Interesting article, originally published in Al Ahram, from the Egyptian Professor Tarek Heggy, explaining why there is no word in Arabic for "compromise", and how Egypt needs to work on developing one. Pity we don't have Win around to explain to us how racist this guy is for using the terms "Arab, Latin and Anglo-Saxon Mind":
Our need for "A Culture of Compromise"
by Tarek Heggy
A few years ago, I discovered that there is no equivalent in the Arabic ýlanguage, classical or colloquial, for the English word "compromise", which ýis most commonly translated into Arabic in the form of two words, literally ýmeaning ‘halfway solution’. I went through all the old and new ýdictionaries and lexicons I could lay my hands on in a futile search for an ýArabic word corresponding to this common English word, which exists, ýwith minor variations in spelling, in all European languages, whether of the ýLatin, Germanic, Hellenic or Slavic families. The same is true of several ýother words, such as ‘integrity’, which has come to be widely used in the ýdiscourse of Europe and North America in the last few decades and for ýwhich no single word exists in the Arabic language. As language is not ýmerely a tool of communication but the depositary of a society’s cultural ýheritage, reflecting its way of thinking and the spirit in which it deals with ýthings and with others, as well as the cultural trends which have shaped it, I ýrealized that we were here before a phenomenon with cultural (and, ýconsequently, political, economic and social) implications. ý
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