Hacker News Reader

Comment by amasad | Hacker News Reader

It'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-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.

View on HN

I live in Algeria, you need to know that France colonized Algeria for more than 130 years so like 25% of our words are French when speaking Algerian dialect that's why you struggle. without mention there tons of words from Berbers tribes before Islam that still in use. but the official language is still Arabic Fusha and its used in every official document not dialect.

Yes, I know that. My mother is Algerian ;)

Plus 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.

Yep, here's a post game football match interview with live translation across three Arabic dialects: https://twitter.com/haythamx/status/1040904833929289728?s=21

Certainly. In Jordan, 5-10% of our words, when we're speaking Arabic that is, is English.

This morning someone shared with me an article on cnbc that a guy and a girl from Jordan raised 4.5 million and now I see you here, congratulations :)

haha only on HN. And thank you!

I only took issue with the analogy, not the starkness. Which I suppose is maybe a different argument since you need to understand the Latin languages relationship to Latin.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com