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Why Arabic is Terrific

idlewords.com

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Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#211

Post by roel_v »

donw wrote: post #189

Marginally on-topic, but I just looked at the tuition for the Monterey Institute. A summer program is $15k USD; a full semester is $16k USD. If you want to learn a language, and have a spare $15K and the time for intensive classes, you're far better off just booking a plane ticket, going to wherever it is, and hiring a private tutor. Let's say you wanted to learn Chinese. You can live very, very comfortably in Beijin…

I don't know anything about US three-letter agencies' hiring practices, but wouldn't living in e.g. China for 6 to 12 months make it harder to get hired there? Wouldn't attending a 'regular' school make you look more hire-worthy, even if you know less of the language?

(similar to how people with papers from a degree mill be looked upon more favorably by certain companies than those who learned programming on their own)

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#212

Post by anghyflawn »

billswift wrote: post #119
tty wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>English in the 10th century was basically the same language as German (Althochdeutsch or Old High German, to be precise). In 1066, the Normans conquered England, bringing French which became the official and court language of England for several centuries. Old English and Old High German being "basically the same language" is a very ignorant thing to say and categorically wrong. Old High German might have been much…

Old English (aka Anglo-Saxon) was a Low German dialect, closer to Dutch in many ways, and to Danish in others, than to High German. Which isn't surprising when you consider the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes came from the North Sea coast region from southern Denmark to the eastern Netherlands.

No, it was not a Low German dialect. It was what is called an Ingvaeonic dialect, most closely related to Old Saxon and Old Frisian. Old High German is what is sometimes called Istvaeonic (and the Franconian dialects that were to become Dutch is also part of that group). There is a bunch of important differences between Ingvaeonic and Istvaeonic, and both are quite, quite different from North Germanic.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#213

Post by furyg3 »

idiopathic wrote: post #160
idlewords wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So would your advice to someone wishing to learn Arabic (for the purposes of understanding / being understood by as wide of an area as possible) to learn Egyptian Arabic or to learn classical Arabic?

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#214

Post by roel_v »

Jun8 wrote: post #13

Interesting post but the OP is linguistically naive, which is generally what happens when English speakers encounter another language with more interesting (i.e. exotic") morphological, phonetical, etc. elements. If Arabic if your first foray into a highly inflectional language, it might look fairly exotic. If you had studied, say ancient Greek or Latin, first, it might look less so. "you find out that the underlying…

Am I interpreting you correctly when I think that you're saying that Chinese isn't hard to learn? What's your native tongue? In my experience, and I found that interesting, Chinese seem to really derive pride out of stating that Chinese is such a hard language that us white people shouldn't even try.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#215

Post by SiVal »

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.

Your glib recital of orthodox campus political flapdoodle and breezy contempt for those whose "grim" attitudes come from years of tough, real-world experience mark YOU as the real frat boy.

I've had many experiences over the years with both Monterey and DLI, and one thing you neglected to mention was that the average "frat boy" at DLI is in his forties, about 15 years older than the average at Monterey. While the merry Monterey kids tend to be fresh from the trenches at some campus political activist club, the average DLI student has spent those extra fifteen or so years on the ground, in military or diplomatic postings, dealing with life and death issues deep within other cultures. If they seem grimmer than you, it's quite possible that they have lost some of your frat boy illusions during those fifteen years off campus.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#216

Post by _corbett »

Arabic is terrific and difficult. I studied it for years, including moving twice to the Middle East but in just a few months of study was better at German than at Arabic simply because of the cognates.

It's definitely worth the effort though.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#217

Post by vacri »

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…

On the simplification of roman script, I've just travelled through Vietnam, and learned that Ho Chi Minh did a similar thing to Ataturk - he mandated that Vietnamese be written in Roman script (as set down by a Portuguese bloke several centuries ago) and not in the traditional Chinese script. His reasoning was that the easier it is to learn, the better for the general population.

I can't say what Vietnam looked like before the change, but certainly today there's writing blazed over everything in the cities - and there's very little in the way of images or pictographs to indicate what a shop might sell to an illiterate (I may have been unaware of other indicators). They do make prodigious use of diacritics to adapt Roman script to Vietnamese, though.

It was while puzzling over these diacritics that I finally realised that English uses (needs?) these as well, we just don't write them down - wind (moving air) and wind (make a coil) are pronounced differently, but without diacritics, someone has to tell you how to do so.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#218

Post by szopa »

bane wrote: post #133
Sharlin wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finnish, my native language, has this to a lesser extent. Historically, there has been a significant regional variation in spoken Finnish (although modern communications and inexpensive travel have greatly diminished the differences), but the more formal the context, and the more diverse the audience, the closer one's speech tends to the Standard Written Finnish. To some extent, isn't this true for English as well, a…

And in the US as well. There are some isolated regional accents that are virtually unintelligible to people from other parts of the country. It's not perhaps quite as pronounced as in the British Isles, but it's definitely there. But everybody understands a midwestern accent (the kind used on national news broadcasts). For a while there was even a neutral American British accent used in major broadcasts and films...b…

That's sort of confusing. In a number of places I've read an explanation that what is described in the Wikipedia article as "Mid-Atlantic English" was in fact higher class New York English before WWII (one of its most characteristic features was a non-rhotic "r"). These sources also tend to use Franklin Delano Roosevelt as an example of this sort of accent.

For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_dialect#History (that article quotes the

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#219

Post by onan_barbarian »

Thought-provoking, but with some comedy gold scattered through it. I thought I vaguely recognized this guy's sense of humor and/or the blog title, and sure enough:

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

Definitely worth a read for anyone who missed it the first time. Warning: contains irreverent references to pg.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#220

Post by wisty »

w1ntermute wrote: post #125
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…

> 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…

I think some of radicals are homonyms of other radicals. Most of the radicals have a lot of near-homonyms.Also, those radicals can change their shape depending on what position they are in.

Yes, it's possible, but nowhere near as easy.

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