14 ms·
Why Arabic Is Terrific (2011)
- dang 7y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909136
- rmbryan 7y agoAnd then there is this beast: ع a consonant pronounced so far back in the throat that you must wait two hours after eating to safely attempt it. Naturally it's one of the most common sounds in the language.
- AtlasLion 7y agoYour body is made to make that sound, you just need to let it do it instead of fighting it.
- vowelless 7y agoTell that to the Arabs who can’t bronounce “p”
- AtlasLion 7y agothe statement still stands.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoOur bodies are made to pronounce a ton of sounds we both can't hear and speak as adults. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/accents-are-forever-35886605/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/accents-are-fo...
- yorwba 7y agoThe expert quoted in that article disagrees with the idea that you can't do it: "People talk about a 'window of opportunity' for learning language," Kuhl says. "The implication is that if you miss that opportunity, it's too late. I don't agree. It is more difficult with the years. But not impossible." Personally, I think the largest difficulty is the amount of practice required. Kids can babble about all day, but as an adult, even investing an hour a day into language practice is hard to find the time for.
- Cyph0n 7y agoWell, there is no “p” in Arabic, so it makes sense that native Arab speakers would struggle with it initially. The same applies to “v”. As a native speaker of both Arabic and English, I have no trouble with pronouncing letters in either language.
- ocschwar 7y agoCan you figure out which dialect the original author is learning here? From some of the vocabulary I'm pretty sure it isn't the Damascene Arabic I learned.
- Cyph0n 7y agoIt’s formal Arabic, i.e., Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). This is a neutral and more grammatically correct version of the language. Its use is mostly limited to the written medium, but is also used for verbal communication in news channels and academic contexts.
- barry-cotter 7y agoCalling FuSha (Modern Standard Arabic) a >neutral and more grammatically correct version of the language is nuts. Arabic isn’t a language any more than the Romance languages are. Moroccan, Egyptian and Yemeni Arabic are at least as divergent as Spanish, French and Romanian. FuSha is like if the entire Romance speaking world wrote in Latin. The academic contexts FuSha is used in are also limited to primary and secondary instruction, Arabic language and religion mostly. Tertiary education across the Arab world is often conducted in English or French so the educated classes will speak at least one of those languages at a near native level. That’s part of why there are fewer books translated into Arabic each year than into Dutch.
- Cyph0n 7y agoTrue, the differences are significant, to say the least...
- 7y ago
- ComputerGuru 7y agoIt’s more an inability to grasp it rather than an inability to produce that sound. It’s especially apparent when after learning to make the “p” sound, ESL (or ETL/EFL even!) Arabs go around saying “apsoloutely no broblem.” The most common reverse substitution is probably “peautiful” with considerable emphasis on the p.
- ithkuil 7y agoThe mechanics of speech is complicated and most of the people most of the time have no idea what is actually going on, pretty much like with breathing. It doesn't help that alphabetical writing systems are sold to us from young age as if they were actual representing the sounds. They are not, and in more subtle ways than you'd think. For example, in the context of B's and P's, English has "explosive consonants". In many words the "p" sound is actually followed by a puff of air. But this also happens incidentally when B is followed by some other sounds. Imagine pronouncing "beautiful" without emitting any puff of air after the B and you'll notice you sound Italian or Indian. So, if your native language doesn't have the p sound at all and you learn it from examples in English it's quite likely you'll latch on the "puff of air" feature of exaggerated explosive variant of the p sound you might be practicing a lot. You'll then hear a similar sound in beautiful, and try to repeat that too but native speakers might percieve that as a p sound
- ComputerGuru 7y agoThat's an interesting explanation, thank you.
- rvense 7y agoIts formal name is 'amanual autoasphyxiation', because to pronounce the 'ayn, you simply attempt to strangle yourself without using your hands. I remember looking up from my grammar book one day I felt particularly stupid and saying to one of my classmates that this language must have been thought up by a sadist on a bad day! To which they replied that he was, in fact, probably having his best day ever. (I never learned to speak it, properly, but I feel better for having attempted)
- frenchyatwork 7y agoAs a random anecdote, [ʢ] and [ʕ] (the sounds that make ع) are my 9 month old son's favourite sounds.
- simlevesque 7y agocan someone link to a video/recording of the sound ?
- idlewords 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSwHMvc0zM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSwHMvc0zM4
- AtlasLion 7y agoMaha explains how to pronounce it quite Nicely here https://youtu.be/Y0ro6b50-Lk?t=159 https://youtu.be/Y0ro6b50-Lk?t=159
- kissickas 7y agoIt's not an uvular letter though, it's pharyngeal (to epiglottal in some places). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayin#Arabic_%CA%BFayn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayin#Arabic_%CA%BFayn
- AtlasLion 7y agoTrue, she struggled with that part, but that technique of limiting the airflow by hand works and gives you a good feel on how to pronounce it.
- Rampoina 7y agoI was a bit confused with it being called a consonant. After some research, although I had a flawed understanding of vowels and consonants, I think it's classified as a semivowel.
- fortran77 7y agoThe Hebrew Ayin (ע) is also pronounced as a glottal stop in some communities -- Like the Jews who returned to Israel from communities in Syria and Iraq). So is a "Hay" (ה) with a Dagesh (usally not written) at the end of a word is pronounced short way back in the throat by Jews who came back to Israel after exile in North Africa (Tunisia, etc.)
- einpoklum 7y agoNot just "in some communities"; glottal ע is the recognized correct pronunciation. We Ashkenazi are just lazing out with proper pronunciation.
- marton78 7y agoHow do you pronounce the ayin?
- edanm 7y ago(Not parent) Basically "ah-in" or "ah-yin" ("ah" being pronounced like when a doctor tells you "open your mouth and say ah"). It makes the use of that letter much closer to "a" (א or ה in Hebrew). We don't really involve the deep part of the throat, though I think it's pretty well known that you're "supposed to".
- 2rsf 7y agovery close to א and ה... They all sound like Ah/I/Uh/Eh depending on the punctuation
- lordgrenville 7y ago"Recognized correct" in the sense that we guess that's how ancient Hebrew speakers pronounced it, based on Arabic. But we don't really know for sure.
- mehrdadn 7y agoOh man, it's not that bad is it :-) but yeah I was trying to think of a way to explain this in text and it's hard... but the closest English equivalent I can think of is the diaeresis, like when you say "naïve"... except, imagine if instead of blending the 'a' and 'ï' together, you made as hard of a constant-ish boundary as you possibly could. I think that's a rough approximation?
- jfk13 7y agoI'm not sure I can describe any better, but I think most English speakers would tend to produce a glottal stop [ʔ] between the vowels in response to that description, rather than a pharyngeal fricative.
- mehrdadn 7y agoYeah that's true. Also just realized I wrote constant when I meant consonant... hope that wasn't confusing.
- dsimms 7y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/travel/2010/feb/07/learn-arabic-pronunciation https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2010/feb/07/learn-arabic-... says: : We have a muscle in our throat which is never used except in vomiting. Think about that and pretend you are about to be sick. You will find that what is normally called in English gagging is actually a restriction in the deep part of the throat. If you begin to gag, and then release the airstream from the lungs, you will have produced a perfect : (called :ain in Arabic).
- hinkley 7y agoIs that the same muscle used to roll Rs in some of the Romance languages?
- etatoby 7y agoNo, the rolled R is just a vibration of the tongue against the roof of the mouth.
- hinkley 7y agoYeah I dunno how to tell you this, but those of us who make the rrr sound at the back of our throats roll our eyes at you when your backs are turned. I can't speak for the other Romance languages, but that's for sure the wrong way to make that sound in French, and a lot of people can't seem to hear the difference. There's a reason some comedians make fun of european languages by clearing their throats. The rolled consonants are throaty, not mouthy (a word I just made up right now, sue me).
- ocschwar 7y agoMy first name starts with it. Owing to my accent, I have trouble pronouncing it. Growing up in Israel, among "Arab Jews" who did not have this problem, I was reminded daily of the difficulty I have in pronouncing my own name.
- mcguire 7y agoGiven the trouble I have with the glottal stop in "mcguire", I understand your problem.
- amaccuish 7y agoDoes anyone know if it's similar to russian ы in that respect? I know people in my russian class use to struggle with ы.
- yongjik 7y agoPresumably French speakers would feel the same about English /h/, a sound that is created even farther back in the throat (glottal vs. pharyngeal(?)).
- anticensor 7y ago/h/ is not really a fricative, though. Linguists consider it a voice transistion.
- omarish 7y agoThat's the first letter of my name.
- zouhair 7y agoNone of my western friend can pronounce ق some can handle ع but the ق is a lost cause.
- whalabi 7y agoYeah that one's tough for me and I grew up Arab ت
- whalabi 7y agoIt's really not that hard It's in the word "Saudi" for example - right when you transition from the a to the oo sound, your throat just does a bit of the work along with your mouth. There's another letter that's way harder in my Arab-Australian opinion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qoph#Arabic_q%C4%81f https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qoph#Arabic_q%C4%81f That one legit is close to a cough, just higher up in the throat.
- sdiq 7y agoSomali does have this sound too. I am yet to come across another language with the same.
- kaycebasques 7y agoI crammed 3 years of Arabic study into my 2 years at Cal. The logic of the triliteral root system is partly what got me interested in programming.
- vowelless 7y agoDoesn’t Hebrew have a similar concept?
- edflsafoiewq 7y agoYes, it's characteristic of Semitic languages.
- dalbasal 7y agoNot just similar, many/most of the roots are shared.
- fortran77 7y agoHebrew, at least as far as instances of Hebrew writing, is _much_ older than Arabic. There are 3,000 year old Hebrew Inscriptions ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zayit_Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zayit_Stone ). The Zayit stone was found 31 miles south west of Jerusalem and its dated as 10th century BCE. Also see: https://www.quora.com/Which-language-is-older-Hebrew-or-Arabic/answer/Helena-Almagest https://www.quora.com/Which-language-is-older-Hebrew-or-Arab...
- opportune 7y agoThat's because Hebrew died out for over a thousand years and is now a revived dead language. The lack of a vulgar dialect prevented it from changing, similar to how Latin has not changed since native vulgar speakers died out (or rather, their dialects became so distinct that they are now considered different languages e.g. Romanian).
- 7y ago
- vowelless 7y ago> Arabic, on the other hand, twists healthy minds in twelve ways: I only see 11.
- idlewords 7y agoThat's the 12th way!
- sudosteph 7y agoI love learning writing systems and think the Semitic languages, including Arabic, are especially fun to learn and write. I thought about trying to learn more Arabic for fun, but this part convinced me not to bother: > My absolute favorite is that all non-human plurals are grammatically feminine singular: al-kutub hadra' (الكتب خضراء) "The books, she is green" After attempting a minor in French, I hate dealing with arbitrary gender in languages. I'm convinced that the grammatical construct of gender exists only to make it easier to identify foreign or uneducated speakers!
- pault 7y agoI agree, this plagued me throughout the years I was living in Brazil and I still can't fathom how a language (Latin in this case) could evolve with the concept of gender applied to inanimate objects!
- kissickas 7y agoIn case that actually dissuaded you from learning and you would want to otherwise, I want to point out that gender is extremely simple in Arabic. It is not at all arbitrary in the way Romance languages treat it - nearly every word is clearly masculine or feminine (with very few exceptions, like war, sea, sun) and treating all nonhuman plurals as feminine simplifies things rather than complicating them.
- dalbasal 7y agoAre there any semetic languages that don't have arbitrary gender rules? Correctly gendering numbers (depending on the gender of the noun being counted) in hebrew is hard for native speakers.
- istajeer242 7y agoExcellent article on a very logical language. However this part: > No other language will make you work as hard to avoid speaking formally to pairs of women Arabs actually don't speak this formal way and may look at you strange if you do (they may not even understand in countries like Libya or Egypt); most of the colloquial dialects skip most of these rules, and don't deal the difference between "those two females ran" vs "those two males ran" vs "those males ran", etc. But author summarizes it: > The second is that spoken Arabic has diverged substantially from the written language, so you can study it formally for years and not be able to understand a television commercial
- Causality1 7y ago>Muslims believe that Arabic as written in the 7th century A.D. is the language of divine revalation. This has served as a tremendously conservative force on written Arabic, with two important consequences. >The first is that texts from over a thousand years ago remain accessible to modern readers. If you're an English speaker, where even texts from 200 years ago can be rough going, this is quite a treat. The former has less to do with the latter than you might imagine. Many languages without a supposed divine mandate are also readable many hundreds of years later. English is in the minority in that regard, in that its history of being influenced strongly by conquest locks off its older writings to modern eyes.
- ggm 7y agoHad the experience in the National Palace Museum Taiwan of both Taiwanese and elder Chinese (the ones who don't only speak simplified but can handle traditional) looking at thousand-plus year old artifacts and mumbling to themselves, way beyond what an english speaker will try and do with roman or greek inscription.
- iso1337 7y agoThose older texts were written in Classical Chinese, so there's still a barrier in terms of context and education to fully understanding them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese
- ncmncm 7y agoThe ambiguity of the term "terrific" seems uniquely suited to describing Arabic. For non-native readers: the word means both extremely appealing, and also mortally horrifying. It is best used when both apply to some degree.
- DonHopkins 7y ago"1. There's something about intelligence agencies - maybe the familiar comfort of a three-letter acronym on the wall, maybe the late-night spanking parties - that draws fraternity boys like ants to a picnic, and right now the road to bro advancement leads through an Arabic classroom. Their complete lack of a sense of irony allows these students to combine sincere appreciation for The Fountainhead with a desire for a lifelong career in government service, and the hardest part of studying Arabic is having to listen to their asinine opinions after they have gained enough proficiency to try to express them." Is there a term like "Brook" is to "Spook" like "Brogrammer" is to "Programmer"?
- vram22 7y agoThe mention of a non-existent thing creates it. - The Zen School of Me. :)
- Terr_ 7y agoI'd like to propose "Brost" <- "Ghost" <- "Spook" It's a weaker connection, but rhyming with "Boast" it maintains the clear "Bro" prefix and is distinct from other spoken or written words.
- DonHopkins 7y agoBrost! Aha yes, rhyming with "Boast" gives it a nice ring, while the pronunciation and meaning of "Brook" is kind of ambiguous. I wonder if spies now prefer to be called ghosts instead of spooks because of the latter's racist connotations, or have they reclaimed the term and wear it as a badge of honor? ;)
- inflatableDodo 7y agoThere's no modifier needed. They are slap bang in the middle of the bell curve in those environments.
- DonHopkins 7y ago"Deep State" => "Douche State"
- weinzierl 7y ago> The Feminine Plural > 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. > This gives Arabic a total of twelve personal pronouns. No other language will make you work as hard to avoid speaking formally to pairs of women. All Romance languages I know (French, Spanish, Portuguese) work like that. For example in Portuguese: "They play football." is "Elas jogam futebol." if it's about the women's national soccer team but "Eles jogam futebol." if it's an all male or mixed team.
- notafrog 7y agoAFAIK they (in Arabic) also have dual pronouns which refers to exactly two people; they use another pronoun for 3+ people.
- Arete314159 7y agoYes for the "groups of women" part, but no for the dual formation. So for Spanish you have to learn masculine singular and plural, feminine singular and plural, but not masculine dual and feminine dual.
- dhruvparamhans 7y agoIf I remember my Sanskrit correctly, it too has duals. But not specifically gendered duals. So two of them are going is written the same way irrespective of whether "the two" are male or female or neutral. Yeah Sanskrit has a neutral as well. Makes the language much simpler. (In my opinion) .
- jen729w 7y agoMy best friend has a little site which I’m always trying to get her to do more on. If you’re attempting to learn Arabic it may help. http://www.rememberarabic.com/ http://www.rememberarabic.com/ She has a very definite style: > When writing the rules for Arabic grammar, someone decided that Lakin should be called the weak version of 'but', and Lakinna should be called the strong version of 'but'. If someone can decide that, then I can decide to create a Hammock of Freedom. So I did. Go check her out. I’m seeing her for a walk in an hour, I can pass on kind comments. :-)
- arbuge 7y agoAnybody who finds Arabic interesting might also like to take a look at Maltese, an Arabic offshoot which is the only Semitic language written in Latin script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language As a Maltese person, we were required during the 1980s to learn Arabic as an additional language in school, a task made considerably easier by the similarities between the languages.
- wallflower 7y agoYou might enjoy “The Hyperglot” which stars Michael Levi Harris, a true polyglot, in a cute short film involving the Maltese language. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YKahZwqZjWg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YKahZwqZjWg https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-hyperglot/id992386797 https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-hyperglot/id992386797
- askthereception 7y ago"Unlike the rest of the language, numerals are written left-to-right." Everyone makes this mistake. It is rather the case that in English (and other languages) numerals are written right-to-left. You can tell since, when reading right-to-left, you will know exactly what each number signifies. If you start from the left, you will not know what the first number signifies until you have reached the end of the whole number. Interesting to learn though that in Arabic it is still pronounced from left to right, up until the tens.
- meitham 7y agoIt actually used to be right to left, just like the language! In some formal communication it's still the case, like when news channel announce new year "one and eighty and nine hundreds and a thousand. The change to read from left to right started fairly recently in the twentieth century, along with the change of the order of alphabets from أبجدهوز to أبتثجحخ. I'm a native Arabic speaker, and yes I still struggle to both: speak P and hear P, Put no BroPlem!
- phicoh 7y agoI'm curious, when was it right to left? In computer speak, the way we write numbers in English is 'big endian'. We write the most significant digit first. The most common 'little endian' system is postal addresses, where we start with the smallest unit (name) then in, some cases, house number, street, city, country. Note that roman numerals are commonly written in big ending way. So this practice is very old.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoYet historically English numbers were little endian, base twenty: "four and twenty" etc. Base 20 comes from Celtic roots I think, so perhaps other European languages have a similar history too.
- zouhair 7y agoActually for example 1959 in Arabic the modern way to say it is "A thousand and nine hundred and fifty nine - الف وتسعمائة وتسعة وخمسون" but we also can say (and this is the old way) "Nine and fifty and nine hundred and a thousand - خمس ﻮ تسعون ﻮ تسع مئة وألف" which from tight to left.
- alzaeem 7y ago"Glottal stops are everywhere in English but we are not trained to hear them, so a long portion of one of your first Arabic classes will be devoted to blowing your mind with the fact that English words like 'apple' and 'elegant' do not start with a vowel." Is this for real?! Do non native speakers of Arabic (and similar languages) not hear the common sound at the start of words like apple, elegant, ignite, umpire? I find that hard to believe since they are saying it.
- graeme 7y agoNo, at least for me, Canadian English, I hear them as starting with: ap, el, ig, um So sound wise they all start with a glottal stop that we don't notice as it isn't written as such?
- yorwba 7y agoYou may very well pronounce them without a glottal stop. If you whisper the words, you might be able to hear it as a click in your throat.
- graeme 7y agoI tried that and I sounded a bit like an exaggerated latin accent from a movie. Sort of like a faintly pronounced h in front. Is that a glottal stop?
- fouronnes3 7y agoNo it's not like the initial h in 'hospital' at all. It's closer to you pronounce the 't' in 'batman' with a Boston accent.
- idlewords 7y agoThey start with 'ap, 'el, 'ig, 'um, where the apostrophe is the tiniest catch in the throat. You can pronounce them without the catch, but to our ears the difference is inaudible, because we don't make a distinction. Arabs do.
- ydnaclementine 7y agoThe books recommended seem to have less than stellar reviews, unfortunate
- whorleater 7y agoAl-kitaab is a diffcult book to self study, and somehow an even harder one to work with in class. While it's inefficient, somewhere around book 2 you've aquired enough vocabulary and grammar to speak in fusha, although unless you've really followed through with a dialect for ammiya you're going to need a tutor to help you out. I wouldn't put too much stock in the reviews for the textbook. Realistically, arabic is difficult, and actually speaking street arabic is frustrating. Source: Currently doing arabic, spending the month in Jordan on vacation doing an arabic intensive, using al-kitaab in both classroom settings and self study. Arabic is, however, definitely terrific. I'm definitely going to blow all my vacation days next year to come back again.
- vvvij 7y agoJesus, this dude sounds quite insufferable.
- chungleong 7y agoSort of off topic. I still remember this project we inherited from DLI ages ago. Folks there were having difficulty with storing UTF-8 strings in JavaScript. Whenever a character gets truncated (due to db length limit), Netscape would complain and die. Someone apparently discovered that you wouldn't get the error if the broken UTF-8 text was in a JavaScript comment. So every text string in the program was a function that parses its own source code for a comment. It was a hilarious hack.
- justaaron 7y agoBonus points for not being on Medium!
- justaaron 7y agodouble bonus for being witty as all get-up. well written. scroll to the bottom.
- barce 7y agoI wonder if this is still true: "right now the road to bro advancement leads through an Arabic classroom."
- ggm 7y agoWell that, or inheriting a few billions from dad, to turn into millions so you can be a millionaire without trying.
- getcrunk 7y agoTraditional Arabic (fusha) is closest to Modern Standard Arabic. Everyone who said msa or fusha is generally relegated to academic or formal use is not incorrect. But fusha is still widely in use by Muslim scholars (clergy-ish). It is necessary to do an advanced study Islam, Quran and majority of Islamic texts (legal, spiritual, theological) and new texts of a higher academic caliber are still written in fushah today (albeit with voweling)
- gumby 7y agoI really enjoyed learning Arabic and this article nicely calls attention to a number of the highlights. As my first non-indo-european language it helped change some of my perspectives. If you speak French the Arabic language texts and practice books are better than what I've been able to find in English.
- apta 7y agoA not very well known fact is that Arabic has a pharyngealized lateral fricative letter (ض) which a lot of people mispronounce as eather a pharyngealized /d/ sound, or merge with the pharyngealized /dh/ sound (ظ). Both of which are incorrect. Apparently there are still some people in Iraq and parts of Saudi Arabia who maintain the correct pronunciation. It is even mis-transliterated as /d/ in the linked article in (hadra).
- inawarminister 7y agoIsn't that sound one of the original sound in ancient Hijazi Arabic, and therefore most learned Muslims can at least distinguish it? I know I can...
- apta 7y agoThis is the correct pronunciation: https://youtu.be/U0qr9XxJges?t=99 https://youtu.be/U0qr9XxJges?t=99 Let me know if you have heard it before :)
- ComputerGuru 7y agoYes, Arabic is sometimes called “لغة الضاد” or “the language of ض" as it is considered a very important characteristic of Arabic, and almost (I once looked it up) entirely exclusive to it (there are some tribal languages that include the emphatic pharyngealized voiced alveolar stop).
- apta 7y agoExcept that the original (classical) pronounciation is not a (pharyngealized voiced alveolar stop), but a (pharyngealized voiced lateral fricative), which sounds very close to (ظ), and explains why many Arabs merged the two sounds together. The alveolar stop is a new letter, and seems to have come out of Egypt because they had a hard time pronouncing the original latter. See this video about how to correctly pronounce it: https://youtu.be/U0qr9XxJges?t=99 https://youtu.be/U0qr9XxJges?t=99
- 7y ago
- ztravis 7y agoI absolutely agree - Arabic is a beautiful language and a joy to learn, and it is particularly appealing for those who enjoy structure and regularity (e.g. CS and math folk!). Be forewarned, though - the significant differences between MSA (modern standard Arabic, the focus of most "Arabic" courses/material) and regional/national dialects (and the differences between those various dialects themselves) may make it a bit less practical than you'd hope (and a source of disappointment when you go to actually speak with people!). Permit me to plug a pet project of mine: http://arabicreference.com http://arabicreference.com It's basically an online version of Hans Wehr, the de facto standard dictionary for students of Arabic. You can search by root or by word and provides form I vowelling, masadir (infinitives), broken plurals, and other useful information organized by form. I know there exist other good dictionaries out there, but I never found one I quite liked as a reference as much as I enjoyed Hans Wehr. I hope someone else finds it useful! (I've been neglecting it a bit recently, so I apologize for any bugs and for the lack of an SSL cert).
- jnbiche 7y agoHans Wehr's dictionary is awesome. How did you get permission to use it online?
- jnbiche 7y agoI'll try to answer my own question: I knew Wehr's dictionary was fairly old, but it may be old enough that it has entered public domain. There are still major publishers that publish the dictionary, but it may well be public domain.
- ammaristotle 7y agoYou have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for something like this, without the time to implement it myself. All these years I’ve had to use http://ejtaal.net/mr/ http://ejtaal.net/mr/ but it’s just getting quite cumbersome. Do you have any plans to open source the work you’ve done and allow contributions from the outside? I could easily see value in doing this for Lane’s Lexicon as well.
- whalabi 7y agoBut most importantly, you can use an Arabic letter, teh (sounds like t) as a smiley face: ت See this happy fellow? ت
- whalabi 7y agoYou can hear some spoken Arabic and a comparison of some of the dialects here: https://youtu.be/WEwgafTDrOU https://youtu.be/WEwgafTDrOU I think it's an awesome sounding language. The differences between the dialects are huge though, but everyone will understand Lebanese Arabic and Egyptian because they make the most tv and movies ت
- alpha_squared 7y agoWow, I'm thoroughly impressed how well he nailed that. For reference, I speak Egyptian Arabic and know speakers from nearly every country represented in that video. Very neat.
- learc83 7y agoI'm trying to learn Egyptian Arabic and the resources available are incredibly frustrating. It's a very popular language yet nearly all the beginner resources are for Modern Standard Arabic. It's almost like being forced to learn Latin first before you can learn Spanish.
- Thorrez 7y ago> This idea is so cool that you'd think it came from a constructed language, and yet Arabic has actual native speakers who live completely normal lives and will not try to talk to you about Runescape. Is there a large overlap between constructed language enthusiasts and Runescape enthusiasts? That seems kind of strange to me.
- lurker9000 7y agoshame about the people
- ggm 7y agoMy favourite bit, after the comments about the screaming eagle? This is where a douchier person would write 'colophon' But overall it did its mission: it made learning arabic feel linguistically interesting.
- petjuh 7y agoProto-indo-european also had extensive use of ablaut, and a dual number.
- shgidi 7y agoHave you tried Hebrew?
- Grustaf 7y agoJapanese grammar is decidedly not vanilla. Arabic is actually much more similar to English and the ind-european languages.