France loves French. It’s quite possible there’s no other country on earth this proud
of its linguistic heritage. So, in light of the attacks just days ago, perhaps there’s
no tribute to Paris more Parisian than spending some time grammar-checking ISIS’ French.
While the world takes in the shock of the Paris attacks, news comes in from France telling
us there’s a letter from the Islamic State claiming full responsibility, and in perfect
French nonetheless. Always eager to justify my underused degree in Romance languages,
I had to see what counts as perfect French these days. Tracking down an image of the
communiqué in just a few clicks, I sighed and prepared to read my way through what I
was sure would be a brief declaration of religious war against the infidels perfectly polished
by a middleman translator, giving me that stellar French I was promised.
At first, I think I got what I expected - a religious dedication, a sacred verse, an explanation
of the attacks.
But a handful of sentences in, some linguistic doubts bubbled up. Yes, mandatory references
to Allah and the Caliphate.
But, “wanting humiliating his enemies”? You mean, wanting to humiliate? Okay.
“Allah has conquered by their hand and to cast fear in the heart of the crusaders”
- “Allah has Has cast fear in the heart of the crusaders.” Okay.
This is actually a pretty common mistake I see. These are actually homophonous in French,
so maybe that makes some sense, but it’s definitely not polished.
“the bataclan or hundreds of idolaters were gathered” - “WHERE hundreds of idolaters”,
not to mention the Bataclan is all small like it’s just a familiar place in the city and
not a proper noun.
Sometimes I don’t even know. “le bilan de ses attaques“ - the result of his attacks.
Did you misspell “these attacks”? Is this talking about their attacks but you used the
singular instead of the plural? Did you get confused by just having mentioned “ses rues”
- its streets, the streets of Paris - in the previous sentence? I can’t tell.
What does it say here, “granted them what they were hoping for (the martyr)” - Martyrdom?å
“May Allah accept them among the martyrs and they allow us to join them” - HE allow.
By far, the parts of this thing with the lowest linguistic weirdness factor are the top and
bottom verses from the Quran, copied - punctuation and all - from, as far as I can track it down,
this French translation by Muhammad Hamidullah, a prolific writer and language lover in his
own right. But, let’s be honest, it’s a good bet they were pasted from one of the
free online sites that come up here. They were even kind enough to start it off with
the same little blessing.
There’s so much strangeness to it. I think some of that linguistic strangeness pops out
in just one word.
This is the word surah. Surah is a typical feminine noun in Arabic, and like so many
feminine nouns it comes built in with what they call an “attached t”. In the word
“sura” that attached taa’ gives away the gender, but, make a note, that taa’
isn’t pronounced when the word is on its own like this. Instead, the silent “t”
shows up in speech when the word takes other forms (other endings), like when it’s the
subject of a sentence. There’s a different noun form for that in Arabic. And that’s
where the difference comes in between the English pronunciation of this word - surah,
the nativized English way to pronounce the Arabic word on its own with the silent “t”
- and the French pronunciation: not surah, but sourate, from the form with the not-so-silent
“t”.
But this guy doesn’t write the French word sourate. He writes it this way. It looks similar
to your eyes, but it caught me off guard. First, this funny hat. It’s a circumflex.
Vowels often wear that hat as a decorative piece of French language history, the leftover
crumbs of a French sound that used to be there but isn’t anymore. The French word “beast”,
for example, earned itself the hat when it got rid of its “s” a long time ago. The
word for “sure” in French gained its circumflex by losing its inner “e”, and that’s
after it had already erased its Latin “c” that it had long ago. So, what sound did surah
lose in French? Well, none.
There’s an even bigger clue here. There’s that missing “s” at the end. Just like
in English, well, almost like in English, the final “e” can be silent in French.
But it does something to the letter before it. See, there are a lot of consonants that
just don’t get pronounced when they’re at the end of a French word. It’s why Jacques
and Poirot aren’t Jaks and Pwuh-raht. But when that “e” makes its way onto the end
of a word with a silent “t”, it stays silent while the “t” gets pronounced.
So in sourate that final “e” lets us have our “t”. But lop off that final “e”,
and I promise you any French reader will pronounce this as a silent “t”: this word is sourat.
And that’s where it gets strange. See, if this righteous-tongued writer is all about
French, or his translator on retainer is, soûrat is a lot harder to justify. But if
he’s imitating the Arabic pronunciation of the word in isolation, soûrat suddenly
becomes a plausible spelling. On the other hand, this spelling isn’t at all what we’d
expect if someone were just translating literally from Arabic. It shows a familiarity with nativizing
Arabic words into French in a way that tells us something about the culture of that nativization
process: making analogies with other French words that come to mind, and even extending
circumflexes in a standardized, academic way to compensate for that Arabic long vowel.
Huhhh, and that Arabic-minded circumflex makes sense when you consider two other facts. One,
the few other examples you can find touting this spelling are chaykhs and institutes citing
specific verses in their lectures or people setting themselves up as instructors teaching
you something from the Quran, always leaning into the formal Arabic even when they’re
preaching in another tongue. Two, Islam. Specifically, this way of spelling Islam. This way is leaning
into yet another Arabic long vowel.
I don’t mean to mislead you into thinking this is all a bunch of lurking Arabic seeping
through. That’s not what soûrat is telling us. This isn’t the dictionary French word,
but it’s not the dictionary Arabic word either. This is too productive for a literal
translation for a broader audience, but it’s also too communal for a case of personal creativity.
And my hunch right now is that this is the root of my feeling of strangeness. This is
where the language of this communiqué begins to unravel, giving us a glimpse of the writer.
“as well as other targets in the tenth, the eleventh and the eighteenth arrondissement
and this, simultaneously.” My reading’s not English enough, it’s too close to the
original, but zoom in here. Closer. The writer knows he’s about to list a bunch of targets,
so he uses the plural, but then in mid-sentence turns to break this list up into three singular
targets. And he finishes it all up with this journalistic but-wait-there’s-more back-reference
tweak. It’s like a first draft of a stop-and-go news report tripping over itself.
And it’s all laced with a stream of condemnations so constant that it’s almost as if the terms
were just the only words available at the time in the mind of this writer: France and
Germany are the two crusader countries, François Hollande the idiot of France, there are miscreants,
there’s perversion, there’s emotive wanting and hoping and shoulding and how-dare-you-ing
of modal verbs dressed up as statements of fact, and, of course, the threat of more to
come. It would all sound over the top, if it just weren’t so fresh.
This is the product of a mind that knows French, yes, but one that makes linguistic mistakes,
linguistic mistakes that showcase an idiosyncratic language that’s closer to a certain kind
of community speech, a veneer of Arabic style and simple faux pas fumblings with political
French news announcement delivery. It’s so much closer to those things than it is
to what I was naïvely promised would be a clear example of perfect French.
But maybe my language is too flowery or stylized here. This is what I mean:
It’s a he. He sets himself up as a preacher, but a preacher that’s more eager than meticulous.
And while he is someone that wants to instruct you, even preach to you, this isn’t a scholar
or a translator, even though he likes to incorporate tics of religious scholarship. He’s from
a subculture that readily Arabizes rather than Gallicizes Arabic borrowings into French.
He distances himself from his surroundings, playing both moral judge and factual reporter.
He knows Paname, the City of Lights, well enough to be disgusted by specifics. And he’s
probably not the translator. He’s the author.