All posts about Around a word

I’ve always been a lover of words and their nuances. If you can ‘survive’ in a language with a ultimately small number of words, expanding your vocabulary allows you to grasp its richness. The best way, for me, is to develop ‘around a word’, what are its (almost) synonyms, its opposites … how is it used figuratively, what ideas does it convey for native speakers, even subconsciously?When I was a child, I loved vocabulary exercises. Having learnt Latin and Greek (yes ma’am!) it was easier for me to trace the history of words. As a French, I did the same work in English (a language that has a lot of Saxon-Latin duplicates that don’t totally have the same meaning).And I try to do it in Arabic, although it’s more difficult: my teachers found it hard to answer my questions, often I was told ‘you say

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that and then that’s it’. In the case of Arabic, in many cases you can go back to the Quran and hadiths, as well as legal concepts (fiqh – فقه ), discover the wealth of words that are perceived in a very reduced way through the media. We can also see how Arabic words have entered European languages sometimes changing meaning. Finally, in the case of ‘Moroccan, Arabic words have also ‘slipped’ just as the English of Brits, Americans, Australians etc. is not always the King’s language.