4 ms·

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

by cwp 15y ago

deno 15y 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.
- riffraff 15y ago
  obligatory noticeable case: swahili (one of the widely studied non-indo european languages) comes with _18_ noun classes.
  - gaustin 15y ago
    How does that compare to the other languages in the Bantu family? Long ago I studied Ichibemba, and think it had something like 18 noun classes, too. IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating.
    - lkozma 15y ago
      "IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating" Finnish (and other agglutinative languages) use suffixes to express many concepts that in English are expressed with prepositions: imagine if instead of "in my room" you would have to say "room-my-in" and you would call this the noun case of "containment" or something similar, the number of cases would go up pretty quickly.
    - zeemonkee 15y ago
      > IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating. It's not actually that complicated, most are simple suffixes - so for example, instead of on the table in Finnish you say table-on (pöydällä). Once you learn the rules of vowel harmony and consonant mutation it's a pretty regular, straightforward language.
    - riffraff 15y ago
      My knowledge of bantu languages is only what I read on wikipedia, so I am not qualified to answer, but it seems they orbitate around 20 :) As for cases: I am learning hungarian which is related to finnish and also has more than 20 cases. The problem, in my personal experience, is that learning such an agglutinative language is slightly harder than others because when you are learning you don't know all the suffixes and at the same time you don't even know enough vocabulary to understand what's what. Especially once you consider that suffixes stack up. I see something like "ccddee" and it's hard to understand where I should break up the thing (<ccd,dee>, <cc,dd,ee>, <cc,dde,e> etc). YMMV :)
      - peterbotond 15y ago
        as a native hungarian speaker, let me wish you fun and many discoveries while learning this enormous grammer. hungarian is not related to finnish, rather to turkic languages. i am a native hungarian speaker, and i know hungarian grammar is logically closer to turkish than to finnish. the story how they became related is purely political, and references easily found on this subject and i do not intend to get into. in hungarian literature class we studied finnish words that were similar, grammer, and a few poems.
        adamzochowski 15y ago
        > hungarian is not related to finnish "" The Uralic languages ( /jʊˈrælɨk/) (sometimes referred to as Uralian languages) constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt. "" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages
        peterbotond 15y ago
        the referenced wiki article also mentions another point of view. the referenced article also does not mention the significant number of hungarian speakers in Canada. i will not comment any further on this thread. my view is based on extensive research of turkish, finnish, hungarian, english, german, spanish, and russian grammers.
  - joelhaasnoot 15y ago
    Swahili is supposedly quite easy compared to Arabic or Amharic (also a Semitic language like Arabic).
- skoob 15y ago
  I think the point here was more about how Arabic treats groups of non-human objects as feminin singular. I assume that in Polish you would use a plural form of "green" when talking about multiple books and you would only use the feminine form if "book" is a feminine word.
  - guard-of-terra 15y ago
    Maybe the underlying idea is that "a group of something is green", and a group is singular and is feminine (at least in Russian ^^)
    - idlewords 15y ago
      Nope :-)
  - idlewords 15y ago
    That's right. Polish adjectives agree in number, gender and case with the nouns they modify.
- idlewords 15y ago
  You've misunderstood this part. The unusual behavior is not having grammatical gender, but treating all non-human plurals as feminine singular.
  - deno 15y ago
    Hmm, yes; it seems I did. I hope that my basic premise holds true though — in that this doesn't make Arabic inherently sexist.
  - ithkuil 15y ago
    Not sure if this applies to Arabic, but sometimes this happens when there is a old case which got lost and which had the same suffix as feminine singular. Usually that's genitive. For example Croatian (I'm a native speaker) uses genitive plural agreement for number >=5. Feminine genitive plural happens to have the same suffix as feminine singular, and it could be possible to envision an future evolution of the language where the genitive is lost, while the number agreement rule could be preserve. So it's possible that grammars of this future language would state that feminine plural agreement for numbers >=5 you have to use the feminine singular. Btw, I once read a very nice title of a german language book: "Der Dativ is dem Genitiv sein Tot" literaly, "the dative is [to] the genitive its death" Which denotes the fact that in modern German the genitive case is being lost in faviour of constructs based on dative (the correct form would be "Der Dativ ist der Tod des Genitivs", i.e. "the dative is the death of the genitive") (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Dativ_ist_dem_Genitiv_sein_Tod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Dativ_ist_dem_Genitiv_sein_...)
- Abdul321 15y ago
  As far as I know, in Arabic, it should say "The books are green". "Green" has the same form and pronunciation that singular feminine has. However, green is used as an adjective here for the group of "Books", not "she is".
  - idlewords 15y ago
    A literal version: الكتب books(definite) حضراء green(feminine singular indefinite)
- ctrager 15y ago
  A de facto rule of spoken English: "Everyone should floss their teeth" - Singular nouns of indeterminate gender take plural, and therefore genderless, possessives.

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

by cwp 15y ago

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

deno 15y 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.

riffraff 15y ago
obligatory noticeable case: swahili (one of the widely studied non-indo european languages) comes with _18_ noun classes.
- gaustin 15y ago
  How does that compare to the other languages in the Bantu family? Long ago I studied Ichibemba, and think it had something like 18 noun classes, too. IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating.
  - lkozma 15y ago
    "IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating" Finnish (and other agglutinative languages) use suffixes to express many concepts that in English are expressed with prepositions: imagine if instead of "in my room" you would have to say "room-my-in" and you would call this the noun case of "containment" or something similar, the number of cases would go up pretty quickly.
  - zeemonkee 15y ago
    > IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating. It's not actually that complicated, most are simple suffixes - so for example, instead of on the table in Finnish you say table-on (pöydällä). Once you learn the rules of vowel harmony and consonant mutation it's a pretty regular, straightforward language.
  - riffraff 15y ago
    My knowledge of bantu languages is only what I read on wikipedia, so I am not qualified to answer, but it seems they orbitate around 20 :) As for cases: I am learning hungarian which is related to finnish and also has more than 20 cases. The problem, in my personal experience, is that learning such an agglutinative language is slightly harder than others because when you are learning you don't know all the suffixes and at the same time you don't even know enough vocabulary to understand what's what. Especially once you consider that suffixes stack up. I see something like "ccddee" and it's hard to understand where I should break up the thing (<ccd,dee>, <cc,dd,ee>, <cc,dde,e> etc). YMMV :)
    - peterbotond 15y ago
      as a native hungarian speaker, let me wish you fun and many discoveries while learning this enormous grammer. hungarian is not related to finnish, rather to turkic languages. i am a native hungarian speaker, and i know hungarian grammar is logically closer to turkish than to finnish. the story how they became related is purely political, and references easily found on this subject and i do not intend to get into. in hungarian literature class we studied finnish words that were similar, grammer, and a few poems.
      - adamzochowski 15y ago
        > hungarian is not related to finnish "" The Uralic languages ( /jʊˈrælɨk/) (sometimes referred to as Uralian languages) constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt. "" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages
        peterbotond 15y ago
        the referenced wiki article also mentions another point of view. the referenced article also does not mention the significant number of hungarian speakers in Canada. i will not comment any further on this thread. my view is based on extensive research of turkish, finnish, hungarian, english, german, spanish, and russian grammers.
- joelhaasnoot 15y ago
  Swahili is supposedly quite easy compared to Arabic or Amharic (also a Semitic language like Arabic).
skoob 15y ago
I think the point here was more about how Arabic treats groups of non-human objects as feminin singular. I assume that in Polish you would use a plural form of "green" when talking about multiple books and you would only use the feminine form if "book" is a feminine word.
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  Maybe the underlying idea is that "a group of something is green", and a group is singular and is feminine (at least in Russian ^^)
  - idlewords 15y ago
    Nope :-)
- idlewords 15y ago
  That's right. Polish adjectives agree in number, gender and case with the nouns they modify.
idlewords 15y ago
You've misunderstood this part. The unusual behavior is not having grammatical gender, but treating all non-human plurals as feminine singular.
- deno 15y ago
  Hmm, yes; it seems I did. I hope that my basic premise holds true though — in that this doesn't make Arabic inherently sexist.
- ithkuil 15y ago
  Not sure if this applies to Arabic, but sometimes this happens when there is a old case which got lost and which had the same suffix as feminine singular. Usually that's genitive. For example Croatian (I'm a native speaker) uses genitive plural agreement for number >=5. Feminine genitive plural happens to have the same suffix as feminine singular, and it could be possible to envision an future evolution of the language where the genitive is lost, while the number agreement rule could be preserve. So it's possible that grammars of this future language would state that feminine plural agreement for numbers >=5 you have to use the feminine singular. Btw, I once read a very nice title of a german language book: "Der Dativ is dem Genitiv sein Tot" literaly, "the dative is [to] the genitive its death" Which denotes the fact that in modern German the genitive case is being lost in faviour of constructs based on dative (the correct form would be "Der Dativ ist der Tod des Genitivs", i.e. "the dative is the death of the genitive") (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Dativ_ist_dem_Genitiv_sein_Tod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Dativ_ist_dem_Genitiv_sein_...)
Abdul321 15y ago
As far as I know, in Arabic, it should say "The books are green". "Green" has the same form and pronunciation that singular feminine has. However, green is used as an adjective here for the group of "Books", not "she is".
- idlewords 15y ago
  A literal version: الكتب books(definite) حضراء green(feminine singular indefinite)
ctrager 15y ago
A de facto rule of spoken English: "Everyone should floss their teeth" - Singular nouns of indeterminate gender take plural, and therefore genderless, possessives.