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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

#291

Post by m23khan »

mkaziz wrote: post #272
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.

regarding seen and suad, please check out: https://www.quora.com/What-is-difference-between-se-%D8%AB-s...

And as for the using persian script for urdu, without going into political stuff, I think it is a huge advantage - Persian script is not only used for Persian and Urdu, even Balochi, Daari (Afghanistan), and Pashto uses Persian script. Moreover, by virtue of knowing Persian script, it becomes immensely easy to pick up Arabic (at least reading it).

Then there are few other languages such as Sindhi (Pakistani Sindhi) which have a Persian-based script (few other characters on top of Persian which are specific to the language).

Which means, if you can read Urdu, with little effort, you can start reading Arabic/Balochi/Sindhi which means you can read literature from Pakistan all the way to Morocco.

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

#292

Post by School-Cotton »

jki275 wrote: post #287
School-Cotton wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? “Dog” and “cat” have different pronunciations in English, and therefore mean different things.

Dog and Cat are different words. There are many word pairs in many languages that are written exactly the same way but have different pronunciations and different meanings.

You are thinking of the written language as the fundamental thing. Actually spoken language is fundamental, and writing is an imperfect representation of it.

The verb "lead" and the noun "lead" (i.e., the metal) are two different words, pronounced differently. The fact that they are spelled the same is just an example of how the English writing system doesn't encode the English language perfectly accurately.

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

#293

Post by aliswe »

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.

Ataturk used so many arabic words it's very difficult for a modern turk to understand... you should give it a try

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

#294

Post by bookofjoe »

zouhair wrote: post #161
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,…

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

Concur. I simply cannot understand the English spoken by Scots.

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

#295

Post by browsercoin »

User23 wrote: post #139
browsercoin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German is not as awful as Dutch-should be noted as a throat condition.

Strangely the Dutch all seem to speak better English than most Americans and even Brits.

Dutch calls Danish a throat condition!

Highly ironic, this!

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

#296

Post by browsercoin »

gnulinux wrote: post #229
browsercoin wrote: post #121

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

Farsi is an Indo-European language. Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language. Farsi is genealogically closer to English than Arabic.

im a fucking idiot.

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

#297

Post by mega_behemoth »

amasad wrote: post #147
mega_behemoth wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those "muslim" scholars were mostly not arab,, and were constantly being accused for heresy. It is smart people that produce science and not Islam. The only science Islam has produced is the magical benefits of drinking camel urine and Hijama. No thanks.

>It is smart people that produce science and not Islam Who said anything about Islam generating the science. You're just a bigoted asshole looking for a way to bash islam.

No surprise you quickly started throwing offensive stones. Quickly ran out of sensible logic. Peace upon you.

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

#298

Post by isostatic »

kibwen wrote: post #269
planteen wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because Spanish isn't an official language in the US doesn't make it less useful. The US is the second largest Spanish speaking nation in the world, behind Mexico. There are a number of careers in the US where speaking Spanish is very useful, especially when you interact a lot with people (e.g., medicine & sales). Every major US market is served by at least two Spanish speaking TV stations over the air. And if y…

Seconded. The emphasis on countries with Spanish as an "official language" is misplaced; the US famously has no "official" language (though let's not pretend this is the result of magnanimity, rather than just a peculiar quirk of legislation), and Spanish-speaking enclaves are all over the place. If you're outside the US you might think that Spanish is relegated to the areas near the border, but no: I have driven thr…

And Polish or Hindi or a dozen other languages will give you insights in the UK.

Looking at https://blog.udemy.com/how-many-countries-speak-spanish/ tells me that outside of the Americas, I can use Spanish in

Spain Gibraltar (which is painfully British) Andorra

It makes sense for Americans to take Spanish as a second language, but for Europe; Arabic and Russian are in countries that are far closer, French and German are more widely spoken in Europe. Spanish is only useful if you go to Spain on holiday, and then not in the normal resorts.

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

#299

Post by dang »

amasad wrote: post #147
mega_behemoth wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those "muslim" scholars were mostly not arab,, and were constantly being accused for heresy. It is smart people that produce science and not Islam. The only science Islam has produced is the magical benefits of drinking camel urine and Hijama. No thanks.

>It is smart people that produce science and not Islam Who said anything about Islam generating the science. You're just a bigoted asshole looking for a way to bash islam.

Please don't break the site guidelines yourself, regardless of how another commenter is behaving. That only makes this place worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#300

Post by gnulinux »

browsercoin wrote: post #296
gnulinux wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farsi is an Indo-European language. Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language. Farsi is genealogically closer to English than Arabic.

im a fucking idiot.

No, it's a fairly widespread misconception. People also think Turkish is also somehow related to Arabic and/or Farsi whereas Turkish belongs to a yet another language family (Turkic Languages) and is genealogically entirely unrelated.
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