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Arabic, a great language, has a low profile
- mega_behemoth 8y agoArabic, among many other languages is on a low profile simply because no science is produced in these languages. English won the game because bits and bytes were invented in English. Arabic is indeed a great and very rich language, perhaps more than English, unfortunately, nothing with importance is being produced in Arabic, especially in the last 1.4k years.
- thebooktocome 8y agoThe ghazal begs to disagree.
- lgessler 8y agoThe ghazal is a poetic form, not science. Not saying I agree with GP, but this isn't a rebuttal.
- thebooktocome 8y agoOP didn't write what you seem to have read. > nothing with importance is being produced in Arabic, especially in the last 1.4k years. Poetry is important.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Scriptor 8y agoThe Arab golden age was very important. I am also unclear what you mean by "especially". Are you saying that there was actually more scientific output in Arabic before 1400 years ago?
- adictator 8y agoNot sure what you mean by "very important". But the Arab golden age is a myth. There was very little that was contributed by the Arabs at any time. There is abundant evidence that most "Arab" knowledge was appropriated from Vedic India. Yes, I am talking about Algebra, Arithmetic, Alchemy etc. Not only that, the Arab hordes destroyed most of what they encountered because it was un-Islamic. I would hesitate to call a thing "golden" if that thing actually destroyed what was the center of science, math & logic much before Greeks or anywhere in the world.
- barry-cotter 8y agoCalling it the Arab Golden Age is pushing it. It was a Golden Age of the Islamic world but the high culture, science and philosophy was often communicated in Persian and most of the great thinkers we remember were not Arabs.
- amasad 8y agoAlmost all of science and philosophy was done in Arabic during the middle ages so "1.4k years" is an overestimate. Without the Arab and Muslim scholarship much of Greek/Roman wisdom would be lost. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Greek_Classics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Greek_Cl...
- thisrod 8y ago> Without the Arab and Muslim scholarship much of Greek/Roman wisdom would be lost. I've just been on a holiday in Venice and Florence, which made me question that standard wisdom, as I learnt more about Venice and Constantinople. The most important effect of those texts, I guess, was the Italian Renaissance. Petrarch seems to have found his books by hunting through old piles in attics, and the Venetians got (looted?) theirs directly from the Byzantines. It isn't clear to me that the Arabs had a major role. The Spanish got their classical books from the Moors. But what did they do with those books, and why does that matter?
- thrower123 8y agoVenice, certainly, had significant ties to Constantinople, most notably looting the hell out of it in the 4th Crusade in the 1200s.
- gamegoblin 8y ago> The Spanish got their classical books from the Moors. But what did they do with those books, and why does that matter? Arguably, had a huge affect in kicking off the Renaissance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_School_of_Translators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_School_of_Translators
- tehlike 8y agoIslamic/arabic world could not keep up with the science, unfortunately.
- Scriptor 8y agoImagine if during the height of the Greek golden age most of the largest cities were razed to the ground and their populations systematically exterminated. That means Athens as we knew it would have been reduced to rubble. That's what happened during the Mongol Conquests. The fall of Baghdad alone caused at least several hundred thousand people to be killed. The main library, which had collected countless works over the centuries, was gone. Baghdad was rebuilt, of course. Economically and politically it bounced back since it was still right on the silk road. But scientific study never really recovered there.
- luminati 8y ago1.4K years is certainly an overestimate. 150 years maybe a better timeframe since the Industrial revolution started going in full swing. But your same logic applies to any non major Western European language too. But past 150 years -> don't think any major scientific discovery was done in the Japanese/Korean/Chinese language. All of them was first written down and communicated and published first in the English language.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoNot quite - the academic world wasn't Arabic up until the industrial revolution. The height of Arabic intellectualism was short lived, basically the early middle ages, not even into the Renaissance, let alone the enlightenment. However PC it is or not - it's true that not much has been done in the Arab world for a long time, say 700 years. Muslim Golden Age: "This period is traditionally said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate due to Mongol invasions and the Siege of Baghdad in 1258 AD" from Wikipedia. Up until 1950, something like 5% of the Arab world was literate. Very sparse population, very little industry. Without Oil ... most of us would know nothing about 'Arab' - it'd be on our radar as much as Morocco is today (a nominally Arab country without Oil) which is to say not at all. Basically not hugely important to us.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago"English won the game because bits and bytes were invented in English" English as the dominant language in Science is a new thing, just 100 years ago it was German.
- mega_behemoth 8y agoWhether new or not, Computers speak English. Game over for German/French/All others.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoComputers speak binary, not English - and computer code has almost nothing to do with Anglo dominance. Have a look at a map.
- mega_behemoth 8y agoComputers speak voltage, not binary. Come on. Do you write software using binary ? Technology speaks English. In theory, you can invent the wheel and use Arabic for programming. Good luck finding resources and finding users who are willing to use your new programming language that uses Arabic alphabet and use your Arabic javadoc. Using multiple languages to achieve the same goal is stupid. Pure overhead. English dominates the world, end of story.
- Koshkin 8y agoMais les ordinateurs parlent français !
- dang 8y ago> nothing with importance is being produced in Arabic That crosses into some sort of racial (or whatever) flamewar. Please don't. It leads to destructive dynamics that are just what we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- angersock 8y agoThe discussion has been polite so far and it's not an unfair point. Earlier in the 20th century, German was the language of engineering. Before that, French. Before that, Latin. Before that, something else. Languages and their significance in different fields wax and wane.
- dang 8y agoYes, and things of importance happen in any of them.
- mega_behemoth 8y agoI do not care about race. I care about the truth. Having said that, Arabic is not a race, it is a language. Multiple races use Arabic.
- dang 8y agoThat's why I said "some sort of racial (or whatever) flamewar". There's a grey area between commenting on a language and slurring the people who use it, and you stepped into the latter, which is unacceptable here. Please don't do it again.
- pvaldes 8y ago> nothing with importance is being produced in Arabic If we navigate the flamewar this is still an interesting point. "Essay on the Computation of Casting and Equation" at least was written in arabic. It was long long time ago but its impact is still noticeable. What are they doing more recently? I can see femtochemistry, improving robots and inventing critical parts of the litium battery for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_Arab_scientists_and_engineers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_Arab_scientists...
- joaodelvalle 8y agoDuolingo has been postponing its launch of Arabic for English speakers for a while. Now, next date is March 1st 2019. https://www.duolingo.com/course/ar/en/Learn-Arabic-Online https://www.duolingo.com/course/ar/en/Learn-Arabic-Online
- s3graham 8y agoI had been using that as an excuse too :) but I've made some progress with Mango (may be available via a local library).
- r3bl 8y agoDoesn't surprise me at all. Implementing right-to-left support in a product that's production-ready will require a lot of code rewrite.
- lordgrenville 8y agoBut they already have Hebrew!
- lozenge 8y agoDuolingo only teaches vocab and shows you example sentences to teach grammar. It doesn't have any explicit teaching, which means it's less effective the further the language is from English. But, they just like advertising their 30 or however many language options.
- arijun 8y agoI disagree. I'm using it to learn another language that is far from English, albeit one with much simpler grammar. I find it more effective than a grammar heavy course. You can know every rule of a language and still not be able to speak it at all. What you need is internalization of those rules via practice, which Duolingo provides.
- Tor3 8y agoIt depends heavily on the language course. Duolingo's Italian course actually manages to teach grammar and usage through their standard translation setup, while their Japanese course does nothing of the sort. It does not work very well for the latter, I've been through most of it by now and it's just translation-translation-translation, which doesn't teach you much at all, because the translation to English really doesn't work with Japanese. For example, they keep translating 'itadakimasu' (いただきます in Hiragana) to "Let's eat!", but that's not what it means. Otherwise the taxi driver wouldn't ask you '1980 yen itadakimasu'.. :) (and that's just one, there are so many.)
- sandworm101 8y agoExcept for arabic numerals. All of science, in every language, uses arabic numerals. That is a really big deal we rarely even mention.
- ignoramous 8y agoWell, those were invented by Indian Mathematicians acc to Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu–Arabic_numeral_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu–Arabic_numeral_system
- sandworm101 8y agoInvention isnt the same as adoption. They were spread to the west, becoming the scientific standard, through muslim/arabic scholars. Had they not done so, the numbers might have stayed in india for centuries, or roman numbers (I V M etc) be adopted into a base-ten system instead.
- ianbicking 8y agoI've been struggling some to describe numerals and Mikey's to my small children, and it often feels like they area backwards. As you describe this I wonder: are we literally writing them backwards?
- gumby 8y agoIn Arabic numbers are written in the same order as in, say, English, Thus Arabic is little-endian. I grew up with the Hundu digits (and the European ones!) which look more like the digits we use here than the actual arabic ones.
- rleigh 8y agoIs the Hindu and English ordering the same? If so, it's gone through two endian changes from India to Europe!
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- Paraesthetic 8y agoHaving learned Arabic because my ex girlfriend was Jordanian I can say it is a difficult language, but anything gendered is frustrating and difficult. Its the writing that gets me, the right to left thing is entirely a new way of thinking.
- umeshunni 8y agoAs someone who studied elementary Arabic as a child temporarily living in an Arab country, the only bits that are left with me is the script. 25 something years later, I can still read elementary Arabic words I see on the internet or in TV, but I have forgotten most of the vocabulary and grammar.
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- anonu 8y agoI would disagree with the articles analogy of MSA to arabic dialects is like Latin to Romance languages. The difference is not quite that stark with Arabic.
- amasad 8y agoIt's pretty stark. I speak Laventine and I struggle to communicate with my North African friends and often end up supplementing with english. I'm not sure I'd go this far but some scholars make the case that the dialects are not really dialects, they are there own language that were influenced by Arabic. See for example Taleb's argument on Lebanese being a language https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-genetics/no-lebanese-is-not-a-dialect-of-arabic-e95320c164c https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-ge... Historically it makes some sense because North Africa and the Laventine didn't have much in common with Arabia before Islam so they must've had their own local languages (say Berber or Aramaic) that was influenced by Arabic.
- Pharmakon 8y agoPlus you get the influence of colonial powers like France in North Africa. Tunisian for example is... challenging if you come at it from the perspective of something like Kuwaiti Arabic.
- dbkahn 8y agoYep, here's a post game football match interview with live translation across three Arabic dialects: https://twitter.com/haythamx/status/1040904833929289728?s=21 https://twitter.com/haythamx/status/1040904833929289728?s=21
- amasad 8y agoCertainly. In Jordan, 5-10% of our words, when we're speaking Arabic that is, is English.
- _shadi 8y ago
- greeneggs 8y agoPeter Hessler wrote a wonderful New Yorker story about Arabic and Egyptian Arabic, mixing history and language history, politics, and his personal history in Egypt. It goes into much more detail. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/learning-arabic-from-egypts-revolution https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/learning-arabi... Some random quotes: > Over time, Arabs came to associate any encouragement of vernacular writing with colonialism. By the nineteen-fifties, allegiance to fusha was critical to pan-Arabism, because the language created a bond across the Arab world. > At public universities, math, medicine, and some hard sciences are taught in English. Centuries ago, Europeans needed Arabic to learn medicine, but nowadays even Egyptian medical students don’t use Arabic texts. “What happens is that you reserve Arabic for traditional knowledge,” Doss said. “And it becomes more conservative.” > After the Chinese, textbook Egyptians seemed remarkably uninspired by development. There were no production quotas, no economic plans, no infrastructure projects. The word “factory” did not appear in the book. People said things like “Ya hag, I’m an engineer and after five years of university, I’m working as a waiter in a restaurant.” > The language is wonderful for Wanderwort. Arabic imported “shah” from the Persians, and then the phrase al-shah mat—the king died—was introduced to English as “checkmate.” > Translation into fusha can clean up a politician’s words. For example, in April, 2016, President Sisi discussed political reform with representatives of different sectors of society. Speaking Egyptian, he stumbled: “The ideal shape that you are calling for, that idealism is in books, but we cannot take everything you think about with paper and pen and then ask the state for it, no, it won’t happen . . . but we are on a pathway in which we’re succeeding each day more than the day before.” In Al-Ahram, the quote appeared in fusha as: “Idealism exists in books, but we’re walking the pathway of success, and we will succeed day by day.” > During the last century, publishers sometimes rejected books that used Egyptian, and even novels about everyday life, like Naguib Mahfouz’s “Cairo Trilogy,” featured fusha dialogue that no Egyptian would ever speak. Egyptian Arabic still lacks a standardized orthography, but its use has become more common during the past fifteen years, in part because of the Internet and texting. Nowadays, a writer like Rakha can publish in Egyptian, but to some degree it’s too late, because people rarely read Arabic books of any sort. For Rakha’s third novel, he’s writing in English, primarily because he wants to attract readers.
- msvan 8y agoChinese 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.
- village-idiot 8y agoFrance is doing the same with French.
- davidw 8y ago'A language is a dialect with an army'
- rvense 8y agoFrench was a minority language in France until the 20th century. The other languages were basically beaten and shamed out of school children.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoSame situation with Italian. The introduction of the radio and the television played a big part in the shift to Italian and French becoming the normal languages for their respective countries over the multitude of regional languages.
- gumby 8y agoI learned MSA and some Egyptian and there really are things you can say in it that are almost impossible to express in English (or the other European languages I know). This is true of any pair of languages of course but structurally the root system allows much more nuance and overtone than more workmanlike languages like English. I believe Hebrew (which I don't speak!) has a similar structure though I've been told by Hebrew+Arabic speakers that Hebrew in practice is less so. It's a real shame the contemporary literature is so small.
- jl6 8y agoHave you got some examples?
- solatic 8y agoJust off the top of my head, in Hebrew the G-R-L root gives you both fate (goral) and lottery (hagralah). The grammatical form of hagralah connotes causing something to happen, and in that sense the word for lottery has a deeper meaning, that it determines your fate. Same for the S-V/B-R root - you get clear (savir), explanation (hesber), and what's usually mistranslated as propaganda (hasbarah - Google that transliteration and you'll get lots of political articles). Hasbarah is when you're trying to explain something to somebody so that it will be clear to them. These words are all completely independent and come from disparate sources in English, but the Semitic root system ties them together.
- getcrunk 8y agoI have very limited knowledge on the topic so take what I say with some skepticism, but one thing is that most words are formed by a variation of a three or four letter root word. So this gives a lot of flexibility and subtlety to the language. Context is everything. A root word for example made up of the letters d - r - b in its most basic form means to hit. But that same root can be used to mean depress (as in a pedal) or separate things (sort) or ring a bell or to agree on a time and place for a meeting, to be unrealistic, to make and example or analogy. The dictionary entry is multiple columns. And this is common in the language. Further to the competent speaker this results in no difficulty understanding the language give the next point which is its grammer. Words and therefore phrases and scentences have their grammatical role signified by Vowels.
- lgessler 8y agoThis article was hailed by Language Log as being mostly right in its scientific treatment of language[1], which is unfortunately pretty rare in journalism. [1]: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=40379 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=40379
- titanomachy 8y agoInteresting that he says MSA is further from region arabic than Latin is from Spanish. Provides useful context for people familiar with European languages.
- nealdt 8y agoIt's a somewhat misleading comparison because nobody uses Latin today. MSA however is the language of the news, media and academia so everyone can understand it.
- umanwizard 8y agoPeople did use Latin even into the 1800s for a similar purpose in western countries.
- jnbiche 8y agoAs someone who has studied and mastered Classical Latin and several Romance languages, as well as studied and learned some (but not mastered) MSA as well as an Arabic dialect, I disagree with that assessment, at least to some extent: Golden Age Latin is incredibly far removed from modern Romance languages. Even a Sardinian or Romanian (said to be the closest Romance languages to Latin) requires years of study to learn to fluently read Golden Age Latin. Vulgar Latin, on the other hand, is much closer to the modern Romance languages. An educated modern Italian or Sardinian could learn to read Vulgar Latin fairly quickly (and sometimes they do know it, from reading the Vulgate Bible). I'd say the difference between MSA and the North African dialects of Arabic is tantamount to the difference between modern Romance languages and Golden Age Latin. But the difference between MSA and Levantine Arabic is less, and more akin to the gap between Vulgar Latin and Romance languages. Overall, I'd say the MSA/dialects + Latin/Romance languages is a great analogy.
- davewasthere 8y agoIt is a great language to learn. I speak a bit of Khaleej Arabic, and maybe twenty years ago, could read the characters (I'd struggle a bit now) so could read anything that was transliterated. But it's logical and very easy. Well worth learning even just the fundamentals. There are a few sounds that us English speakers don't necessarily use natively, but on the whole, it's a lot easier to learn (I find) than say a tonal language.
- sdiq 8y agoKaif halach? As a Muslim who gets to hear Arabic several times a week in the mosque and who lived in the Khaleej, too, picking Arabic has been a not so easy thing for me. I think any other language not formally read would still be difficult for me. However, I can read Arabic though still can't speak.
- diminish 8y agoSomehow the sound of Arabic accents are quite harsh among all languages I know to my ears. Only German is somewhat harsh - I have a lot of pleasure with Rammstein the metal/rock band sound in German. I always thought metal music would sound quite nice in Several Arabic accents as opposed to let's say a softer language like Italian. In short metal/hard rock in Arabic would sound wonderful whereas in Italian not.
- vertline3 8y agoMaybe conversely, I think Arabic written script is lovely with flowing line.
- nerdponx 8y agoThere is a great punk band from New York with all Arabic lyrics: https://haramharam.bandcamp.com/ https://haramharam.bandcamp.com/
- brusch64 8y agoWow - they are great. Thank you for that link! And I don't think it sounds any harsher than other hardcore punk in English.
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- browsercoin 8y agoGerman is not as awful as Dutch-should be noted as a throat condition.
- User23 8y agoStrangely the Dutch all seem to speak better English than most Americans and even Brits.
- browsercoin 8y ago
- theprotocol 8y agoI 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 Arabic, and the dialect factor multiplies this problem. It also encodes ideas very inefficiently for multiple reasons. 1. It's very convoluted and it takes many more words to describe things accurately than latin and/or germanic languages; 2. Due to geographical and cultural separation from the West, the vocabulary is just not adapted to modern life, so "workarounds" need to be used to refer things that have become common in our daily lives. I can recall a humorous TV ad that made fun of this, which involved a wife asking her husband for "the thing" and him being confused about what she was referring to. If we're to compare it to a programming language, I'd describe it as PHP ecosystem/stdlib/development practices combined with Rust syntax.
- Annatar 8y agoAll that aside, I find the script flowing and incredibly elegant and beautiful, purely from an aesthetic point of view.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoCan't deny that; same with the eastern languages. Latin script on the other hand appeals more to the engineering side of me, simpler 'instructions' so to speak. RISC vs CISC?
- umanwizard 8y agoThat script is used in several languages that are unrelated to Arabic though, like Urdu for example.
- unhammer 8y ago> knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly So just like every other language.
- z92 8y agoTo me Arabic seems to have two dialects mainly. Egyptian and the rest. Egyptian being so different as to sound like a separate language. And as for Iraqi, Syrian, Gulf, Arab or rest of North African Arabic -- those are more or less the same. And if you learn MSN you can cover those.
- findyoucef 8y agoYou think Iraqi, Syrian, Gulf arabic is the same as Maghrebi arabic? As an Algerian I have yet to meet anyone east of Tunisia who can understand the Maghrebi dialects without us heavily modifying our speech to mimic MSA.
- csomar 8y ago> And as for Iraqi, Syrian, Gulf, Arab or rest of North African Arabic -- those are more or less the same. This is very wrong. The is a massive difference between North African and the gulf arabic. So massive that the speakers will have to revert to the standard arabic to be able to communicate.
- Bombthecat 8y agoIt 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?
- bshimmin 8y agoI 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 there were a specific region you were interested in living in / communicating with people in (but at least in my case, my only goal is "learn some Arabic because it sounds lovely", not "move to Syria and be able to communicate with people there").
- avar 8y ago> I think it will be the second most spoken language in Europe Arabic has 4-12 million speakers in Europe depending on how you count. If we take the most generous estimation (12 million) which compares 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants to native speakers it's at best the 13th most spoken language in Europe[2]. Why do you think it'll displace all the languages that are currently ahead of it? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#Immigrant_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#Immigrant_... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#List_of_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#List_of_la...
- glangdale 8y agoThe "Idle Words" blog, home to the infamous "Dabblers and Blowhards" takedown of Paul Graham, also has a good article on Arabic (http://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm http://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm). Opening paragraph: I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called the Defense Language Institute, where young men and women learn how to eavesdrop on the nation's enemies, provided that the enemies speak slowly and limit their conversation to hobbies and the weather.
- pferde 8y agoThanks for the link, it is an excellently written article, which manages to poke fun at Arabic's various weird quirks, and convey author's enthusiasm about how cool the language is, both at the same time. Very good read!
- Gormisdomai 8y agoArabic's grammar system should also be fascinating for any computer scientist. The majority of MSA vocabulary is generated by predictably transforming "root strings" of 2, 3 or 4 letters. Beyond just English style conjugation, this means that every verb can predictably be transformed into a set of nouns, every noun can be traced back to to its original root verb (the same for adjectives and adverbs). For example Root: KTB Kataba (he wrote) Kitaab (book) [thing you write] Maktaba (bookshop / library / office) [place you write] Kateb (clerk, writer, author) [writer] (and so on for words that don't translate directly into English) Root: AML Amala: (he did / worked) Amal: (~action) [thing you do / make] Mamal: (factory) [place you do / make] Amel: (~worker) [doer, maker, worker] So on for words like (kitchen = place where you eat, pilot = person who flies). The previous comment arguing that Arabic is too rigid for new vocabulary overlooks how this rigidity allows for a very well structured grammar, that ability to express thoughts and ideas thag just fall out of a result of the combinatorics. Similarly, this means that contrary to previous comments, Arabic is also /very well/ encoded for many tasks. Once you know your roots, is very easy to reverse engineer what a lot of commonly used words mean. What's more, you can (and people have) exploited this to write very efficient semantic compression algorithms for Arabic text. You can't see it in the English letters but these transformations are super algorithmic, you do them by just doubling consonants or adding vowels and it's very intuitive for native speakers. There are only about a total of 6000 lexical root words in Arabic, so on a computer you can represent each word by encoding it's lexical root, and the grammatical transformation on it. This results in compressed text which is also still very easy to analyse for meaning and sentiment. You can check out the literature on Arabic natural language processing to see more like this, and a lot of them double as helpful tools for learning Arabic. Google once made an API which would take written Arabic text and infer the locations of all the pronunciation marks from the context and vocabulary, so you can turn text into a form that's easier for beginners to read. Yamli is a popular tool which automatically transliterates Arabic that has been written phonetically in Roman characters back to correctly spelled Arabic letters, so if you've heard a word but don't know how to spell it you can still Google it. I'm sure there are many other cool things I don't know about too. There may be a lot of spoken dialects, but written Arabic is potentially one of the most standardised and carefully encoded languages there is.
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- ramigb 8y ago"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.
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoThere are many places on the margins of the Arabic world where people lack an active command of MSA (as opposed to a merely passive understanding), and where newspapers may well be in French instead of MSA. After all, an active command is learned through formal schooling, and regrettably there are places in the Arabic world where children do not get much formal schooling.
- browsercoin 8y agonot to mention the most beautiful (imo) and has some pleasant Farsi spoken in Iran.
- mattnewport 8y agoFarsi has adopted the same alphabet and has some Arabic loan words but it's a very different language. Farsi is an Indo-European language while Arabic is Semitic (Afro-Asiatic).
- gnulinux 8y agoFarsi is an Indo-European language. Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language. Farsi is genealogically closer to English than Arabic.
- browsercoin 8y agoim a fucking idiot.
- gnulinux 8y agoNo, it's a fairly widespread misconception. People also think Turkish is also somehow related to Arabic and/or Farsi whereas Turkish belongs to a yet another language family (Turkic Languages) and is genealogically entirely unrelated.
- tragomaskhalos 8y agoLanguage buffs should also check out Maltese, which is basically a form of Arabic written in a Latin script with a heavy admixture of (mainly) Italian and English loan words
- CydeWeys 8y agoAs a typical American who mostly just speaks English, the #1 most useful language I wish I also spoke is Spanish. It's pervasive, both in the US and elsewhere. I'm currently in Barcelona for a conference and this is the third time in 1.5 years I've been in a Spanish-speaking country for a conference. The only other language that can have a similarly credible case for learning it would be Mandarin, but unlike Spanish, that's only good for one country. For anyone living in the Sinosphere, that would obviously be the best choice, but for someone living in the US, Chinese isn't nearly as important. Plus, Spanish is way easier to learn, given that it shares an alphabet, similar pronunciation, and through casual exposure you likely already have a start on a basic vocabulary. As for Arabic ... yeah, that's far down the list. I've only ever been to one Arabic country (the UAE), and more people there speak English than Arabic. Obviously that's atypical for Arabic countries, but way more westerners are likely to go the UAE than to, say, Egypt.
- jpatokal 8y agoThat's a rather US-centric worldview. Looking at the official languages of countries, French and Arabic are probably the most useful worldwide, with Spanish third and Chinese (Mandarin) indeed largely useless outside greater China. https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/35348/as-a-native-english-speaker-which-two-further-languages-would-give-me-the-most https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/35348/as-a-native...
- frobozz 8y agoMeasuring the utility of a language by number of countries in which it is spoken, or number of speakers worldwide is pretty meaningless. It's not dissimilar to the argument that children in SE England should all learn French because most of the ferries go to Calais and Boulogne - planes go everywhere. The utility of a language is a personal thing. CydeWeys makes professional visits to Spanish speaking countries at a rate of 2x per year. That alone makes Spanish more useful than French or Arabic. If you visit Riga with that kind of frequency, then Latvian is a far more useful language than Spanish, French or Arabic.
- qubax 8y ago
- mega_behemoth 8y agoSo my original comment was flagged, possible by many sharia clerics floating around here. It was deleted. All I've said: "Nothing with importance is being produced in Arabic, especially in the last 1.4 years". Is this forum now abides Strict Sharia law ? f that. I thought hackernews readers are intelligent in average. clearly I was wrong.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoWith the multiple rants about "sharia" here I think it's safe to assume that your original comment wasn't made in good faith. It's no real surprise that people will get offended when you attack their language, it's an integral part of their culture and identity.
- sctb 8y agoWould you please read the guidelines and then stop trolling? Your comments in this thread don't meet the standards of civility and substantiveness of this site and we eventually ban accounts that don't fix that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mega_behemoth 8y agoState the guideline that my current comments are not meeting. Be useful instead of repeating yourself. I am the one being trolled here. I only said the f---ing truth. You can ban my disposable account - I have keyboard, internet connection and disposable emails. People hate the truth when it is painful.
- nosjwshere 8y agoMohammed used Arabic, so it's the perfect of God.
- biggio 8y agoArabic is a horrible language both written and spoken. Turkish on the other hand is a beautiful language and it should be more popular.
- Insanity 8y agoAny arguments as to why that is so?
- biggio 8y agoTurkish is regular and straightforward. Arabic, not so much. As for speaking, you have to speak like something stuck in your throat and it doesn't sound that pleasant to be honest.
- Salamat 8y agoI think Turkish lacks consonants so it was tough for me to learn it with vowels flowing freely like there is no tomorrow. That throat sound, they call it glotral and it is there in many languages such as Spanish German and Irish and Scottish. kh' as in Scots 'loch' or German 'mach' but the Ein sound is toug: Ayin the sixteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʿayin Phoenician ayin. Hebrew ʿayin ע, Aramaic ʿē Ayin.svg, Syriac ʿē ܥ, and Arabic ʿayn ع
- eudora 8y agoArabic sounds lovely https://youtu.be/WEwgafTDrOU https://youtu.be/WEwgafTDrOU
- growlist 8y agoI find the general throatiness and swallowing of sounds in Arabic to be far from melifluous.
- eudora 8y agoCommon misconception. Arabic sounds lovely https://youtu.be/WEwgafTDrOU https://youtu.be/WEwgafTDrOU
- fatihdonmez 8y agoI'm turkish and because of hidden arabic imperialism and assimilation rooted deep in islam, I refuse to use even arabic words which are common in turkish.
- biggio 8y agoCompared to Turkish I find Arabic quite messy
- barry-cotter 8y agoI’m not surprised Turkish is simpler. It was “reformed” so much after the foundation of the republic that modern Turks can’t understand Ottoman Turkish. It was written in Arabic script and had a great, great many Arabic and Persian words. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_language > Owing to this sudden change in the language, older and younger people in Turkey started to differ in their vocabularies. While the generations born before the 1940s tend to use the older terms of Arabic or Persian origin, the younger generations favor new expressions. It is considered particularly ironic that Atatürk himself, in his lengthy speech to the new Parliament in 1927, used a style of Ottoman which sounded so alien to later listeners that it had to be "translated" three times into modern Turkish: first in 1963, again in 1986, and most recently in 1995.
- biggio 8y agoInteresting. I suppose reform worked for Turkish. I'm fascinated by the simplicity and the straightforwardness of Turkish.
- fatihdonmez 8y agoOf course it worked, now we can easily understand other turkic people from Kygrzystan, Uzbekistan, Uyghur, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan. It’s one of the most important and critical reform, Ataturk did.
- aibrahem 8y ago
- xvilka 8y agoAlso there is a poor support in software, for example in console tools: [1] [1] https://gist.github.com/XVilka/a0e49e1c65370ba11c17 https://gist.github.com/XVilka/a0e49e1c65370ba11c17
- m23khan 8y agoUrdu is a language which I speak and admire - for the reason that the Hindi-Persian mix along with the Persian syntax/alphabet gives it the ultimate flexibility. You can capture any sound/accent in Urdu. What I mean is you to take any word in any language and if you wanted to write it as-is in Urdu syntax, you can do so with 100% accuracy.
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoSounds very versatile! The Persian alphabet seems to be lacking some vowels. How is that handled when writing Urdu?
- posterboy 8y agoDiacritical marks are used but often omitted
- jnbiche 8y ago> What I mean is you to take any word in any language and if you wanted to write it as-is in Urdu syntax, you can do so with 100% accuracy. Well, except for all the tonal languages, such as Chinese (Urdu has no tonal system). And the various Caucasus languages such as Ubyhk, which has over 80 phonemes (Urdu has 48). But your point is well-taken, which is that Urdu is a phonetically-rich language.
- mkaziz 8y agoDisagree. I am a native speaker of Urdu, and Urdu is effective only with significant English loan words. The Persian alphabet also makes little sense - we pronounce seen and suad the same way but write them differently thanks to the Persian alphabet being forced on a language that wasn't meant for it.
- m23khan 8y agoregarding seen and suad, please check out: https://www.quora.com/What-is-difference-between-se-%D8%AB-sin-%D8%B3-and-swad-%D8%B5-in-the-Urdu-alphabet https://www.quora.com/What-is-difference-between-se-%D8%AB-s... And as for the using persian script for urdu, without going into political stuff, I think it is a huge advantage - Persian script is not only used for Persian and Urdu, even Balochi, Daari (Afghanistan), and Pashto uses Persian script. Moreover, by virtue of knowing Persian script, it becomes immensely easy to pick up Arabic (at least reading it). Then there are few other languages such as Sindhi (Pakistani Sindhi) which have a Persian-based script (few other characters on top of Persian which are specific to the language). Which means, if you can read Urdu, with little effort, you can start reading Arabic/Balochi/Sindhi which means you can read literature from Pakistan all the way to Morocco.