Why Arabic is Terrific • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#91

Post by vbtemp » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 6:49 PM UTC

just_the_tip wrote: post #89

Jun8 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

+ a million if I could. One of my favorite quotes. It's from Max Weinreich, right? "A sprakh iz a dialekt mit an Armee un Flot"

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#92

Post by zeemonkee » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 6:50 PM UTC

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.

Most languages in the world have no spoken form. They all have grammatical "rules", that is they follow a certain syntax, morphology, etc.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#93

Post by ars » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 6:57 PM UTC

dmoney wrote: post #53

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.

It was reconstructed based on ancient writing, so a speaker of modern Hebrew can read text written thousands of years ago with full fluency after learning a few additional vocabulary words (mainly nouns).

The structure of the language and it's grammar rules has not changed. Even though the language was not used for regular conversation, it was still studied and spoken for the entire time, so was never lost.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#94

Post by riffraff » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 7:01 PM UTC

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.

My knowledge of bantu languages is only what I read on wikipedia, so I am not qualified to answer, but it seems they orbitate around 20 :)

As for cases: I am learning hungarian which is related to finnish and also has more than 20 cases.

The problem, in my personal experience, is that learning such an agglutinative language is slightly harder than others because when you are learning you don't know all the suffixes and at the same time you don't even know enough vocabulary to understand what's what. Especially once you consider that suffixes stack up.

I see something like "ccddee" and it's hard to understand where I should break up the thing (, , etc). YMMV :)

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#95

Post by nikcub » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 7:01 PM UTC

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 realized that when I heard palestinian kids mocking Israeli soldiers in Hebrew about how poor their Hebrew was

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#96

Post by anghyflawn » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 7:08 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #62

Jun8 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Uh, really?

Japanese: topic instead of subject marking, deference forms, completely different morphological categories?

Chinese: productive verb serialization, very different syntax?

That's just off the top of my head

But that's not the point really. Learning any language well is mind-bending for any speaker of another language. It does help if the languages are different (I remember very vividly the click that went in my head in high school when I was taking English, Chinese and Hebrew simultaneously... that's how I ended up in linguistics grad school), but different people have their minds bent by completely different things. I mean, root-and-pattern morphology is really cool when it's that regular, but if you think of it it's not horribly different from Germanic strong verbs (write-wrote-written). Weird agreement patterns? Well, Welsh only uses the 3pl verb forms with a pronominal subject, so "they they-went" but "people he-went" (as, for that matter, do some varieties of English). And so on.

I mean, sure, whatever floats your boat, and it's awesome that studying Arabic can be so fulfilling; I've had the same experience with Welsh. But at the end of the day all languages bend your mind, and I don't think there can be an objective metric. They are just hard.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#97

Post by andrewem » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 7:11 PM UTC

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.

A friend who's a native Hebrew speaker told me that modern Hebrew initially lacked foul words, and so they were borrowed from Arabic.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#98

Post by njharman » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 7:21 PM UTC

Whatever author has planned for a career I hope he dumps that and decides to be a writer of some sort. That was a truly superior read.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#99

Post by nikcub » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 7:22 PM UTC

mwerty wrote: post #80

cefarix wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They did. The Indians invented both base10 and positional notation. The Persian's picked it up from the, and a few short years later the Arabs picked it up. It was bought to Europe via Fibonacci's Liber Abaci.

The entire time the positional notation didn't change with alphabet

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#100

Post by w1ntermute » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 7:28 PM UTC

yariang wrote: post #20

Jun8 wrote: post #13

Interesting post but the OP is linguistically naive, which is generally what happens when English speakers encounter another language with more interesting (i.e. exotic") morphological, phonetical, etc. elements. If Arabic if your first foray into a highly inflectional language, it might look fairly exotic. If you had studied, say ancient Greek or Latin, first, it might look less so. "you find out that the underlying…

> 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.

> 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.

I've been studying Japanese as my fourth language for over 2 years, and I have to disagree with both you and the OP. If you didn't find Japanese to be very gramatically challenging or interesting, you unfortunately probably didn't get into any keigo, which contains grammar of a mindbogglingly high level of complexity that is probably only surpassed by a similar system in Korean, since Japanese grammar was artificially simplified during the Meiji Restoration in order to make a simpler national dialect that all Japanese could easily learn/use. Nevertheless, the situational shifts in Japanese grammar based upon the relationship between the speaker and the listener are very difficult to become accustomed to, even for native speakers.