I'm turkish and because of hidden arabic imperialism and assimilation rooted deep in islam, I refuse to use even arabic words which are common in turkish.
You probably forgot Fatih, is that not still Arabic?
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Arabic, a great language, has a low profile
241–250 of 318 posts
Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile
#242Arabic, 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
> nothing with importance is being produced in Arabic
If we navigate the flamewar this is still an interesting point.
"Essay on the Computation of Casting and Equation" at least was written in arabic. It was long long time ago but its impact is still noticeable.
What are they doing more recently? I can see femtochemistry, improving robots and inventing critical parts of the litium battery for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_Arab_scientists...
Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not surprised Turkish is simpler. It was “reformed” so much after the foundation of the republic that modern Turks can’t understand Ottoman Turkish. It was written in Arabic script and had a great, great many Arabic and Persian words. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_language > Owing to this sudden change in the language, older and younger people in Turkey started to differ in their vocabularies. While the…
Interesting. I suppose reform worked for Turkish. I'm fascinated by the simplicity and the straightforwardness of Turkish.
Of course it worked, now we can easily understand other turkic people from Kygrzystan, Uzbekistan, Uyghur, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan.
It’s one of the most important and critical reform, Ataturk did.
Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly So just like every other language.
Yep. First rule of languages: Languages are not logic. If somebody tells you that their mother tongue is more logical than language X, it's in most cases just bias of the native speaker who is not aware of the difficulties. Second rule of languages: There are no easy or hard languages. Whether a language is easy or difficult to learn, depends entirely on the languages you already speak (and, of course, the environmen…
> a difficult writing system has also a negative impact on speaking skills because it hinders you from quickly extending your vocabulary by reading books etc.
True enough. I learned two of the languages I know by reading books (after starting with magazines etc). I never used a dictionary - not once. Because when you finally associate a word with its meaning, through understanding, you don't forget it, unlike with a dictionary (which can't give you the exact meaning either - just the nearest translation). But I can't use that method with languages with a different writing system, not in the beginning at least.
Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile
#245Earlier 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.
In the last 10 years (had to do this for an Indian visa recently so have them on file), I've been to
New Zealand, Austrailia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, South Korea, Japan, India, Pakistan, Russia, Qatar, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil, St Lucia, USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Portugal, Gibraltar, Italy, Vatican City, Switzerland, Greece, Hungary, Germany, Czech Republic, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden
Before that they were only places like Austria, Lichtenstein, Finland, etc
I've never been to Spain. Never been to Slovenia either, just hasn't come up. I can't think of any other non-american countries that have Spanish as the official language.
I've come close to visiting Chile, Mexico and Cuba at various points, but never had the dots fall into place.
Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile
#246Earlier 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…
I'd argue that Arabic is simpler than English. It might have been simpler for you as your were the native :) For me Arabic and English both are foreign and I can definitely tell you that English was much simpler to learn. While words "transformation" might seem cool and convenient, there is no common rule on how to predict final meaning. Also the pronunciation is very (VERY) important. One tiny mistake and you will e…
That's a totally different letter, not a different pronunciation..
It's like confusing thumb with sum
Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile
#247Earlier 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…
I love learning languages and learning about languages. I considered seriously learning Arabic but I eventually decided against it mainly because, as the parent points out, there seem to be many variations between countries and also between formal, literary arabic and the spoken dialects. Given that learning the language (in any form) is probably going to be a huge challenge the prospect of spending years studying th…
You would just learn Egyptian or Lebanese arabic, everyone would understand you.
Written (formal) arabic is a different story though, I think that's what's commonly taught for non arabic people
Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm absolutely sure - I've lived in Japan, and my wife is Japanese. 'gozaimasu' is a word you add to a sentence to make it (even) more polite. E.g. 'Arigatou' - thanks. 'Arigatou gozaimasu' 'Thank you very much' (or whatever way you want to think about it). Same with phrases for 'good morning' etc. As for the taxi driver phrase, it goes like this: Normally when you ask for something in Japanese you would use for exam…
Any free alternatives to DuoLingo's Japanese offering or general advice?
An easy one is to start with Human Japanese (Windows, Android, or iOS). The 'light' version is free on Android and gives you the first chapters (seven, IIRC) to give you a taste of it. After that there are lots of resources.
Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile
#249Earlier 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,…
Up till about 100 years ago, most of today's Arabic speaking areas were at least nominally under Turkish suzeranity, Turkey also was the centre of the Islamic world for so long, I wonder if the Turks did not try to replace Arabic with Turkish?
I believe they were fairly light handed in that regard, and respected the cultural independence of their people. Grain of salt though, vague memory.
Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
you're right ! and a little bit biased because pronunciation is important for all languages out there I see the same issue with french foreign speakers too. In Arabic pronunciation is straight forward, in english pronunciation depends on each word (a,u,o) can have a different sounds (depends in which word used) and the emphasis also is a dark magic :D there are no such exceptions in Arabic Arabic can be difficult but…
The difference is that English words don't really change meanings based on pronunciation. Words do have many pronunciations, but the meaning remains the same.
What do you mean?
“Dog” and “cat” have different pronunciations in English, and therefore mean different things.