I don't speak Arabic -- though I recently ordered the beginner module from Rosetta Stone which still sits in its wrapper on my desk shelf. (I am in the Arab world a lot however and learning more each trip) Perhaps after the conventions.

But a friend, Foued Mokrani, speaks Arabic just fine -- and reported on his Facebook page the following after watching a film during a flight to Paris:

I watched the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and noticed they translate the word ''gay" to ''pervert" in the Arabic subtitles!! Very dumb



He continued, responding to a person who really loved the film:





The exchange intrigued me -- and obviously raised the question of what the right word in Arabic might be for "gay" and in my own inexperience with the language whether there was such a word at all.

Another commenter on Mokrani's page wrote:

.



Mokrani responded:





When I wrote to Mokrani about this, intrigued that a language as distinguished, beautiful and storied as Arabic would not have been modernized to include "homosexual" in its basic vocabulary, he wrote this to me:

In Arabic, there is no exact word to say "homosexual." People use bad words like faggot, pervert, or just use the sentence "liking people from same sex." Recently, a few people started using the word "mithli" modifying the word for "sex" -- meaning "same as me".



What they used in the movie is "pervert" to translate the word gay -- or "cheth" in Arabic.



The same word was used by my Imam when I met him as a young guy and told him I like men.



Still intrigued, I called Ghaith al-Omari, executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine, to see whether what I was hearing was right or not -- and ask how he would say the word "gay." Al-Omari just happened to be walking into a lecture he was giving to a bunch of foreign service students on the topic of Arabic language, so the timing was perfect.