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Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

economist.com

81–90 of 318 posts

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

#81

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/

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

#82
It is on my list of languages I want to learn! Because I think it will be the second most spoken language in Europe. But as others already wrote: the dialects are very strong and different.. So, not sure which one to learn :)

Any advise? Or maybe prediction which will win the "language" war in Europe?

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

#83

Duolingo has been postponing its launch of Arabic for English speakers for a while. Now, next date is March 1st 2019. https://www.duolingo.com/course/ar/en/Learn-Arabic-Online

Doesn't surprise me at all. Implementing right-to-left support in a product that's production-ready will require a lot of code rewrite.

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

#84
post #58
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Let's not go into religious or racial flamewar, please.

As a muslim myself, this is not a religion war. It simply is the case. There is no reasonable budget for science in most/all of muslim dominant countries, and the budget that exists is not used effectively. Private sector support for technology is very limited, and medical research especially genetic research is very limited.

I wish this was not the case.

I do not care who produces the science, we all are one and the same. Science benefits all.

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

#85
post #83

Duolingo has been postponing its launch of Arabic for English speakers for a while. Now, next date is March 1st 2019. https://www.duolingo.com/course/ar/en/Learn-Arabic-Online

Doesn't surprise me at all. Implementing right-to-left support in a product that's production-ready will require a lot of code rewrite.

But they already have Hebrew!

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

#86

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

Interesting that he says MSA is further from region arabic than Latin is from Spanish. Provides useful context for people familiar with European languages.

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

#87
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you got some examples?

I have very limited knowledge on the topic so take what I say with some skepticism, but one thing is that most words are formed by a variation of a three or four letter root word. So this gives a lot of flexibility and subtlety to the language. Context is everything. A root word for example made up of the letters d - r - b in its most basic form means to hit. But that same root can be used to mean depress (as in a pe…

This isn't exactly an unusual concept; you can see the same thing in earlier English, preserved in different forms like "rise" (present) / "rose" (past) / "raise" (causative).

This was once considered significant enough that a distinction was drawn between "strong" irregular verbs that inflect through a vowel change (rise / rose; grow / grew; swim / swam...), and "weak" irregular verbs that derive their irregular past form from the regular one (bend / bent; sleep / slept...).

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

#88
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been struggling some to describe numerals and Mikey's to my small children, and it often feels like they area backwards. As you describe this I wonder: are we literally writing them backwards?

In Arabic numbers are written in the same order as in, say, English, Thus Arabic is little-endian. I grew up with the Hundu digits (and the European ones!) which look more like the digits we use here than the actual arabic ones.

Is the Hindu and English ordering the same? If so, it's gone through two endian changes from India to Europe!

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

#89
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> It's not unique to the PRC Yes, that’s what I just said. > Nearly every modern state promotes a national language. While I agree that many states engage in implicit or explicit suppression of minority cultures (often worse in the past than today), and many (most?) states have a legally declared official language, your brief summary is a false equivalence. There are many places in the world where e.g. media in local…

I grew up in Shanghai from 1994 - 2013. To go through your points: 1) media in local languages is allowed and state-funded in Shanghai, 2) Kids did speak Shanghainese in school, though official instruction was in Mandarin, 3) Official documents can't be translated into Shanghainese since it's not written, 4) there is institutional support for cultural preservation - as I write below TV shows are in Shanghainese / Wu, announcements on buses and subways in Shanghainese, there are free Shanghainese classes you can attend, radio shows (all state-backed) that are Shanghainese only or have Shanghainese / Wu radio shows, 5) Shanghai's Religious Bureau was pretty good, I went to 3 Catholic churches in Shanghai growing up, they had Masses in Mandarin, Shanghainese (harder to do now since most priests in China come from smaller, extremely Catholic Villages, not as many from Shanghai), and English. The city gov't gave money to help restore / renovate the Shanghai Cathedral (if you're there you should go visit, it's in Xujiahui) - unclear about other ones but I've been to Protestant churches, been to one Mosque. There are 80 million Catholics in China now, so I think it counts as a minority religious faith.

So to your points, the only one that Shanghai did not fulfill would probably be the "allowed to attend schools speaking their native languages" part. I'm not sure I think Shanghainese should be, maybe it should have a formal class? There are free classes you can take (usually by District), and everyone spoke Shanghainese at home, so I'm not sure it's necessary.

If you go to Shanghai, buses and subways announce in three languages: Mandarin, English, and Shanghainese. I was just there beginning of October and yes, not all buses had this but it was prevalent enough. This means they are promoting the Shanghainese language (a subset of the larger Wu Chinese dialect). There are TV shows in Shanghai / Jiangsu / Zhejiang that are solely in the Wu dialect - and this is not recent. I remember watching shows with my aunts and uncles 15 years ago. XinMin Evening News always had some cartoons (think New Yorker cartoons but not as highbrow) with Shanghainese dialect subtitles (as in Chinese words that most mimic the Shanghainese dialect).

If you go to Guangdong or Guangxi, many people still have trouble speaking Mandarin, especially outside of bigger cities like Guangzhou. In 2010 I was doing some volunteer work in a tiny village a few hours from Guangzhou and the kids we met literally did not understand Mandarin. The CCP struggled really hard to make schooling in Guangdong province taught in Mandarin (but succeeded by the 80s-ish, again, only in bigger cities). Now though, more and more schools are starting to do Cantonese classes with their own textbooks, alongside the standard Mandarin education.

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

#90
post #70

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

The discussion has been polite so far and it's not an unfair point.

Earlier in the 20th century, German was the language of engineering. Before that, French. Before that, Latin. Before that, something else. Languages and their significance in different fields wax and wane.

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