Health and the body in Algerian Arabic

This is the page you hope not to need and will be very glad to have. Explaining that something hurts, and where, to somebody who does not speak your language, is one of the few situations where not having the words is genuinely serious rather than merely awkward.

A hundred and eighty two entries: the parts of the body, the words for feeling ill, and the phrases for a pharmacy, a doctor and a hospital. It is also, less dramatically, the vocabulary of ordinary conversation, because how are you feeling comes up every day and تعبان is one of the most used words in the country.

Where does it hurt is the question you must recognise

You do not need to produce a medical explanation. You need to understand the question and point. The exchange in a pharmacy is short: what is wrong, where, since when, here is what to take. Learn to recognise those four and you will be understood, because the pharmacist is doing most of the work and has done this a thousand times.

Body words appear everywhere except medicine

Head, hand, eye, heart and stomach run through idioms, insults, compliments and jokes in Algerian just as they do in English. عين is on this page glossed as eye and also as a spring of water, which is a good example: learn the body word and you have quietly acquired a piece of half a dozen expressions elsewhere in the library.

Have the pharmacy sentence ready before you need it

Write one sentence now: I have a pain in my, and the part of the body you most often have trouble with. Learn it cold. Add the word for since yesterday or for three days. That is two sentences and it covers the overwhelming majority of what you would ever need to say across a pharmacy counter, and you will not be composing it while you feel unwell.

What to do with this page

Learn the ten body parts you could point to on yourself right now, and three ways to say something is wrong. Then look at the phrases for asking somebody else how they are and for wishing them well, because you will use those far more often than you will use the medical vocabulary, and they are the ones that matter socially.

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