This week's drama lesson was about developing a voice. No, not the silly voices on cartoons summoned of by 8-year-olds when they want to wind up their parents. Nor the sentimental words uttered in squeaky voices by ventriloquists intended to raise an ‘aaah' and a smile. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one would be stone-hearted not to laugh at a feathered parody of a bird being battered to bits by burly bipolar building site employees. (This writer has been waiting a fortnight to work in that bit of alliteration.) no, no, seriously though, one charge's during the drama session were reading a short speech (“Once upon a time, there was a man who lived with his mother. Because they were as poor as an empty pocket, the mother sent the man out to find work...") in various modes. The students produced this speech in ‘motherese' with the careful enunciation for youngsters whose linguistic skills as are the ‘Ball!' stage, as opposed to the ‘Excuse me, if you wouldn't mind awfully, I was wondering if you would retrieve my ball, my favourite plaything, from yonder shelf as, I am sure you can appreciate, my lack of stature – i.e. my altitude being a mere fraction of yours, dear parent – does not allow me to grasp the object of my desire" of a few weeks later in the scale of child development. They also read the same speech in the manner of a newsreader, in the style of an advertisement for fast food, with the raciness of a sports commentator and delivered with the sententiousness of a judge. The results were amazing as the children learned that how one says something is as important – if not, more important – as how it is uttered. The best was yet to come. The students were asked to deliver the “Once upon a time" speech and imagine they were a teacher shouting at a pupil. The shouters were convincing in their portrayals of members of the teaching staff such that the ‘shoutee' cringed as their ears were assaulted with “Look here, you! One upon a time...Look at me when I'm talking to you!...Once upon a time..." The audience doubled up with laughter in the safety of a near-empty classroom far from the madding crowd doing an artist's impression of basketball in the court two storeys down. I must admit, I shared in the young people's mirth. Indeed, watching someone lose their temper is, frankly, funny. When you are on the receiving end of someone's rough tongue, you may not feel so light-hearted. Even so, the best of Egyptian comedy films of three or four decades ago include a fair amount of raised voices: people screaming down phones, yelling at each other and rendering their lines unintelligible to the audience. Meanwhile, the Arabic lexicon of raising one's voice yields interesting findings. To begin with, the term ‘Saa7 – yiSii7' means shout, bellow, roar, or scream. The problem with some pronunciations in Arabic is that one false move in the point of articulation can land you in trouble, particularly since ‘saa7' (with an allophone of ‘S') denotes ‘to roam,' hence ‘saayi7' – tourist. Perhaps we have the title of a film: is-saayi7 iS-Saayi7 – ‘The Shouting Tourist'. Similarly, ‘Sara5' with that harsh guttural ‘kh' at the end means ‘scream, shriek, cry for help', but minus the dot over the last consonant in writing will result in ‘Sarrah – y-Sarri7' – ‘to explain'. Another film title: ‘Sarra7 wi-Sar5it' – ‘He Explained and She Screamed'. Ho-hum. Maybe a textbook on Egyptian Spoken Arabic. Now for the granddaddy of them all: ‘itza33a2'. When you pronounce this mush of pharyngeals and a sibilant, even your face is contorted into that of a purple, rage-filled monster of the fender-bender, or outraged customer. And now for something a little quieter: the expression ‘hataf bihi haatif' – ‘a voice called out to him', which implies that the caller was unseen, hence ‘haatif', the word for ‘telephone' current in the Arab Gulf countries. A related expression that has possibilities for entertaining your listeners is ‘hataf thalaathan' – ‘give three cheers'. Now you can sing: ‘Yalla nihtaf thalaathan wa-waahidan thaani li-kabitaan il-binafur' (Let's give three cheers and one cheer more/For the Captain of the Pinafore). This raises the question as to whether Egypt is ready for operettas of the Gilbert and Sullivan variety – a far cry from ‘Aida'. The experts tell us that shouting is ‘vociferation', denoting a scream, shout, shriek, hoot, holler, vociferation, yell, outcry. This is “a loud vocalisation in which air is passed through the vocal folds with greater force than is used in regular or close-distance vocalisation." Perhaps the best exponents of vociferation are the participants in a shouting match, in which the participants debate an issue at the tops of their voices in the belief that loud means forceful. Shouting of this kind should make a superb spectator sport that would need little adaptation for radio. Or you might go for the opening scenes of ‘Shanabo fi-l-Masyada' (Shanabo in the Trap) in which Fouad el-Muhandis is shouted at by his screen boss. Your homework – stop groaning at the back! – is to practice shouting the name of your ‘bawab' down the well of the stairs. That sounds easy enough, but try this without varying pitch or intonation, thus: ‘yaa-A7mad!...(6 seconds)... ‘yaa-A7mad!...(6 seconds)... ‘yaa-A7mad!...(6 seconds)... ‘yaa-A7mad!...(6 seconds)... If you can keep this up for ten minutes, award yourself three points and shout ‘hooray!' three times.
