Arabic, a great language, has a low profile
economist.com
economist.com
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.
So just like every other language.
Each of them has its own infuriating challenges, but they all share one big characteristic: Native children learn to speak them well around the age of seven. After that age, most children just add advanced vocabulary. Each of the four languages is by far the worst in some regard, but in a real, practical sense all four exhibit the same overall difficulty for a comparable group of learners.
I've heard that the age is the same for most languages, not just "my" four. For Arabic too, or is it one of the exceptions?
First rule of languages: Languages are not logic. If somebody tells you that their mother tongue is more logical than language X, it's in most cases just bias of the native speaker who is not aware of the difficulties.
Second rule of languages: There are no easy or hard languages. Whether a language is easy or difficult to learn, depends entirely on the languages you already speak (and, of course, the environment, e.g. whether you have access to learning material).
(edit) Big exception: Writing systems. Learning 5000 Chinese characters is objectively harder than learning how to read Spanish. Unfortunately, a difficult writing system has also a negative impact on speaking skills because it hinders you from quickly extending your vocabulary by reading books etc.
True enough. I learned two of the languages I know by reading books (after starting with magazines etc). I never used a dictionary - not once. Because when you finally associate a word with its meaning, through understanding, you don't forget it, unlike with a dictionary (which can't give you the exact meaning either - just the nearest translation). But I can't use that method with languages with a different writing system, not in the beginning at least.
Interesting...how long did it take you to become proficient? And does proficiency in speech your reading ability?
Before that I had been reading a magazine about stuff I was very interested in (I for one need more motivation than just 'learn the language'. I believe my interest in what I was reading was crucial, without that it wouldn't have worked).
Then I read a couple of relatively short books about science, again not too difficult. At a later time I picked up a book in the international section in a book shop while travelling for work (lots of hotel time..), and since then I just continued.
And yes I think it does help a lot with my speaking proficiency too (I think that was what you meant by your last question), although it does absolutely nothing for my pronunciation..
Back in the day I worked in a very international environment, two Tunisian colleagues spoke Tunisian to each other, but when the Moroccan or Lebanese guys from the other teams came to ask some questions, everybody switched to French. If was small talk, they would stick to Arabic with the Moroccan though.
It's pretty amazing that Arabic, technically spoken in a contiguous region from Morocco to Saudi Arabia isn't mutually intelligible with itself, whereas English, French or Spanish, separated by oceans for centuries, even if they grew different variants, stay intelligible.
"The one thing not mentioned in the article is the idea of registers, which is the vertical transition between intermediate stages between full dialect and full MSA depending on the socio-lingiustic context of a conversation or other language production opportunity."
Language is political.
If a different political situation had come about you could see French, Spanish, Italian and Romanian dubbed one language named Neo-Latin, this language wouldn't be very mutually intelligible either
Such is an advantage of separating written and spoken forms of a language: as the spoken form inevitably mutates over time and fractures over space, having a stable written form means people who would otherwise consider each other foreigners may (1) share a common understandable set of historical and cultural documents, (2) communicate with each other at least in letters, (3) identify each other's language as but a "variation" of the standard written form.
English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese remain largely uniform across the Oceans because they are spread across the Oceans only recently, that is, not long before centralised nation states, compulsory education, sound recording, radio broadcasting, and YouTube.
Keeping Latin while it was helpful as a shared language when the scholar density was low and then moving on once local intellectual networks became stronger and mass education required efficiency may have been one of those "guns germs and steel" factors where Europe just happened to be lucky.
That’s a better analogy.
There’s no scientific reason to say all the Arabic dialects are “the same language” whereas all the modern Latin dialects are “different languages”.
It could be correct in the opposite side too, there is many Arabic sentences that need longer words to translate to English.
Edit: typos.
פעמיים נקודתיים
I definitely disagree on this. Sure, for some concepts, that might be true, but Arabic vocabulary and verbs are so diverse that there are many things that are much easier to say in Arabic.
Combined with the fact that written words are much shorter, you can easily see why Arabic Twitter is thriving so well. Before the tweet limit was raised, Arabic tweets could hold about the equivalent of a paragraph of information. Now that it's been increased they're essentially blog posts.
There are only 3 tenses: Also it's derivational language which mean once you learn about a verb you actually learn about the whole lexical family of the verb.
In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabic (kitaab, kaatib, maktaba) which is the same root (k,t,b) and with simple rules you can discover all those words or even invent them if not used previously The big problem of arabic as language is arabic societies/people/... but the language itself is a gem.
https://blogs.transparent.com/arabic/the-arabic-morphologica...
While words "transformation" might seem cool and convenient, there is no common rule on how to predict final meaning.
Also the pronunciation is very (VERY) important. One tiny mistake and you will end up telling your girlfriend that you have a gift from deep of your dog (كلب/ Kalb) instead of deep of your heart (قلب / K'alb).
In Arabic pronunciation is straight forward, in english pronunciation depends on each word (a,u,o) can have a different sounds (depends in which word used) and the emphasis also is a dark magic :D there are no such exceptions in Arabic
Arabic can be difficult but simple. English can be easy but complex.
As he pointed, you might tell your girlfriend this is a gift from your dog (كلب) instead of heart (قلب), but I'm sure that if she is a native speaker, she'll understand correctly.
I've seen the same mistakes happen in other languages, but the native speaker usually miss the meaning.
I think this relates to the fact that Arabic spoken language has a vast number is unique dialects, and they mostly understand each others dialects, unlike other languages that differs between dialects mostly in spelling sounds.
It is also highly regional. Someone from Glasgow pronounces things rather differently to someone from Brighton.
I don't speak Arabic, but my understanding is that someone from Morocco can't necessarily hold an easy conversation with someone from Qatar.
Whereas, I can name very few varieties of English that aren't easily mutually intelligible with basically all of the rest of the English-speaking world - patois and gullah, for example.
"I read that magazine": do I mean regularly, or that I have done in the past?
"The messenger wrote down Lincoln's address": was that his home, or his speech?
The context would need to be quite explicit to work around problems such as this.
“Dog” and “cat” have different pronunciations in English, and therefore mean different things.
There are many word pairs in many languages that are written exactly the same way but have different pronunciations and different meanings.
The verb "lead" and the noun "lead" (i.e., the metal) are two different words, pronounced differently. The fact that they are spelled the same is just an example of how the English writing system doesn't encode the English language perfectly accurately.
It's like confusing thumb with sum
I see might not be difficult for me to learn it since I know Swahili (the most commonly spoken language in East Africa, which has Arab influence) since those words are pronounced respectively: Kitabu(book), Katibu(secretary), Maktaba(library).
Arab is not really complicated. Trust me, I'm accustomed to more troublesome dialects in Africa.
I don't see why the word for "author" has to be derived from the same root as "book", logically speaking. There are a great deal more things than books that have authors.
The reason why this particular root that you've picked produces differences between "book" and "library" in most European languages is because they had two major sources from which their roots were borrowed: Latin (where "book" is "liber") and Greek (where "book" is "biblio"); and both roots were borrowed and used in this case. However, for most roots, the principle is exactly the same in European languages - a single common root produces a whole family of words, and new words are derived as needed. It's not something that's unique to Arabic.
2 of may favorite things about the language: 1/ fun fact is that the vast majority of verbs have only 3 letters in them 2/ Pronouns make a distinction between one, two or more people, and even indicate whether the subject is present or absent. I find it extremely powerful.
And those things all have their own words for their authors, as well.
poetry - sha3r
poet - shaa3r
composition (the noun of the verb) - ta2leef
composition (the thing written) - mu2allaf
composer - mu2allef
letter, correspondance - resala
messenger - rasool
correspondent (like a news reporter) - murasel
You can also use kaateb for the author of a letter or perhaps a poem, but not really a symphony. Just like you wouldn't use author. Pardon the use of the numbers in words - it's how people represent letters that aren't in English in Arabic.
Note, by the way, that your examples showcase the same pattern in English - the author of "poetry" is a "poet", the author of a "composition" is a "composer" etc.
I was more replying to your comment than continuing GP's argument, but I believe what they were trying to say is that the system used in Arabic is very regular and predictable. If I didn't know English, I might say that the person who writes poems is a poemer. Or a poetrier. I might try to use "to poetry" as a verb.
I wouldn't really make that argument because through learning Esperanto I realized that a truly logical language would make nearly no sense. You can't just invent any word you like in Esperanto, although it is sometimes billed that way, and you can't in Arabic. But at least it's very predictable and, at least, you can derive the meanings of an already-written text fairly easily.
The problem (touched upon in the OP) is that each dialect has its own domain of vocabulary, so even apart from foreign/native language influences, the classical vocabulary that sticks around in each dialect varies widely from one place to another. Some people use the verb for "work" to mean "work" and some use the verb for "preoccupy oneself" to mean "work."
Given that learning the language (in any form) is probably going to be a huge challenge the prospect of spending years studying the idiom only to end up in an arabophone country and not being able to fluently converse with anybody felt discouraging.
I eventually decided that I would focus on learning Russian instead, an other very difficult but obviously completely different languages (although it also features declensions and relatively simple conjugations minus the aspect thingy).
Do you think I was mistaken?
Written (formal) arabic is a different story though, I think that's what's commonly taught for non arabic people
But even within these dialects, there are regional dialects that might be difficult to understand even for native speakers from that same country.
For example, Tunisian Arabic can (roughly) be divided into northern and southern dialects. I've met people in the north who think I'm from Libya because of some words that are shared with southern Tunisian Arabic. Tunisia is a relatively small country, so imagine the variation in dialects in Egypt!
If you're interested in learning Arabic, don't let this scare you! The "generic" Egyptian, Lebanese, and Syrian dialects will easily be understood by most Middle Easterners and a fair chunk of North Africans.
But note that Egyptian Arabic is very different from Lebanese and Syrian Arabic (which both are in the Levantine Arabic family).
Would you say this is true of spoken english as well? By that I mean, a large amount of the difficulty involving english involves our train-wreck of spelling rules, spoken english on the other hand tends to be reasonably easy to become functional in (apart from idioms). Would you say that Arabic is simpler than purely spoken english as well?
I'll never regret what Arabic has taught me directly and indirectly about the world.
I have seen a lot of the contrast of the myopic sheltered culture of middle class Northeast US I grew up in. And I learned Europeans borrowed and saved a lot of important knowledge for safe keeping with the Arabs in Arabic. I see certain artistic themes go so far back even beyond classical Arab history and they give evidence of that. Ditto for math and science.
Ugly is beautiful too, man.
من يعلمني حرفا فصرت له عبدا!
For he who teaches me a letter, for him I become a slave. I saw this old trope on a classroom board studying in Cairo and it has stayed with me all my life.
Perhaps, not so much philosophical...
This is exactly the situation with Hindi (and I'd venture to say all Indian languages). The colloquial (or at least urban) vocabulary seems so much smaller than English that it's just faster to code-mix in English words and phrases in a lot of situations. And insisting on speaking in Hindi would require a lot more metaphors and indirect expression than seemingly how the same thing would be said in English.
Even if a Hindi word exists for a very specific concept, and the speaker knows the listener probably knows it, it's considered less pretentious to use the English equivalent than to use the ten-dollar Hindi word.
Why is that?
Reverse snobism towards the upper or more educated classes?
As an outsider who knows very little about Indian culture, it feels wrong and sad.
These days using a difficult Hindi word (especially one derived from Sanskrit, or one that sounds Sanskrit-ish) in place of a common English term also signals that the speaker supports the political right wing.
Well that's a stretch. I am also a native speaker and given Arabic(s) has its quirks it can be extremely fluid especially when politics leave it alone.
You know, and I don’t mean to question the veracity of your statement, I don’t think you are a native speaker at all. I think you grew up hearing enough Arabic to understand it and speak it. I would bet you speak and think in English and not in Arabic.
I'll just put this out there, I find Arabic very descriptive. Think about the food! Lahm w Aajeen (Meat and Dough) is a meat pie that you have for breakfast. So many food items have names that are just the ingredients!
Also, while yes, the written form differs from how you speak, I speak Lebanese to any other person whose dialect is is different, and they will understand me. Whether Syrian, Iraqi, etc.
And for the record, I've been to Yorkshire, England and I had so much trouble understanding what the heck they said. I'm confident this problem occurs in many other languages, and not just Arabic.
Also, depending on where you come from in the country, you will have a different accent e.g. North Lebanon vs. South Lebanon.
In Canada, if you're from Newfoundland, you will definitely have an accent and people from anywhere in the Country would notice it.
No language is perfect, you just have to roll with the dice.
So are we talking almost different languages, or minor differences?
As for your other criticisms, I mean they sound a lot like English criticisms. Because English has a lot of those problems too, at a greater or lower scale I can't say. But I wonder.
>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.
My experience was that English and Urdu are much worse grammarwise. In the latter, it's not so much that there are exceptions to rules - it's that the rules are the exception. Most of the language doesn't follow grammatical rules. It's not as bad in English, but the problem exists. When I used to help people learn English, I could see how frustrated they would get whenever they'd ask a question and they'd be told "yeah, this is just how it is".
IIRC, most of formal Arabic is covered by first level grammar rules. The thing I found interesting about it is that the exceptions themselves have rules. So it wasn't a case of "just memorize that this is an exception" that you'd have for other languages. It was "Here's the exception to that bigger rule, and you know if a word/phrase should follow the exception based on these rules". I think the challenge you speak of is that sometimes even the exceptions had exceptions.
I'm not a native speaker, so I may be wrong. Overall I found it the most structured language amongst all of these. It's not simple, but it's not haphazard.
(Speaking only of formal Arabic).
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.
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.
https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/35348/as-a-native...
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.
Countries with french as an official language only have a total population of 434 million people. And a few of them, like canada, has english as an official language as well. Also, most of the francophile countries are small former african colonies which may one day give up french as an official language and move to english or a native language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_entities_w...
French language's geographical and population reach is smaller than china's. The same applies for arabic and spanish.
> and Chinese (Mandarin) indeed largely useless outside greater China.
Which is true, but greater china accounts for a significant amount of land and people.
French, Arabic and Spanish account for 1.3 billion people. China alone has 1.4 billion people.
But this is a moot point since the french, arabs, spaniards and chinese are all desperate to learn english since english ( for the time being ) is the language of culture, science and business. I don't see chinese, french, arabic or spanish unseating english as the world's language.
That’s not happening outside of a war. It did in Rwanda because of a war where the side that eventually won spent long periods outside their home country and hated French as a symbol of the Belgians. Ditto for Algeria with the French though French is still a lingua franca so pervasive it might as well be official.
Why would an entire country that’s not undergoing a war or revolution stop speaking a language basically all educated people speak? Where is the political benefit in doing so?
Usually nationalism and self-interest. It's why england switched from norman french to english a few hundred years ago. It's also why kazahkstan switched from cryllic to latin alphabet recently and has been pushing for kazakh and english education to the detriment of russian.
> Where is the political benefit in doing so?
To get rid of their former foreign masters' language? As france's power and influence continues to wane, what incentive is there for africans to hold onto a language forced upon them by colonizers? The french language is a symbol of humiliation for a lot of african and asian countries and their elites. Especially the nationalists.
I'm not saying it will happen, but it could. Especially if france declines further and the political and financial incentive to stick to french disappears.
Not to mention the huge economic and culture importance of it in the future give that vasts amounts of culture products are produced in China.
There may be more countries speaking it, but many of those countries are practically speaking, not as important as China because they don’t produce much exported culture.
Even Korean and Japanese IMHO arguably have greater use dur to Kdrama/pop And Anime. Whereas Arabic would only be useful during tourist trips and practically speaking it’s easier for people to consume exported culture than to travel to dozens of countries.
The top 10 list is, in order, English, Mandarin, Hindustani, Spanish, Arabic, French, Malay, Russian, Bengali, and Portuguese.
English we already speak. Mandarin is primarily useful in China and not so much otherwise. Hindustani has the same problem but for India, and there's also a good amount of overlap with English there too. Spanish is the next language in the list, above Arabic and French. Incidentally I speak some French, and didn't find it that necessary for navigating the two French-speaking countries I've visited so far. English was widely spoken and understood.
And I have to point out the irony here of being accused of being US-centric when I'm talking about Spanish, and of visiting other countries where Spanish is dominant (Spain and most of South/Central America).
In a given year the languages that would help me are Russian, Mandarin, and Arabic. French in some parts of Africa (and France/Belgium of course).
In places like India and Kenya, I follow conversations with the locals as they generally speak English, but then they throw in borrowed phrases (Hindi, Swahili, etc).
Do yourself a favor and buy a cheap flight to Barcelona and make it 51.
New Zealand, Austrailia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, South Korea, Japan, India, Pakistan, Russia, Qatar, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil, St Lucia, USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Portugal, Gibraltar, Italy, Vatican City, Switzerland, Greece, Hungary, Germany, Czech Republic, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden
Before that they were only places like Austria, Lichtenstein, Finland, etc
I've never been to Spain. Never been to Slovenia either, just hasn't come up. I can't think of any other non-american countries that have Spanish as the official language.
I've come close to visiting Chile, Mexico and Cuba at various points, but never had the dots fall into place.
That's all countries in the western hemisphere of any decent size except for the US, Canada, and Brazil.
So you just haven't traveled much in the western hemisphere.
(And St Lucia)
The Western Hempisphere is mostly water, there's not a lot there compared with the eastern hemisphere. Far East is my favorite long haul destination, but both SubSaharan Africa and Middle East have their charms.
If you're outside the US you might think that Spanish is relegated to the areas near the border, but no: I have driven through towns in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania and seen stores with signs exclusively in Spanish; I have hitchhiked through Aurora, Illinois and encountered wandering mariachi bands making their way to a quinceañera; the alley behind my apartment in Massachusetts is filled nightly with the excited Spanish exclamations of children at play.
By no means is Spanish strictly required to enjoy the US, but it will give you insight into enormous US subcultures that many won't ever appreciate.
Looking at https://blog.udemy.com/how-many-countries-speak-spanish/ tells me that outside of the Americas, I can use Spanish in
Spain Gibraltar (which is painfully British) Andorra
It makes sense for Americans to take Spanish as a second language, but for Europe; Arabic and Russian are in countries that are far closer, French and German are more widely spoken in Europe. Spanish is only useful if you go to Spain on holiday, and then not in the normal resorts.
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.
And yes, in Japanese culture it would be extremely rude to point out errors in a guest's attempts to speak the language.
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.
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.
In my country (Egypt), Turkey is actually seen as being a huge part of Islamic history, and it's often cited as a proof of the diversity of the Islamic and Arabic world that it was hugely impacted by the Turkish culture (Words, Foods..etc).
Some quite common words are on that list: jumper, cat, fanfare...
Ahem, but I think most Arabs complain about Turkish imperialism. I don't think Turkey was ever conquered by the Arabs, but the reverse is true.
When did this happen? What year/century are you talking about?
Highly ironic, this!
Arabic is the language of poetry, so don't let how it sounds deceive you ;)
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-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.
But one thing I can say is mabrook (congrats) on the fund raising. Really cool stuff you're doing. At least that word is common across the region.
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.
The Persian alphabet seems to be lacking some vowels. How is that handled when writing Urdu?
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.
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.
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.
The Chinese government is by no means unique in this approach. Violent suppression of minority cultures has been a common occurrence in world history.
Yes, that’s what I just said.
> Nearly every modern state promotes a national language.
While I agree that many states engage in implicit or explicit suppression of minority cultures (often worse in the past than today), and many (most?) states have a legally declared official language, your brief summary is a false equivalence. There are many places in the world where e.g. media in local languages is allowed, children are allowed to attend schools speaking their native languages, official government documents are translated into all of the most common minority languages, there is institutional support for cultural preservation, minority religious faiths are allowed to freely practice, etc.
So to your points, the only one that Shanghai did not fulfill would probably be the "allowed to attend schools speaking their native languages" part. I'm not sure I think Shanghainese should be, maybe it should have a formal class? There are free classes you can take (usually by District), and everyone spoke Shanghainese at home, so I'm not sure it's necessary.
If you go to Shanghai, buses and subways announce in three languages: Mandarin, English, and Shanghainese. I was just there beginning of October and yes, not all buses had this but it was prevalent enough. This means they are promoting the Shanghainese language (a subset of the larger Wu Chinese dialect). There are TV shows in Shanghai / Jiangsu / Zhejiang that are solely in the Wu dialect - and this is not recent. I remember watching shows with my aunts and uncles 15 years ago. XinMin Evening News always had some cartoons (think New Yorker cartoons but not as highbrow) with Shanghainese dialect subtitles (as in Chinese words that most mimic the Shanghainese dialect).
If you go to Guangdong or Guangxi, many people still have trouble speaking Mandarin, especially outside of bigger cities like Guangzhou. In 2010 I was doing some volunteer work in a tiny village a few hours from Guangzhou and the kids we met literally did not understand Mandarin. The CCP struggled really hard to make schooling in Guangdong province taught in Mandarin (but succeeded by the 80s-ish, again, only in bigger cities). Now though, more and more schools are starting to do Cantonese classes with their own textbooks, alongside the standard Mandarin education.
I am not an expert, but my impression as an outsider is that Shanghai, as one of the richest and most politically influential cities (and main media centers) in today’s China, can accomplish quite a bit more along these lines than most other cities.
It’s great to hear that there is significant support for continued use of Shanghainese. In your experience, has the government’s approach changed over time? Would you say that support for the Shanghainese language is increasing or diminishing? What about popular awareness/activism?
In your experience do most kids in Shanghai today end up using Shanghainese as their primary language when talking with their peers? I have heard from multiple Chinese immigrants that the younger generation in their home cities now primarily use Mandarin.
> Now though, more and more schools are starting to do Cantonese classes with their own textbooks, alongside the standard Mandarin education.
That is encouraging.
Until around 1990, they promoted it brutally, fitting the description of the GP. IIRC the history, in the first free elections in Taiwan in the early 1990s, one appeal of the winner is that he spoke the local dialect.
Edit: it was mentioned in a previous edit of parent comment
[edit] sorry re-read and saw that the U.S. government did fund them.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations
> Children taken to such institutions were trained to be assimilated to Anglo-Australian culture. Policies included punishment for speaking their local indigenous languages. The intention was to educate them for a different future and to prevent their being socialised in Aboriginal cultures.
During multiple times throughout the history, it wasn't healthy to speak other Iberian languages in public.
- Florentine Italian displaced Sardinian, Napolitan, Romanesco, etc.
- Ille-de-france French displaced Provencal, Occitan, Breton, etc.
- English displaced Scots, Gaelic, Welsh, etc.
Even countrires traditionally considered "nation-states" in a linguistic sense such as Portugal went down this route to some degree, with Mirandese and Barranqueno all but gone nowadays.
Didn't knew that main Italian came from Florence, thanks for the hint.
I know my Iberian friends might have an argument about the last three ones, but I opted to list them as such anyway.
Then there are tiny ones like Leonese, which the government provides support for learning and still have small communities speaking it.
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.
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.
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.
And does inferring / generating words this way actually work? For example, can I say "makra" (مقرأ) for "Library", a place where you read? Based on the verb "yakra" (read).
Bookshop: matjar/dukkan (shop/store) kutub (books)
Library: maktaba
Office: maktab
Desk: maktab
The difference between office and desk is found from context.
It's a real shame the contemporary literature is so small.
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.
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.
This was once considered significant enough that a distinction was drawn between "strong" irregular verbs that inflect through a vowel change (rise / rose; grow / grew; swim / swam...), and "weak" irregular verbs that derive their irregular past form from the regular one (bend / bent; sleep / slept...).
It's a productive system in modern Arabic and a fossil of earlier times in modern English, but it's not different in kind.
For example the word (as written) k-t-b (كتب) means "write" but could just as much mean letters, writer, books etc; these stems are really how you think of the word at a much deeper level than you get out of English etymology[+] or (IMHO) Hanzi radicals. Arabic has some limited case, but the grammar is quite different from PIE languages, lacking a "to be" verb and adjectival/adverbial distinctions (a fast car and a car that was swift are differentiated only by the article).
[+] I really love that English is pretty conservative in spelling so that you can often tell the meaning of the word by looking at how it is written. Languages like German that reform their spelling periodically to match pronunciation shifts snip those connections away (while French goes the other way...there's a reason why a spelling bee can be prime time television in France).
You're making binary what your parent did not.
Any advise? Or maybe prediction which will win the "language" war in Europe?
When I was speaking it, which was a long time ago and I remember almost nothing, I sounded like a footballer clearing his throat :)
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_...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#List_of_la...
Foreign languages only tend to have staying power until the 2nd or 3rd generation. All these immigrants are going to public schools in their respective countries where the official language is spoken, it's expected that they speak it at their jobs etc.
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.
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.
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.
Most of their names (at least in Hindi) are recognisable from enlish/latin/greek. Looks like that's not the case in Arabic, unsurprisingly really... unless 7 = سَبْعَة = sabʿä = sabbath counts, but I suspect we got that from semitic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numbers_in_various_lan...