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Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

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Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#111

Post by realusername »

village-idiot wrote: post #23
msvan wrote: post #10

Chinese also had the same "issue": it is more of a family of languages rather than a language. But the Chinese government has been pushing pretty hard for Mandarin over the past 100 years, such that it has now become the Chinese language. It has cost them a lot of linguistic diversity, but they probably think it pays off in the long run.

France is doing the same with French.

It's not exactly the same situation as Mandarin, the French dialects have generally not much to do with each other, it's not really a family of languages like Chinese.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#112

Post by shodan666 »

theprotocol wrote: post #64

I am a native Arabic speaker. It is an awful language. As the article points out, the dialects are just too numerous for it to gain any kind of critical mass of adoption. But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly. edit: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Ara…

>: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Arabic, and the dialect factor multiplies this problem.

This is true only for English. When it comes to eastern European languages: written arabic is the same as spoken arabic.

Arab people can read Polish, Slovakian, Belarusan language without any problems whatsoever with perfect pronunciation.

English is an exception - its very rare case of language in which you write differently then you speak.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#113

Post by ramigb »

"But Western students who sign up for a class in it soon discover that nobody speaks this “standard” as a native tongue; many Arabs hardly speak it at all. "

This is not completely true! I'm a native Arabic speaker and MSA is the official language of newspapers, news segments, and legal documents, governments speeches even wedding invitations and not to forget the Quran and the Arabic bible. So it's spoken and written widely but people tend not to use it that often because it's easier to use shorter words that most of the time sum longer sentences.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#114

Post by EliRivers »

bshimmin wrote: post #107
Bombthecat wrote: post #82

It is on my list of languages I want to learn! Because I think it will be the second most spoken language in Europe. But as others already wrote: the dialects are very strong and different.. So, not sure which one to learn :) Any advise? Or maybe prediction which will win the "language" war in Europe?

I would love an answer to this too - Arabic always sounds beautiful to me and I would love to learn at least a little bit. It seems like learning both MSA and a dialect (perhaps Egyptian) might be the way to go, at least from what I can infer from this thread, the article, and conversations I've had with people in the past, but it's probably not as simple as that. It would perhaps be an easier question to answer if t…

Arabic always sounds beautiful to me

When I was speaking it, which was a long time ago and I remember almost nothing, I sounded like a footballer clearing his throat :)

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#115

Post by kissickas »

theprotocol wrote: post #64

I am a native Arabic speaker. It is an awful language. As the article points out, the dialects are just too numerous for it to gain any kind of critical mass of adoption. But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly. edit: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Ara…

> It's very convoluted and it takes many more words to describe things accurately than latin and/or germanic languages

I definitely disagree on this. Sure, for some concepts, that might be true, but Arabic vocabulary and verbs are so diverse that there are many things that are much easier to say in Arabic.

Combined with the fact that written words are much shorter, you can easily see why Arabic Twitter is thriving so well. Before the tweet limit was raised, Arabic tweets could hold about the equivalent of a paragraph of information. Now that it's been increased they're essentially blog posts.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#116

Post by smel »

theprotocol wrote: post #64

I am a native Arabic speaker. It is an awful language. As the article points out, the dialects are just too numerous for it to gain any kind of critical mass of adoption. But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly. edit: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Ara…

I'm native arabic speaker too, and can tell you that your statement is far from the truth. Arabic is far more simple language with fewer exceptions than english or french (I love/speak french :D).

There are only 3 tenses: Also it's derivational language which mean once you learn about a verb you actually learn about the whole lexical family of the verb.

In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabic (kitaab, kaatib, maktaba) which is the same root (k,t,b) and with simple rules you can discover all those words or even invent them if not used previously The big problem of arabic as language is arabic societies/people/... but the language itself is a gem.

https://blogs.transparent.com/arabic/the-arabic-morphologica...

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#117

Post by mrhichem »

theprotocol wrote: post #64

I am a native Arabic speaker. It is an awful language. As the article points out, the dialects are just too numerous for it to gain any kind of critical mass of adoption. But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly. edit: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Ara…

I'm also a native arabic speaker. I also speak french and English fluently. What you say is utterly false. I think that trying to evaluate a language based on it being similar to western languages simplicity for it to be good/bad is plain nonsense. Arabic having many variant local dialects is not an awful thing but a richness. I will not fall into the trap of saying such language is better or worse. What I can say is that Arabic as a language is complexe and that is why it is a very much powerful language to express ideas an emotions then other languages I know.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#118

Post by namanyayg »

smel wrote: post #116
theprotocol wrote: post #64

I am a native Arabic speaker. It is an awful language. As the article points out, the dialects are just too numerous for it to gain any kind of critical mass of adoption. But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly. edit: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Ara…

I'm native arabic speaker too, and can tell you that your statement is far from the truth. Arabic is far more simple language with fewer exceptions than english or french (I love/speak french :D). There are only 3 tenses: Also it's derivational language which mean once you learn about a verb you actually learn about the whole lexical family of the verb. In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabi…

The translation is Book, Author, Library; (kitaab, kaatib, maktaba); respectively.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#119

Post by 616c »

theprotocol wrote: post #64

I am a native Arabic speaker. It is an awful language. As the article points out, the dialects are just too numerous for it to gain any kind of critical mass of adoption. But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly. edit: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Ara…

You might think that but I decided to major in it in college and it led to many crazy life choices I sometimes regret, but I go to the Arab world often as a result of them.

I'll never regret what Arabic has taught me directly and indirectly about the world.

I have seen a lot of the contrast of the myopic sheltered culture of middle class Northeast US I grew up in. And I learned Europeans borrowed and saved a lot of important knowledge for safe keeping with the Arabs in Arabic. I see certain artistic themes go so far back even beyond classical Arab history and they give evidence of that. Ditto for math and science.

Ugly is beautiful too, man.

من يعلمني حرفا فصرت له عبدا!

For he who teaches me a letter, for him I become a slave. I saw this old trope on a classroom board studying in Cairo and it has stayed with me all my life.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#120

Post by avaika »

smel wrote: post #116
theprotocol wrote: post #64

I am a native Arabic speaker. It is an awful language. As the article points out, the dialects are just too numerous for it to gain any kind of critical mass of adoption. But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly. edit: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Ara…

I'm native arabic speaker too, and can tell you that your statement is far from the truth. Arabic is far more simple language with fewer exceptions than english or french (I love/speak french :D). There are only 3 tenses: Also it's derivational language which mean once you learn about a verb you actually learn about the whole lexical family of the verb. In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabi…

I'd argue that Arabic is simpler than English. It might have been simpler for you as your were the native :) For me Arabic and English both are foreign and I can definitely tell you that English was much simpler to learn.

While words "transformation" might seem cool and convenient, there is no common rule on how to predict final meaning.

Also the pronunciation is very (VERY) important. One tiny mistake and you will end up telling your girlfriend that you have a gift from deep of your dog (كلب/ Kalb) instead of deep of your heart (قلب / K'alb).

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