he finally said. “i don’t know how to be a good father.”
“you are a good father, michael,” you insisted, eyes filled with conviction. “you’re here, you love them, and you try every day. that’s more than enough.”
he looked at you, his wife, the one who had seen through his walls and loved him despite everything. “i don’t deserve you,” he whispered.
you smiled, leaning in to kiss him softly. “you deserve all the happiness in the world, michael. and you deserve this family.”
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most of us have heard of the red car game. you’re on a road trip, you’re bored, you start looking for red cars to do something.
and then they’re everywhere. you notice them nearly every few minutes.
there aren’t suddenly more red cars now, of course. you were seeing them already, but you weren’t noticing. you weren’t looking.
I am noticing things.
there is a plant I notice everywhere now, a small bushy plant in suburbs, along streets, by shops on the highways. dwarf umbrella bush is what the internet tells me when I look for it’s name. I did this because I wanted to know why,
every time I ever saw it, every place,
it was always dying.
always the leaves turning yellow, the branches small and scraggly. inside out - nitrogen deficiency. their soil drained.
I am noticing how many of these landscaping plants are yellowing, how small and sickly they look in just a few years. I am noticing how often the grass outside the house is replaced when it once again turns brown and dry, how the type never changes and the cycle starts again. I am noticing how the unmowed, unkempt spaces on lakesides and roadsides look more alive than this. how the preserve I grew up next to was miles of “messy” unmanicured nature and the ground was covered in leaves instead of grass and there was life.
I am noticing the birds that come by the lake. there was a flash of blue wings and red chest - eastern bluebird, male, relatively common. I had never seen one before. there is a family of ducks that appear every spring; i cannot say if it’s successive generations or different ducks, but I can always look forward to ducklings. there are little brown birds with white heads whose names I do not know - are they some kind of piper? why don’t I already know?
why is it so hard to learn about my native plants (accurately, that is)? why are so many gardening sites littered with people who think a plants value is based on how pretty or useful it is to them, who think a tree shedding leaves is “messy”?
why is knowing about the world we live in so… odd? why is it a hobby and not vital knowledge? I learned about polar equations. I taught myself about mycorrhizal networks and species of insects.
(did you know there are shiny green bees? a special species of wasp pollinating figs? that white flowers bloom at night for moths? do you know? have you looked?)
I cannot look at a lawn and see life anymore. it is a wasteland, devoid of life, dying slowly itself. everywhere is grass, grass, doused in water that runs over into storm drains, soaked in fertilizer and pesticides and a hundred other poisons and sending one clear message:
this is a place of death. life is not welcome here.
I do not think I could live in a city. too loud, yes, too busy, yes, too many people, yes, but the plants would bother me. a tree allotted only a convenient square, surrounded by dead stone and metal.
a forest cleared for this, for burning asphalt streets and racing cars and shops whose bathrooms are “for paying customers only”.
this is a place of death. life is not welcome here.
and now I am noticing.
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another mena language post - i wanted to talk about judeo-arabic and clarify a little bit about what "judeo-arabic" means
the basics, for those of you who don't know: arabic, being a language that was spread over a large part of the world and has since evolved into many different forms, has many different things that differentiate certain dialects. languages/dialects can be influenced by languages speakers' ancestors spoke before, by the social structure of where speakers live, by languages they come into contact with, and by gradual evolution in pronunciation. (many letters like evolving into ones that are easier to pronounce - this is why arabic has no "p" sound, it eventually evolved into "f" or "b". the same thing happened in germanic languages to some extent, which is why we say "father" in english and "vader" in german while in romance languages it's some variation of "padre" or "père".) many arabic dialects in particular possess different substratum (obvious, traceable influence from languages people spoke in before shifting to the new one).
arabic, being a language that was spread over a large part of the world and has since evolved into many different forms, has many different regional dialects which are different for the reasons i described in the above paragraph. even though there's modern standard arabic (which is the subject of its own post), people speak regional dialects in real life. on top of that, there's a variety of social influences on different types of arabic, such as whether someone's living in the city or in the country, whether someone's sedentary or a bedouin, and in some cases religion.
in the middle east, religion was historically:
not seen as a personal choice, but as something you're born into and a group you're a part of, kind of like ethnicity;
not generally something governments actively wanted everyone to share one of at the penalty of ostracization due to sticking to your group being the more livable way of life in the area, or later, the benefits of things like imposing extra taxes on people who weren't the "correct" religion/branch (this is far from being a "muslim thing" btw, it's been in the area for a while now, i mean look at the assyrians);
an influential factor in where you lived and who you were more likely to interact with because of those two things. (for example, it wasn't uncommon for most of the people living in one village in the countryside to share one religion/branch of a religion. if your village converted, you converted, too. if they didn't, you didn't, either.)
this means that the influence of religion in different types of arabic is due to people of different religions living in or coming from different places, and who people talked to most often.
for example, in bahrain, most sedentary shia bahrainis' ancestors have lived on the island for a very long time, while most sedentary sunni bahrainis' ancestors immigrated from other places in the gulf and iran in the 18th century. therefore, while they've all interacted and shared different aspects of their dialects including loanwords, there are two "types" of bahraini arabic considered distinctive to sunni and shia bahrainis respectively, regardless of how long ago their ancestors got there. despite the differences being marked by the religion of the speakers, they have nothing to do with religion or contact/lack thereof between bahraini sunni and shia, but with the factors affecting the different dialects i mentioned in the first paragraph which influenced either group.
a similar phenomenon to this in english is class differences in accent in england. nothing in received pronunciation is actually something only rich people can say or unintelligible to poor people, it developed by the class differences influencing where rich and poor english people lived and the different pronunciation/linguistic histories in those places, as well with different classes keeping more to themselves.
the influence of religion on arabic dialects isn't universal and nowhere near as intense as it is with aramaic. some places, especially more cosmopolitan or densely populated places, are less likely to have very noticeable differences or any differences at all. in addition, certain variations of a dialects that may've been influenced by religion in some way (as well as urban dialects) may be standardized through tv/movies/social media or through generally being seen as more "prestigious", making more people who wouldn't have spoken them otherwise more likely to pick it up. (this is why so many arabic speakers can understand egyptian arabic - cairo is like the hollywood of the arabic-speaking world.) this is the case with many if not most countries' official and regional languages/dialects nowadays.
this phenomenon is what "judeo-arabic" refers to generally. like many other jewish diaspora languages, the "jewish" aspect is that it was a specific thing jewish people did to different types of arabic, not that it was isolated, possessed a large enough amount of certain loanwords (though some varieties did have them), or is unintelligible to non-jews. people were generally aware of differences where they existed and navigated between them. (for example, baghdadi jews may've switched to the more prestigious muslim baghdadi dialect when in public.) if you know arabic, listen to this guy speak, you should be able to understand him just fine.
judeo-arabic also often used the hebrew alphabet and some may have been influenced by hebrew syntax and grammar in their spelling. you can also see the use of script for religious identification in persian and urdu using the arabic script, and in english using the latin alphabet. in general, influences of hebrew/aramaic on different types of judeo-arabic aren't consistent. you can read more about that here.
"judeo-arabic" isn't a universal that definitely happened in every arabic-speaking part of the world that had jews in it to the same degrees, but it did definitely exist. some examples:
after the siege of baghdad in 1258, where mongols killed all muslim baghdadis and spared baghdadis of other religions, bedouins from the south gradually resettled the city. this means that the "standard" sedentary dialect in the south is notably bedouin influenced, while dialects in the north are more notably influenced by eastern aramaic. christians and (when they lived there) jews in baghdad have dialects closer to what’s up north. within those, there's specific loans and quirks marking the differences between "christian" and "jewish".
yemenite jews faced some of the most persistent antisemitic persecution in the middle east, so yemeni jewish arabic was more of a city thing and often in the form of passwords/codewords to keep jews safe. jews were usually a lot safer and better-regarded in the countryside, so jewish yemeni arabic was much less of a thing there, and when it was, it was less "serious".
due to the long history of maghrebi immigration to palestine, there's attestation of maghrebi influences in arabic spoken by some palestinian jews with that origin. this was also a thing in cairo to some extent.
(i'd link sources, but most of them are in hebrew, i guess you'll have to trust me on this one??)
still, the phrase "judeo-arabic" is often used with the implication that it was one all encompassing thing (which it wasn't, as you can see), or that jews everywhere had it in some way. many jews who spoke some version of arabic special to their mostly-jewish locale may not have registered it as a specifically "jewish" version of arabic (though they did more often than not). the truth is that research about anything related to middle eastern and north african jews is often sloppy, nonexistent, and often motivated by the desire of the researcher to prove something about israel's colonization of palestine (on either "side" of the issue). this is not me being a centrist about the colonization of palestine, this is me stating that academia is often (even usually) influenced by factors that aren't getting the best and most accurate information about something. i don't think we're going to get anything really "objective" on arabic spoken by jews in that regard for a long while.
for comparison's sake: yiddish is considered a separate language from german due to 19th century yiddishists' efforts to "evolve" yiddish from dialect to language (yiddish-speaking jews were said to speak "corrupted german" historically; on that note sephardim were also said to speak "corrupted spanish"). this was at a time when ethnic nationalism was en vogue in europe and declaring a national language meant declaring your status as a sovereign nation (both metaphorically and literally). for yiddishists to assert that they were speaking a language and not a dialect that intrinsically tied them to germans was to reject the discrimination that they were facing. (besides, german/austrian/swiss jews weren't speaking yiddish (leaving it with the connotation of being the language of those icky ostjuden), yiddish-speaking jews had practically zero other ties to germany/austria/switzerland, and yiddish-speaking jews (let alone the yiddishists) were almost entirely east of germany/austria/switzerland, so it's not like they were pulling this out of their ass.)
whether a jewish person of arabic-speaking descent calls it "arabic", "judeo-arabic", or something like "moroccan"/"syrian"/etc depends on who you're talking to, where they're from (both diaspora origins and today), how old they are, and what they think about zionism. despite "judeo-arabic" being what it's called in academia, on the ground, there's no real strong consensus either way because the social circumstances arabic-speaking jews lived in didn't drive them to form a movement similar to yiddishists. (not because there was no discrimination, but because the political/social/linguistic circumstances were different.) the occupation since made the subject of middle eastern jews’ relation to the middle east a contentious topic considering the political and personal weight behind certain cultural identifiers. the term "judeo-arabic" is modern in comparison - whether it's a distinction dredged up by zionist academics to create separations that didn't really exist or a generally accurate term for a specific linguistic phenomenon is a decision i'll leave you to make.
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