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Why Arabic is Terrific

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Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#191

Post by blacksmith_tb »

burgerbrain wrote: post #134
hessenwolf wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don't convey any sort of meaning in Arabic either - letters just change their shapes depending on where they occur in a word. Cursive English handwriting does the same thing, to a lesser degree, and for the same reasons.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#192

Post by nwomack »

cletus wrote: post #156
theli0nheart wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I know #1 looks completely insane, but I have been studying Chinese for about 2 years, and I just started writing 3 or 4 months ago, and the breakdown of it is actually fairly simple. There's actually a somewhat limited set of characters that are reused over and over again, and I have already learned to write every one of the pieces (*edit: In that particular character). It's already been broken down in a post above me so I won't do it again...

Some characters would be harder for me to remember than this, because this particular character is made up of common used components.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#193

Post by Natsu »

chc wrote: post #129
w1ntermute wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think it depends mostly on how hard the explanation is or how available paper is.

I had a friend of mine show me how to explain how to write her name in Japanese. There are even special names for the different radical forms (e.g. ninben vs. ningen).

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#194

Post by SeanLuke »

cefarix wrote: post #65
wheels wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wrong in a couple ways: • "Arabic numerals" aren't Arabic. They're Indian. They come from the Brahmi script, which is written left to right. • The prevailing numeral system being replaced, Roman numerals, also placed the most significant digit on the left, so it's unlikely that this was something that was simply forgotten. • Western languages (usually) mention the most significant digit first when reading the…

I know they are Indian. I am from South Asia. However, the modern system was first created in Arabic. Also, I am talking about the placement of the digits, and this came to Europe from Arabic, not Brahmi.

> However, the modern system was first created in Arabic.

Actually, the modern positional system was created, in its entirety, in India. This includes the use of zero.

al-Khwarizmi gets credit largely for introducing the Indian system to the Arabic and Western world. He is the reason that the Arabs and Europeans use Indian numerals, though they've since mutated in look over time.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#195

Post by beagle3 »

philwelch wrote: post #167
andrewem wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend who's a native Hebrew speaker told me that modern Hebrew initially lacked foul words, and so they were borrowed from Arabic.

That makes sense, as modern Hebrew is largely reconstructed ancient Hebrew with added words for things that were invented in the past several centuries. I don't think the people who reconstructed Hebrew would have gone out of their way to include foul words. What is surprising is that the foul words were borrowed from Arabic, and not Yiddish or any of the other languages commonly spoken by the Jews who settled in Isr…

Israelis curse in a mix of Arabic, Russian, German, Polish, Yiddish and recently even English -- but at least at this point in time, Arabic is the dominant source.

There's a decent selection of biblical foul words to use, by the way, and many are in use.

And the reference to a penis is interesting in its own way - at least three times in the last 200 years, a new "safe" reference, and the reference took over as the improper foul word. The one in the last 50 years is literally equivalent to "the f" (as in, "the f word") was spawned verbs equivalent to "I will f you" -- the emerging noun, "זיון", is pronounced exactly the same as the f*cking Microsoft iPod competitor.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#196

Post by slowpoke »

Jun8 wrote: post #28
yariang wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Putting Chinese and Japanese (I guess because their writing systems are kind of similar) is similar to, similar to saying the same for English and Basque (which, like Japanese is agglutinative) because they both use the Latin alphabet. I don't know what exactly the OP means by "vanilla" in this context, these languages are anything but vanilla! One could argue that perhaps English grammar is vanilla because it has de…

  Putting Chinese and Japanese (I guess because their
  writing systems are kind of similar) is similar to,
  similar to saying the same for English and Basque (which,
  like Japanese is agglutinative) because they both use the
  Latin alphabet.
This comparison is flawed. The Latin alphabet is phonetic and carries no inherent meaning, while the Chinese Hanzi (which were, historically, adapted in Japan and slightly modified/simplified since then, and are called Kanji there) rely on meaning, and each character can have multiple ways to be pronounced.

Actually, Chinese and Japanese people could read (or rather, infer meaning from) texts the respective other has written if they use the subset of characters that both know (Hanzi ∩ Kanji, if you'd like ;) ), even though they could never communicate verbally. It'd be a bit like showing each other drawings of things that both know and understand, yet have completely different names for.

Comparing both on a purely grammatical/syntactical level, of course, is pretty meaningless.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#198

Post by sethg »

nikcub wrote: post #95
vbtemp wrote: post #24

Hebrew has virtually the exact same properties, and is quite simple to learn as it is extremely regular, and like all Semitic languages is based off a three-root system. In fact, in a number of conversations with my arab friends I'm stunned just how similar Hebrew and Arabic are (both in good and foul words) and in grammar.

I realized that when I heard palestinian kids mocking Israeli soldiers in Hebrew about how poor their Hebrew was

Were the Israeli soldiers in question first-generation immigrants from Russia or the US?

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#199

Post by sethg »

As someone who has learned classical Hebrew and Aramaic up to the “if I torture the page for long enough it usually confesses”, I love the root-and-pattern Semitic grammar, up until the point where I have to look a word up in a dictionary, because a lot of root letters actually drop out of the inflected forms, so I have to flip back and forth looking for possible candidate root forms. And prepositions are just tacked onto the beginnings of words, so especially in un-vowelled text, one can confuse a preposition for part of the root. And Talmudic commentaries are often written in a mishmash of Hebrew and Aramaic, because after all, if you can’t read both Hebrew and Aramaic, you shouldn’t be reading the Talmud in the first place.... Good times.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#200

Post by idlewords »

hetman wrote: post #182
Cushman wrote: post #113

Earlier 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…

Someone more familiar with Arabic may need to correct me, however I was under the impression that the shape of the letters is not at all affected by the letters it follows, but by their position in the word. Arabic letters look different depending on whether they are in the initial, medial, final position in a word (as well as having a 4th form when they appear in isolation). However, there are patterns of similarity…

Not quite. There are several letters that don't connect to the letter that follows them, so a letter that follows them will appear in the 'initial' form even though it's not at a word boundary.
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