A lot of times there are phrases that have 2 meanings. The first being the actual meaning of the phrase and the second having nothing to do with the literal meaning. In English the first phrase that comes to mind is “Bob’s your uncle“. The first meaning is pretty self explanatory, the person named Bob is your uncle. The second meaning is where it gets weird. The second meaning is used when giving some instructions and after you have given the instructions you say this phrase almost to mean that’s it, or if you follow my instructions everything will be completed easily. As you can see the second meaning doesn’t have anything to do with someone named Bob or him being your uncle. You find the same pattern with a Moroccan phrase.
Today, I came across a similar double meaning Moroccan phrase. The Moroccan phrase Sh7all hadi in the first meaning is translated to how much is this. Pretty straightforward, a simple question you may use when shopping. The second meaning is where things get confusing.
Before I give you the meaning, I’ll give you the sentence that confused me.
Sh7al hadi ma taSlt b lwalid dyali.
I kept thinking that the sentence meant how much is it call my father. The problem is that the verb taSl (to call) is in the past tense so it couldn’t be the translation I was thinking of. The meaning of sh7al hadi is it’s been ages or it’s a long time. Using the second meaning we can translate the sentence to I haven’t called my father in a long time.
This makes more sense but the problem is how do differentiate the difference between the two?
For the first meaning, this is basically a question, how much is this? Ideally the phrase should be followed by a noun. How much is this house? How much is this car? How much is this carpet? This is the ideal although I suppose someone could say something like how much is this car which is under the tree where my dad proposed to my mom on a warm autumn evening? Let’s hope that is a rare case but even if it is something said the phrase sh7al hadi is followed by a noun.
In the second meaning you can see sh7al hadi is followed by a verb. This makes sense as it would a long time since some action was taken. In my example it was calling my father but this could be used by other verbs as well like it’s been a long time since I went to the beach or it’s been a long time since I wrote to my sister.
Another interesting thing is the second meaning sort of flips the words around when translating to English. So the sentence sh7al hadi ma taSl b lwalid dyali is flipped to ma taSl b lwalid dyali sh7al hadi when translating to English.
If this concept sounds confusing, here is a great way to practice. Come up with a few sentences using the phrase sh7al hadi and put them in the comments. Also if you need any more explanation let me know in the comments.