Saturday: the 1st point for Major Chris (in the fountain)

While Major Chris, Jocelyn, Senda, and I had lunch together, Chris noted that:

"There is مَاء in the fountain by us, and we are drinking مَاء as well."

-- (Mnemonic: There was a dog in the shopping center new where we were eating at the  مَطَعَمْ

 so I imagined the mutt drinking water that Jasmine splashed out of the found for him onto a mat below.  When we call a dog a "mutt" in English, many of us use the glottal stop like the Hamza in Arabic, and then the word "mat" is close too that word too, so if you imagine a mutt lapping up water off a mat below a fountain you have the word for water in Arabic.)

Jocelyn had wanted to learn the word for fountain, but neither Chris or Senda could be sure of what fountain was in Modern Standard Arabic.  Senda only new that particular word in Tunisia dialect.

The word for fountain is:  نَاْفُوْرَة or without the diacritics which confuse the "f": نافورة

-- (Mnemonic: I can't think of a good Mnemonic for this one so I just cheat and use my animal icons for each consonant in the spelling with food for the vowels.  At the top of the 3 level fountain I see a Nutcracker bird washing rotten egg off of himself for the long A sound.  On the next level down I see a flamingo lying in the fountain with a pile of "ooh, la, la" acai berries on his stomach that he's popping into his mouth with his feathers.  Finally, at the bottom I see a Raccoon with an rotten apple trying to hide behind the fountain from Jasmine who is laughing at him and trying to splash water at him.  Jasmine comes at the end to give me the "it's a girl word" te-marbutah ending.  I pull her into the story just to connect it with the context of learning the word today since Jasmine happened to be a significant part of the story of my day.  And there I have it: fountain is Nae-foo-Rah.)

For those of you who want to find words to memorize and to post that you don't know like this, I confirmed this word as a good useful word in a five step process as follows.

(1) I went onto google translate to find the noun google suggests.

http://translate.google.com/#ar|en|%0A%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%81%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A9

(2nd) I search the word on google images to see if it would consistently pull up the image I wanted.  Indeed, the word did pull up all fountain images on Google images.

http://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1793&bih=1150&q=%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%81%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A9&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=

(3rd) I looked up the word in an old fashion hard cover dictionary (Al-Mawrid Al-Hadeeth), and I did indeed find the word there as a legitimate MSA word for fountain--option number 3 to be precise.  The first two options in the dictionary consisted of using two words to translate fountain, so the third one did in fact seem like an excellent choice on google.

(4th) I added the diacritics I thought I heard on Google Translate's audio pronunciation by copying and pasting the word into LEXILOGOS Arabic Keyboard at this website:

http://www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/arabic.htm

(5th) I copied the new spelling of the word I created with all of the vowel signs, and then I pasted the word back into Google translated to make sure Google still recognized the word as the same and translated it as such.  It worked, so I knew I had spelled it correctly, so I then pasted the word into this blog as seen above.