Why Arabic is Terrific

http://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm

by ColinWright • 15 years ago

504 236 15 years ago

idlewords.com

damncabbage2• 15 years ago

This is a great article, but Firefox chokes on the <?xml ... ?> 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.

sbierwagen• 15 years ago

Ah, but which Firefox?

Rendered perfectly fine in Firefox 7 on Vista 64-bit.

damncabbage2• 15 years ago

Firefox 6 gave me Western ISO (on Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit).

deno3• 15 years ago

Firefox 9.0a1 (Nightly) / Linux 3.0 x64 has this problem as well. Might be problem with platform rather than browser itself.

idlewords24• 15 years ago

Thanks, hopefully this is now fixed.

hermanthegerman2• 15 years ago

Thanks, 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).

azernik• 15 years ago

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.

asuth• 15 years ago

Yea -- when we have arabic text on Quizlet, we override the font to this:

font: 2em 'Al Bayan', Nadeem, 'Simplified Arabic', 'Arial Unicode MS', sans-serif;

gwern• 15 years ago

> 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.)

Jun83• 15 years ago

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).

just_the_tip• 15 years ago

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

geon• 15 years ago

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 idioms in each language to make especially written norwegian cryptic.

There are also a lot of gotchas where the same words have different meaning. A fun example is the expression "rar tös" meaning "sweet little girl" in Swedish, but "weird slut" in Norwegian.

mechanical_fish• 15 years ago

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.

adnanymously• 15 years ago

dates in Arabic are not read right to left as the author suggested. They are written and read left to right.

gms• 15 years ago

The numbers are written left to right, but dates are indeed right to left.

cwp• 15 years ago

Personally, I'd go with 6 & 7 as reasons Arabic is terrifying.

deno3• 15 years ago

“The books, she is green” is not very unique to Arabic actually. It's also how you'd say it in Polish, for example. Most languages, that have feminine and masculine forms (unlike English), have some arbitrary rules as to what form to assign for different material objects.

idlewords24• 15 years ago

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 languages are totally mutually unintelligble.

4. There is no dominant dialect of Arabic, like there is a dominant variety of Chinese. Instead every dialect shares the same formal register (MSA) which is taught in school like a foreign language.

idiopathic4• 15 years ago

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 is the impact of satellite television. These new stations have global audiences and content that Arabs want to watch as opposed to their national censored channels. But their solution to pan-Arab broadcasting is classical Arabic, not Egyptian Arabic, and so there is a resurgence of the use of classical Arabic outside of courts and classrooms.

abhaga• 15 years ago

Not at all unique to Arabic. The Indo-Gangatic plain is a big continuum of people speaking various dialects of Hindi. We even have a saying: Water changes every kos (~2 miles) and language changes every 4 kos (~ 8 miles).

samuel1604• 15 years ago

I 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...

Mvandenbergh3• 15 years ago

I 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.

hermanthegerman2• 15 years ago

Hebrew has a vocalization system to signal it, though (for educational purpose, for example).

drtse4• 15 years ago

Great 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.

csomar• 15 years ago

There are a few words that take a regular plural suffix, but most of the time to make a plural you have to change the structure of the word quite dramatically:

The structural change is regular. That is you don't have to learn each name plural.

The Arabic writing system is exotic looking but easy to learn, which is a rare combination. The language uses a straightforward alphabet, but because letters change their shape depending on what their neighbors are it is quite impenetrable to the uninitiated.

I thought the same thing for English and French, no? When I learn English and French in school, we join letters.

Formal Arabic distinguishes between groups composed entirely of women and groups that contain one or more men, and has distinct pronouns, plural forms, and verb conjugations for feminine dual and feminine plural.

The same for french. (Il, Ils, Elle, Elles, On)

What we call Arabic numerals aren't used in Arabic except in extraordinarily formal contexts. Instead, Arabic uses "Indian numerals", which look like this:

Not true. The real Arabic numbers are the ones used today. The Indian numbers were used in the middle east region because of the strong Indian influence.

Well, if you are really interested in Arabic, then what you should learn is the Arabic poetry. It's one of the marvelous human inventions. It's very hacky, and quite hard to write. The wealth of books (old books) and poems written in Arabic are worth learning it.

yariang2• 15 years ago

> I thought the same thing for English and French, no? When > I learn English and French in school, we join letters.

You can write cursive but, generally, we don't join letters together (think online text like this comment).

> The same for french. (Il, Ils, Elle, Elles, On)

And for Spanish--Ellas y elllos--and for Italian.

jawher• 15 years ago

> The structural change is regular. That is you don't have to learn each name plural.

Not all the time. And if they do, there still are subtle variations in suffixes. For example:

- Kalb (dog) => Kilab (dogs)

- Liss (thief) => Losous (thieves)

- Karoura (bottle) => Kawarir (Bottles)

- etc.

> I thought the same thing for English and French, no? When I learn English and French in school, we join letters.

Yes, but that doesn't change the letter's shape as in Arabic, you just add a line to connect letters.

> The same for french. (Il, Ils, Elle, Elles, On)

Not quite: what you cite are just pronouns, but the conjugation and grammar doesn't vary. For instance, conjugating the verb manger (to eat) with feminine plural "elles" and masculine plural yields the same "mangent", whereas in Arabic you have different forms.

> Not true. The real Arabic numbers are the ones used today. The Indian numbers were used in the middle east region because of the strong Indian influence.

Agreed. I myself have a hard time reading numbers written in the Hindi numerals (٠‎ - ١‎ - ٢‎ - ٣‎ - ٤‎ - ٥‎ - ٦‎ - ٧‎ - ٨‎ - ٩‎)

cabalamat4• 15 years ago

> Not quite: what you cite are just pronouns, but the conjugation and grammar doesn't vary. For instance, conjugating the verb manger (to eat) with feminine plural "elles" and masculine plural yields the same "mangent", whereas in Arabic you have different forms.

It's mostly true that the verb form stays the same in French regardless of the gender of the subject. However, they are exceptions. If a verb conjugates conpound tenses with être, then the past participle is considered an adjective and must agree with the subject, e.g.:

Ils sont allés = They went (one or more male)

Elles sont allées. = They went (all female)

ztravis• 15 years ago

> Not all the time. And if they do, there still are subtle variations in suffixes.

There are many patterns and forms in the broken plurals themselves which you can pick up on and learn so that you often can correctly predict new ones without memorization. For example, you give:

-liss => lusuus

And likewise, most doubled nouns of this form take the same plural:

-jadd => juduud

-hass => husuus

-hamm => humuum

Still... this is far from a hard and fast rule, and it also takes a lot of time to build familiarity and notice these patterns. It's also something that al-Kitaab (for example) doesn't ever mention.

(just explaining... not implying that you aren't aware of this)

masklinn• 15 years ago

> I thought the same thing for English and French, no? When I learn English and French in school, we join letters.

I don't think cursive letters significantly "change their shape depending on what their neighbors are". There is more variation in personal cursive styles than due to neighbors in a single cursive style.

The only modification to letters are small lines joining them with one another, generally from the "feet" around the baseline.

> The same for french. (Il, Ils, Elle, Elles, On)

Correct for pronouns (especially in masculine "taking over" feminine as soon as a single male is included in the group), but french does not use different plural forms and verb conjugations for feminines (let alone distinguish between dual and further plurals).

> Not true.

How is it not true? You're saying exactly what he wrote: what are commonly known as arabic numerals aren't used in (middle-eastern) arabic.

> The real Arabic numbers are the ones used today.

There are no "real arabic numbers", North-Africa use western arabic numbers (what we call "Arabic numbers"), the middle-east uses eastern-arabic numbers ("Indic numerals"), western-arabic numbers progressively got their modern shape in Europe between the 10th and the 15th century (they got fixed with the advent of typesetting and print).

jinushaun2• 15 years ago

> I thought the same thing for English and French, no? When I learn English and French in school, we join letters.

No, English and French don't have a concept of "different characters for different places." The "c" in "cat", "act" and "topic" are all written exactly the same. It's not "cat", "a#t" and "topi*"

There are many languages, besides Arabic, that have a concept of distinct initial, medial and final characters. For example, the dozens of writing systems derived from Sanskrit.

cabalamat4• 15 years ago

> No, English and French don't have a concept of "different characters for different places.

Yes they do, at least the way handwriting is sometimes taught. For example, "s" in handwriting sometimes looks like a slash ("/") followed by a backwards "c".

ziyadb• 15 years ago

The most interesting part is the deviation of spoken Arabic (which as mentioned in the article, varies by region, e.g. Saudis speak different Arabic from Jordanians, or the Lebanese) from written Arabic. I'm a native Arabic speaker but most of my education and upbringing were in English, so I tend to use the "higher form" i.e. written Arabic, when communicating with fellow speakers. And yes, it is terrific indeed.

Jun83• 15 years ago

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 language is pretty vanilla, and meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between you and the ability to skim a newspaper." This comment about Chinese and Japanese (totally unrelated languages with very different writing systems, is laughable. The syntax of Chinese is simple (it pretty much has non at all) but Japanese syntax is complicated.

The OMG moment one faces when faced with thousands or weird Chinese signs is partly an illusion. Yes, you have to memorize a lot of things, like any other languages, but the meaning of a Chinese word can be guessed if you know the determinitve, even f you don't know the word. There are only about 200 determinitives.

An interesting thing about Arabic is that, due to its tie to Koran, it's been studied linguistically since early times. But other languages can also boast such long examined lives, e.g. Sanskrit or Chinese.

jarek• 15 years ago

The OP knows Polish and Russian, so it's pretty safe to say Arabic isn't his first encounter with inflection.

yariang2• 15 years ago

> This comment about Chinese and Japanese (totally unrelated > languages with very different writing systems, is laughable.

No it's not. I studied Japanese as my fourth language for 1.5 years and went through pretty much exactly what the OP described.

Edit: Other languages were Spanish English and Italian.

Jun83• 15 years ago

Putting Chinese and Japanese (I guess because their writing systems are kind of similar) is similar to, similar to saying the same for English and Basque (which, like Japanese is agglutinative) because they both use the Latin alphabet.

I don't know what exactly the OP means by "vanilla" in this context, these languages are anything but vanilla! One could argue that perhaps English grammar is vanilla because it has developed certain creole-like characteristics due to various pressures during its history: Compared to most other languages in the IE family, its grammar is quite simplified, it's lost most of its complexity.

w1ntermute4• 15 years ago

> No it's not. I studied Japanese as my fourth language for 1.5 years and went through pretty much exactly what the OP described.

I've been studying Japanese as my fourth language for over 2 years, and I have to disagree with both you and the OP. If you didn't find Japanese to be very gramatically challenging or interesting, you unfortunately probably didn't get into any keigo, which contains grammar of a mindbogglingly high level of complexity that is probably only surpassed by a similar system in Korean, since Japanese grammar was artificially simplified during the Meiji Restoration in order to make a simpler national dialect that all Japanese could easily learn/use. Nevertheless, the situational shifts in Japanese grammar based upon the relationship between the speaker and the listener are very difficult to become accustomed to, even for native speakers.

roel_v4• 15 years ago

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.

hackermom• 15 years ago

If you're looking for something that is terrific for real, read up on Japanese - its entirely syllabled nature is fascinating.

Cyph0n7• 15 years ago

Yep, Arabic is indeed a fascinating language. I'd like to add that Arabic grammar is extremely difficult, at least when compared to English. It takes years of study just to understand what short vowel to place at the end of certain words.

To put it simply, Arabic sentences are divided into two main types: "verb" sentences (first word is a verb) and "noun" sentences.

Verb sentences are structured as (from right to left of course):

verb > subject > object

Each word ends with a different short vowel depending on its place in a sentence. The subject for instance always ends in a dhamma ('u' sound), while the object ends in a fatha ('a' sound).

Unlike with the English language, rarely do you find someone who follows grammatical rules in everyday speech. Only scholars or teachers who use formal language apply such rules when speaking or writing.

The vastness of the language is also why Muslims resort to a tafsir (or explanation) of the Quran to understand certain verses and chapters. Words sometimes mean something else when found after a certain word or in a certain context.

cabalamat4• 15 years ago

> Unlike with the English language, rarely do you find someone who follows grammatical rules in everyday speech.

Surely they do follow grammar, albeit the grammar of whatever colloquial Arabic they are speaking, rather than the grammar of Modern Standard Arabic?

In terms of colloquial Arabics, do they have less complex inflexional systems compared to MSA (in the same way that Italian and Spanish do compared with Latin)?

Cyph0n7• 15 years ago

Most Arabic dialects are just that: dialects. They have no grammatical rules, nor a official written form for that matter, and are ultimately used for nothing more than speech.

Mvandenbergh3• 15 years ago

This is sort of true, but short vowels at the end of words (the case system) are not generally useful for non-Muslim language learners.

Why is this? Well, in the Qur'an, they are written (as are all short vowels). Also in some voweled classical Arabic poetry. But even in formal, MSA, they aren't pronounced!

So you have a grammatical marker that isn't written, and isn't pronounced outside of certain unique contexts.

You can converse in fluent MSA, read virtually any non-religious text, and never need to see these case markers. Of course for Muslims (the majority of Arabic learners) they are important.

Cyph0n7• 15 years ago

Agreed. I only mentioned this to show that Arabic is complex, especially for people who want to study the language in detail.

In older times however, most Arabs used to incorporate these short vowels into everyday speech. It was normal for them.

I find this somewhat fascinating because if I or any other casual speaker were to attempt to do this, we'd have to pause for at least a few seconds before each word to figure out which short vowel goes at the end of it.

It's pretty sad that Arabic speakers have gone backwards instead of advancing in the language, but I guess it's a price we must pay.

vbtemp2• 15 years ago

Hebrew has virtually the exact same properties, and is quite simple to learn as it is extremely regular, and like all Semitic languages is based off a three-root system. In fact, in a number of conversations with my arab friends I'm stunned just how similar Hebrew and Arabic are (both in good and foul words) and in grammar.

dmoney3• 15 years ago

I don't know either language, but Modern Hebrew's regularity may be due to the fact that it was constructed (or reconstructed) less than 150 years ago.

ars• 15 years ago

It was reconstructed based on ancient writing, so a speaker of modern Hebrew can read text written thousands of years ago with full fluency after learning a few additional vocabulary words (mainly nouns).

The structure of the language and it's grammar rules has not changed. Even though the language was not used for regular conversation, it was still studied and spoken for the entire time, so was never lost.

idlewords24• 15 years ago

Heh, just because it's regular doesn't make it easy to learn. But you are right that the two languages are very closely related.

The main differences I can think of is that Hebrew doesn't go quite as crazy with broken plurals, there's no diglossia, and of course the writing system isn't so pretty.

nikcub4• 15 years ago

I realized that when I heard palestinian kids mocking Israeli soldiers in Hebrew about how poor their Hebrew was

sethg2• 15 years ago

Were the Israeli soldiers in question first-generation immigrants from Russia or the US?

andrewem• 15 years ago

A friend who's a native Hebrew speaker told me that modern Hebrew initially lacked foul words, and so they were borrowed from Arabic.

philwelch2• 15 years ago

That makes sense, as modern Hebrew is largely reconstructed ancient Hebrew with added words for things that were invented in the past several centuries. I don't think the people who reconstructed Hebrew would have gone out of their way to include foul words.

What is surprising is that the foul words were borrowed from Arabic, and not Yiddish or any of the other languages commonly spoken by the Jews who settled in Israel.

pknerd2• 15 years ago

Without having any intention of sounding bias,let's ignore that it belongs to some faith, if Arabic is recited properly then it does sound amazing even if you can't understand it at all. The sounding of Arabic Alphabets is in such a way that which I hardly found in any other language. Even in my own native language which is quite rich. Do listen a bit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riW4W66ptqI

johnyzee4• 15 years ago

The linked hymn is also very beautiful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdCPDP5qHy0&feature=relat...

pknerd2• 15 years ago

Original version is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW1s5Ny_4rk

dmoney3• 15 years ago

> For exmaple, here are some "words" consisting of a single letter repeated three times:

> ÙŠÙŠÙŠ Ø¹Ø¹Ø¹ Ù‡Ù‡Ù‡ ÙƒÙƒÙƒ Ù„Ù„Ù„

Which for me looks like (asciified):

> USUSUS 010101 UtUtUt UfUfUf UnUnUn

I'm guessing I'm missing a font or something? (Firefox 6)

amirhhz• 15 years ago

View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode

Interestingly Chrome auto-corrected this.

dmoney3• 15 years ago

That worked, thanks.

cedsav2• 15 years ago

Your browser probably auto-detects the encoding as Western (ISO-8959-1). Change it to Unicode (UTF-8) to see the Arabic characters.

greengarstudios• 15 years ago

What's your OS? Here's how it looks to me:

http://twitpic.com/69kqzg

Mac OS X 10.6.8 / Google Chrome 13.0.782.112

cedsav2• 15 years ago

Firefox 6 seems to ignore the encoding declaration in the xml prolog. Setting a content-type meta tag should fix this (or setting the encoding in the http headers).

cefarix3• 15 years ago

Have you ever wondered why numbers are written backwards in English? Why do we write the highest-order digits first and proceed to the lower-order digits?

Well these numbers originated in Arabic, and since Arabic is written right-to-left, writing numbers in Arabic actually follows a more logical order: start with the lowest-order digit, and move on to the higher-order ones.

Apparently when the concept was brought into Europe, they failed to account for the different writing directions.

wheels• 15 years ago

That's wrong in a couple ways:

• "Arabic numerals" aren't Arabic. They're Indian. They come from the Brahmi script, which is written left to right.

• The prevailing numeral system being replaced, Roman numerals, also placed the most significant digit on the left, so it's unlikely that this was something that was simply forgotten.

• Western languages (usually) mention the most significant digit first when reading the number out, which makes it convenient for it to be written that way as well.

cefarix3• 15 years ago

I know they are Indian. I am from South Asia. However, the modern system was first created in Arabic. Also, I am talking about the placement of the digits, and this came to Europe from Arabic, not Brahmi.

nivertech3• 15 years ago

this is where Big Endianess comes from? ;)

johnyzee4• 15 years ago

I believe Arabic is the language with the largest variety in sounds. A lot of these sounds don't exist in other languages, such as the deep-throated 'ain and the seemingly many different ways to make an 's' sound, each with subtle differences. A friend of mine said it makes speaking very relaxing as it involves so many parts of the throat and mouth.

I read somewhere once that Arabic is also the language with the largest vocabulary of words - something like three million versus one million for English. Don't know if this is true or not.

cefarix3• 15 years ago

Arabic has a large variety of sounds - but I think no more than other languages do. For example, Arabic does not have a p sound or a g sound. My native language, though, has 4 types of t and 4 types of d, 2 types of k, 2 types of g, etc.

idlewords24• 15 years ago

Arabic doesn't have a very large sound inventory, but some of the sounds are pretty unfamiliar to people from an indo-european background. I believe there are only two kinds of /s/ (س and ص).

The root/pattern system and degree of inflection makes it hard to count words in Arabic (since things like pronouns tend to stick to the ends, throwing off the count). But it is very rich in vocabulary. Arabs love parallelism in writing, and seem to have three versions of every word for that purpose.

defen• 15 years ago

> But it is very rich in vocabulary. Arabs love parallelism in writing, and seem to have three versions of every word for that purpose.

English-only speaker here. I've seen about 50 different variants of "Muammar Gaddafi" rendered into English - is this due to different ways of Anglicizing the same name, or does he really have a 50 different ways of writing it, or something in between?

johnyzee4• 15 years ago

How about ذ (zal), ز (zaa) and ظ (sor)? Perhaps they are more 'z' than 's'? Then there is ث (tha) though that is more of a 'th' sound I think, but people in the subcontinent pronounce it as an 's'. The differences are really subtle to me.

tty3• 15 years ago

>I believe Arabic is the language with the largest variety in sounds.

You believe wrongly. There are languages with far bigger phonological inventories. Practically every language spoken in the Caucasus region would fit this criteria.

rdouble2• 15 years ago

As a side note to the side note, the "Arabist" tradition in the US State Department has been around since the mid 1800s. Robert Kaplan wrote a great book about it: http://www.amazon.com/Arabists-American-Robert-D-Kaplan/dp/0...

(The OP made it sound like elites studying Arabic for their ambassador posts is something new. It just faded in popularity when religious fundamentalists started to rise in influence.)

idlewords24• 15 years ago

Arabic programs were tiny pre-2001, and now they are extremely oversubscribed. Curiously enough there are still very few people who make it past third-year level :-)

rdouble2• 15 years ago

In any case, you may like the book I linked to in my post.

jinushaun2• 15 years ago

This is why I love linguistics. Languages are so fascinating. Humans invented so many different ways to speak and write down ideas.

llcoolv• 15 years ago

to be honest most of those neat things exist in many other languages - for example all the slavic languages + the more conservative germanic ones have a way root+prefixes/suffixes that plays a similar role. also most of the slavic languages have separate endings for feminine/neuter plural and slovene even has the dual.

Apparently, to a person who only knows english, which is a very inconsistent and mixed language, these features could look extremely neat, but the reality is that they are quite common.

timsally• 15 years ago

> Apparently, to a person who only knows english, which is a very inconsistent and mixed language, these features could look extremely neat, but the reality is that they are quite common.

I don't know enough to comment on the issues of language, but Maciej speaks Polish, French, and Russian. This is like the umpteenth comment that has assumed the author only speaks English. A curious pattern.

aclimatt2• 15 years ago

The main point of the article is not that Arabic has a list of things that are impossible to find in any other language. It is that Arabic has many intriguing features that are in contrast to what a native English speaker might be used to. (This is about native English speakers learning Arabic, not Arabic vs. The World.)

When English speakers look to learn an "exotic language", the general go-tos are Chinese and Japanese, which have comparatively very simple grammars. Thus in the exotic language category, as the author points out, Arabic is a very intriguing choice. (And while many Indo-European languages may share a few related grammar rules, using the Latin alphabet hurts your candidacy as an exotic language.)

hsmyers• 15 years ago

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 have done without the attack on DLI---actually having worked with graduates (speaking Korean and Vietnamese) they spoke as natives including idiomatic expressions. Oh well we all have biases and the rest of the posting was excellent!

idlewords24• 15 years ago

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.

jgfoot• 15 years ago

I found your article interesting but I was really distracted by your characterization of DLI students as douchebag fraternity boys who love The Fountainhead and think all Arabs are "scary men in turbans." Totally doesn't jibe with the guys I know.

wbruce2• 15 years ago

It really wasn't so much the politics of the post that bothered me (I'm a "pre-occupation" Arabic DLI graduate whose politics probably closely match your own) -- it was your mischaracterization of the 63+ week program there as limited to "hobbies and the weather," said from the comfort of a (somehow more extensive?) 9 week program at MIIS. I have a stack of Arabic books, about as tall as me, from the DLI course that shows this for the hyperbole this is. The idea that someone is favorably comparing the extent of MIIS Arabic curriculum to DLIFLC is frankly just a bit laughable.

SiVal• 15 years ago

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.

bluekeybox4• 15 years ago

One of my friends (who studied philosophy) and I had a discussion the other day about differences between natural and programming languages. I made a point that my knowledge of Russian in no way helps me speak better English (we both agreed on that), while a C programmer who also knows a language that relies on a different programming paradigm, for example, Lisp or Prolog, is likely to be a more effective C programmer than someone who hasn't been exposed to that paradigm.

athom• 15 years ago

That's interesting. I found my German lessons did help me better understand the underpinnings of English. Of course, that may owe more to the teacher, and English being a Germanic language probably helped, but knowing a second natural language does give you a new perspective on your first, and additional languages broaden that even further. If you don't feel knowing a second language is helping you use your first, maybe you need to look more closely at how you use both.

bluekeybox4• 15 years ago

> knowing a second natural language does give you a new perspective on your first

I agree with that, however I disagree that having a different perspective on English makes me a better English speaker. Writer -- perhaps -- but still nothing that a smart native English speaker who spent some time in school reading Shakespeare and the classics could not beat.

> If you don't feel knowing a second language is helping you use your first, maybe you need to look more closely at how you use both.

I can speak English, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and French. The last two are a bit rusty but I bet I could catch up pretty quickly if I had to. The problem is that, while I speak and write English very well, I possess no "secret power" that would let me beat native speakers of English. Proof: nearly all great writers who wrote in English (or any other language) were native speakers. Knowing the ways of Lisp gives a C programmer a "secret power" which he or she can apply even to the procedural language that is C. Knowing the ways of Russian or French gives me no such advantage with English (except obviously for the occasional French phrase or word root -- but those advantages are insignificant compared to the tremendous advantage of being a native speaker).

johnyzee4• 15 years ago

I don't think that is true. Learning another language sets you up with a grammar vocabulary that is very useful when learning any other language later on. We learn Latin in high school specifically because it is like a key to learning other languages.

bluekeybox4• 15 years ago

> We learn Latin in high school specifically because it is like a key to learning other languages

I would say that this concept that Latin is a key to European languages is a big fat lie. In the former Soviet block (which is where I'm from), Latin was not taught in schools. About half of my former high school classmates now live in a different country and are fluent in the language of that country, whether it's English, German, Spanish, or Italian. Most of the Americans I've met know only English, some bits of French/Spanish, and some bits of Latin.

I'm not saying that learning Latin is completely useless -- I am simply saying that I believe that whatever advantage it gives is insignificant compared to actually going to the country and speaking the language. As a matter of fact, I believe that teaching Latin/Greek in American schools is a giant conspiracy designed to making pupils appear educated without actually giving them practical knowledge.

Which is completely different from the situation with programming -- where, if you are really, really good with math and logic, you can pick up pretty much any programming language relatively easily.

Mvandenbergh3• 15 years ago

Well, the syntax and vocabulary (keywords and such) of even a large programming language like Java or C++ is regular, and tiny compared to a natural language.

What is hard about programming has very little to do with learning a programming language and everything to do with more abstract concepts and ways of structuring solutions. The equivalent of CS concepts like object orientation or functional programming would be types of writing such as essays, or newspaper articles. Even though I can't write Russian, I still know how I'd structure an essay written in Russian. Even though I've never used Ruby, I have a fairly good idea of how I'd tackle any particular category of problem using Ruby.

The difference is that the vocabulary required for writing Russian is vastly larger than the equivalent vocabulary in Ruby.

bluekeybox4• 15 years ago

Thanks for putting into words what I meant but wasn't sure how to express.

bluishgreen• 15 years ago

"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 language based on the situation and the linguistic background of their interlocutor."

Nope, not unique.

Tamil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language) is the same way. I am a native tamil speaker.

idlewords24• 15 years ago

I stand corrected! I guess since each dialect gets a country or two to itself it's easier to notice the situation with Arabic.

Sharlin• 15 years ago

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, at least in the UK? Many regional dialects are almost mutually unintelligible, but everyone understands Standard English (aka Received Pronunciation or "BBC English".) Perhaps in Arabic the differences are even more about vocabulary and grammar, not just pronunciation?

spiffworks• 15 years ago

Pretty much every Indian language I can think of satisfies these criteria, actually. The lack of centralization and a generally rich heritage naturally gives rise to this, I think. Also, glad to see other Tamil speakers here.

drinian• 15 years ago

Going back in history about five hundred years, I wonder if you could compare the Arabic dialects vs. classical Arabic to Romance languages vs. Latin.

donw3• 15 years ago

Japanese and Chinese do this as well. Lots of different formality levels, and every region in either country has dialects that are incomprehensible to an unlearned outsider.

In Japan, everybody learns Standard Japanese Pronunciation, and I've never had a problem getting around even in the boonies.

In China, I believe there are still a lot of people that don't speak Standard Mandarin, but this number will continue to shrink thanks to the explosive growth of high-speed (Radio/TV/Internet) media in China.

glenngillen2• 15 years ago

"The language of the National Designated Other is bound to switch to Chinese in a couple of years"

I assume this in reference to the predominant 2nd language for most people? If so, something I've always struggled to agree with is the implication that English is the second language for so many people only because of some fortuitous timing on the part of the British Empire. Technological advancements have certainly helped, as has the fact that as the British fell from their peak the US (also English speaking) came to take it's place. But is it really just a matter of timing within a generation or two most people will be expected to be somewhat fluent in Mandarin?

Maybe I'm a bit naive because I was raised speaking English, in an English speaking country, and only fumble my way through a couple of other languages enough to not get entirely lost as travelling. And I can understand the reasons why English can be so difficult for foreigners to learn because, even moving to the UK I discovered entirely new ways to pronounce words I thought I already knew. But... and I think it's a big "but"... something that has always seemed almost unique to English in my limited experience is that you can speak it badly and still be understood. You can speak it really badly, and while people might chuckle at the way you've turned a phrase you'll still get help. When I compare that to my experiences throughout south-east Asia, Italy, France, and Spain nothing further could be from the truth. Inflections or emphasis on the wrong syllable can have drastically different meanings that elicit confused looks or something altogether wrong.

I just don't see Mandarin doing the same. But maybe I discount the importance of the economy as a driving factor too much.

idlewords24• 15 years ago

I'm talking about the language of the perceived (US) national enemy. This used to be Russian and is now Arabic.

glenngillen2• 15 years ago

ah! Wasn't a phrase I'd heard before. Makes much more sense in that context.

Thanks

njharman• 15 years ago

Whatever author has planned for a career I hope he dumps that and decides to be a writer of some sort. That was a truly superior read.

cletus2• 15 years ago

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 learnt traditional Chinese (rather than simplified, as is now taught and used in China). The character memorization, to me at least, is horrifying. But the grammar is fairly simple (apart from tonal variation in words).

The evolution of languages (linguistics I guess) interests me greatly so first up, thanks for the post.

With all these different language systems, one has to wonder how they evolve.

Several events in history are of particular interest.

The first is what happened to English. 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.

This had several important effects:

Firstly, many words migrated to English from French and Latin (although there were Latin words previously). Often the English form was "low brow" whereas the Latin/French version were "high brow".

Secondly, without a central authority enforcing a language standard, the language evolved hugely. Old English for Modern English speakers is basically unreadable. Middle English is mostly comprehensible. This was a massive change.

Along the way, English basically lost the concept of case (apart from pronouns), gender (again, apart from pronouns) and word agreement. Grammar was also greatly simplified (almost everything in English is done on word position rather than word ending like most Indo-European languages).

The TL:DR version of this is that there is a reasonable case to be made that a central authority actually stifles language "innovation". If true, one could argue that how arbitrary (rather than regular) a language is is a measure of the state control over that language during its history.

I don't presume to argue that this is true but it's an interesting idea.

The second interesting historical event was the switch in 1929 from the Arabic alphabet to a Latin alphabet for Turkish, which had a massive increase in literacy in the following years (since the alphabet is simple and phonetic).

The third interesting event is the rise of computers. I would argue that is was almost inevitable that this would happen in a country with either the Latin or Cyrilic alphabets. The reasons are:

1. Limited number of characters (think: keyboards and character sets); and

2. Limited variation in those characters (in English: uppercase and lowercase). Compare that to Arabic.

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. In English, a new word can be communicate verbally. I don't think you can overstate how important this distinction is.

Asian computer use has evolved a number of schemes to get around these issues, such as character combinations to represent certain characters (which, again, you have to learn) and, more recently, the use of graphics pads to draw characters.

The last thing I wanted to mention was this paper [1], which shows a mathematical relationship between languages becoming regular and the frequency with which words are used (the more a word is used, the longer it takes to become regular).

Anyway, enough rambling on my part.

[1[: http://www.physorg.com/news111241495.html

tty3• 15 years ago

>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 more close to Old English than modern standard German is to English but they weren't mutually intelligible and they were clearly different languages even at that time. Major differences between the two had arisen many centuries earlier. Take for example the High German consonant shift. Now, would you please explain why you would say that both were "basically the same language"?

billswift• 15 years ago

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.

Cushman5• 15 years ago

I don't know if it's completely true that English has less character variation than Arabic— as you say, in English there is a choice of upper or lower-case, with occasional changes in meaning. In Arabic, the form of a letter is completely determined by the letter it follows. It's purely a display difference, not a separate character set. There are the diacritics to think about, but outside of the Quran they are simply ignored.

That's still a big problem for a universal language of the internet though, since written Arabic is highly non-phonetic.

hessenwolf3• 15 years ago

There are some differences in the way the way the characters are laid out in English too, unless you use a monospace font.

idiopathic4• 15 years ago

A couple of corrections I feel I have to make as an Arab.

> There are the diacritics to think about, but outside of the Quran they are simply ignored.

They are not ignored - when they are present, attention is paid to them. I think what you mean is that Arabic speakers, knowing what the diacritics are, do not bother writing them down. That is not because they ignore them, it is because we have paid such close attention to them when learning Arabic that we no longer need to be reminded of them.

> That's still a big problem for a universal language of the internet though, since written Arabic is highly non-phonetic.

Arabic is highly phonetic, and if being phonetic was a criterion for being universal language of the internet, English should be disqualified immediately.

On arrival in England at the age of 10, I had no idea how English people knew how to pronounce their words. Now I know that non-Arab speakers may think the same way about Arabic because we do not write down the diacritics by default... but it is easy to buy books that have these diacritics written, and thus to crack the code.

But English seemed designed to trap foreigners into mispronunciations, to the great amusement of my classmates. (Traveling to America after college, it was mostly place names that tripped me up.)

hetman2• 15 years ago

Someone more familiar with Arabic may need to correct me, however I was under the impression that the shape of the letters is not at all affected by the letters it follows, but by their position in the word.

Arabic letters look different depending on whether they are in the initial, medial, final position in a word (as well as having a 4th form when they appear in isolation). However, there are patterns of similarity so it's not as difficult as having to learn 4 completely random shapes for each letter.

theli0nheart• 15 years ago

First: I lived in China for a year studying Mandarin, and spent 3 years studying at school.

You're wrong in that there is no way to describe characters in Chinese to other speakers. There are certain words you use to describe strokes. The equivalent in English would be something like "there is a cross on the left and a flower on the right." Chinese speakers do this all the time, so I'm kind of surprised you jump to this conclusion when it's clear you aren't knowledgeable on the issue.

cletus2• 15 years ago

Care to explain how you'd explain this [1] to someone else such that they could reproduce it in a readable fashion? Or one of these [2]?

[1] http://necromanc.blogspot.com/2006/05/most-complicated-chine...

[2] http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/437-most-comp...

w1ntermute4• 15 years ago

> 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). Clearly not the same as having 26 letters, but not unmanageable by any stretch of the imagination.

The second difference is that characters are "spelled" in 2 dimensions. Once again, there is a set of rules for radical placement, and if you're familiar with these (as you would be if you'd studied Chinese or Japanese), it is very straightforward.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radicals

chc• 15 years ago

This is true, but I've noticed that in practice, Chinese or Japanese trying to identify characters to each other (rather than look up an unfamiliar character in a dictionary) tend to draw rather than list the components.

wisty• 15 years ago

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.

buss• 15 years ago

> In Mandarin, if I want to tell you a new character I have to show you. There is no way to describe it.

This isn't strictly true. Some characters are simple combinations of radicals and other characters and can be sufficiently described as saying "the radical for x and the character for y." For example, the word for hungry (饿, è) is a combination of the radical for "eat" or "food" (饣, shí) and the character for "self" or "me" (我, wǒ).

I'm only a beginning student of the language, so I can't claim that many other characters are as simple to describe.

chrisdone• 15 years ago

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, nationally and globally. I think the past 100 years with the advent of radio, television and now the internet, language is really going to evolve at a rate previously unseen in history.

The whole globe is connected, textually, verbally and visually, and it's immediate and constant. The past thousand years the only way to get your novel usage of a particular word or grammatical construct was to either go to some venue and talk, send a letter, or write a book. Now you can spread your literary love everywhere, constantly and with a wide audience. And not only to people with your local dialect, but every dialect. What a melting pot.

I'm quite a lover of language evolution. I moved to Italy a year ago in a very multilingual office, and my French and Italian colleagues noted how nice it is in English that you can verb nouns. It hadn't occurred to me that this wasn't possible in French or Italian. I expressed that though English is quite liberal and almost anything goes in a lot of areas, I still wish that people were more accepting of linguistic novelties. People scorn you if you play with language, or actively drop old ways, or invent new words, with the exception of high school kids who, in my experience, are the most inventive English speakers I've seen. When I was in school the amount of new language and idioms introduced every week was overwhelming.

I'm quite descriptivist, though. I like dictionaries that are extremely up to date, like [Wordnik](http://www.wordnik.com/), that encourage people to just use words freely, and take 3 seconds to explain to their partner in conversation what the word means, without fear that their new word isn't cromulent! (I just added "cromulent" to Chrome's dictionary.) Some words I like to use when talking to myself (hey, kids do it, so sue me), are words that don't exist already but are the 'root' of existing words, like inane (“That's quite ane.”), edible (“I think I'll ed some peanut butter sarnies”), etc.

Anyway, I'm rambling, too.

eru2• 15 years ago

On the other hand, prescription has a far bigger reach today than even thirty years ago. Trivial example: When everything you write gets spell checked automatically, new orthography develops slower.

Also immediate communication can slow down a language, and homogenize it. Radio and TV certainly brought the German dialects closer together.

It depends on the patterns of communication. The internet allows lots of small groups to interact with each other all over the world. That has a different effect than the few to many pattern you get with traditional mass media.

You might enjoy http://verben.texttheater.net/Englisch and if you know German, you might enjoy http://verben.texttheater.net/ even more. On the German version they are doing stuff like inane, ane, or overwhelmed, underwhelmed, whelmed.

jodrellblank• 15 years ago

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

blahedo2• 15 years ago

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 comprehensible". It takes a lot of work and a good ME dictionary at hand. By contrast, Early Modern English (think Shakespeare) is more in the line of "mostly comprehensible".

4) It's not just the fact there was no central authority that caused English to massively change. There still isn't a central authority, but change has been slow and non-radical for the last 500 years or so. Having a central authority doesn't really prevent change, either, although it might help to slow it down.

5) It's not at all clear what you mean by "arbitrary" in your claim about language change and state control, but you certainly have not backed up any claim about languages under "state control" being more "regular".

6) The alphabet switch for Turkish did not succeed because the Latin alphabet is "simple and phonetic". The Arabic alphabet is also simple and phonetic, as is (or as could be) any alphabet. It was not a great fit for the Turkish language, however, and the Latin alphabet (with a few additions) mapped better.

7) But much more important than any facts about the Latin alphabet was the fact that Kemal Ataturk was a dictator who pushed through a massive literacy programme on the population (who, it should also be said, was basically supportive of this goal). Had he done an alphabet reform instead---adding a few letters to the Arabic alphabet to make it a better fit for Turkish---and accompanied it with the same literacy policy, it'd do just as well. (Better, arguably, because it would have left the writings of the Ottomans much more accessible to the literate modern population.)

You might be right about computers arising in alphabet countries (I'd broaden that to any non-ideographic writing system, including Greek, Korean, and those of the Indian subcontinent and southeast Asia), but it might be more accurate to say that if computers had arisen first in China they would have looked very, very different. (Even in Japan, they might have gone the route of kana-only systems first, in a similar way to how early western machines had ALL CAPS interfaces.)

mortenjorck• 15 years ago

Actually, isn't the concept of a kana-only character system how early, domestically-marketed microcomputers in Japan did in fact work? The only example I can think of is a home entertainment console, but the Nintendo Family Computer generally used kana with a few highly common kanji.

devijvers• 15 years ago

Be careful who you call a dictator. While Ataturk has been President of Turkey for 15 years (until his death in 1938) he encouraged a multi-party system. However, during his lifetime several parties were formed and again self-dissolved or dissolved after an uncovered assassination attempt on Ataturk. It's only in 1945 - after Ataturk's death - that the multi-party system in Turkey took off for real.

vacri• 15 years ago

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.

nikcub4• 15 years ago

Chinese characters may seem intimidating until you remember that we read and memorize English words, not letters, when reading - and Chinese characters are much the same. If you don't know a character you can slow down and figure it out based on its composition

The Chinese composition just has many more variables than the English alphabet (it is a few hundred, IIRC)

gmi01• 15 years ago

I am a native Arabic speaker, I enjoyed the article, however there are a few mistakes.

In 2. The exceptions are called plural exceptions which happen much less than the general rule, Otherwise most of Arabic follows a very specific rule to making plurals from singulars.

In 7. Adjectives have no gender, and therefore al-kutub hadra' (الكتب حضراء) "The books, she is green" this translates to the books are green (hadra is an adjective and has no gender)

In 9. Formally Arabic numbers are read right to left, i.e. we read the least significant digit first. Although very few people do this.

In 10. It is next to impossible to understand any written text which is a 1000 years by the average Joe, including the Qur'an

idlewords24• 15 years ago

2. About 41% of plurals in an Arabic corpus are broken (http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/acl2004/emnlp/pdf/Goweder.pdf). Since most feminine plurals are regular, this means most masculine plurals are not.

7. I don't know what makes you say this. Adjectives in Arabic agree in gender, number and case. The masculine of hadra' is ahdar.

10. This is true for the average Iosif, but if you study MSA (like American students invariably do) these texts really are accessible. A short sura from the Qur'an is taught in the second semester Arabic curriculum.

leviathan4• 15 years ago

Re 7: In a way, you're both right.

Khadra' here is a form of plural, not the feminine of akhdar. The literal translation might be "she is green," but the correct translation is "the books are green." No native arabic speaker will think of the books as feminine while referring to them in plural, but in singular objects' gender is strangely ingrained in our minds:

kitab akhdar : green book (masculine)

tawila khadra' : green table (feminine)

saljam2• 15 years ago

I'm a native Arabic speaker, and I agree with you on point 10. If you've learned formal Arabic properly - i.e. attended school - then even texts from the pre-islamic era should be accessible. (Mostly poems, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muallaqat)

However, there is a definite decline in the number of people who can fluently and eloquently use MLA. Keeping this (sad) trend in mind, you will definitely find native speakers who have trouble understanding not only the old texts, but even the more silver-tongued of the modern ones. This isn't unique to Arabic. Perhaps a parallel can be found in the constant confusion between the possessives and the abbreviated verbs with English pronouns even by native English speakers.

I'm not claiming that formal and eloquent Arabic is going to die any time soon, however the rise of movements such as Masry (http://arz.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%88%D9%8A%D9%83%D9%8A%D8%A8...) is a sure tell sign that maybe there aren't as many people speaking it as we thought there are.

And I believe something should be done about this.

hasenj4• 15 years ago

You're wrong on #7.

I'm a native Arabic speaker too.

First, khadra خضراء really is the femenine form of "green". The muscular form is akhdar اخضر

Second, it really is true that we use feminine forms when referring to multiple "it"s. You probably never consciously realized it, but think about it:

beautiful flowers ازهار جميلة

beautiful girls بنات جميلات

beautiful boys اولاد جميلون

Note how jameela is the singular feminine form of the adjective.

beautiful girl بنت جميلة

beautiful boy ولد جميل

bane3• 15 years ago

Anybody interested in written languages can get lost for hours here http://www.omniglot.com/

iamwil• 15 years ago

"Some words have separate broken plurals depending on whether you're talking about a small or large number (the cutoff is somewhere around seven)."

Huh, I wonder if this came about naturally, and if it did, I wonder if it has any tie-in to the number of items people can hold in their heads at one time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_...

patrickas3• 15 years ago

Very interesting article.

This is the first time I hear the plural : ustaath -> usaatatha, I am a native arabic speaker and we always use asaatitha.

Also an old side project of mine, http://yoolki.com for en-ar transliteration

idlewords24• 15 years ago

It's the first time you hear it because I got it wrong - thanks! Fixed now.

hasenj4• 15 years ago

That's because the 'u' is really not the 'u' but the glottal stop ;) (hamza)

patrickas3• 15 years ago

You should also fix dukkan -> dukaakiin to become dakaakiin

coldarchon• 15 years ago

The reason why I will never learn Arabic is that "black man" and "slave" use the same word in that language ..

ithkuil2• 15 years ago

"abd" means also servant as in servant of god (Abdullah).

Also in slavic languages "slovo" means word, so "slaveni" are ""people who speak (the same language),". But it become "sclavoni" in late latin, since appareantly many slaves were slavic? Should I avoid learning any language which has derived from latin because I'm slavic?

Words have ancient roots, in times where there wasn't yet the concept of political correctness and we still have traces of it in every language.

dreyfiz• 15 years ago

English has homonyms too. Besides, the same word is also used to mean "worshipper".

saljam2• 15 years ago

1) It's also the first part of some of the most popular given names. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_(name) The word for slave simply doesn't have the same meaning as in English.

2) "Slave" (عبد) means black just as much as "nigger" means the same in English. Or "chink" means Chinese. It's a pejorative term. Anyone decent enough would simply say "black" (اسود) or "tanned" (اسمر).

hasenj4• 15 years ago

What? No.

Black man = رجل اسود

Slave = عبد

nivertech3• 15 years ago

Funny thing, that Ancient North Arabian [1] sounds almost like Hebrew.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_North_Arabian

idiopathic4• 15 years ago

It's not funny, it's inevitable - Arab and Israeli tribes were all Semites (which is why accusing Arabs of being anti-Semitic is annoying, as it implies that we are not Semites) they share a common genetic and cultural heritage, and their languages evolved from common roots. If you ignore the current crazies on both sides, Judeo-Islamic tradition makes far more sense that Judeo-Christian one does.

nivertech3• 15 years ago

All you said is right, but please don't mix concepts.

It's funny because Classical Arabic do not sounds like Hebrew at all (except some very basic words). But Ancient North Arabic very similar to Hebrew and other Canaanite languages.

Languages and genetics are two very different things. The reason, that Ancient Hebrews spoke Semitic language doesn't mean they were "Semites". Many people in Canaan were speaking Semitic languages, so it might be Ancient Hebrews just adopted local lingua-franca.

gyardley• 15 years ago

We didn't invent the term 'anti-Semitic' - I believe it was coined by a rather anti-Semitic German. We're all very aware Arabs are also Semites, but the word as it's actually used is solely about Jews, and everybody knows this.

If you can get everyone to switch to something like 'Judaeophobia', I'd personally have no objections - but sometimes you've got to work with the vocabulary that already exists.

blahedo2• 15 years ago

To get a sense of the status of Arabic dialect with a referent that might make more sense to a western audience (or maybe not), try this approximation: Arabic now is like Latin a millennium ago.

In the 11th century, standard Church Latin had evolved slightly relative to Cicero but was clearly the same language; someone who was fluent in Church Latin could reliably travel anywhere in Christendom (and to cosmopolitan cities elsewhere) and make themselves understood. The local dialect there might have evolved from Latin, or might not, but there'd be someone educated and literate that they could communicate with. In the areas where the language had evolved from Latin, the hoi polloi could kinda sorta make out the Latin (better in some areas than others), and the cleverer ones could figure out the relationships between their language and Latin, and the educated ones would just go learn Latin (but perhaps have an easy time of it).

Thus also, mutatis mutandis, with Modern Standard Arabic. The analogy isn't perfect but it turns out to be pretty darn good and lets you make some good guesses about the situation on the ground in the Arabic-speaking world and the mutual intelligibility of, say, Qatari and Tunisian (i.e. not very much).

donw3• 15 years ago

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 Beijing on about $2k USD per month, including the cost of a private tutor, food, entertainment, and travel.

That means six months in-country for less than the tuition of the Institute. Six months of daily use plus intensive study will move you, terms of proficiency, ahead of 90% of people that hold degrees in Chinese.

You could do something like this even in less westerner-friendly countries, and learn a million times more than you will at any language school -- there is absolutely no substitute for actual experience.

roel_v4• 15 years ago

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)

idlewords24• 15 years ago

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

idlewords24• 15 years ago

Heh, people can continue to downvote me but it won't change the fact that I paid about 3K for the SILP course.

donw3• 15 years ago

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

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

super_mario• 15 years ago

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.

sethg2• 15 years ago

As someone who has learned classical Hebrew and Aramaic up to the “if I torture the page for long enough it usually confesses”, I love the root-and-pattern Semitic grammar, up until the point where I have to look a word up in a dictionary, because a lot of root letters actually drop out of the inflected forms, so I have to flip back and forth looking for possible candidate root forms. And prepositions are just tacked onto the beginnings of words, so especially in un-vowelled text, one can confuse a preposition for part of the root. And Talmudic commentaries are often written in a mishmash of Hebrew and Aramaic, because after all, if you can’t read both Hebrew and Aramaic, you shouldn’t be reading the Talmud in the first place.... Good times.

tomtom101• 15 years ago

Really great post. I studied Arabic for 15 months at the British Military language school and after working as a "Terp" I went on to run the policy for language support to the British Military. I encourage you to continue with your studies as the more time you spend learning the language the more rewarding it becomes. Once you start to move away from MSA and learn dialects it becomes much easier to speak, but even harder to listen. Good luck and great post.

_corbett• 15 years ago

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.

onan_barbarian• 15 years ago

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.

Why Arabic is Terrific

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