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Why Arabic is Terrific

idlewords.com

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Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#81

Post by johnyzee »

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…

How about ذ (zal), ز (zaa) and ظ (sor)? Perhaps they are more 'z' than 's'? Then there is ث (tha) though that is more of a 'th' sound I think, but people in the subcontinent pronounce it as an 's'. The differences are really subtle to me.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#82

Post by athom »

bluekeybox wrote: post #74

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 programme…

That's interesting. I found my German lessons did help me better understand the underpinnings of English. Of course, that may owe more to the teacher, and English being a Germanic language probably helped, but knowing a second natural language does give you a new perspective on your first, and additional languages broaden that even further. If you don't feel knowing a second language is helping you use your first, maybe you need to look more closely at how you use both.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#83

Post by glenngillen »

"The language of the National Designated Other is bound to switch to Chinese in a couple of years"

I assume this in reference to the predominant 2nd language for most people? If so, something I've always struggled to agree with is the implication that English is the second language for so many people only because of some fortuitous timing on the part of the British Empire. Technological advancements have certainly helped, as has the fact that as the British fell from their peak the US (also English speaking) came to take it's place. But is it really just a matter of timing within a generation or two most people will be expected to be somewhat fluent in Mandarin?

Maybe I'm a bit naive because I was raised speaking English, in an English speaking country, and only fumble my way through a couple of other languages enough to not get entirely lost as travelling. And I can understand the reasons why English can be so difficult for foreigners to learn because, even moving to the UK I discovered entirely new ways to pronounce words I thought I already knew. But... and I think it's a big "but"... something that has always seemed almost unique to English in my limited experience is that you can speak it badly and still be understood. You can speak it really badly, and while people might chuckle at the way you've turned a phrase you'll still get help. When I compare that to my experiences throughout south-east Asia, Italy, France, and Spain nothing further could be from the truth. Inflections or emphasis on the wrong syllable can have drastically different meanings that elicit confused looks or something altogether wrong.

I just don't see Mandarin doing the same. But maybe I discount the importance of the economy as a driving factor too much.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#84

Post by idlewords »

glenngillen wrote: post #83

"The language of the National Designated Other is bound to switch to Chinese in a couple of years" I assume this in reference to the predominant 2nd language for most people? If so, something I've always struggled to agree with is the implication that English is the second language for so many people only because of some fortuitous timing on the part of the British Empire. Technological advancements have certainly he…

I'm talking about the language of the perceived (US) national enemy. This used to be Russian and is now Arabic.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#85

Post by aclimatt »

cabalamat wrote: post #48
jinushaun wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

I don't think you quite grasp the amount of variation there is in the Arabic alphabet relative to the Latin alphabet. Sure, there are few letters that look slightly different in cursive depending on how you write them, but they don't even compare to the fact that in Arabic, every single letter has a completely different form depending on whether it's written as an isolated, initial, middle, or final letter (four forms). Sometimes these forms are completely different, /and/ there are very specific rules that specify which form to use depending on the letter it follows. (That is to say, not only are there 4 forms, but they're not even uniform. You will either write the initial form or the middle form of a letter depending on the letter it follows). This is a good order of magnitude above Latin.

Take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet#Table_of_basic_...

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#86

Post by idlewords »

bluishgreen wrote: post #79

"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.

I stand corrected! I guess since each dialect gets a country or two to itself it's easier to notice the situation with Arabic.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#87

Post by johnyzee »

bluekeybox wrote: post #74

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 programme…

I don't think that is true. Learning another language sets you up with a grammar vocabulary that is very useful when learning any other language later on. We learn Latin in high school specifically because it is like a key to learning other languages.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#88

Post by lkozma »

gaustin wrote: post #52
riffraff wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Finnish (and other agglutinative languages) use suffixes to express many concepts that in English are expressed with prepositions: imagine if instead of "in my room" you would have to say "room-my-in" and you would call this the noun case of "containment" or something similar, the number of cases would go up pretty quickly.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#89

Post by just_the_tip »

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…

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#90

Post by zeemonkee »

gaustin wrote: post #52
riffraff wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It's not actually that complicated, most are simple suffixes - so for example, instead of on the table in Finnish you say table-on (pöydällä). Once you learn the rules of vowel harmony and consonant mutation it's a pretty regular, straightforward language.

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