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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

#271

Post by jnbiche »

Cyph0n wrote: post #259
eudora wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would add Syrian to that list. But even within these dialects, there are regional dialects that might be difficult to understand even for native speakers from that same country. For example, Tunisian Arabic can (roughly) be divided into northern and southern dialects. I've met people in the north who think I'm from Libya because of some words that are shared with southern Tunisian Arabic. Tunisia is a relatively sm…

> The "generic" Egyptian/Lebanese/Syrian dialect will easily be understood by most Middle Easterners and a fair chunk of North Africans.

But note that Egyptian Arabic is very different from Lebanese and Syrian Arabic (which both are in the Levantine Arabic family).

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

#272

Post by mkaziz »

m23khan wrote: post #262

Urdu is a language which I speak and admire - for the reason that the Hindi-Persian mix along with the Persian syntax/alphabet gives it the ultimate flexibility. You can capture any sound/accent in Urdu. What I mean is you to take any word in any language and if you wanted to write it as-is in Urdu syntax, you can do so with 100% accuracy.

Disagree. I am a native speaker of Urdu, and Urdu is effective only with significant English loan words. The Persian alphabet also makes little sense - we pronounce seen and suad the same way but write them differently thanks to the Persian alphabet being forced on a language that wasn't meant for it.

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

#273

Post by Cyph0n »

jnbiche wrote: post #271
Cyph0n wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add Syrian to that list. But even within these dialects, there are regional dialects that might be difficult to understand even for native speakers from that same country. For example, Tunisian Arabic can (roughly) be divided into northern and southern dialects. I've met people in the north who think I'm from Libya because of some words that are shared with southern Tunisian Arabic. Tunisia is a relatively sm…

> The "generic" Egyptian/Lebanese/Syrian dialect will easily be understood by most Middle Easterners and a fair chunk of North Africans. But note that Egyptian Arabic is very different from Lebanese and Syrian Arabic (which both are in the Levantine Arabic family).

Definitely! I was just pointing out that these three dialects are the most universally understood, primarily due to their domination of Arabic music and film/TV.

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

#274

Post by Koshkin »

mega_behemoth wrote: post #135
sonnyblarney wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"English won the game because bits and bytes were invented in English" English as the dominant language in Science is a new thing, just 100 years ago it was German.

Whether new or not, Computers speak English. Game over for German/French/All others.

Mais les ordinateurs parlent français !

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

#275

Post by posterboy »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #264
m23khan wrote: post #262

Urdu is a language which I speak and admire - for the reason that the Hindi-Persian mix along with the Persian syntax/alphabet gives it the ultimate flexibility. You can capture any sound/accent in Urdu. What I mean is you to take any word in any language and if you wanted to write it as-is in Urdu syntax, you can do so with 100% accuracy.

Sounds very versatile! The Persian alphabet seems to be lacking some vowels. How is that handled when writing Urdu?

Diacritical marks are used but often omitted

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

#276

Post by posterboy »

bovine3dom wrote: post #196
fatihdonmez wrote: post #172

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'd have a hard time doing the same in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Arabi... Some quite common words are on that list: jumper, cat, fanfare...

Fanfare is surely related to latin fanum, temple, whence fanatic, but good to know there's an arabic connection. Edit: Some nationalist tendencies would even try to find a turkic root, for everything, and there might be some reason to it with the prominent location of anatolia, but historical location and language is hard to trace, of turks and of whoever else stayed there.

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

#277

Post by BeetleB »

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've dabbled in Arabic, Spanish and Urdu. When it comes to this:

>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.

My experience was that English and Urdu are much worse grammarwise. In the latter, it's not so much that there are exceptions to rules - it's that the rules are the exception. Most of the language doesn't follow grammatical rules. It's not as bad in English, but the problem exists. When I used to help people learn English, I could see how frustrated they would get whenever they'd ask a question and they'd be told "yeah, this is just how it is".

IIRC, most of formal Arabic is covered by first level grammar rules. The thing I found interesting about it is that the exceptions themselves have rules. So it wasn't a case of "just memorize that this is an exception" that you'd have for other languages. It was "Here's the exception to that bigger rule, and you know if a word/phrase should follow the exception based on these rules". I think the challenge you speak of is that sometimes even the exceptions had exceptions.

I'm not a native speaker, so I may be wrong. Overall I found it the most structured language amongst all of these. It's not simple, but it's not haphazard.

(Speaking only of formal Arabic).

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

#278

Post by BeetleB »

fatihdonmez wrote: post #172

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.

>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.

Ahem, but I think most Arabs complain about Turkish imperialism. I don't think Turkey was ever conquered by the Arabs, but the reverse is true.

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

#279

Post by jnbiche »

titanomachy wrote: post #86
lgessler wrote: post #26

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.

As someone who has studied and mastered Classical Latin and several Romance languages, as well as studied and learned some (but not mastered) MSA as well as an Arabic dialect, I disagree with that assessment, at least to some extent:

Golden Age Latin is incredibly far removed from modern Romance languages. Even a Sardinian or Romanian (said to be the closest Romance languages to Latin) requires years of study to learn to fluently read Golden Age Latin. Vulgar Latin, on the other hand, is much closer to the modern Romance languages. An educated modern Italian or Sardinian could learn to read Vulgar Latin fairly quickly (and sometimes they do know it, from reading the Vulgate Bible).

I'd say the difference between MSA and the North African dialects of Arabic is tantamount to the difference between modern Romance languages and Golden Age Latin. But the difference between MSA and Levantine Arabic is less, and more akin to the gap between Vulgar Latin and Romance languages.

Overall, I'd say the MSA/dialects + Latin/Romance languages is a great analogy.

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

#280

Post by BeetleB »

User23 wrote: post #142
gumby wrote: post #22

I learned MSA and some Egyptian and there really are things you can say in it that are almost impossible to express in English (or the other European languages I know). This is true of any pair of languages of course but structurally the root system allows much more nuance and overtone than more workmanlike languages like English. I believe Hebrew (which I don't speak!) has a similar structure though I've been told b…

No offense, but this might just be an issue with your command of English. If you can't communicate nuance in a language with north of 600,000 words and an incredibly rich literary tradition, it might not be the language that's the problem. English has aggressively adopted loanwords, which gives it such breadth.

>If you can't communicate nuance in a language with north of 600,000 words and an incredibly rich literary tradition

You're making binary what your parent did not.

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