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Why Arabic is Terrific

idlewords.com

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Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#41

Post by jinushaun »

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.

No, English and French don't have a concept of "different characters for different places." The "c" in "cat", "act" and "topic" are all written exactly the same. It's not "cat", "a#t" and "topi*"

There are many languages, besides Arabic, that have a concept of distinct initial, medial and final characters. For example, the dozens of writing systems derived from Sanskrit.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#42

Post by damncabbage »

sbierwagen wrote: post #31
damncabbage wrote: post #2

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.

Ah, but which Firefox? Rendered perfectly fine in Firefox 7 on Vista 64-bit.

Firefox 6 gave me Western ISO (on Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit).

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#43

Post by cabalamat »

Cyph0n wrote: post #23

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 lef…

> Unlike with the English language, rarely do you find someone who follows grammatical rules in everyday speech.

Surely they do follow grammar, albeit the grammar of whatever colloquial Arabic they are speaking, rather than the grammar of Modern Standard Arabic?

In terms of colloquial Arabics, do they have less complex inflexional systems compared to MSA (in the same way that Italian and Spanish do compared with Latin)?

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#44

Post by cefarix »

johnyzee wrote: post #37

I believe Arabic is the language with the largest variety in sounds. A lot of these sounds don't exist in other languages, such as the deep-throated 'ain and the seemingly many different ways to make an 's' sound, each with subtle differences. A friend of mine said it makes speaking very relaxing as it involves so many parts of the throat and mouth. I read somewhere once that Arabic is also the language with the larg…

Arabic has a large variety of sounds - but I think no more than other languages do. For example, Arabic does not have a p sound or a g sound. My native language, though, has 4 types of t and 4 types of d, 2 types of k, 2 types of g, etc.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#45

Post by [deleted] »

Jun8 wrote: post #6
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.)

The concept of dialect is quite vague and is generally determined politically. Some like the Chinese "dialects" are generally mutually unintelligible and are actually different languages. On the other end of the spectrum, one may consider Norwegian/Swedish/Danish, which may be treated as dialects of teh same language practically bur are considered separate languages ( http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1…

[deleted]

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#46

Post by greengarstudios »

dmoney wrote: post #32

> 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)

What's your OS? Here's how it looks to me:

http://twitpic.com/69kqzg

Mac OS X 10.6.8 / Google Chrome 13.0.782.112

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#48

Post by cabalamat »

jinushaun wrote: post #41
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. No, English and French don't have a concept of "different characters for different places." The "c" in "cat", "act" and "topic" are all written exactly the same. It's not "cat", "a#t" and "topi*" There are many languages, besides Arabic, that have a concept of distinct initial, medial and final character…

> No, English and French don't have a concept of "different characters for different places.

Yes they do, at least the way handwriting is sometimes taught. For example, "s" in handwriting sometimes looks like a slash ("/") followed by a backwards "c".

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#49

Post by dmoney »

amirhhz wrote: post #36
dmoney wrote: post #32

> 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)

View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode Interestingly Chrome auto-corrected this.

That worked, thanks.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#50

Post by cedsav »

greengarstudios wrote: post #46
dmoney wrote: post #32

> 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)

What's your OS? Here's how it looks to me: http://twitpic.com/69kqzg Mac OS X 10.6.8 / Google Chrome 13.0.782.112

Firefox 6 seems to ignore the encoding declaration in the xml prolog. Setting a content-type meta tag should fix this (or setting the encoding in the http headers).

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