Funny thing, that Ancient North Arabian [1] sounds almost like Hebrew.
Why Arabic is Terrific
151–160 of 239 posts
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#152Earlier 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"
Except that for Arabic "dialects", the presence of Armies and Navies hasn't turned any of these dialects to a language.
On the other hands, Kurds have their language(s?) despite not having an army or a navy.
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I wasn't referring to the DLI students there, but to a certain type of student I've encountered in (civilian) university Arabic programs. I've never met a DLI graduate but I know instructors who have taught there and they have a uniformly high opinion of their students.
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#154I'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…
A couple of corrections I feel I have to make as an Arab.
> There are the diacritics to think about, but outside of the Quran they are simply ignored.
They are not ignored - when they are present, attention is paid to them. I think what you mean is that Arabic speakers, knowing what the diacritics are, do not bother writing them down. That is not because they ignore them, it is because we have paid such close attention to them when learning Arabic that we no longer need to be reminded of them.
> That's still a big problem for a universal language of the internet though, since written Arabic is highly non-phonetic.
Arabic is highly phonetic, and if being phonetic was a criterion for being universal language of the internet, English should be disqualified immediately.
On arrival in England at the age of 10, I had no idea how English people knew how to pronounce their words. Now I know that non-Arab speakers may think the same way about Arabic because we do not write down the diacritics by default... but it is easy to buy books that have these diacritics written, and thus to crack the code.
But English seemed designed to trap foreigners into mispronunciations, to the great amusement of my classmates. (Traveling to America after college, it was mostly place names that tripped me up.)
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#155I 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…
You're wrong on #7.
I'm a native Arabic speaker too.
First, khadra خضراء really is the femenine form of "green". The muscular form is akhdar اخضر
Second, it really is true that we use feminine forms when referring to multiple "it"s. You probably never consciously realized it, but think about it:
beautiful flowers ازهار جميلة
beautiful girls بنات جميلات
beautiful boys اولاد جميلون
Note how jameela is the singular feminine form of the adjective.
beautiful girl بنت جميلة
beautiful boy ولد جميل
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#156I'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 t…
Care to explain how you'd explain this [1] to someone else such that they could reproduce it in a readable fashion? Or one of these [2]?
[1] http://necromanc.blogspot.com/2006/05/most-complicated-chine...
[2] http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/437-most-comp...
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#157Funny thing, that Ancient North Arabian [1] sounds almost like Hebrew. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_North_Arabian
It's not funny, it's inevitable - Arab and Israeli tribes were all Semites (which is why accusing Arabs of being anti-Semitic is annoying, as it implies that we are not Semites) they share a common genetic and cultural heritage, and their languages evolved from common roots. If you ignore the current crazies on both sides, Judeo-Islamic tradition makes far more sense that Judeo-Christian one does.
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#158Very 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.
That's because the 'u' is really not the 'u' but the glottal stop ;) (hamza)
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#159The reason why I will never learn Arabic is that "black man" and "slave" use the same word in that language ..
What? No.
Black man = رجل اسود
Slave = عبد
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#160> 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 lanugage based on the situation and the linguistic background of their interlocutor. Not Chinese? (Also, #9 hardly seems like an item to include in an article explaining 'Why Arabic is Terrific'. 'Terrifying', perhaps.)
There are a couple of differences with Chinese: 1. Lots of people speak Mandarin at home. No one speaks MSA at home except us poor language students. 2. The set of languages binned under 'Chinese' is much more diverse than the Arabic dialect continuum. 3. The writing system is shared between several languages. You can write Cantonese (kind of) in hanzi and write notes that Mandarin speakers can read even though the l…
I wanted to add my opinion as an Arab (from Bahrain), which is nowhere as scholarly as yours (I am so in awe of your linguistic nerdiness, thanks for such a lovely article).
Egyptian Arabic is dominant in a similar way to American English, i.e. Egypt had the largest movie industry and population, and everyone else could understand Egyptians while Egyptians had no need to understand other dialects.
What is interesting is the impact of satellite television. These new stations have global audiences and content that Arabs want to watch as opposed to their national censored channels. But their solution to pan-Arab broadcasting is classical Arabic, not Egyptian Arabic, and so there is a resurgence of the use of classical Arabic outside of courts and classrooms.