Why Arabic is Terrific • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#141

Post by ithkuil » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 9:37 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #54

deno wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The books, she is green” is not very unique to Arabic actually. It's also how you'd say it in Polish, for example. Most languages, that have feminine and masculine forms (unlike English), have some arbitrary rules as to what form to assign for different material objects.

You've misunderstood this part. The unusual behavior is not having grammatical gender, but treating all non-human plurals as feminine singular.

Not sure if this applies to Arabic, but sometimes this happens when there is a old case which got lost and which had the same suffix as feminine singular. Usually that's genitive. For example Croatian (I'm a native speaker) uses genitive plural agreement for number >=5.

Feminine genitive plural happens to have the same suffix as feminine singular, and it could be possible to envision an future evolution of the language where the genitive is lost, while the number agreement rule could be preserve. So it's possible that grammars of this future language would state that feminine plural agreement for numbers >=5 you have to use the feminine singular.

Btw, I once read a very nice title of a german language book:

"Der Dativ is dem Genitiv sein Tot"

literaly, "the dative is [to] the genitive its death"

Which denotes the fact that in modern German the genitive case is being lost in faviour of constructs based on dative (the correct form would be "Der Dativ ist der Tod des Genitivs", i.e. "the dative is the death of the genitive")

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Dativ_ist_dem_Genitiv_sein_...)

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#142

Post by genieyclo » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 9:39 PM UTC

leviathan wrote: post #139

genieyclo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, forgot about the thaal. And yes, the shaddah is one of the big reasons for different spellings, some choose to put one meem in Muhammad (like I do), some try to be more "purist" and put double as is normal spelled in English. Mu3ammar has one shaddah on the second meem and a another shaddah on the thaal in Ghaddafi.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#143

Post by idlewords » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 9:42 PM UTC

patrickas wrote: post #136

Very 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

It's the first time you hear it because I got it wrong - thanks! Fixed now.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#144

Post by saljam » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 9:49 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #127

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 invari…

I'm a native Arabic speaker, and I agree with you on point 10. If you've learned formal Arabic properly - i.e. attended school - then even texts from the pre-islamic era should be accessible. (Mostly poems, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muallaqat)

However, there is a definite decline in the number of people who can fluently and eloquently use MLA. Keeping this (sad) trend in mind, you will definitely find native speakers who have trouble understanding not only the old texts, but even the more silver-tongued of the modern ones. This isn't unique to Arabic. Perhaps a parallel can be found in the constant confusion between the possessives and the abbreviated verbs with English pronouns even by native English speakers.

I'm not claiming that formal and eloquent Arabic is going to die any time soon, however the rise of movements such as Masry (http://arz.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%88%D9%8A%D9%83%D9%8A%D8%A8...) is a sure tell sign that maybe there aren't as many people speaking it as we thought there are.

And I believe something should be done about this.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#145

Post by Cyph0n » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 9:54 PM UTC

leviathan wrote: post #140

Cyph0n wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, they aren't. د and ض are pronounced as dal and dahd respectively. I know this because I'm a native Arabic speaker.

http://arabic.speak7.com/arabic_alphabet.htm

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#146

Post by jgfoot » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 9:56 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #73

hsmyers wrote: post #64

Great article on one of my favorite subjects. In the 80's using an IBM PC with a Hercules graphics card I wrote an Arabic word processor so my partner could write to his family in Farsi. The problems of right to left and differing letter shapes depending on leading, middle and ending position was an interesting challenge---not to mention the problem of vowels that occur above and below the letters. That said, I could…

I have no doubt that DLI students are at least as accomplished as any civilian language learners. My beef is with the idea that most Arabic education in this country is done for the purposes of military occupation, but as you point out that has nothing to do with the substance of the post.

I found your article interesting but I was really distracted by your characterization of DLI students as douchebag fraternity boys who love The Fountainhead and think all Arabs are "scary men in turbans." Totally doesn't jibe with the guys I know.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#147

Post by ithkuil » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 9:59 PM UTC

coldarchon wrote: post #137

The reason why I will never learn Arabic is that "black man" and "slave" use the same word in that language ..

"abd" means also servant as in servant of god (Abdullah).

Also in slavic languages "slovo" means word, so "slaveni" are ""people who speak (the same language),". But it become "sclavoni" in late latin, since appareantly many slaves were slavic? Should I avoid learning any language which has derived from latin because I'm slavic?

Words have ancient roots, in times where there wasn't yet the concept of political correctness and we still have traces of it in every language.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#148

Post by dreyfiz » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 10:02 PM UTC

coldarchon wrote: post #137

The reason why I will never learn Arabic is that "black man" and "slave" use the same word in that language ..

English has homonyms too. Besides, the same word is also used to mean "worshipper".

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#149

Post by rdouble » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 10:02 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #57

rdouble wrote: post #39

As a side note to the side note, the "Arabist" tradition in the US State Department has been around since the mid 1800s. Robert Kaplan wrote a great book about it: http://www.amazon.com/Arabists-American-Robert-D-Kaplan/dp/0... (The OP made it sound like elites studying Arabic for their ambassador posts is something new. It just faded in popularity when religious fundamentalists started to rise in influence.)

Arabic programs were tiny pre-2001, and now they are extremely oversubscribed. Curiously enough there are still very few people who make it past third-year level :-)

In any case, you may like the book I linked to in my post.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#150

Post by saljam » Sun, Aug 21, 2011, 10:14 PM UTC

coldarchon wrote: post #137

The reason why I will never learn Arabic is that "black man" and "slave" use the same word in that language ..

1) It's also the first part of some of the most popular given names. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_(name) The word for slave simply doesn't have the same meaning as in English.

2) "Slave" (عبد) means black just as much as "nigger" means the same in English. Or "chink" means Chinese. It's a pejorative term. Anyone decent enough would simply say "black" (اسود) or "tanned" (اسمر).