Why Arabic is Terrific • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#21

Post by jawher » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 3:48 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #11

There are a few words that take a regular plural suffix, but most of the time to make a plural you have to change the structure of the word quite dramatically: The structural change is regular. That is you don't have to learn each name plural. The Arabic writing system is exotic looking but easy to learn, which is a rare combination. The language uses a straightforward alphabet, but because letters change their shape…

> The structural change is regular. That is you don't have to learn each name plural.

Not all the time. And if they do, there still are subtle variations in suffixes. For example:

- Kalb (dog) => Kilab (dogs)

- Liss (thief) => Losous (thieves)

- Karoura (bottle) => Kawarir (Bottles)

- etc.

> I thought the same thing for English and French, no? When I learn English and French in school, we join letters.

Yes, but that doesn't change the letter's shape as in Arabic, you just add a line to connect letters.

> The same for french. (Il, Ils, Elle, Elles, On)

Not quite: what you cite are just pronouns, but the conjugation and grammar doesn't vary. For instance, conjugating the verb manger (to eat) with feminine plural "elles" and masculine plural yields the same "mangent", whereas in Arabic you have different forms.

> Not true. The real Arabic numbers are the ones used today. The Indian numbers were used in the middle east region because of the strong Indian influence.

Agreed. I myself have a hard time reading numbers written in the Hindi numerals (٠‎ - ١‎ - ٢‎ - ٣‎ - ٤‎ - ٥‎ - ٦‎ - ٧‎ - ٨‎ - ٩‎)

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#22

Post by cwp » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 3:52 PM UTC

gwern wrote: post #4

> The combination of numerous dialects and a formal/informal continuum is pretty much unique to Arabic and gives rise to fascinating situations watching Arabs calibrate their lanugage based on the situation and the linguistic background of their interlocutor. Not Chinese? (Also, #9 hardly seems like an item to include in an article explaining 'Why Arabic is Terrific'. 'Terrifying', perhaps.)

Personally, I'd go with 6 & 7 as reasons Arabic is terrifying.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#23

Post by Cyph0n » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 3:59 PM UTC

Yep, Arabic is indeed a fascinating language. I'd like to add that Arabic grammar is extremely difficult, at least when compared to English. It takes years of study just to understand what short vowel to place at the end of certain words.

To put it simply, Arabic sentences are divided into two main types: "verb" sentences (first word is a verb) and "noun" sentences.

Verb sentences are structured as (from right to left of course):

verb > subject > object

Each word ends with a different short vowel depending on its place in a sentence. The subject for instance always ends in a dhamma ('u' sound), while the object ends in a fatha ('a' sound).

Unlike with the English language, rarely do you find someone who follows grammatical rules in everyday speech. Only scholars or teachers who use formal language apply such rules when speaking or writing.

The vastness of the language is also why Muslims resort to a tafsir (or explanation) of the Quran to understand certain verses and chapters. Words sometimes mean something else when found after a certain word or in a certain context.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#24

Post by vbtemp » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 4:02 PM UTC

Hebrew has virtually the exact same properties, and is quite simple to learn as it is extremely regular, and like all Semitic languages is based off a three-root system. In fact, in a number of conversations with my arab friends I'm stunned just how similar Hebrew and Arabic are (both in good and foul words) and in grammar.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#25

Post by pknerd » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 4:04 PM UTC

Without having any intention of sounding bias,let's ignore that it belongs to some faith, if Arabic is recited properly then it does sound amazing even if you can't understand it at all. The sounding of Arabic Alphabets is in such a way that which I hardly found in any other language. Even in my own native language which is quite rich. Do listen a bit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riW4W66ptqI

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#26

Post by deno » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 4:07 PM UTC

cwp wrote: post #22

gwern wrote: post #4

> The combination of numerous dialects and a formal/informal continuum is pretty much unique to Arabic and gives rise to fascinating situations watching Arabs calibrate their lanugage based on the situation and the linguistic background of their interlocutor. Not Chinese? (Also, #9 hardly seems like an item to include in an article explaining 'Why Arabic is Terrific'. 'Terrifying', perhaps.)

Personally, I'd go with 6 & 7 as reasons Arabic is terrifying.

“The books, she is green” is not very unique to Arabic actually. It's also how you'd say it in Polish, for example. Most languages, that have feminine and masculine forms (unlike English), have some arbitrary rules as to what form to assign for different material objects.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#27

Post by masklinn » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 4:10 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #11

There are a few words that take a regular plural suffix, but most of the time to make a plural you have to change the structure of the word quite dramatically: The structural change is regular. That is you don't have to learn each name plural. The Arabic writing system is exotic looking but easy to learn, which is a rare combination. The language uses a straightforward alphabet, but because letters change their shape…

> I thought the same thing for English and French, no? When I learn English and French in school, we join letters.

I don't think cursive letters significantly "change their shape depending on what their neighbors are". There is more variation in personal cursive styles than due to neighbors in a single cursive style.

The only modification to letters are small lines joining them with one another, generally from the "feet" around the baseline.

> The same for french. (Il, Ils, Elle, Elles, On)

Correct for pronouns (especially in masculine "taking over" feminine as soon as a single male is included in the group), but french does not use different plural forms and verb conjugations for feminines (let alone distinguish between dual and further plurals).

> Not true.

How is it not true? You're saying exactly what he wrote: what are commonly known as arabic numerals aren't used in (middle-eastern) arabic.

> The real Arabic numbers are the ones used today.

There are no "real arabic numbers", North-Africa use western arabic numbers (what we call "Arabic numbers"), the middle-east uses eastern-arabic numbers ("Indic numerals"), western-arabic numbers progressively got their modern shape in Europe between the 10th and the 15th century (they got fixed with the advent of typesetting and print).

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#28

Post by Jun8 » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 4:17 PM UTC

yariang wrote: post #20

Jun8 wrote: post #13

Interesting post but the OP is linguistically naive, which is generally what happens when English speakers encounter another language with more interesting (i.e. exotic") morphological, phonetical, etc. elements. If Arabic if your first foray into a highly inflectional language, it might look fairly exotic. If you had studied, say ancient Greek or Latin, first, it might look less so. "you find out that the underlying…

> This comment about Chinese and Japanese (totally unrelated > languages with very different writing systems, is laughable. No it's not. I studied Japanese as my fourth language for 1.5 years and went through pretty much exactly what the OP described. Edit: Other languages were Spanish English and Italian.

Putting Chinese and Japanese (I guess because their writing systems are kind of similar) is similar to, similar to saying the same for English and Basque (which, like Japanese is agglutinative) because they both use the Latin alphabet.

I don't know what exactly the OP means by "vanilla" in this context, these languages are anything but vanilla! One could argue that perhaps English grammar is vanilla because it has developed certain creole-like characteristics due to various pressures during its history: Compared to most other languages in the IE family, its grammar is quite simplified, it's lost most of its complexity.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#29

Post by riffraff » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 4:22 PM UTC

deno wrote: post #26

cwp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'd go with 6 & 7 as reasons Arabic is terrifying.

“The books, she is green” is not very unique to Arabic actually. It's also how you'd say it in Polish, for example. Most languages, that have feminine and masculine forms (unlike English), have some arbitrary rules as to what form to assign for different material objects.

obligatory noticeable case: swahili (one of the widely studied non-indo european languages) comes with _18_ noun classes.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#30

Post by skoob » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 4:39 PM UTC

deno wrote: post #26

cwp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'd go with 6 & 7 as reasons Arabic is terrifying.

“The books, she is green” is not very unique to Arabic actually. It's also how you'd say it in Polish, for example. Most languages, that have feminine and masculine forms (unlike English), have some arbitrary rules as to what form to assign for different material objects.

I think the point here was more about how Arabic treats groups of non-human objects as feminin singular. I assume that in Polish you would use a plural form of "green" when talking about multiple books and you would only use the feminine form if "book" is a feminine word.