Emphases Quotes
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Day and night Balian studied Arabic, both the language of the street corner and the more formal prose of his oneiric teachers. It was not that he mastered the language but rather that it mastered him. He found himself thinking in a language in which nouns shaded imperceptibly into verbs, a language which seemed to discount being in the present, a language with a special verb form for colours and physical deformities, a language of rhythmic syntax and many tiered layers of sense, communicated through hawking stops, gutturals, odd emphases and doublings.
