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I 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.

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I'm native arabic speaker too, and can tell you that your statement is far from the truth. Arabic is far more simple language with fewer exceptions than english or french (I love/speak french :D).

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...

The translation is Book, Author, Library; (kitaab, kaatib, maktaba); respectively.

Good catch ! Thank you

I'd argue that Arabic is simpler than English. It might have been simpler for you as your were the native :) For me Arabic and English both are foreign and I can definitely tell you that English was much simpler to learn.

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).

you're right ! and a little bit biased because pronunciation is important for all languages out there I see the same issue with french foreign speakers too.

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.

I agree with you, I even think that Arabic speakers are the best at understanding foreigners speech.

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.

And language aside, a partner that is willing to meet you halfway in understanding is a great partner. :)

> in english pronunciation depends on each word (a,u,o) can have a different sounds (depends in which word used)

It is also highly regional. Someone from Glasgow pronounces things rather differently to someone from Brighton.

Is it as regional as Arabic, though?

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.

In my work, I have colleagues from all Arabic countries among others, I talk to people of Morroco and my Arabic is more Levante, with no issue at all. Syrian dialect, along with Egyptian, has gained a lot of ease in the region due to popular tv series and movies (more Egyptian than Syrian ones)I predict that the variations will be reduced since the differences grow out of old geographical barriers that gave distinctions and differences. There is a lesser strict everyday language that is very simple yet formal Arabic, as in the news, be it TV or online. So please look further before jumping to conclusions, as in the region you would read the news regardless of the geographical aspect of the source. If an Arabic website in Morroco has a compelling news story, or article speakers of Arabic in the whole region and abroad will read it very comfortably.

The difference is that English words don't really change meanings based on pronunciation. Words do have many pronunciations, but the meaning remains the same.

Oh really, what about 'lead' and 'lead'?

They will never be confused because context supplies the clues.

This is often true, but far from universal. Oftentimes there are differences in verb and noun (as with "lead" and "lead"), or transitive vs. intransitive verbs ("seconded"), but occasionally we have problems with two nouns or two verbs with the same form:

"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.

If context supplied enough clues, grammar correction software would work much better than it does.

Words don't change meaning based on pronunciation. They're different words.

What do you mean?

“Dog” and “cat” have different pronunciations in English, and therefore mean different things.

Dog and Cat are different words.

There are many word pairs in many languages that are written exactly the same way but have different pronunciations and different meanings.

You are thinking of the written language as the fundamental thing. Actually spoken language is fundamental, and writing is an imperfect representation of it.

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.

That's a totally different letter, not a different pronunciation..

It's like confusing thumb with sum

... which likely happens as well.

"In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabic (kitaab, kaatib, maktaba) which is the same root (k,t,b)"

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.

> 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

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.

Indeed, many languages have a concept of root from which words must be derived. In Arabic, it’s much more pronounced, because knowing the root of a word is essential to being able to use the language effectively.

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.

The concept word is not clearly defined. As a programmer it seems natural to assume that a word is a short series of bits. Anything else is composition. Why is of a word but -ed isn't? ab- is from the same origion, as in aberrant. The difference isn't completely arbitrary. Bio Logy might as well be two wods. The keyword is lexicalization and how words are learned. Obviously, shorter words are easier to discover.

> There are a great deal more things than books that have authors

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.

So then the correct translation was "writer"?

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.

Yes, kaateb can be translated as "author" or "writer" or "scribe" 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."

I love learning languages and learning about languages. I considered seriously learning Arabic but I eventually decided against it mainly because, as the parent points out, there seem to be many variations between countries and also between formal, literary arabic and the spoken dialects.

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?

Even though there are many dialects, nobody will misunderstand you. And, beyond that, it’s easy for everyone to shift to using a more formal Arabic in order to communicate with you.

yes but you are judged based on the dialect you speak, i have experienced cases where i wasn't taken seriously by businessmen coz i spoke a turkish variant of arabic in saudi arabia

True, but North African dialects in general are not understood at all by Middle Easterners. Further, some of the Gulf dialects (e.g., Iraqi, Omani, Yemeni) can be hard to understand.

You would just learn Egyptian or Lebanese arabic, everyone would understand you.

Written (formal) arabic is a different story though, I think that's what's commonly taught for non arabic people

I would add Syrian to that list.

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.

> The "generic" Egyptian/Lebanese/Syrian dialect 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).

Definitely! I was just pointing out that these three dialects are the most universally understood, primarily due to their domination of Arabic music and film/TV.

It reminds me of Czech, where a fixed list of prefixes can be used to modify the meaning of any verb, with very creative possibilities!

https://mluvtecesky.net/en/grammar/prefixes

Same in Polish, with some curse words providing very flexible bases for every situation.

Do you know of a resource that shows pictograms for Polish like the one the parent shows? My partner is Polish and I’m slowly acquiring the language, butI have always struggled to visualise the meanings of the Polish equivalent prefixes

Most of them are the same as in Polish. The "prefixes" are called "przyimek" (plural przyimki) in Polish, try googling for that. Here's an example: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/73/ad/c8/73adc83b89ba15c7a79f...

Same in many other indo-european languages. See Language tree: https://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/196.jpg

> Arabic is far more simple language with fewer exceptions than english or french

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 would say that English is somewhat hard, mostly because of the exceptions in the past participate, words that are NOT - edit - spelled phonetically, making it hard to learn new words, and there are many tenses - not as many as in French, most of which are misused when casually speaking.

English spelling is a feature, not a bug. You can tell the origin of nearly any word by it's spelling, and knowing that gives you clues to pronunciation and grammar. If you're ignorant of latin and more modern European languages it might be difficult though.

But spelling keeps changing. What's the origin behind "check", as in checkbook?

yeah sure at an academic level arabic is tres beautiful just like french but realistically none of that translates to everyday spoken arabic to the point where you have to learn a different dialect based on who you want to sound like - a denizen of a country, a foreigner or a bedouin. arabic is one of those languages where there are so many local modifications going on it's insane amounts of effort to be known as "fluent" and "understandable". people in arabia even use emojis differently for crissakes

You might think that but I decided to major in it in college and it led to many crazy life choices I sometimes regret, but I go to the Arab world often as a result of them.

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.

What is the meaning of the quote? that when someone teaches you to read, that you have a huge philosophical debt to them (that can never be repayed)?

> philosophical debt

Perhaps, not so much philosophical...

I'm also a native arabic speaker. I also speak french and English fluently. What you say is utterly false. I think that trying to evaluate a language based on it being similar to western languages simplicity for it to be good/bad is plain nonsense. Arabic having many variant local dialects is not an awful thing but a richness. I will not fall into the trap of saying such language is better or worse. What I can say is that Arabic as a language is complexe and that is why it is a very much powerful language to express ideas an emotions then other languages I know.

> 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.

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.

I've noticed that in Tagalog and Japanese as well.

> 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.

No it's not anti-intellectualism of any kind. If anything, Indians have a high regard for education. It just comes across as artificial because usage of those words is now mostly limited to literary contexts.

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.

I'm a polyglot, and what keeps me from trying to learn Arabic is precisely that.

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 fact that the Tunisian dialect is infused with French words doesn't help with communication either, especially with someone from the middle East.

Your anecdote is also mentioned in the article [0] linked somewhere in this thread:

"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."

[0] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=40379

Would it be comparable to, say, Dutch and Afrikaans? They sound similar and up to a point people from those countries can have a conversation in their respective languages, but there's just so many differences that it's easier to switch to English.

Dutch and Afrikaans is probably in the top three most similar language pairs among Indo-European languages along with Spanish-Portuguese-Italian (a three way) and Danish-Norwegian bokmål. The fact that people switch to English is more a reflection of how good English language education is than the difference between the languages. If you are in Italy and you speak Spanish and English you’ll get more benefit from your Spanish outside tourist traps.

> 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.

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

The Quran and its language ("Modern Standard Arabic") may be what binds the "dialects" together under one umbrella label "Arabic". Chinese is in a similar situation, whose writing system unifies the mutually un-intelligible "dialects" like Mandarin, Hokkien, and Cantonese as one "language" called "Chinese".

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.

The parallel to post-Roman Europe is interesting, where Latin lived on for quite a while as the language of writing. It gradually gave way to written forms of the various spoken languages, derivatives of Latin or others. During this time of parallel usage Latin, just by being there as an alternative for the elites to show off pedantry, may have helped establishing a tradition of keeping the new written languages continuously aligned with their permanently changing spoken counterparts.

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.

The spreading of English and Spanish across oceans is much younger than the spreading of Arabic. Arabic had many centuries more to diverge than English or Spanish. The regional separation of Arabic is only few centuries younger than that of Latin if we pretend for simplicity that the empire somehow had uniform language.

Well try going from south of England to the north of Scotland and tell me these people speak the same language.

Concur. I simply cannot understand the English spoken by Scots.

Up till about 100 years ago, most of today's Arabic speaking areas were at least nominally under Turkish suzeranity, Turkey also was the centre of the Islamic world for so long, I wonder if the Turks did not try to replace Arabic with Turkish?

I believe they were fairly light handed in that regard, and respected the cultural independence of their people. Grain of salt though, vague memory.

French and Spanish aren’t mutually intelligible with each other, despite both being dialects of Latin.

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's very convoluted and it takes many more words to describe things accurately than latin and/or germanic languages

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.

I am a native speaker. I have no idea what language you are describing. 1) Arabic is highly expressive, the number of ways a root word can be morphed is astonishing. In fact, I would guess it’s unmatched in expressiveness. 2) grammatically speaking, it’s very simple. A little kid can tell you when something is off in grammar. Why? Because Arabic is a language where the semi-vowels indicate the grammar. And because of this, a grammatically incorrect statement will just sound weird. This ease is why most (educated) native speakers have learned grammar at a young age. They will have poetry memorized and understand grammar in a fundamental way.

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.

> knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly

So just like every other language.

I speak 4 languages and Arabic is by far the worst in this regard.

I too speak four languages (one of them very poorly).

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?

Except of course glorious English! /s

Yep.

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.

> 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.

> True enough. I learned two of the languages I know by reading books (after starting with magazines etc)

Interesting...how long did it take you to become proficient? And does proficiency in speech your reading ability?

I can't honestly remember how long it took. Not that long, possibly. The first book took a while, but at the end of the book I had decoded what I first didn't understand (by seeing the words used in various contexts), and reading books after that became easy. New expressions and phrases were quickly understood.

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..

I have to disagree. Past a certain age, you will learn a lot from written material, and the difference between a language that is orthographically regular and one that isn't, is like night and day.

I've dabbled in Arabic, Spanish and Urdu. When it comes to this:

>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).

Being a native Urdu speaker I second you.

If everyone spoke Lakhnavi Urdu I’d get it, but my impression (heritage speaker) is that Urdu in Pakistan today at least is less grammatically demanding in comparison because people who don’t speak it as a home language have had to learn it. I would think reading and writing would be the problem compared to English. Can you give an example besides memorizing genders where there’s a noticeable lack of grammar that impedes learning?

Hmmm...not sure I agree with you. I also used to speak 4 languages, and native Arabic (Lebanese) being one of them. Terrible at Spanish now, Advanced French, Average Lebanese, but English is tops.

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.

All that aside, I find the script flowing and incredibly elegant and beautiful, purely from an aesthetic point of view.

Can'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?

That script is used in several languages that are unrelated to Arabic though, like Urdu for example.

> 1. It's very convoluted and it takes many more words to describe things accurately than latin and/or germanic languages

It could be correct in the opposite side too, there is many Arabic sentences that need longer words to translate to English.

Sounds to me like arabic is an equivalent of evolved latin. It is kind of the situation that would have happened if no languages had evolved from latin and we would still have regional interpretations of latin. Am I correct? Is it possible that arabic continues to evolve into completely different languages with grammar, lexicon and all?

Edit: typos.

I mean I guess I don't know, and some people have disagreed with you. But how do Arabic dialects compare to all the English dialects. I mean U.S., U.K. and Australians can all understand each other mostly, but there's all those little differences too (that I personally enjoy). And even within English speaking countries there are dialects.

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.

> It is an awful language.

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.

Well, that part is subjective.

At least it is phonetic though.

Nonsense. Arabic is Arabic. It is not convoluted. It is sophisticated and powerful. You are mixing dialicts with languages. Go to rural -middle of nowhere- villages in Scotland. Good luck understanding a single word.

There's no hard line between dialects and languages. As they say, "language is a dialect with an army".

> I'd describe it as PHP ecosystem/stdlib/development practices

פעמיים נקודתיים

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