591–600 of 629 posts
Requires personal information to download from Huggingface. Meh. Why would I want to give them my personal data, just to be able to try the model? Then I will rather stick with other models that can be downloaded without having someone overreaching and trying to grad my info.
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Arabic, even. An outlier, as it is AFAIK the only arabic dialect that is not written with the arabic alphabet. Also it's far removed from other arabic dialects.
It's not at all far removed from the North African dialects of arabic which is the dialect that it's derived from. Tunisians and Algerians can understand Maltese quite well.
Not in my experience. Not at all actually. My experience with Arabic speakers is that they think they're understanding when you speak Maltese, because it sounds kind of familiar, but in actual fact they're not understanding much at all.
Which is not surprising after a thousand years of divergence.
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Not sure which Tunisians are claiming this but they'd definitely need a lot more than minimum effort. Maltese split off from Arabic around 1k years ago. The two languages sound pretty different, and are written with different alphabets.
As an Algerian, I can confirm that Maltese is surprisingly easy to understand. I was genuinely shocked the first time I heard it because the similarities are so obvious. Many Arabic dialects are also written using the Latin alphabet, especially online and on social media, so the different writing systems aren’t really a barrier at all.
can arabic people understand maltese?
That’s a really interesting question — and the answer is: *partially, but not easily.*
Here’s why:
### Linguistic roots
Maltese is a *Semitic language*, and its *core grammar and basic vocabulary* come from *Arabic*, specifically from *Siculo-Arabic*, the dialect of Arabic spoken in Sicily and Malta about 1,000 years ago. Because of that, *many Maltese words sound familiar* to Arabic speakers — especially from the *Maghrebi (North African)* or *Levantine* dialects.
For example:
| Maltese | Meaning | Similar in Arabic | | ------- | ------- | ----------------- | | Dar | house | دار (dar) | | Kelb | dog | كلب (kalb) | | Seba | seven | سبعة (sabʿa) | | Xemx | sun | شمس (shams) |
### Influence from Italian and English
However, over the centuries, Maltese absorbed *a lot of Italian (especially Sicilian)* and *English* vocabulary — so modern Maltese is *a hybrid*. Roughly:
* 30–40% of its vocabulary is Semitic (Arabic origin), * 40–50% is Romance (mostly Italian/Sicilian), * and the rest is English and other sources.
That means Arabic speakers might *recognize some words and structures*, but they’ll *struggle to understand full sentences*, especially because:
* Pronunciation has changed, * Grammar evolved differently, * Many everyday words are not Arabic anymore.
### Summary
So:
* *Yes*, Maltese and Arabic share a deep connection — like cousins. * *No*, they’re *not mutually intelligible* today. An Arabic speaker might catch words here and there, but a real conversation would be hard without studying Maltese.
The above is exactly my experience with Arabic speakers by the way. Again, not surprising after 1k years of divergence.
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You certainly wouldn’t call English a “dialect”
"A language is a dialect with an army and navy" -- Max Weinrich In the Yiddish original: "אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט", see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
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> Investing in an Estonian startup from, say, the Netherlands is near impossible If anything this would be due to Dutch regulations rather than Estonian ones. So that would be more of a problem for setting up VCs in the EU rather than attracting capital in general, as the same would apply to the rest of the world. Is it easier for a US or Singapore VC to invest in an Japanese startup vs an Estonian startup? As far as…
This is because there's no unified capital market. A texas VC can invest in a startup in Chicago and a startup in Florida can raise money from NY and so on. > If anything this would be due to Dutch regulations rather than Estonian ones Yes, because there's no unified capital market. You describe an effect not the cause. With 27 member states, if such regulations are bi-directional, you'd need 351 of such "regulations…
> Is it easier for a US or Singapore VC to invest in an Japanese startup vs an Estonian startup?
This was my main question, and it looks like the answer is indeed no.
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So what? There's no common ground in the US either, and it's not an issue there.
The ground is significantly more common than in the EU. And that's just one of the problems (many of the problems have nothing to do with European bureaucracy)
Some cursory clicking about didn't reveal to me the actual corpus they used, only that it is several trillion tokens 'divided across the languages'. I'm curious mainly because Irish (among some other similarly endangered languages on the list) typically has any large corpus come from legal/governmental texts that are required to be translated. There must surely be only a relatively tiny amount of colloquial Irish in…
Can you provide a link about the “Scots Gaelic Wikipedia drama” you reference? I've heard of drama related to the Scots Wikipedia but that has nothing to do with Gaelic.
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> the current official 21st century literature doesn't read anything like the historic literature Does modern English read like historical English? > Native speakers have complained that official documents and signage in Ulster-Scots are incomprehensible to them. Sure, there are tonnes of issues with the "officialisation" of any language but the fact that there are "native speakers" involved in the debate strongly su…
>Does modern English read like historical English? If you can read and understand text from the 18th century, then yes. We're not talking about Middle English or Old English. >but the fact that there are "native speakers" involved in the debate I should have put native speakers in quotes as well. What counts as a native Ulster Scots speaker is someone who speaks English with an NI accent with some localisms thrown in…
Yes, and I can read and understand historical Ulster Scots as well, but you were making a different point about codification/drift, no? The English I would find in those historical writings is quite different from what is being taught in schools today or recommended in style guides.
> What counts as a native Ulster Scots speaker is someone who speaks English with an NI accent with some localisms thrown in.
Then by your definition I am a native speaker. So how can we square it that you're telling me native speakers feel one way while I feel another way?
> Nobody speaks the official Ulster Scots
That's the nature of any newly codified minority language.
> The Protestant community in NI see it as a bit of an embarrassment.
There is no "protestant community" in Northern Ireland. A Dungannon farmer, an East Belfast loyalist and a BT9 lecturer will all give you very different views despite being of protestant background.
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> the current official 21st century literature doesn't read anything like the historic literature Does modern English read like historical English? > Native speakers have complained that official documents and signage in Ulster-Scots are incomprehensible to them. Sure, there are tonnes of issues with the "officialisation" of any language but the fact that there are "native speakers" involved in the debate strongly su…
My comments are entirely aside from the dialect vs. language argument as a miniscule minority care about Ulster Scots in NI as a language in its own right - comparative even to say Cant or Shelta - versus the usual Stormont tomfoolery like 'cash for ash' scandals. Simply put, Ulster Scots prominence in legislation is merely a reflection of bad-faith political negotiations by Unionists to degrade the status of the Iri…
Ah right, I get you now! The point you're making is fair enough, apologies for drawing the labour from your to explain it so fully.