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Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

economist.com

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

#61

Post by sandworm101 »

ignoramous wrote: post #4
sandworm101 wrote: post #3

Except for arabic numerals. All of science, in every language, uses arabic numerals. That is a really big deal we rarely even mention.

Well, those were invented by Indian Mathematicians acc to Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu–Arabic_numeral_system

Invention isnt the same as adoption. They were spread to the west, becoming the scientific standard, through muslim/arabic scholars. Had they not done so, the numbers might have stayed in india for centuries, or roman numbers (I V M etc) be adopted into a base-ten system instead.

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

#62

Post by toomanybeersies »

rvense wrote: post #52
village-idiot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France is doing the same with French.

French was a minority language in France until the 20th century. The other languages were basically beaten and shamed out of school children.

Same situation with Italian.

The introduction of the radio and the television played a big part in the shift to Italian and French becoming the normal languages for their respective countries over the multitude of regional languages.

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

#63

Post by sonnyblarney »

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.

"English won the game because bits and bytes were invented in English"

English as the dominant language in Science is a new thing, just 100 years ago it was German.

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

#64

Post by theprotocol »

I am a native Arabic speaker. It is an awful language. As the article points out, the dialects are just too numerous for it to gain any kind of critical mass of adoption. But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly. edit: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Arabic, and the dialect factor multiplies this problem.

It also encodes ideas very inefficiently for multiple reasons. 1. It's very convoluted and it takes many more words to describe things accurately than latin and/or germanic languages; 2. Due to geographical and cultural separation from the West, the vocabulary is just not adapted to modern life, so "workarounds" need to be used to refer things that have become common in our daily lives. I can recall a humorous TV ad that made fun of this, which involved a wife asking her husband for "the thing" and him being confused about what she was referring to.

If we're to compare it to a programming language, I'd describe it as PHP ecosystem/stdlib/development practices combined with Rust syntax.

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

#65

Post by nerdponx »

diminish wrote: post #53

Somehow the sound of Arabic accents are quite harsh among all languages I know to my ears. Only German is somewhat harsh - I have a lot of pleasure with Rammstein the metal/rock band sound in German. I always thought metal music would sound quite nice in Several Arabic accents as opposed to let's say a softer language like Italian. In short metal/hard rock in Arabic would sound wonderful whereas in Italian not.

There is a great punk band from New York with all Arabic lyrics: https://haramharam.bandcamp.com/

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

#66

Post by sonnyblarney »

luminati wrote: post #15
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.

1.4K years is certainly an overestimate. 150 years maybe a better timeframe since the Industrial revolution started going in full swing. But your same logic applies to any non major Western European language too. But past 150 years -> don't think any major scientific discovery was done in the Japanese/Korean/Chinese language. All of them was first written down and communicated and published first in the English langu…

Not quite - the academic world wasn't Arabic up until the industrial revolution.

The height of Arabic intellectualism was short lived, basically the early middle ages, not even into the Renaissance, let alone the enlightenment.

However PC it is or not - it's true that not much has been done in the Arab world for a long time, say 700 years. Muslim Golden Age: "This period is traditionally said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate due to Mongol invasions and the Siege of Baghdad in 1258 AD" from Wikipedia.

Up until 1950, something like 5% of the Arab world was literate. Very sparse population, very little industry. Without Oil ... most of us would know nothing about 'Arab' - it'd be on our radar as much as Morocco is today (a nominally Arab country without Oil) which is to say not at all. Basically not hugely important to us.

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

#67

Post by solatic »

jl6 wrote: post #57
gumby wrote: post #22

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 b…

Have you got some examples?

Just off the top of my head, in Hebrew the G-R-L root gives you both fate (goral) and lottery (hagralah). The grammatical form of hagralah connotes causing something to happen, and in that sense the word for lottery has a deeper meaning, that it determines your fate.

Same for the S-V/B-R root - you get clear (savir), explanation (hesber), and what's usually mistranslated as propaganda (hasbarah - Google that transliteration and you'll get lots of political articles). Hasbarah is when you're trying to explain something to somebody so that it will be clear to them.

These words are all completely independent and come from disparate sources in English, but the Semitic root system ties them together.

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

#68

Post by z92 »

To me Arabic seems to have two dialects mainly. Egyptian and the rest. Egyptian being so different as to sound like a separate language.

And as for Iraqi, Syrian, Gulf, Arab or rest of North African Arabic -- those are more or less the same. And if you learn MSN you can cover those.

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

#69

Post by forapurpose »

geowwy wrote: post #31
jacobolus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The RoC also promotes Mandarin, it's not unique to the PRC. Nearly every modern state promotes a national language.

> The RoC also promotes Mandarin

Until around 1990, they promoted it brutally, fitting the description of the GP. IIRC the history, in the first free elections in Taiwan in the early 1990s, one appeal of the winner is that he spoke the local dialect.

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

#70

Post by dang »

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.

> nothing with importance is being produced in Arabic

That crosses into some sort of racial (or whatever) flamewar. Please don't. It leads to destructive dynamics that are just what we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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