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

121–130 of 239 posts

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#121

Post by Mvandenbergh »

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…

Well, the syntax and vocabulary (keywords and such) of even a large programming language like Java or C++ is regular, and tiny compared to a natural language.

What is hard about programming has very little to do with learning a programming language and everything to do with more abstract concepts and ways of structuring solutions. The equivalent of CS concepts like object orientation or functional programming would be types of writing such as essays, or newspaper articles. Even though I can't write Russian, I still know how I'd structure an essay written in Russian. Even though I've never used Ruby, I have a fairly good idea of how I'd tackle any particular category of problem using Ruby.

The difference is that the vocabulary required for writing Russian is vastly larger than the equivalent vocabulary in Ruby.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#122

Post by bluekeybox »

Mvandenbergh wrote: post #121
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…

Well, the syntax and vocabulary (keywords and such) of even a large programming language like Java or C++ is regular, and tiny compared to a natural language. What is hard about programming has very little to do with learning a programming language and everything to do with more abstract concepts and ways of structuring solutions. The equivalent of CS concepts like object orientation or functional programming would b…

What is hard about programming has very little to do with learning a programming language and everything to do with more abstract concepts and ways of structuring solutions. The equivalent of CS concepts like object orientation or functional programming would be types of writing such as essays, or newspaper articles.

Thanks for putting into words what I meant but wasn't sure how to express.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#123

Post by Mvandenbergh »

Cyph0n wrote: post #23

Yep, Arabic is indeed a fascinating language. I'd like to add that Arabic grammar is extremely difficult, at least when compared to English. It takes years of study just to understand what short vowel to place at the end of certain words. To put it simply, Arabic sentences are divided into two main types: "verb" sentences (first word is a verb) and "noun" sentences. Verb sentences are structured as (from right to lef…

This is sort of true, but short vowels at the end of words (the case system) are not generally useful for non-Muslim language learners.

Why is this? Well, in the Qur'an, they are written (as are all short vowels). Also in some voweled classical Arabic poetry. But even in formal, MSA, they aren't pronounced!

So you have a grammatical marker that isn't written, and isn't pronounced outside of certain unique contexts.

You can converse in fluent MSA, read virtually any non-religious text, and never need to see these case markers. Of course for Muslims (the majority of Arabic learners) they are important.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#124

Post by theli0nheart »

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…

First: I lived in China for a year studying Mandarin, and spent 3 years studying at school.

You're wrong in that there is no way to describe characters in Chinese to other speakers. There are certain words you use to describe strokes. The equivalent in English would be something like "there is a cross on the left and a flower on the right." Chinese speakers do this all the time, so I'm kind of surprised you jump to this conclusion when it's clear you aren't knowledgeable on the issue.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#125

Post by w1ntermute »

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…

> IMHO (1) is incredibly important. In Mandarin, if I want to tell you a new character I have to show you. There is no way to describe it.

Have you actually studied hanzi? It is very easy to describe a character verbally, and if you live in Asia for any period of time, you will see that people do this quite often. There are only 214 Kangxi radicals[0] (plus some variations based upon how much space is available). Clearly not the same as having 26 letters, but not unmanageable by any stretch of the imagination.

The second difference is that characters are "spelled" in 2 dimensions. Once again, there is a set of rules for radical placement, and if you're familiar with these (as you would be if you'd studied Chinese or Japanese), it is very straightforward.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radicals

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#126

Post by buss »

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…

> In Mandarin, if I want to tell you a new character I have to show you. There is no way to describe it.

This isn't strictly true. Some characters are simple combinations of radicals and other characters and can be sufficiently described as saying "the radical for x and the character for y." For example, the word for hungry (饿, è) is a combination of the radical for "eat" or "food" (饣, shí) and the character for "self" or "me" (我, wǒ).

I'm only a beginning student of the language, so I can't claim that many other characters are as simple to describe.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#127

Post by idlewords »

gmi01 wrote: post #120

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…

2. About 41% of plurals in an Arabic corpus are broken (http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/acl2004/emnlp/pdf/Goweder.pdf). Since most feminine plurals are regular, this means most masculine plurals are not.

7. I don't know what makes you say this. Adjectives in Arabic agree in gender, number and case. The masculine of hadra' is ahdar.

10. This is true for the average Iosif, but if you study MSA (like American students invariably do) these texts really are accessible. A short sura from the Qur'an is taught in the second semester Arabic curriculum.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#128

Post by spiffworks »

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.

Pretty much every Indian language I can think of satisfies these criteria, actually. The lack of centralization and a generally rich heritage naturally gives rise to this, I think. Also, glad to see other Tamil speakers here.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#129

Post by chc »

w1ntermute wrote: post #125
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…

> IMHO (1) is incredibly important. In Mandarin, if I want to tell you a new character I have to show you. There is no way to describe it. Have you actually studied hanzi? It is very easy to describe a character verbally, and if you live in Asia for any period of time, you will see that people do this quite often. There are only 214 Kangxi radicals[0] (plus some variations based upon how much space is available). Cle…

This is true, but I've noticed that in practice, Chinese or Japanese trying to identify characters to each other (rather than look up an unfamiliar character in a dictionary) tend to draw rather than list the components.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#130

Post by Cyph0n »

Mvandenbergh wrote: post #123
Cyph0n wrote: post #23

Yep, Arabic is indeed a fascinating language. I'd like to add that Arabic grammar is extremely difficult, at least when compared to English. It takes years of study just to understand what short vowel to place at the end of certain words. To put it simply, Arabic sentences are divided into two main types: "verb" sentences (first word is a verb) and "noun" sentences. Verb sentences are structured as (from right to lef…

This is sort of true, but short vowels at the end of words (the case system) are not generally useful for non-Muslim language learners. Why is this? Well, in the Qur'an, they are written (as are all short vowels). Also in some voweled classical Arabic poetry. But even in formal, MSA, they aren't pronounced! So you have a grammatical marker that isn't written, and isn't pronounced outside of certain unique contexts. Y…

Agreed. I only mentioned this to show that Arabic is complex, especially for people who want to study the language in detail.

In older times however, most Arabs used to incorporate these short vowels into everyday speech. It was normal for them.

I find this somewhat fascinating because if I or any other casual speaker were to attempt to do this, we'd have to pause for at least a few seconds before each word to figure out which short vowel goes at the end of it.

It's pretty sad that Arabic speakers have gone backwards instead of advancing in the language, but I guess it's a price we must pay.

Post reply on HN