Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Arabic is Terrific

idlewords.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 239 posts

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#111

Post by bluekeybox »

athom wrote: post #82
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, ma…

> knowing a second natural language does give you a new perspective on your first

I agree with that, however I disagree that having a different perspective on English makes me a better English speaker. Writer -- perhaps -- but still nothing that a smart native English speaker who spent some time in school reading Shakespeare and the classics could not beat.

> 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.

I can speak English, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and French. The last two are a bit rusty but I bet I could catch up pretty quickly if I had to. The problem is that, while I speak and write English very well, I possess no "secret power" that would let me beat native speakers of English. Proof: nearly all great writers who wrote in English (or any other language) were native speakers. Knowing the ways of Lisp gives a C programmer a "secret power" which he or she can apply even to the procedural language that is C. Knowing the ways of Russian or French gives me no such advantage with English (except obviously for the occasional French phrase or word root -- but those advantages are insignificant compared to the tremendous advantage of being a native speaker).

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#112

Post by tty »

cletus wrote: post #104

I'm a native English speaker. I studied a little French and speak (and can read/write) some German (with limited vocabulary). For the English speaker, German grammar is painful enough (3 genders, agreement of nouns and adjectives by case, number and article, separable verbs, etc) but, based on what reading I've done, German is still "Latin lite". A friend of mine (also native English speaker) lives in Taiwan and has…

>English in the 10th century was basically the same language as German (Althochdeutsch or Old High German, to be precise). In 1066, the Normans conquered England, bringing French which became the official and court language of England for several centuries.

Old English and Old High German being "basically the same language" is a very ignorant thing to say and categorically wrong. Old High German might have been much more close to Old English than modern standard German is to English but they weren't mutually intelligible and they were clearly different languages even at that time. Major differences between the two had arisen many centuries earlier. Take for example the High German consonant shift. Now, would you please explain why you would say that both were "basically the same language"?

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#113

Post by Cushman »

cletus wrote: post #104

I'm a native English speaker. I studied a little French and speak (and can read/write) some German (with limited vocabulary). For the English speaker, German grammar is painful enough (3 genders, agreement of nouns and adjectives by case, number and article, separable verbs, etc) but, based on what reading I've done, German is still "Latin lite". A friend of mine (also native English speaker) lives in Taiwan and has…

I don't know if it's completely true that English has less character variation than Arabic— as you say, in English there is a choice of upper or lower-case, with occasional changes in meaning. In Arabic, the form of a letter is completely determined by the letter it follows. It's purely a display difference, not a separate character set. There are the diacritics to think about, but outside of the Quran they are simply ignored.

That's still a big problem for a universal language of the internet though, since written Arabic is highly non-phonetic.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#114

Post by tty »

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.

I'd say the fact that Japanese is a head-last language is enough to complicate the matter greatly for any non-native speaker of Japanese.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#115

Post by Sharlin »

idlewords wrote: post #86
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.

Finnish, my native language, has this to a lesser extent. Historically, there has been a significant regional variation in spoken Finnish (although modern communications and inexpensive travel have greatly diminished the differences), but the more formal the context, and the more diverse the audience, the closer one's speech tends to the Standard Written Finnish.

To some extent, isn't this true for English as well, at least in the UK? Many regional dialects are almost mutually unintelligible, but everyone understands Standard English (aka Received Pronunciation or "BBC English".) Perhaps in Arabic the differences are even more about vocabulary and grammar, not just pronunciation?

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#116

Post by tty »

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…

>I believe Arabic is the language with the largest variety in sounds.

You believe wrongly. There are languages with far bigger phonological inventories. Practically every language spoken in the Caucasus region would fit this criteria.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#117

Post by bluekeybox »

johnyzee wrote: post #87
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.

> We learn Latin in high school specifically because it is like a key to learning other languages

I would say that this concept that Latin is a key to European languages is a big fat lie. In the former Soviet block (which is where I'm from), Latin was not taught in schools. About half of my former high school classmates now live in a different country and are fluent in the language of that country, whether it's English, German, Spanish, or Italian. Most of the Americans I've met know only English, some bits of French/Spanish, and some bits of Latin.

I'm not saying that learning Latin is completely useless -- I am simply saying that I believe that whatever advantage it gives is insignificant compared to actually going to the country and speaking the language. As a matter of fact, I believe that teaching Latin/Greek in American schools is a giant conspiracy designed to making pupils appear educated without actually giving them practical knowledge.

Which is completely different from the situation with programming -- where, if you are really, really good with math and logic, you can pick up pretty much any programming language relatively easily.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#118

Post by hessenwolf »

Cushman wrote: post #113
cletus wrote: post #104

I'm a native English speaker. I studied a little French and speak (and can read/write) some German (with limited vocabulary). For the English speaker, German grammar is painful enough (3 genders, agreement of nouns and adjectives by case, number and article, separable verbs, etc) but, based on what reading I've done, German is still "Latin lite". A friend of mine (also native English speaker) lives in Taiwan and has…

I don't know if it's completely true that English has less character variation than Arabic— as you say, in English there is a choice of upper or lower-case, with occasional changes in meaning. In Arabic, the form of a letter is completely determined by the letter it follows. It's purely a display difference, not a separate character set. There are the diacritics to think about, but outside of the Quran they are simpl…

There are some differences in the way the way the characters are laid out in English too, unless you use a monospace font.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#119

Post by billswift »

tty wrote: post #112
cletus wrote: post #104

I'm a native English speaker. I studied a little French and speak (and can read/write) some German (with limited vocabulary). For the English speaker, German grammar is painful enough (3 genders, agreement of nouns and adjectives by case, number and article, separable verbs, etc) but, based on what reading I've done, German is still "Latin lite". A friend of mine (also native English speaker) lives in Taiwan and has…

>English in the 10th century was basically the same language as German (Althochdeutsch or Old High German, to be precise). In 1066, the Normans conquered England, bringing French which became the official and court language of England for several centuries. Old English and Old High German being "basically the same language" is a very ignorant thing to say and categorically wrong. Old High German might have been much…

Old English (aka Anglo-Saxon) was a Low German dialect, closer to Dutch in many ways, and to Danish in others, than to High German. Which isn't surprising when you consider the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes came from the North Sea coast region from southern Denmark to the eastern Netherlands.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#120

Post by gmi01 »

I am a native Arabic speaker, I enjoyed the article, however there are a few mistakes.

In 2. The exceptions are called plural exceptions which happen much less than the general rule, Otherwise most of Arabic follows a very specific rule to making plurals from singulars.

In 7. Adjectives have no gender, and therefore al-kutub hadra' (الكتب حضراء) "The books, she is green" this translates to the books are green (hadra is an adjective and has no gender)

In 9. Formally Arabic numbers are read right to left, i.e. we read the least significant digit first. Although very few people do this.

In 10. It is next to impossible to understand any written text which is a 1000 years by the average Joe, including the Qur'an

Post reply on HN