Children's book brings Lebanese proverbs to life
Author Caroline Torbey spent her childhood trying to understand her Lebanese father’s colorful Arabic filled with proverbs, so she created a children’s book to share what she learned with a new generation.
Caroline Torbey has the perfect example of a multicultural and multilingual background. Her father is Lebanese and her mother Vietnamese-German. When Torbey was a child they lived in Cameroon, where the official languages are French and English, but 250 other languages are spoken. She grew up speaking French with her parents as well as Arabic, English, German and some occasional Vietnamese.
“My father did not speak a lot [in Arabic] but when he spoke, it was full of proverbs and idioms,” Torbey told Al-Monitor. “I wasn’t fluent in Arabic as a little girl and ended up doing a lot of research so that I could understand what he was saying. I thought the Lebanese proverbs, with which I grew up, were both colorful and interesting.”
