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This is a great article, but Firefox chokes on the block at the top, and switches to ISO-8859-1 encoding. Go View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) to have the Arabic examples render correctly.
Rendered perfectly fine in Firefox 7 on Vista 64-bit.
> ييي ععع ههه ككك للل
Which for me looks like (asciified):
> USUSUS 010101 UtUtUt UfUfUf UnUnUn
I'm guessing I'm missing a font or something? (Firefox 6)
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…
It's mostly true that the verb form stays the same in French regardless of the gender of the subject. However, they are exceptions. If a verb conjugates conpound tenses with être, then the past participle is considered an adjective and must agree with the subject, e.g.:
Ils sont allés = They went (one or more male)
Elles sont allées. = They went (all female)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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.
Well these numbers originated in Arabic, and since Arabic is written right-to-left, writing numbers in Arabic actually follows a more logical order: start with the lowest-order digit, and move on to the higher-order ones.
Apparently when the concept was brought into Europe, they failed to account for the different writing directions.
> For exmaple, here are some "words" consisting of a single letter repeated three times: > ييي ععع ههه ككك للل Which for me looks like (asciified): > USUSUS 010101 UtUtUt UfUfUf UnUnUn I'm guessing I'm missing a font or something? (Firefox 6)
Interestingly Chrome auto-corrected this.
I read somewhere once that Arabic is also the language with the largest vocabulary of words - something like three million versus one million for English. Don't know if this is true or not.
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
(The OP made it sound like elites studying Arabic for their ambassador posts is something new. It just faded in popularity when religious fundamentalists started to rise in influence.)
> For exmaple, here are some "words" consisting of a single letter repeated three times: > ييي ععع ههه ككك للل Which for me looks like (asciified): > USUSUS 010101 UtUtUt UfUfUf UnUnUn I'm guessing I'm missing a font or something? (Firefox 6)