"It's just a different language."

[kpete]

"I was just trying to share my culture, my language. I wasn't forcing it on others."

Dana is a sophomore. She speaks in serious tones that belie her age. One day, she hopes to pursue a degree in computer science.

Dana didn't expect to be the first student to mark National Foreign Language Week by reciting the Pledge; others had been scheduled to recite it in Japanese and Spanish on Monday and Tuesday. She can't help but think that had they done so, things might have turned out differently.

"I also thought I'd recite the Pledge in English, as well," she says.

But it was not to be. She read the Pledge in Arabic, "and after that, people just blew up," she said Friday.

Friends told her of ugly comments posted by other students on Twitter; that students refused to stand for the Pledge while she read it.

She could hardly believe what her friends were telling her.

"I just felt people didn't respect my culture or language."

Did she translate the word "God" in the Pledge as "Allah"?

"Yes, it was on Google Translate that way."

Her voice strains with pained incredulity.

MORE:http://www.recordonline.com/article/20150320/NEWS/150329906/101019




**********
Ingraham, who serves as a contributor at Fox News and hosts "The Laura Ingraham Show," wasn't having any of it.

"What if the skinheads want to do the Pledge of Allegiance, we're gonna do that too?" she said on her radio show, using a term often synonymous with neo-Nazism. "To some people that would be offensive. We're gonna let them do that?"

Where have you been, Ms. Ingraham? Skinheads already recite the Pledge of Allegiance in English, as do your wingnut friends, most of whom are indistinguishable from skinheads.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/20/laura-ingraham-arabic-skinheads-pledge-of-allegiance-_n_6910562.html

[guillaumeb]

1. "with liberty and justice for all"

I believe that is the ending of the pledge of allegiance.

Did I miss the asterisk to alert me that Arabs are not part of the ALL?

[JHB]

3. It's the same as the asterisk after "love thy neighbor as they self"

I can never find it, but so many others do that here must be something wrong right with my eyesight.

[Igel]

2. Did she translate the word "God" in the Pledge as "Allah"?

"Yes, it was on Google Translate that way."

She probably doesn't know the thicket of semiotics she landed in. Any more than the reporter did.

Some Muslims I've known treat "Allah" as a kind of personal name. That makes it a bad translation for "God." There is always a different word for "god." Similarly, in Indonesia or Malaysia (one of those eastern-most outposts of Islam) the law or courts ruled that "Allah" could not be used as a translation in the Xian texts for "God." This is a fairly common way in the US of looking at the differences. If I speak "Muslim" I say "Allah", if I'm referring to Jesus, Adonai, or the Father, I'm not likely to use "Allah."

Making "Allah", again, a word that is specific to the Muslim god.

For others, though--sometimes sincerely, sometimes mostly for purposes of PR and proselytization--"allah" just means "god." (I go lower-case to make a minor point. Even for them, most of the time it's really the true Allah that's understood, with others not fully in the know about what's really the case.)

Try saying "Jesus is Allah." Or "Jesus is Allah's son." It's a bit easier because the Qur'aan goes this way, but it often rankles to say that "Allah gave Jews the Sabbath" but don't try to say that "Allah told the Jews to kill the inhabitants of the land of Canaan." Suddenly there's a gulf between Allah and Adonai. For all except people outside this fight--atheists, Hindus, agnostics that are atheist-adjacent or only "cultural ____________".

In other words, a lot of people, both Muslim and not, don't view "Allah" as a good translation for "God." Native speakers of Arabic and other languages that aren't Muslim often have little choice but to appropriate the word--just as "God" referred to a variety of deities but now the anarthrous use of the word in English is taken as a proper name.

Just as bad is to try to use the generic Arabic word for 'god' as the word that means specifically "Allah." So Illah revealed his way to Muhammed, who is Illah's messenger. That usually goes badly. Again, there's a distinction between just any old god and Allah. "Allah" is much like "God", while "illah" is "god."

Now, having reviewed not a few words in a dictionary that strips out context and all but the barest of denotation, but as a part of a system, as where several different kinds of paradigms intersect--which is what native speakers routinely do as part of their native-speaker competence--go back to "One nation, under Allah, ..."

Yeah. It's a problem that simpletons can miss. Or kids, even smart kids, who confuse Google and facts for knowledge and understanding. I used to say fairly often that as soon as politics and ideology come into play, native speakers lose all semblance of native-speaker competence. Suddenly we act like the way we actually speak is some arcane system that simply doesn't exist.

"Motivated thinking" is the term. We know the conclusion we want. And instead of all the facts fit to print, we print all the facts that fit.

If you like the idea of a few words being the depth of a word's semantics, take nearly any racist term and do the same trick. Strip out connotations that vary by speech community, strip out all the contextual usage, and try to argue that, really, those terms can't possibly be racist and only idiots would try to argue that they are. When it suits us to remember how language works, we insist on it and insult those who ignore it; when it suits us to remember how language works ... Huh?

[guillaumeb]

4. nice point and indeed a minefield

Allah is derived from al-ilah and means "the god" and contextually separates the one (presumably true) god from the many (presumably false) gods that were worshipped in the Arabian peninsula area.

Allah also is related to the Aramaic word al-leh which also means the one god.

Great point that Allah is not considered to be the literal name of god. But I think many people miss that point and do not realize that the word god is more of a genus or species name rather than referring to any individual.

[GeorgeGist]

5. We're going backwards. When I was a kid ...

we'd have told the adults where to stuff their bigotry.