Arabic-english Ambiguity

Every language is Sui Generis, i.e. a new version of life or a new window to the world. Arabic is unique; it has its own features and characteristics such as parsing, duality, inter-sentence connectors, diacritical markers as well as semantic and structural diversity of meaning. Crystal defines ambiguity as, it might be resulted from the multi-layered and/or allegorical meanings, a term used to refer to a word, a sentence, or a structure, expressing more than one meaning (Crystal, 1978: 17). It constitutes an Arabic specific-feature as several types of ambiguity are recognized in Arabic linguistics .

Ambiguity which exists in almost all languages does not function in the same way in each one. In Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) which is believed by modern linguists to have been thoroughly established as an independent variety by the second half of the twentieth century constitutes a certain peculiar difficulty to the native speakers of Arabic due to ambiguity and many other reasons. In MSA, for example, one might say (akalna al-aysha bil-goubni) which may have two different explanations, the first is that `we ate bread and cheese` while the second explanation is that `we made a living by being cowardly`. This is a lexical ambiguity of the word (goubn) which has both meanings.