Arabic and Ancient Greek MA (Hons) personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

The Greek grammar I bought for two pounds in a charity shop still had its previous owner's pencil ticks beside the first declension. I wanted to see whether the alphabet I half-recognised from maths could be turned into sentences, and within a month I was reading short lines with a dictionary. What keeps me going is how much careful reasoning a single sentence demands: endings, word order and particles all have to be weighed before the meaning settles. At the same time I had begun learning Arabic at a free Saturday class in our community centre, and I noticed something that made the two languages feel connected rather than separate. The Arabic word qanun, meaning law, comes from Greek kanon, and falsafa is simply philosophia carried across. I want to study both languages together because I am interested in what happens to ideas when they move between them.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My school does not offer Latin, Greek or Arabic, so my evidence of preparation is partly independent. In Advanced Higher French I enjoy close translation most, especially working out why a literal rendering sounds wrong in English. Higher History taught me to treat sources as arguments, which proved useful when I read Dimitri Gutas's Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. His case that the Abbasid translation movement was driven by the practical and political needs of Baghdad society, rather than by a few enthusiastic rulers, changed how I saw my own project. Over the past year I have kept a notebook of Greek words that entered Arabic, such as iqlim from klima and jughrafiya from geographia, noting how Arabic sound patterns reshaped them. Where I could not check an etymology in a reliable dictionary, I left it out. I also read about Hunayn ibn Ishaq's translations of Galen and tried translating a short passage of Plato's Crito myself, comparing my version line by line with a published one to see where I had flattened the Greek. In Arabic I can now read unvowelled short texts slowly and use a root-based dictionary confidently, which has made me curious about how morphology works so differently from Greek inflection. Comparing languages has also made me wary of treating a borrowed word as proof that an idea travelled unchanged. Its meaning depends on the text and the people using it. I want the linguistic skill to investigate those changes directly, while keeping dictionary evidence separate from an attractive historical story.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

Three evenings a week I work in a fish and chip shop, where I take orders, run the fryer when we are busy and close up with the manager. Friday rushes have taught me to stay calm, keep track of many small details at once and stay polite to people who are tired and hungry. I am trusted to cash up the till, which I take seriously. On Saturday mornings I referee under-11 football. Explaining a decision clearly to an eight-year-old and to an unhappy parent in the same minute is harder than it sounds, and I have become better at staying fair and consistent. Before school I walk my younger brother to his primary, and we often test each other on vocabulary, his spellings against my Arabic verbs. At the community class I have started helping newer learners with the letter forms, because I remember which joins confused me. None of this is glamorous, but it has given me steady habits: I study in short, regular sessions around shifts, and I finish what I start. I am looking forward to learning both languages properly with expert teaching, and to finding out how far the patient reading I have begun on my own can take me.