The various Arab television news channels offer drastically different narratives of the same events. What that means for the viewer, and for the student of Arabic, is having to decipher a complex code of politically charged vocabulary whose usage can swiftly betray someone’s political views. The government soldiers killed by the rebels, or the rebels killed by the government? I first stepped into this linguistic labyrinth while studying Arabic in Cairo in 2004. “In the Arab world it is not nuanced,” he said.

Source: New York Times January 14, 2017 20:19 UTC