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Why Arabic is Terrific

idlewords.com

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Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#71

Post by idlewords »

Cyph0n wrote: post #56
cabalamat wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They have lots of grammatical rules! See http://arabic.desert-sky.net/g_tenses.html, for example.

Arabic speakers tend to diss their dialects and dismiss them as 'mere speech', but they're just as rich as any other language.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#72

Post by defen »

idlewords wrote: post #59
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…

> But it is very rich in vocabulary. Arabs love parallelism in writing, and seem to have three versions of every word for that purpose.

English-only speaker here. I've seen about 50 different variants of "Muammar Gaddafi" rendered into English - is this due to different ways of Anglicizing the same name, or does he really have a 50 different ways of writing it, or something in between?

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#73

Post by idlewords »

hsmyers wrote: post #64

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…

I have no doubt that DLI students are at least as accomplished as any civilian language learners. My beef is with the idea that most Arabic education in this country is done for the purposes of military occupation, but as you point out that has nothing to do with the substance of the post.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#74

Post by bluekeybox »

One of my friends (who studied philosophy) and I had a discussion the other day about differences between natural and programming languages. I made a point that my knowledge of Russian in no way helps me speak better English (we both agreed on that), while a C programmer who also knows a language that relies on a different programming paradigm, for example, Lisp or Prolog, is likely to be a more effective C programmer than someone who hasn't been exposed to that paradigm.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#76

Post by aclimatt »

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…

The main point of the article is not that Arabic has a list of things that are impossible to find in any other language. It is that Arabic has many intriguing features that are in contrast to what a native English speaker might be used to. (This is about native English speakers learning Arabic, not Arabic vs. The World.)

When English speakers look to learn an "exotic language", the general go-tos are Chinese and Japanese, which have comparatively very simple grammars. Thus in the exotic language category, as the author points out, Arabic is a very intriguing choice. (And while many Indo-European languages may share a few related grammar rules, using the Latin alphabet hurts your candidacy as an exotic language.)

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#77

Post by JMStewy »

defen wrote: post #72
idlewords wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But it is very rich in vocabulary. Arabs love parallelism in writing, and seem to have three versions of every word for that purpose. English-only speaker here. I've seen about 50 different variants of "Muammar Gaddafi" rendered into English - is this due to different ways of Anglicizing the same name, or does he really have a 50 different ways of writing it, or something in between?

There's some discussion of this exact topic on Language Log here:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2989

From the post and the comments I found the following two links interesting:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/02/libya

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/513/how-are-you-sup...

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#78

Post by genieyclo »

defen wrote: post #72
idlewords wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But it is very rich in vocabulary. Arabs love parallelism in writing, and seem to have three versions of every word for that purpose. English-only speaker here. I've seen about 50 different variants of "Muammar Gaddafi" rendered into English - is this due to different ways of Anglicizing the same name, or does he really have a 50 different ways of writing it, or something in between?

Just because of Anglicization and no standard way to do this. His name has 2 Arabic letters that are not found in English, 3ain and Qaaf. The rest of the variation is also due to English not having a consistent way to spell itself and no consistent way to transliterate Ar --> En.

You can also see this in the most common Arabic name as well: Muhammad. Some spell with three ms, some 2. Some spell with u and some with o.

Personally, to be pseudo-unique snowflake (and to give myself a leg up in SEO) I spell my name a little unusually as 'Mohomed'.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#79

Post by bluishgreen »

"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 language based on the situation and the linguistic background of their interlocutor."

Nope, not unique.

Tamil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language) is the same way. I am a native tamil speaker.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#80

Post by mwerty »

cefarix wrote: post #65
wheels wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That does not explain why the Indians did the same thing (I'm assuming) without arabic influence.
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