Three Letters, Four Words: k-t-b in Arabic — Epoche A2
I learned four Arabic words this month before I noticed that they were the same word. Kitab is a book. Maktab is an office or a desk. Katib is a writer. Maktaba is a library. I had written them on four separate cards. Then I looked at the consonants — the letters that are not a, i or u. Kitab: k, t, b. Maktab: k, t, b. Katib: k, t, b. Maktaba: k, t, b. Three letters, in the same order, every time. That is how Arabic is built. A root of three consonants holds the general idea — here, writing — and the vowels and the shapes around it say what kind of thing you mean. Something written is a book. A place for writing is an office, or a library. A person who writes is a writer. What surprised me was not the tidiness. It was what it did to my card box. I had been learning vocabulary one word at a time, as if each word were a stranger. Now, when I meet an unfamiliar word, I look for the three consonants first and ask what family it belongs to. Sometimes I guess wrong. But I am no longer guessing blindly, and that is a different kind of not knowing.