Why Arabic is Terrific
idlewords.com
Why Arabic is Terrific
1–10 of 239 posts
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#2This is a great article, but Firefox chokes on the block at the top, and switches to ISO-8859-1 encoding.
Go View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) to have the Arabic examples render correctly.
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#3Thanks, 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).
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#4> The combination of numerous dialects and a formal/informal continuum is pretty much unique to Arabic and gives rise to fascinating situations watching Arabs calibrate their lanugage based on the situation and the linguistic background of their interlocutor.
Not Chinese?
(Also, #9 hardly seems like an item to include in an article explaining 'Why Arabic is Terrific'. 'Terrifying', perhaps.)
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#5I learnt hebrew at the jewish summer camp and that made a hell lot easier for me whilst learning arabic for my US government contract (field) work...
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#6> The combination of numerous dialects and a formal/informal continuum is pretty much unique to Arabic and gives rise to fascinating situations watching Arabs calibrate their lanugage based on the situation and the linguistic background of their interlocutor. Not Chinese? (Also, #9 hardly seems like an item to include in an article explaining 'Why Arabic is Terrific'. 'Terrifying', perhaps.)
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=1120647).
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#7I agree totally with #1, the root system is very cool.
The diglossia has two sides to it, on the one hand it makes it harder to structure learning because the basic phrases that are the bread and butter of every other language learning program are usually expressed only in the dialects and may not even have agreed upon spelling in the written language. On the other hand, if you just want to speak, you can spend relatively little time on grammatical features like the dual, because many spoken dialects barely use them.
The real barrier for me though has been that Arabic (like Hebrew) is written without the short vowels in all text except for children's books and religious texts. This means that if you don't know a word, you can't pronounce it properly.
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#8Great post.
See this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic (Examples of major regional differences) for more info on the differences between regional dialects.
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#9> The combination of numerous dialects and a formal/informal continuum is pretty much unique to Arabic and gives rise to fascinating situations watching Arabs calibrate their lanugage based on the situation and the linguistic background of their interlocutor. Not Chinese? (Also, #9 hardly seems like an item to include in an article explaining 'Why Arabic is Terrific'. 'Terrifying', perhaps.)
One of the charms of HN is that it attracts posts from people for whom terrific and mindbending to the point of perversity are not necessarily opposites.
Re: Why Arabic is Terrific
#10Thanks, 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.