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Why Arabic is Terrific

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Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#201

Post by Cushman »

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…

That would be me :) No, the preceding letter matters. Some letters (د،ذ،ر،ز،ؤ) have no medial form-- they take the terminal form instead, and the following letter takes the initial form.

There are patterns (17 by my count?) among which letters differ only minorly, so it's not as bad as learning four forms for each letter, but there are some additional gotchas too. For example "ل-ا" ("laa") is always written as a single character "lamalif": لا. (Bonus knowledge: that's also the word for "no". You can see it at the beginning of the Shahada: ...لا إله إلا الله <- "There is no god but God..." etc.)

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#202

Post by pknerd »

johnyzee wrote: post #38
pknerd wrote: post #25

Without having any intention of sounding bias,let's ignore that it belongs to some faith, if Arabic is recited properly then it does sound amazing even if you can't understand it at all. The sounding of Arabic Alphabets is in such a way that which I hardly found in any other language. Even in my own native language which is quite rich. Do listen a bit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riW4W66ptqI

The linked hymn is also very beautiful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdCPDP5qHy0&feature=relat...

Original version is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW1s5Ny_4rk

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#203

Post by tomtom101 »

Really great post. I studied Arabic for 15 months at the British Military language school and after working as a "Terp" I went on to run the policy for language support to the British Military. I encourage you to continue with your studies as the more time you spend learning the language the more rewarding it becomes. Once you start to move away from MSA and learn dialects it becomes much easier to speak, but even harder to listen. Good luck and great post.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#204

Post by leviathan »

Cyph0n wrote: post #145
leviathan wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm a native arabic speaker too. I think I misunderstood your intention of using "dh" in "dhad", I would have used "thad." This misunderstanding stems from the fact that we're both trying to write a sound that cannot be expressed correctly in latin.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#205

Post by Cushman »

Cyph0n wrote: post #145
leviathan wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This conversation would be much more productive if you both used IPA rather than trying to write sounds that don't exist in English :P

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#206

Post by devijvers »

blahedo wrote: post #172
cletus wrote: post #104

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…

There is a certain amount of misinformation in this post that I'd like to clear up: 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…

Be careful who you call a dictator. While Ataturk has been President of Turkey for 15 years (until his death in 1938) he encouraged a multi-party system. However, during his lifetime several parties were formed and again self-dissolved or dissolved after an uncovered assassination attempt on Ataturk. It's only in 1945 - after Ataturk's death - that the multi-party system in Turkey took off for real.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#208

Post by nikcub »

cletus wrote: post #104

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…

Chinese characters may seem intimidating until you remember that we read and memorize English words, not letters, when reading - and Chinese characters are much the same. If you don't know a character you can slow down and figure it out based on its composition

The Chinese composition just has many more variables than the English alphabet (it is a few hundred, IIRC)

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#209

Post by asuth »

azernik wrote: post #10
hermanthegerman wrote: post #3

Thanks, that post was fantastic. Having the arabic words in larger font size would have been great, though - really hard to look at them and spot the differences in that size (and zooming all the time is annoying).

This is something I find on all kinds of Arabic sites (including news outlets, corporations, and governments), as well as signs and print in Arab countries - the default font size for Arabic is generally (to me, as a recent student of the language) illegibly small. People just get used to it, I guess.

Yea -- when we have arabic text on Quizlet, we override the font to this:

font: 2em 'Al Bayan', Nadeem, 'Simplified Arabic', 'Arial Unicode MS', sans-serif;

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#210

Post by roel_v »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #191
burgerbrain wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like where? In cursive, at best what changes is that some ending curse goes up or down a bit more. The existence of cursive computer fonts shows that even in cursive writing, the shape of letters can be the same across a text. Minor changes are caused by the speed of writing the cursive.

On the contrary, and as I understand it, in Arabic there are rules on how to change the shape of letters in certain contexts. In Arabic it's part of the writing system, in Western European languages it's not.

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