Lisa J. White was a senior instructor of Arabic, and
former executive director of CASA, the Center for Arabic Study
Abroad at the Arabic Language Institute of the American University
in Cairo, where she taught for over thirty years.
About the Book:
We are all married to our bodies, for better, for worse, for
richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. As a result, the
body is a hard-wired, powerful presence in thought and
speech.
Rooted in the Body: Arabic Metaphor and Morphology
considers this basic premise of linguistic embodiment and shows how
it is especially true of Arabic.
Consciously and unconsciously, speakers of Arabic use reams of
vocabulary derived from the body, making it an ideal springboard
for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of Arabic morphology.
Structurally speaking, Arabic is a language built on abstract
roots, short sequences of single consonants that are systematically
modified to produce actual vocabulary.
Learning to recognize and manipulate those roots is an
invaluable skill, especially for non-native adult learners, because
it lightens their memorization load significantly.
Rooted in the Body uses delightful side-by-side
essays and comic illustrations to invite readers to explore
Arabic’s signature morphology as they reflect on some 120
metaphorically charged body parts.
On the long road to proficiency, lexical precision is
important, but so, too, is cultural fluency. As it demystifies the
links between morphology and semantics, Rooted in the Body
also uses citations from Arabic’s rich cultural history to
highlight the body’s vital role in language.
This book will be a fascinating and invaluable resource, not
only for advanced learners of Arabic but for linguists,
rhetoricians, and philosophers of language.