Unit 2 · What's this?

da, di, dool: this and these

Capitals mark the emphatic letters, 3 is ع and 7 is ح, and ' is the glottal stop that Cairo uses for q.

da means this or that for a masculine thing, di for a feminine one, and dool for more than one. Put it before a bare noun and you've got a sentence: da kitaab, "this is a book"; di shanTa, "this is a bag". Put it after a noun with el- and it points: el-kitaab da, "this book"; es-saa3a di, "this watch". That second order, noun first and da after, is very Egyptian and worth getting used to early. It makes questions easy too: 'eeh da? "what's this?"