Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

Post by sdegutis » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:30 AM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #25

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.

Post by thisrod » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:37 AM UTC

amasad wrote: post #13

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.

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...

Post by thebooktocome » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:39 AM UTC

lgessler wrote: post #27

thebooktocome wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by Scriptor » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:44 AM UTC

thrower123 wrote: post #29

Scriptor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by amasad » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 4:51 AM UTC

Pharmakon wrote: post #30

amasad wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.