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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

#201

Post by DigitalHobo »

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…

> Arabic is far more simple language with fewer exceptions than english or french

Would you say this is true of spoken english as well? By that I mean, a large amount of the difficulty involving english involves our train-wreck of spelling rules, spoken english on the other hand tends to be reasonably easy to become functional in (apart from idioms). Would you say that Arabic is simpler than purely spoken english as well?

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

#203

Post by mattnewport »

browsercoin wrote: post #121

not to mention the most beautiful (imo) and has some pleasant Farsi spoken in Iran.

Farsi has adopted the same alphabet and has some Arabic loan words but it's a very different language. Farsi is an Indo-European language while Arabic is Semitic (Afro-Asiatic).

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

#204

Post by mohamedattahri »

int_19h wrote: post #182
smel wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) and with simple rules you can discover all those words or even invent them if not used previously I don't see why the word for "author" has to be derived from the same root as "book", logically speaking. There are a great deal more things than books that have authors. The reason why this partic…

Indeed, many languages have a concept of root from which words must be derived. In Arabic, it’s much more pronounced, because knowing the root of a word is essential to being able to use the language effectively.

2 of may favorite things about the language: 1/ fun fact is that the vast majority of verbs have only 3 letters in them 2/ Pronouns make a distinction between one, two or more people, and even indicate whether the subject is present or absent. I find it extremely powerful.

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

#205

Post by CydeWeys »

barry-cotter wrote: post #194
qubax wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.wiki…

> 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. That’s not happening outside of a war. It did in Rwanda because of a war where the side that eventually won spent long periods outside their home country and hated French as a symbol of the Belgians. Ditto for Algeria with the French though Fren…

Also, it takes a good and organized educational system to get everyone to learn a new language. Without that people only learn the languages that are already spoken around them. I'm struggling to imagine these listed African countries pull it off in the same way that, e.g., Germany did with English post-WWII, or China did with Mandarin.

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

#206

Post by sdiq »

CydeWeys wrote: post #180
isostatic wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm frankly amazed that you've never been to a Spanish-speaking country given your homeland and travel propensity, and that are 20 of them (plus Puerto Rico). It's almost like you've gone out of your way to avoid Spanish-speaking countries. Do yourself a favor and buy a cheap flight to Barcelona and make it 51.

Or travel to Gibraltar and take a detour to Spain.

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

#207

Post by memsom »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #193
isolli wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of Czech, where a fixed list of prefixes can be used to modify the meaning of any verb, with very creative possibilities! https://mluvtecesky.net/en/grammar/prefixes

Same in Polish, with some curse words providing very flexible bases for every situation.

Do you know of a resource that shows pictograms for Polish like the one the parent shows? My partner is Polish and I’m slowly acquiring the language, butI have always struggled to visualise the meanings of the Polish equivalent prefixes

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

#208

Post by mohamedattahri »

DigitalHobo wrote: post #201
smel wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Arabic is far more simple language with fewer exceptions than english or french Would you say this is true of spoken english as well? By that I mean, a large amount of the difficulty involving english involves our train-wreck of spelling rules, spoken english on the other hand tends to be reasonably easy to become functional in (apart from idioms). Would you say that Arabic is simpler than purely spoken english as…

I would say that English is somewhat hard, mostly because of the exceptions in the past participate, words that are NOT - edit - spelled phonetically, making it hard to learn new words, and there are many tenses - not as many as in French, most of which are misused when casually speaking.

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

#209

Post by [deleted] »

mohamedattahri wrote: post #204
int_19h wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabic (kitaab, kaatib, maktaba) which is the same root (k,t,b) and with simple rules you can discover all those words or even invent them if not used previously I don't see why the word for "author" has to be derived from the same root as "book", logically speaking. There are a great deal more things than books that have authors. The reason why this partic…

Indeed, many languages have a concept of root from which words must be derived. In Arabic, it’s much more pronounced, because knowing the root of a word is essential to being able to use the language effectively. 2 of may favorite things about the language: 1/ fun fact is that the vast majority of verbs have only 3 letters in them 2/ Pronouns make a distinction between one, two or more people, and even indicate wheth…

[deleted]

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

#210

Post by jcranmer »

CydeWeys wrote: post #179
jpatokal wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The better stat to use is # of speakers worldwide, not official languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... The top 10 list is, in order, English, Mandarin, Hindustani, Spanish, Arabic, French, Malay, Russian, Bengali, and Portuguese. English we already speak. Mandarin is primarily useful in China and not so much otherwise. Hindustani has the same problem but for India, and there's also…

The interesting statistic is to look at languages with much higher L2 speakers than L1 speakers. English, French, Malay, and Swahili are the main languages in this category, with Russian and Hindi having roughly as many L2 as L1. What these statistics are telling you is which languages act as lingua francas among non-native speakers. By contrast, languages like Spanish, Mandarin, and Japanese are spoken by a large number of natives but don't have much use for non-native speakers. It's less useful to learn those kinds of languages unless you specifically want to talk with those speakers.
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