Arabic, a great language, has a low profile • Hacker News Board

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#21

Post by amasad » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:14 AM UTC

anonu wrote: post #8

I would disagree with the articles analogy of MSA to arabic dialects is like Latin to Romance languages. The difference is not quite that stark with Arabic.

It's pretty stark. I speak Laventine and I struggle to communicate with my North African friends and often end up supplementing with english.

I'm not sure I'd go this far but some scholars make the case that the dialects are not really dialects, they are there own language that were influenced by Arabic.

See for example Taleb's argument on Lebanese being a language https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-ge...

Historically it makes some sense because North Africa and the Laventine didn't have much in common with Arabia before Islam so they must've had their own local languages (say Berber or Aramaic) that was influenced by Arabic.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#22

Post by gumby » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:14 AM UTC

I learned MSA and some Egyptian and there really are things you can say in it that are almost impossible to express in English (or the other European languages I know). This is true of any pair of languages of course but structurally the root system allows much more nuance and overtone than more workmanlike languages like English. I believe Hebrew (which I don't speak!) has a similar structure though I've been told by Hebrew+Arabic speakers that Hebrew in practice is less so.

It's a real shame the contemporary literature is so small.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#23

Post by village-idiot » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:14 AM UTC

msvan wrote: post #10

Chinese also had the same "issue": it is more of a family of languages rather than a language. But the Chinese government has been pushing pretty hard for Mandarin over the past 100 years, such that it has now become the Chinese language. It has cost them a lot of linguistic diversity, but they probably think it pays off in the long run.

France is doing the same with French.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#24

Post by Scriptor » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:18 AM UTC

tehlike wrote: post #14

amasad wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all of science and philosophy was done in Arabic during the middle ages so "1.4k years" is an overestimate. Without the Arab and Muslim scholarship much of Greek/Roman wisdom would be lost. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Greek_Cl...

Islamic/arabic world could not keep up with the science, unfortunately.

Imagine if during the height of the Greek golden age most of the largest cities were razed to the ground and their populations systematically exterminated. That means Athens as we knew it would have been reduced to rubble.

That's what happened during the Mongol Conquests. The fall of Baghdad alone caused at least several hundred thousand people to be killed. The main library, which had collected countless works over the centuries, was gone.

Baghdad was rebuilt, of course. Economically and politically it bounced back since it was still right on the silk road. But scientific study never really recovered there.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#25

Post by jacobolus » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:22 AM UTC

msvan wrote: post #10

Chinese also had the same "issue": it is more of a family of languages rather than a language. But the Chinese government has been pushing pretty hard for Mandarin over the past 100 years, such that it has now become the Chinese language. It has cost them a lot of linguistic diversity, but they probably think it pays off in the long run.

They [the Chinese Communist Party] think suppression of local languages “pays off” in the form of political consolidation/control. Which it certainly does, at the expense of Chinese citizens and their regional cultures.

The Chinese government is by no means unique in this approach. Violent suppression of minority cultures has been a common occurrence in world history.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#26

Post by lgessler » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:22 AM UTC

This article was hailed by Language Log as being mostly right in its scientific treatment of language[1], which is unfortunately pretty rare in journalism.

[1]: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=40379

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#27

Post by lgessler » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:24 AM UTC

thebooktocome wrote: post #6

mega_behemoth wrote: post #2

Arabic, among many other languages is on a low profile simply because no science is produced in these languages. English won the game because bits and bytes were invented in English. Arabic is indeed a great and very rich language, perhaps more than English, unfortunately, nothing with importance is being produced in Arabic, especially in the last 1.4k years.

The ghazal begs to disagree.

The ghazal is a poetic form, not science. Not saying I agree with GP, but this isn't a rebuttal.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#28

Post by davidw » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:24 AM UTC

village-idiot wrote: post #23

msvan wrote: post #10

Chinese also had the same "issue": it is more of a family of languages rather than a language. But the Chinese government has been pushing pretty hard for Mandarin over the past 100 years, such that it has now become the Chinese language. It has cost them a lot of linguistic diversity, but they probably think it pays off in the long run.

France is doing the same with French.

'A language is a dialect with an army'

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#29

Post by thrower123 » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:24 AM UTC

Scriptor wrote: post #24

tehlike wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Islamic/arabic world could not keep up with the science, unfortunately.

Imagine if during the height of the Greek golden age most of the largest cities were razed to the ground and their populations systematically exterminated. That means Athens as we knew it would have been reduced to rubble. That's what happened during the Mongol Conquests. The fall of Baghdad alone caused at least several hundred thousand people to be killed. The main library, which had collected countless works over…

One might, on the other hand, wonder what might have happened if the Mongols hadn't been infected by Islamic schism and dynastic troubles and completed their push through into Mamluk Egypt. As pivotal as Ayn Jalut was, the groundwork for that failure was laid in the religious conversion of [1]Berke and the Golden Horde to Islam.

[1] Initially listed his brother Batu, rather than Berke, the first Muslim Khan.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#30

Post by Pharmakon » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:27 AM UTC

amasad wrote: post #21

anonu wrote: post #8

I would disagree with the articles analogy of MSA to arabic dialects is like Latin to Romance languages. The difference is not quite that stark with Arabic.

It's pretty stark. I speak Laventine and I struggle to communicate with my North African friends and often end up supplementing with english. I'm not sure I'd go this far but some scholars make the case that the dialects are not really dialects, they are there own language that were influenced by Arabic. See for example Taleb's argument on Lebanese being a language https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philolog…

Plus you get the influence of colonial powers like France in North Africa. Tunisian for example is... challenging if you come at it from the perspective of something like Kuwaiti Arabic.