What is this blog for?
Hello! Welcome to my humble blog. I am Jacob, a 24-year old member of the Peace Corps. I’ll be departing for Morocco on September 14th, in just 5 days now. I’m making tons of preparations, practicing the language, setting up this website, making sure I have all of the travel essentials and saying farewell to everyone here in St. Louis! It’s a pretty exciting, but stressful process. I have been procrastinating a bit on the language learning as a result (sorry mom!) but I am confident in what I have picked up.
The Arabic alphabet has been particularly interesting to me, as it is truly a puzzle like no other. I have studied other languages in the past - if Spanish is a crossword puzzle and Chinese is a pictograph cypher, then Arabic is something like a subtle pattern of vocalized cues, meaning there are small hints in the letters as to what sounds they make. Z, D, and R for example, are all spoken in the front of the mouth, and have similar appearances. There is also a pattern that most nouns follow - words are composed in three consonant pairs that form meaning: for example k-t-b generally refers to books or reading (ك-ت-ب in Arabic). The language is also read from the right to the left, written entirely in cursive, and with different letter structure depending on if the letter is the initial or final letter of a word. This means each letter has 3 different appearances, not even to mention how shorter vowel sounds appear as accents instead of letters.
This gets to the point of this blog, it will have many different appearances! I will not only talk about the characteristics of Arabic here (although I know how much you would love to read about it). I plan to write about all sorts of topics that interest me. I will exclude, for your sake, the following topics… but everything else is fair game!
I promise not to write about:
Fonts
Video Games
Interesting textures
Weekly changes to my workout routine
Chairs
Moustaches
Hydration and Water Bottles
Artificial Intelligence, Geopolitics, Sociology, Psychology, and Aesthetics
If you would like to read about the last bullet point, I’ll be trying to post one longer essay on these topics every 1-2 months on the home-page, so stay tuned for that! They will be much more serious than these blog posts, and I am hoping I’ll be able to set up a way for you to send me your thoughts through email.
Looking forward to what’s next!
