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Why Arabic is Terrific

idlewords.com

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Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#231

Post by jodrellblank »

chrisdone wrote: post #138
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…

Interesting post and interesting linked article. One part strikes me as especially noteworthy: “Lieberman, Michel, and colleagues expect that some 15 of the 98 modern irregular verbs they studied -- although likely none of these top 10 -- will regularize in the next 500 years.” Now, is this based on previous evolution of verbs? Because the past thousand years have had a certain feasibility of communication, locally,…

Chromulant: a fake word legitimised on a personal basis by adding it to Chrome's dictionary. (verb: Chromulate).

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#232

Post by pavel_lishin »

geon wrote: post #101
Jun8 wrote: post #6

Earlier 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…

Treating it as the same language would be a stretch. As a Swede, especially spoken Danish is completely unitelligible. Having worked with Norwegians the last few years, I have learned to understand spoken Norwegian most of the time. There is however a lot of variation i dialects, making some of them easy to umderstand, while others are almost as bad as Danes. In adition to dialects, there are enough unique words and…

Sounds like a great idea for a band name.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#233

Post by idiopathic »

furyg3 wrote: post #213
idiopathic wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because of satellite television, I would say classical - everyone will understand you, and although you will sound formal in your speech, you will also be able to read and write.

However, you will have difficulty understanding the dialect of the person you are speaking to. And if you have a dialect that you should understand, I would say it should be Gulf Arabic (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, UAE and of course my own Bahrain).

Economic (thriving free markets, not just oil-funded governments) and military activity in the Arab world is concentrated in the gulf, so unless you are trying to be a tourist (Egypt), the real value is in Gulf Arabic. Note that most Arabic teachers are Egyptian or from the Levant, and will try and persuade you otherwise ;)

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#234

Post by donw »

idlewords wrote: post #224
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 have no idea where you got those prices but they are not correct.

If you mean the MIIS prices, I got them here:

http://www.miis.edu/admissions/tuition

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#235

Post by hessenwolf »

roel_v wrote: post #210
blacksmith_tb wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ar…

I give you Typographic Ligature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#236

Post by super_mario »

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…

Yeah, but then you would have to live in an Arabic country for a while, risking getting stoned to death for being too liberal, or having to be covered in table cloth all the time if you are unfortunate enough to be born a lesser creature i.e. a woman.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#237

Post by roel_v »

hessenwolf wrote: post #235
roel_v wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ar…

I give you Typographic Ligature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature

Exactly, ligatures don't have any grammatical meaning. They're merely that - 'typographic'.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#238

Post by hessenwolf »

roel_v wrote: post #237
hessenwolf wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I give you Typographic Ligature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature

Exactly, ligatures don't have any grammatical meaning. They're merely that - 'typographic'.

And the Arabic letters don't have any grammatical meaning. They are also merely typographic.

I think we are saying the same thing here.

Re: Why Arabic is Terrific

#239

Post by idlewords »

donw wrote: post #234
idlewords wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea where you got those prices but they are not correct.

If you mean the MIIS prices, I got them here: http://www.miis.edu/admissions/tuition

Yeah, those are for an unrelated program. See the SILP tuition, which is around $3k.
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