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Why Arabic is Terrific

idlewords.com

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Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#51

Post by wheels »

cefarix wrote: post #35

Have you ever wondered why numbers are written backwards in English? Why do we write the highest-order digits first and proceed to the lower-order digits? 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 int…

That's wrong in a couple ways:

• "Arabic numerals" aren't Arabic. They're Indian. They come from the Brahmi script, which is written left to right.

• The prevailing numeral system being replaced, Roman numerals, also placed the most significant digit on the left, so it's unlikely that this was something that was simply forgotten.

• Western languages (usually) mention the most significant digit first when reading the number out, which makes it convenient for it to be written that way as well.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#52

Post by gaustin »

riffraff wrote: post #29
deno wrote: post #26

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.

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

How does that compare to the other languages in the Bantu family? Long ago I studied Ichibemba, and think it had something like 18 noun classes, too.

IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#53

Post by dmoney »

vbtemp wrote: post #24

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.

I don't know either language, but Modern Hebrew's regularity may be due to the fact that it was constructed (or reconstructed) less than 150 years ago.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#54

Post by idlewords »

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.

You've misunderstood this part. The unusual behavior is not having grammatical gender, but treating all non-human plurals as feminine singular.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#55

Post by idlewords »

skoob wrote: post #30
deno wrote: post #26

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.

That's right. Polish adjectives agree in number, gender and case with the nouns they modify.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#56

Post by Cyph0n »

cabalamat wrote: post #43
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 Lati…

Most Arabic dialects are just that: dialects. They have no grammatical rules, nor a official written form for that matter, and are ultimately used for nothing more than speech.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#57

Post by idlewords »

rdouble wrote: post #39

As a side note to the side note, the "Arabist" tradition in the US State Department has been around since the mid 1800s. Robert Kaplan wrote a great book about it: http://www.amazon.com/Arabists-American-Robert-D-Kaplan/dp/0... (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.)

Arabic programs were tiny pre-2001, and now they are extremely oversubscribed. Curiously enough there are still very few people who make it past third-year level :-)

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#58

Post by Abdul321 »

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.

As far as I know, in Arabic, it should say "The books are green". "Green" has the same form and pronunciation that singular feminine has. However, green is used as an adjective here for the group of "Books", not "she is".

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#59

Post by idlewords »

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 doesn't have a very large sound inventory, but some of the sounds are pretty unfamiliar to people from an indo-european background. I believe there are only two kinds of /s/ (س and ص).

The root/pattern system and degree of inflection makes it hard to count words in Arabic (since things like pronouns tend to stick to the ends, throwing off the count). But it is very rich in vocabulary. Arabs love parallelism in writing, and seem to have three versions of every word for that purpose.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#60

Post by idlewords »

vbtemp wrote: post #24

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.

Heh, just because it's regular doesn't make it easy to learn. But you are right that the two languages are very closely related.

The main differences I can think of is that Hebrew doesn't go quite as crazy with broken plurals, there's no diglossia, and of course the writing system isn't so pretty.

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