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Why Arabic is Terrific

idlewords.com

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Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#61

Post by llcoolv »

to be honest most of those neat things exist in many other languages - for example all the slavic languages + the more conservative germanic ones have a way root+prefixes/suffixes that plays a similar role. also most of the slavic languages have separate endings for feminine/neuter plural and slovene even has the dual.

Apparently, to a person who only knows english, which is a very inconsistent and mixed language, these features could look extremely neat, but the reality is that they are quite common.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#62

Post by idlewords »

Jun8 wrote: post #28
yariang wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 de…

What I mean by vanilla is that neither language has grammatical features that are particularly difficult for an English speaker to internalize.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#63

Post by timsally »

llcoolv wrote: post #61

to be honest most of those neat things exist in many other languages - for example all the slavic languages + the more conservative germanic ones have a way root+prefixes/suffixes that plays a similar role. also most of the slavic languages have separate endings for feminine/neuter plural and slovene even has the dual. Apparently, to a person who only knows english, which is a very inconsistent and mixed language, th…

> Apparently, to a person who only knows english, which is a very inconsistent and mixed language, these features could look extremely neat, but the reality is that they are quite common.

I don't know enough to comment on the issues of language, but Maciej speaks Polish, French, and Russian. This is like the umpteenth comment that has assumed the author only speaks English. A curious pattern.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#64

Post by hsmyers »

Great article on one of my favorite subjects. In the 80's using an IBM PC with a Hercules graphics card I wrote an Arabic word processor so my partner could write to his family in Farsi. The problems of right to left and differing letter shapes depending on leading, middle and ending position was an interesting challenge---not to mention the problem of vowels that occur above and below the letters. That said, I could have done without the attack on DLI---actually having worked with graduates (speaking Korean and Vietnamese) they spoke as natives including idiomatic expressions. Oh well we all have biases and the rest of the posting was excellent!

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#65

Post by cefarix »

wheels wrote: post #51
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…

I know they are Indian. I am from South Asia. However, the modern system was first created in Arabic. Also, I am talking about the placement of the digits, and this came to Europe from Arabic, not Brahmi.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#66

Post by idlewords »

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.)

There are a couple of differences with Chinese:

1. Lots of people speak Mandarin at home. No one speaks MSA at home except us poor language students.

2. The set of languages binned under 'Chinese' is much more diverse than the Arabic dialect continuum.

3. The writing system is shared between several languages. You can write Cantonese (kind of) in hanzi and write notes that Mandarin speakers can read even though the languages are totally mutually unintelligble.

4. There is no dominant dialect of Arabic, like there is a dominant variety of Chinese. Instead every dialect shares the same formal register (MSA) which is taught in school like a foreign language.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#67

Post by ztravis »

jawher wrote: post #21
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…

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

There are many patterns and forms in the broken plurals themselves which you can pick up on and learn so that you often can correctly predict new ones without memorization. For example, you give:

-liss => lusuus

And likewise, most doubled nouns of this form take the same plural:

-jadd => juduud

-hass => husuus

-hamm => humuum

Still... this is far from a hard and fast rule, and it also takes a lot of time to build familiarity and notice these patterns. It's also something that al-Kitaab (for example) doesn't ever mention.

(just explaining... not implying that you aren't aware of this)

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#68

Post by idlewords »

Abdul321 wrote: post #58
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.

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".

A literal version:

الكتب books(definite) حضراء green(feminine singular indefinite)

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#69

Post by idlewords »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #34
skoob wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe the underlying idea is that "a group of something is green", and a group is singular and is feminine (at least in Russian ^^)

Nope :-)

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#70

Post by abhaga »

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.)

Not at all unique to Arabic. The Indo-Gangatic plain is a big continuum of people speaking various dialects of Hindi. We even have a saying: Water changes every kos (~2 miles) and language changes every 4 kos (~ 8 miles).
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