171–180 of 239 posts
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It's the first time you hear it because I got it wrong - thanks! Fixed now.
You should also fix dukkan -> dukaakiin to become dakaakiin
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…
1) In the 10th century, (Old) English and (Old) German were already somewhat divergent, and not really mutually intelligible, but closely related.
2) The same goes for Norman and French. While in the same language family, these were not quite the same language.
3) Have you read any Chaucer? I'm not sure I'd call Middle English "mostly comprehensible". It takes a lot of work and a good ME dictionary at hand. By contrast, Early Modern English (think Shakespeare) is more in the line of "mostly comprehensible".
4) It's not just the fact there was no central authority that caused English to massively change. There still isn't a central authority, but change has been slow and non-radical for the last 500 years or so. Having a central authority doesn't really prevent change, either, although it might help to slow it down.
5) It's not at all clear what you mean by "arbitrary" in your claim about language change and state control, but you certainly have not backed up any claim about languages under "state control" being more "regular".
6) The alphabet switch for Turkish did not succeed because the Latin alphabet is "simple and phonetic". The Arabic alphabet is also simple and phonetic, as is (or as could be) any alphabet. It was not a great fit for the Turkish language, however, and the Latin alphabet (with a few additions) mapped better.
7) But much more important than any facts about the Latin alphabet was the fact that Kemal Ataturk was a dictator who pushed through a massive literacy programme on the population (who, it should also be said, was basically supportive of this goal). Had he done an alphabet reform instead---adding a few letters to the Arabic alphabet to make it a better fit for Turkish---and accompanied it with the same literacy policy, it'd do just as well. (Better, arguably, because it would have left the writings of the Ottomans much more accessible to the literate modern population.)
You might be right about computers arising in alphabet countries (I'd broaden that to any non-ideographic writing system, including Greek, Korean, and those of the Indian subcontinent and southeast Asia), but it might be more accurate to say that if computers had arisen first in China they would have looked very, very different. (Even in Japan, they might have gone the route of kana-only systems first, in a similar way to how early western machines had ALL CAPS interfaces.)
In the 11th century, standard Church Latin had evolved slightly relative to Cicero but was clearly the same language; someone who was fluent in Church Latin could reliably travel anywhere in Christendom (and to cosmopolitan cities elsewhere) and make themselves understood. The local dialect there might have evolved from Latin, or might not, but there'd be someone educated and literate that they could communicate with. In the areas where the language had evolved from Latin, the hoi polloi could kinda sorta make out the Latin (better in some areas than others), and the cleverer ones could figure out the relationships between their language and Latin, and the educated ones would just go learn Latin (but perhaps have an easy time of it).
Thus also, mutatis mutandis, with Modern Standard Arabic. The analogy isn't perfect but it turns out to be pretty darn good and lets you make some good guesses about the situation on the ground in the Arabic-speaking world and the mutual intelligibility of, say, Qatari and Tunisian (i.e. not very much).
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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...
First of all, [1] is ridiculous. Second of all, you just do it recursively. I would describe the first example roughly as follows:
Walking radical (162); cave top (116); to the left a left-right combination with "moon" on the left (74) and a thread radical (52) above "long" (168) on the right; in the middle "speech" (149) above "horse" (187); to the right, a left-right combination with thread above "long" on the left, and a knife radical (18) on the right; under all of that, a heart radical (61).
Numbers refer to the chart here
http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/radicals.php
In practice, it is very common for two Chinese people to meet for the first time and explain to each other which characters their name are. This normally does not involve pulling out pencil and paper.
Funny 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.
If you can get everyone to switch to something like 'Judaeophobia', I'd personally have no objections - but sometimes you've got to work with the vocabulary that already exists.
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How does that compare to the other languages in the Bantu family? Long ago I studied Ichibemba, and think it had something like 18 noun classes, too. IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating.
My knowledge of bantu languages is only what I read on wikipedia, so I am not qualified to answer, but it seems they orbitate around 20 :) As for cases: I am learning hungarian which is related to finnish and also has more than 20 cases. The problem, in my personal experience, is that learning such an agglutinative language is slightly harder than others because when you are learning you don't know all the suffixes a…
hungarian is not related to finnish, rather to turkic languages. i am a native hungarian speaker, and i know hungarian grammar is logically closer to turkish than to finnish. the story how they became related is purely political, and references easily found on this subject and i do not intend to get into. in hungarian literature class we studied finnish words that were similar, grammer, and a few poems.
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.
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> This comment about Chinese and Japanese (totally unrelated > languages with very different writing systems, is laughable. No it's not. I studied Japanese as my fourth language for 1.5 years and went through pretty much exactly what the OP described. Edit: Other languages were Spanish English and Italian.
> No it's not. I studied Japanese as my fourth language for 1.5 years and went through pretty much exactly what the OP described. I've been studying Japanese as my fourth language for over 2 years, and I have to disagree with both you and the OP. If you didn't find Japanese to be very gramatically challenging or interesting, you unfortunately probably didn't get into any keigo, which contains grammar of a mindbogglin…
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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...
龘 == three dragons stack
驫 == three horses stack
It's pretty simple and straight forward.
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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.
It really wasn't so much the politics of the post that bothered me (I'm a "pre-occupation" Arabic DLI graduate whose politics probably closely match your own) -- it was your mischaracterization of the 63+ week program there as limited to "hobbies and the weather," said from the comfort of a (somehow more extensive?) 9 week program at MIIS. I have a stack of Arabic books, about as tall as me, from the DLI course that…
I can see how you can read that comment as a dig at the DLI, but that wasn't my intent.