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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

#161

Post by zouhair »

Uberphallus wrote: post #77
theprotocol wrote: post #64

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,…

Well try going from south of England to the north of Scotland and tell me these people speak the same language.

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

#163

Post by usrusr »

andyshuxin wrote: post #133
Uberphallus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

The Quran and its language ("Modern Standard Arabic") may be what binds the "dialects" together under one umbrella label "Arabic". Chinese is in a similar situation, whose writing system unifies the mutually un-intelligible "dialects" like Mandarin, Hokkien, and Cantonese as one "language" called "Chinese". Such is an advantage of separating written and spoken forms of a language: as the spoken form inevitably mutate…

The parallel to post-Roman Europe is interesting, where Latin lived on for quite a while as the language of writing. It gradually gave way to written forms of the various spoken languages, derivatives of Latin or others. During this time of parallel usage Latin, just by being there as an alternative for the elites to show off pedantry, may have helped establishing a tradition of keeping the new written languages continuously aligned with their permanently changing spoken counterparts.

Keeping Latin while it was helpful as a shared language when the scholar density was low and then moving on once local intellectual networks became stronger and mass education required efficiency may have been one of those "guns germs and steel" factors where Europe just happened to be lucky.

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

#164

Post by pjmlp »

narvval wrote: post #155
pjmlp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like Spanish was actually the language of Castilla region, and all other Iberian languages had to struggle for survival. During multiple times throughout the history, it wasn't healthy to speak other Iberian languages in public.

This is the case in most European countries: - Florentine Italian displaced Sardinian, Napolitan, Romanesco, etc. - Ille-de-france French displaced Provencal, Occitan, Breton, etc. - English displaced Scots, Gaelic, Welsh, etc. Even countrires traditionally considered "nation-states" in a linguistic sense such as Portugal went down this route to some degree, with Mirandese and Barranqueno all but gone nowadays.

Agreed, however in the case of Wales and Portugal there are some ongoing efforts to keep Welsh and Mirandese alive, which of course depends on the willingness of the local population to actually care about it.

Didn't knew that main Italian came from Florence, thanks for the hint.

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

#165

Post by theprotocol »

zouhair wrote: post #158
theprotocol wrote: post #64

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…

> It is an awful language. Well that's a stretch. I am also a native speaker and given Arabic(s) has its quirks it can be extremely fluid especially when politics leave it alone.

Well, that part is subjective.

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

#166

Post by babayega2 »

smel wrote: post #116
theprotocol wrote: post #64

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 native arabic speaker too, and can tell you that your statement is far from the truth. Arabic is far more simple language with fewer exceptions than english or french (I love/speak french :D). There are only 3 tenses: Also it's derivational language which mean once you learn about a verb you actually learn about the whole lexical family of the verb. In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabi…

"In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabic (kitaab, kaatib, maktaba) which is the same root (k,t,b)"

I see might not be difficult for me to learn it since I know Swahili (the most commonly spoken language in East Africa, which has Arab influence) since those words are pronounced respectively: Kitabu(book), Katibu(secretary), Maktaba(library).

Arab is not really complicated. Trust me, I'm accustomed to more troublesome dialects in Africa.

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

#167

Post by isostatic »

CydeWeys wrote: post #132

As a typical American who mostly just speaks English, the #1 most useful language I wish I also spoke is Spanish. It's pervasive, both in the US and elsewhere. I'm currently in Barcelona for a conference and this is the third time in 1.5 years I've been in a Spanish-speaking country for a conference. The only other language that can have a similarly credible case for learning it would be Mandarin, but unlike Spanish,…

As a typical Brit who mostly just speaks English, and have over 50 countries on 6 continents under my belt, I've never been to a country that had Spanish as an official language.

In a given year the languages that would help me are Russian, Mandarin, and Arabic. French in some parts of Africa (and France/Belgium of course).

In places like India and Kenya, I follow conversations with the locals as they generally speak English, but then they throw in borrowed phrases (Hindi, Swahili, etc).

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

#168

Post by frobozz »

jpatokal wrote: post #145
CydeWeys wrote: post #132

As a typical American who mostly just speaks English, the #1 most useful language I wish I also spoke is Spanish. It's pervasive, both in the US and elsewhere. I'm currently in Barcelona for a conference and this is the third time in 1.5 years I've been in a Spanish-speaking country for a conference. The only other language that can have a similarly credible case for learning it would be Mandarin, but unlike Spanish,…

That's a rather US-centric worldview. Looking at the official languages of countries, French and Arabic are probably the most useful worldwide, with Spanish third and Chinese (Mandarin) indeed largely useless outside greater China. https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/35348/as-a-native...

Measuring the utility of a language by number of countries in which it is spoken, or number of speakers worldwide is pretty meaningless. It's not dissimilar to the argument that children in SE England should all learn French because most of the ferries go to Calais and Boulogne - planes go everywhere.

The utility of a language is a personal thing. CydeWeys makes professional visits to Spanish speaking countries at a rate of 2x per year. That alone makes Spanish more useful than French or Arabic.

If you visit Riga with that kind of frequency, then Latvian is a far more useful language than Spanish, French or Arabic.

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

#169

Post by qubax »

jpatokal wrote: post #145
CydeWeys wrote: post #132

As a typical American who mostly just speaks English, the #1 most useful language I wish I also spoke is Spanish. It's pervasive, both in the US and elsewhere. I'm currently in Barcelona for a conference and this is the third time in 1.5 years I've been in a Spanish-speaking country for a conference. The only other language that can have a similarly credible case for learning it would be Mandarin, but unlike Spanish,…

That's a rather US-centric worldview. Looking at the official languages of countries, French and Arabic are probably the most useful worldwide, with Spanish third and Chinese (Mandarin) indeed largely useless outside greater China. https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/35348/as-a-native...

> Looking at the official languages of countries, French

Countries with french as an official language only have a total population of 434 million people. And a few of them, like canada, has english as an official language as well. Also, most of the francophile countries are small former african colonies which may one day give up french as an official language and move to english or a native language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_entities_w...

French language's geographical and population reach is smaller than china's. The same applies for arabic and spanish.

> and Chinese (Mandarin) indeed largely useless outside greater China.

Which is true, but greater china accounts for a significant amount of land and people.

French, Arabic and Spanish account for 1.3 billion people. China alone has 1.4 billion people.

But this is a moot point since the french, arabs, spaniards and chinese are all desperate to learn english since english ( for the time being ) is the language of culture, science and business. I don't see chinese, french, arabic or spanish unseating english as the world's language.

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

#170

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

Tor3 wrote: post #150
arijun wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends heavily on the language course. Duolingo's Italian course actually manages to teach grammar and usage through their standard translation setup, while their Japanese course does nothing of the sort. It does not work very well for the latter, I've been through most of it by now and it's just translation-translation-translation, which doesn't teach you much at all, because the translation to English really do…

Are you sure you don't mean "gozaimasu" in the taxi driver example? I learned what little Japanese I do know from Duolingo and it was somewhat useful on a recent trip to Japan. Our tour guides were mostly impressed and certainly didn't point out any glaring issues with it (although that could be Japanese politeness).
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