Excerpt from Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In its rhythms and melodies, Arabic moves much more like English than Italian does. A newborn might not be able to tell them apart. Like English, Arabic is a stress-timed language; if English and Arabic speakers recite their language to a metronome's beat, they will align the stressed syllables with the clicks and clacks of the machine. In Arabic these beats almost always fall on the last heavy syllable of a word, ending in a consonant or a lengthened vowel. In English, more often than not, the first syllable is stressed, but far from always, and words are allowed to choose for themselves where the stress will fall. English has a larger collection of vowels; Arabic has more consonants, which serve as a rigid spine for its words. Arabic has more restrictive laws governing the shapes of words: a word, for example, is forbidden to begin with a tight cluster of consonants.

Of course, I perceive these patterns long before I'm aware I know them. Gradually, the sounds of Arabic begin to leap out at me on crowded trains in the same way a dear friend's face sharpens into focus against the blur of a multitude. I know that I'm on my way to belonging to this language when, one day, a young man visits my Syrian friends and I hear something off-kilter in his Arabic, the linguistic equivalent of someone taking a photograph of his face and running it through a program to make him resemble, subtly, someone else. I exclaim: You speak Arabic with an English accent! My friends say: Yes, he does. I can detect that his Arabic has a tint of English, but I still do not understand the meaning of any of the words he has uttered.

Such experiences of language fill me with pleasure. But more than that, they are for me a way to defuse the threats of a world that often seems to be so filled with chaos that surely not even a newborn could love it. They remind me that I once passed through worlds more meaningless than the one I'm in now and I did not die. I've learned that it's worth having a dogged faith in the existence of order and that we perceive more of it than we're aware we know. I know to listen for lucid particles of sound that float on the surface of roiling absurdity. If I'm patient, if I keep listening to the music, meaning may once again coagulate into rabbits, big and small.

Minds, meeting and parting

Excerpted from Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy. Copyright © 2024 by Julie Sedivy. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.