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Why Arabic is Terrific
131–140 of 239 posts
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#132"Some words have separate broken plurals depending on whether you're talking about a small or large number (the cutoff is somewhere around seven)."
Huh, I wonder if this came about naturally, and if it did, I wonder if it has any tie-in to the number of items people can hold in their heads at one time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_...
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, a…
And in the US as well. There are some isolated regional accents that are virtually unintelligible to people from other parts of the country. It's not perhaps quite as pronounced as in the British Isles, but it's definitely there. But everybody understands a midwestern accent (the kind used on national news broadcasts).
For a while there was even a neutral American British accent used in major broadcasts and films...but it's since dropped by the wayside.
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Those differences are not to my knowledge as a native English speaker used to convey any sort of meaning, and as demonstrated by the existence of monospaced fonts have no particular importance. They are merely an artifact of the glyph geometry.
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#135I 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 invari…
Re 7:
In a way, you're both right.
Khadra' here is a form of plural, not the feminine of akhdar. The literal translation might be "she is green," but the correct translation is "the books are green." No native arabic speaker will think of the books as feminine while referring to them in plural, but in singular objects' gender is strangely ingrained in our minds:
kitab akhdar : green book (masculine)
tawila khadra' : green table (feminine)
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#136Very interesting article.
This is the first time I hear the plural : ustaath -> usaatatha, I am a native arabic speaker and we always use asaatitha.
Also an old side project of mine, http://yoolki.com for en-ar transliteration
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#137The reason why I will never learn Arabic is that "black man" and "slave" use the same word in that language ..
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#138I'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…
Interesting post and interesting linked article. One part strikes me as especially noteworthy:
“Lieberman, Michel, and colleagues expect that some 15 of the 98 modern irregular verbs they studied -- although likely none of these top 10 -- will regularize in the next 500 years.”
Now, is this based on previous evolution of verbs? Because the past thousand years have had a certain feasibility of communication, locally, nationally and globally. I think the past 100 years with the advent of radio, television and now the internet, language is really going to evolve at a rate previously unseen in history.
The whole globe is connected, textually, verbally and visually, and it's immediate and constant. The past thousand years the only way to get your novel usage of a particular word or grammatical construct was to either go to some venue and talk, send a letter, or write a book. Now you can spread your literary love everywhere, constantly and with a wide audience. And not only to people with your local dialect, but every dialect. What a melting pot.
I'm quite a lover of language evolution. I moved to Italy a year ago in a very multilingual office, and my French and Italian colleagues noted how nice it is in English that you can verb nouns. It hadn't occurred to me that this wasn't possible in French or Italian. I expressed that though English is quite liberal and almost anything goes in a lot of areas, I still wish that people were more accepting of linguistic novelties. People scorn you if you play with language, or actively drop old ways, or invent new words, with the exception of high school kids who, in my experience, are the most inventive English speakers I've seen. When I was in school the amount of new language and idioms introduced every week was overwhelming.
I'm quite descriptivist, though. I like dictionaries that are extremely up to date, like [Wordnik](http://www.wordnik.com/), that encourage people to just use words freely, and take 3 seconds to explain to their partner in conversation what the word means, without fear that their new word isn't cromulent! (I just added "cromulent" to Chrome's dictionary.) Some words I like to use when talking to myself (hey, kids do it, so sue me), are words that don't exist already but are the 'root' of existing words, like inane (“That's quite ane.”), edible (“I think I'll ed some peanut butter sarnies”), etc.
Anyway, I'm rambling, too.
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
actually three letters, there's also the Thal, which is like a "d" (Dal) with a point on top of it, and pronounced as a deep version of "th."
So it's basically Qathafi.
But given the fact that there's a "chaddah" on top of it, all hell breaks loose when you're trying to write it in English.
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The pronunciations you've listed are used in some Arabic dialects. In classical Arabic, ذ is pronounced as dhel , and ظ is more of a dhah .
the pronunciation you mentioned are actually for the letters د and ض