I realize that things have been quiet around here for a while, but this entry might help explain why.

“My family and I have moved to Virginia” = قَد تَنَقَّلنا أنا وَ عائلتي إلى وِلايةِ فيرجينيا (qad tanaqqalnā anā wa ʿāʾilatī ilá wilāyat fīrjīniyā)

Couple of things to note here: the root نَقَلَ (naqala) is one of many ways to translate our verb “move,” but it’s the one that deals specifically with relocation as opposed to other kinds of motion. I’m using the form V version of the root, تَنَقَّلَ (tanaqqala), because form V is reflexive (a literal translation would be “we moved ourselves”). The particle قَد (qad) added before the past tense verb changes the verb from past (“we moved”) to present perfect (“we have moved”). The word وِلاية (wilāyah) means “state,” so the literal translation is “the state of Virginia,” and it can be omitted but I wanted to keep it in to be comprehensive. Finally there’s the manner of representing a foreign sound (in this case the “v” in “Virginia”) that doesn’t occur in Arabic. Usually in the case of “v” the default is its voiceless partner, “f” (ف), as I’ve used here, but you may also encounter the letter و, which sounds like “u” or “w,” maybe because in Persian that letter can also sound like “v,” or the non-alphabetic character ڤ (like a ف but with three dots above, since a ف with two dots above would look just like a ق).

Anyway, that’s why things haven’t been happening around here of late, but I’ll try to do better moving forward.