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Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

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

#91

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 Ara…

I'm a polyglot, and what keeps me from trying to learn Arabic is precisely that. Back in the day I worked in a very international environment, two Tunisian colleagues spoke Tunisian to each other, but when the Moroccan or Lebanese guys from the other teams came to ask some questions, everybody switched to French. If was small talk, they would stick to Arabic with the Moroccan though. It's pretty amazing that Arabic,…

Your anecdote is also mentioned in the article [0] linked somewhere in this thread:

"The one thing not mentioned in the article is the idea of registers, which is the vertical transition between intermediate stages between full dialect and full MSA depending on the socio-lingiustic context of a conversation or other language production opportunity."

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

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

#92
The "Idle Words" blog, home to the infamous "Dabblers and Blowhards" takedown of Paul Graham, also has a good article on Arabic (http://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm).

Opening paragraph:

I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called the Defense Language Institute, where young men and women learn how to eavesdrop on the nation's enemies, provided that the enemies speak slowly and limit their conversation to hobbies and the weather.

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

#93
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Certainly. In Jordan, 5-10% of our words, when we're speaking Arabic that is, is English.

This morning someone shared with me an article on cnbc that a guy and a girl from Jordan raised 4.5 million and now I see you here, congratulations :)

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

#94

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

Duolingo only teaches vocab and shows you example sentences to teach grammar. It doesn't have any explicit teaching, which means it's less effective the further the language is from English. But, they just like advertising their 30 or however many language options.

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

#95

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

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?

Yes we are! I first had the same thought when I was reading about Galley division: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley_division and then I think I found a website that could switch between english and arabic translations and found a number to compare.

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

#96
Arabic's grammar system should also be fascinating for any computer scientist. The majority of MSA vocabulary is generated by predictably transforming "root strings" of 2, 3 or 4 letters. Beyond just English style conjugation, this means that every verb can predictably be transformed into a set of nouns, every noun can be traced back to to its original root verb (the same for adjectives and adverbs).

For example

Root: KTB Kataba (he wrote) Kitaab (book) [thing you write] Maktaba (bookshop / library / office) [place you write] Kateb (clerk, writer, author) [writer] (and so on for words that don't translate directly into English)

Root: AML Amala: (he did / worked) Amal: (~action) [thing you do / make] Mamal: (factory) [place you do / make] Amel: (~worker) [doer, maker, worker]

So on for words like (kitchen = place where you eat, pilot = person who flies).

The previous comment arguing that Arabic is too rigid for new vocabulary overlooks how this rigidity allows for a very well structured grammar, that ability to express thoughts and ideas thag just fall out of a result of the combinatorics.

Similarly, this means that contrary to previous comments, Arabic is also /very well/ encoded for many tasks. Once you know your roots, is very easy to reverse engineer what a lot of commonly used words mean. What's more, you can (and people have) exploited this to write very efficient semantic compression algorithms for Arabic text.

You can't see it in the English letters but these transformations are super algorithmic, you do them by just doubling consonants or adding vowels and it's very intuitive for native speakers.

There are only about a total of 6000 lexical root words in Arabic, so on a computer you can represent each word by encoding it's lexical root, and the grammatical transformation on it. This results in compressed text which is also still very easy to analyse for meaning and sentiment.

You can check out the literature on Arabic natural language processing to see more like this, and a lot of them double as helpful tools for learning Arabic. Google once made an API which would take written Arabic text and infer the locations of all the pronunciation marks from the context and vocabulary, so you can turn text into a form that's easier for beginners to read. Yamli is a popular tool which automatically transliterates Arabic that has been written phonetically in Roman characters back to correctly spelled Arabic letters, so if you've heard a word but don't know how to spell it you can still Google it. I'm sure there are many other cool things I don't know about too.

There may be a lot of spoken dialects, but written Arabic is potentially one of the most standardised and carefully encoded languages there is.

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

#97

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 Ara…

> 1. It's very convoluted and it takes many more words to describe things accurately than latin and/or germanic languages

It could be correct in the opposite side too, there is many Arabic sentences that need longer words to translate to English.

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

#98

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 Ara…

Sounds to me like arabic is an equivalent of evolved latin. It is kind of the situation that would have happened if no languages had evolved from latin and we would still have regional interpretations of latin. Am I correct? Is it possible that arabic continues to evolve into completely different languages with grammar, lexicon and all?

Edit: typos.

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

#99

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 Ara…

> I'd describe it as PHP ecosystem/stdlib/development practices

פעמיים נקודתיים

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

#100
post #94

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

Duolingo only teaches vocab and shows you example sentences to teach grammar. It doesn't have any explicit teaching, which means it's less effective the further the language is from English. But, they just like advertising their 30 or however many language options.

I disagree. I'm using it to learn another language that is far from English, albeit one with much simpler grammar. I find it more effective than a grammar heavy course. You can know every rule of a language and still not be able to speak it at all. What you need is internalization of those rules via practice, which Duolingo provides.
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