Why Arabic is Terrific
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I can see how you can read that comment as a dig at the DLI, but that wasn't my intent.
I've had many experiences over the years with both Monterey and DLI, and one thing you neglected to mention was that the average "frat boy" at DLI is in his forties, about 15 years older than the average at Monterey. While the merry Monterey kids tend to be fresh from the trenches at some campus political activist club, the average DLI student has spent those extra fifteen or so years on the ground, in military or diplomatic postings, dealing with life and death issues deep within other cultures. If they seem grimmer than you, it's quite possible that they have lost some of your frat boy illusions during those fifteen years off campus.
Nope, not unique.
Tamil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language) is the same way. I am a native tamil speaker.
To some extent, isn't this true for English as well, at least in the UK? Many regional dialects are almost mutually unintelligible, but everyone understands Standard English (aka Received Pronunciation or "BBC English".) Perhaps in Arabic the differences are even more about vocabulary and grammar, not just pronunciation?
For a while there was even a neutral American British accent used in major broadcasts and films...but it's since dropped by the wayside.
For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_dialect#History (that article quotes the
You're right that it's a mostly defunct upper-class accent (see Kelsey Grammer for a modern example) taught at boarding schools.
But it was also specifically taught to thespians as a preferred accent for radio, television and film performance in the early part of the 20th century. Performers like Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn both performed in it even though it wasn't their regular accent.
In some stage acting schools it's still taught as a "neutral" accent for performance.
In Japan, everybody learns Standard Japanese Pronunciation, and I've never had a problem getting around even in the boonies.
In China, I believe there are still a lot of people that don't speak Standard Mandarin, but this number will continue to shrink thanks to the explosive growth of high-speed (Radio/TV/Internet) media in China.
"you find out that the underlying language is pretty vanilla, and meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between you and the ability to skim a newspaper." This comment about Chinese and Japanese (totally unrelated languages with very different writing systems, is laughable. The syntax of Chinese is simple (it pretty much has non at all) but Japanese syntax is complicated.
The OMG moment one faces when faced with thousands or weird Chinese signs is partly an illusion. Yes, you have to memorize a lot of things, like any other languages, but the meaning of a Chinese word can be guessed if you know the determinitve, even f you don't know the word. There are only about 200 determinitives.
An interesting thing about Arabic is that, due to its tie to Koran, it's been studied linguistically since early times. But other languages can also boast such long examined lives, e.g. Sanskrit or Chinese.
No it's not. I studied Japanese as my fourth language for 1.5 years and went through pretty much exactly what the OP described.
Edit: Other languages were Spanish English and Italian.
I don't know what exactly the OP means by "vanilla" in this context, these languages are anything but vanilla! One could argue that perhaps English grammar is vanilla because it has developed certain creole-like characteristics due to various pressures during its history: Compared to most other languages in the IE family, its grammar is quite simplified, it's lost most of its complexity.
Japanese: topic instead of subject marking, deference forms, completely different morphological categories?
Chinese: productive verb serialization, very different syntax?
That's just off the top of my head
But that's not the point really. Learning any language well is mind-bending for any speaker of another language. It does help if the languages are different (I remember very vividly the click that went in my head in high school when I was taking English, Chinese and Hebrew simultaneously... that's how I ended up in linguistics grad school), but different people have their minds bent by completely different things. I mean, root-and-pattern morphology is really cool when it's that regular, but if you think of it it's not horribly different from Germanic strong verbs (write-wrote-written). Weird agreement patterns? Well, Welsh only uses the 3pl verb forms with a pronominal subject, so "they they-went" but "people he-went" (as, for that matter, do some varieties of English). And so on.
I mean, sure, whatever floats your boat, and it's awesome that studying Arabic can be so fulfilling; I've had the same experience with Welsh. But at the end of the day all languages bend your mind, and I don't think there can be an objective metric. They are just hard.
Putting Chinese and Japanese (I guess because their
writing systems are kind of similar) is similar to,
similar to saying the same for English and Basque (which,
like Japanese is agglutinative) because they both use the
Latin alphabet.
Actually, Chinese and Japanese people could read (or rather, infer meaning from) texts the respective other has written if they use the subset of characters that both know (Hanzi ∩ Kanji, if you'd like ;) ), even though they could never communicate verbally. It'd be a bit like showing each other drawings of things that both know and understand, yet have completely different names for.
Comparing both on a purely grammatical/syntactical level, of course, is pretty meaningless.
I've been studying Japanese as my fourth language for over 2 years, and I have to disagree with both you and the OP. If you didn't find Japanese to be very gramatically challenging or interesting, you unfortunately probably didn't get into any keigo, which contains grammar of a mindbogglingly high level of complexity that is probably only surpassed by a similar system in Korean, since Japanese grammar was artificially simplified during the Meiji Restoration in order to make a simpler national dialect that all Japanese could easily learn/use. Nevertheless, the situational shifts in Japanese grammar based upon the relationship between the speaker and the listener are very difficult to become accustomed to, even for native speakers.
In 2. The exceptions are called plural exceptions which happen much less than the general rule, Otherwise most of Arabic follows a very specific rule to making plurals from singulars.
In 7. Adjectives have no gender, and therefore al-kutub hadra' (الكتب حضراء) "The books, she is green" this translates to the books are green (hadra is an adjective and has no gender)
In 9. Formally Arabic numbers are read right to left, i.e. we read the least significant digit first. Although very few people do this.
In 10. It is next to impossible to understand any written text which is a 1000 years by the average Joe, including the Qur'an
7. I don't know what makes you say this. Adjectives in Arabic agree in gender, number and case. The masculine of hadra' is ahdar.
10. This is true for the average Iosif, but if you study MSA (like American students invariably do) these texts really are accessible. A short sura from the Qur'an is taught in the second semester Arabic curriculum.
Khadra' here is a form of plural, not the feminine of akhdar. The literal translation might be "she is green," but the correct translation is "the books are green." No native arabic speaker will think of the books as feminine while referring to them in plural, but in singular objects' gender is strangely ingrained in our minds:
kitab akhdar : green book (masculine)
tawila khadra' : green table (feminine)
However, there is a definite decline in the number of people who can fluently and eloquently use MLA. Keeping this (sad) trend in mind, you will definitely find native speakers who have trouble understanding not only the old texts, but even the more silver-tongued of the modern ones. This isn't unique to Arabic. Perhaps a parallel can be found in the constant confusion between the possessives and the abbreviated verbs with English pronouns even by native English speakers.
I'm not claiming that formal and eloquent Arabic is going to die any time soon, however the rise of movements such as Masry (http://arz.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%88%D9%8A%D9%83%D9%8A%D8%A8...) is a sure tell sign that maybe there aren't as many people speaking it as we thought there are.
And I believe something should be done about this.
I'm a native Arabic speaker too.
First, khadra خضراء really is the femenine form of "green". The muscular form is akhdar اخضر
Second, it really is true that we use feminine forms when referring to multiple "it"s. You probably never consciously realized it, but think about it:
beautiful flowers ازهار جميلة
beautiful girls بنات جميلات
beautiful boys اولاد جميلون
Note how jameela is the singular feminine form of the adjective.
beautiful girl بنت جميلة
beautiful boy ولد جميل
In the 11th century, standard Church Latin had evolved slightly relative to Cicero but was clearly the same language; someone who was fluent in Church Latin could reliably travel anywhere in Christendom (and to cosmopolitan cities elsewhere) and make themselves understood. The local dialect there might have evolved from Latin, or might not, but there'd be someone educated and literate that they could communicate with. In the areas where the language had evolved from Latin, the hoi polloi could kinda sorta make out the Latin (better in some areas than others), and the cleverer ones could figure out the relationships between their language and Latin, and the educated ones would just go learn Latin (but perhaps have an easy time of it).
Thus also, mutatis mutandis, with Modern Standard Arabic. The analogy isn't perfect but it turns out to be pretty darn good and lets you make some good guesses about the situation on the ground in the Arabic-speaking world and the mutual intelligibility of, say, Qatari and Tunisian (i.e. not very much).
Not Chinese?
(Also, #9 hardly seems like an item to include in an article explaining 'Why Arabic is Terrific'. 'Terrifying', perhaps.)
On the other hands, Kurds have their language(s?) despite not having an army or a navy.
As a Swede, especially spoken Danish is completely unitelligible.
Having worked with Norwegians the last few years, I have learned to understand spoken Norwegian most of the time. There is however a lot of variation i dialects, making some of them easy to umderstand, while others are almost as bad as Danes.
In adition to dialects, there are enough unique words and idioms in each language to make especially written norwegian cryptic.
There are also a lot of gotchas where the same words have different meaning. A fun example is the expression "rar tös" meaning "sweet little girl" in Swedish, but "weird slut" in Norwegian.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
"" 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. ""
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.
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_...)
الكتب books(definite) حضراء green(feminine singular indefinite)
1. Lots of people speak Mandarin at home. No one speaks MSA at home except us poor language students.
2. The set of languages binned under 'Chinese' is much more diverse than the Arabic dialect continuum.
3. The writing system is shared between several languages. You can write Cantonese (kind of) in hanzi and write notes that Mandarin speakers can read even though the languages are totally mutually unintelligble.
4. There is no dominant dialect of Arabic, like there is a dominant variety of Chinese. Instead every dialect shares the same formal register (MSA) which is taught in school like a foreign language.
Egyptian Arabic is dominant in a similar way to American English, i.e. Egypt had the largest movie industry and population, and everyone else could understand Egyptians while Egyptians had no need to understand other dialects.
What is interesting is the impact of satellite television. These new stations have global audiences and content that Arabs want to watch as opposed to their national censored channels. But their solution to pan-Arab broadcasting is classical Arabic, not Egyptian Arabic, and so there is a resurgence of the use of classical Arabic outside of courts and classrooms.
However, you will have difficulty understanding the dialect of the person you are speaking to. And if you have a dialect that you should understand, I would say it should be Gulf Arabic (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, UAE and of course my own Bahrain).
Economic (thriving free markets, not just oil-funded governments) and military activity in the Arab world is concentrated in the gulf, so unless you are trying to be a tourist (Egypt), the real value is in Gulf Arabic. Note that most Arabic teachers are Egyptian or from the Levant, and will try and persuade you otherwise ;)
The structure of the language and it's grammar rules has not changed. Even though the language was not used for regular conversation, it was still studied and spoken for the entire time, so was never lost.
The main differences I can think of is that Hebrew doesn't go quite as crazy with broken plurals, there's no diglossia, and of course the writing system isn't so pretty.
What is surprising is that the foul words were borrowed from Arabic, and not Yiddish or any of the other languages commonly spoken by the Jews who settled in Israel.
There's a decent selection of biblical foul words to use, by the way, and many are in use.
And the reference to a penis is interesting in its own way - at least three times in the last 200 years, a new "safe" reference, and the reference took over as the improper foul word. The one in the last 50 years is literally equivalent to "the f" (as in, "the f word") was spawned verbs equivalent to "I will f you" -- the emerging noun, "זיון", is pronounced exactly the same as the f*cking Microsoft iPod competitor.
The structural change is regular. That is you don't have to learn each name plural.
The Arabic writing system is exotic looking but easy to learn, which is a rare combination. The language uses a straightforward alphabet, but because letters change their shape depending on what their neighbors are it is quite impenetrable to the uninitiated.
I thought the same thing for English and French, no? When I learn English and French in school, we join letters.
Formal Arabic distinguishes between groups composed entirely of women and groups that contain one or more men, and has distinct pronouns, plural forms, and verb conjugations for feminine dual and feminine plural.
The same for french. (Il, Ils, Elle, Elles, On)
What we call Arabic numerals aren't used in Arabic except in extraordinarily formal contexts. Instead, Arabic uses "Indian numerals", which look like this:
Not true. The real Arabic numbers are the ones used today. The Indian numbers were used in the middle east region because of the strong Indian influence.
--
Well, if you are really interested in Arabic, then what you should learn is the Arabic poetry. It's one of the marvelous human inventions. It's very hacky, and quite hard to write. The wealth of books (old books) and poems written in Arabic are worth learning it.
You can write cursive but, generally, we don't join letters together (think online text like this comment).
> The same for french. (Il, Ils, Elle, Elles, On)
And for Spanish--Ellas y elllos--and for Italian.
Not all the time. And if they do, there still are subtle variations in suffixes. For example:
- Kalb (dog) => Kilab (dogs)
- Liss (thief) => Losous (thieves)
- Karoura (bottle) => Kawarir (Bottles)
- etc.
> I thought the same thing for English and French, no? When I learn English and French in school, we join letters.
Yes, but that doesn't change the letter's shape as in Arabic, you just add a line to connect letters.
> The same for french. (Il, Ils, Elle, Elles, On)
Not quite: what you cite are just pronouns, but the conjugation and grammar doesn't vary. For instance, conjugating the verb manger (to eat) with feminine plural "elles" and masculine plural yields the same "mangent", whereas in Arabic you have different forms.
> Not true. The real Arabic numbers are the ones used today. The Indian numbers were used in the middle east region because of the strong Indian influence.
Agreed. I myself have a hard time reading numbers written in the Hindi numerals (٠ - ١ - ٢ - ٣ - ٤ - ٥ - ٦ - ٧ - ٨ - ٩)
It's mostly true that the verb form stays the same in French regardless of the gender of the subject. However, they are exceptions. If a verb conjugates conpound tenses with être, then the past participle is considered an adjective and must agree with the subject, e.g.:
Ils sont allés = They went (one or more male)
Elles sont allées. = They went (all female)
There are many patterns and forms in the broken plurals themselves which you can pick up on and learn so that you often can correctly predict new ones without memorization. For example, you give:
-liss => lusuus
And likewise, most doubled nouns of this form take the same plural:
-jadd => juduud
-hass => husuus
-hamm => humuum
Still... this is far from a hard and fast rule, and it also takes a lot of time to build familiarity and notice these patterns. It's also something that al-Kitaab (for example) doesn't ever mention.
(just explaining... not implying that you aren't aware of this)
I don't think cursive letters significantly "change their shape depending on what their neighbors are". There is more variation in personal cursive styles than due to neighbors in a single cursive style.
The only modification to letters are small lines joining them with one another, generally from the "feet" around the baseline.
> The same for french. (Il, Ils, Elle, Elles, On)
Correct for pronouns (especially in masculine "taking over" feminine as soon as a single male is included in the group), but french does not use different plural forms and verb conjugations for feminines (let alone distinguish between dual and further plurals).
> Not true.
How is it not true? You're saying exactly what he wrote: what are commonly known as arabic numerals aren't used in (middle-eastern) arabic.
> The real Arabic numbers are the ones used today.
There are no "real arabic numbers", North-Africa use western arabic numbers (what we call "Arabic numbers"), the middle-east uses eastern-arabic numbers ("Indic numerals"), western-arabic numbers progressively got their modern shape in Europe between the 10th and the 15th century (they got fixed with the advent of typesetting and print).
No, English and French don't have a concept of "different characters for different places." The "c" in "cat", "act" and "topic" are all written exactly the same. It's not "cat", "a#t" and "topi*"
There are many languages, besides Arabic, that have a concept of distinct initial, medial and final characters. For example, the dozens of writing systems derived from Sanskrit.
Yes they do, at least the way handwriting is sometimes taught. For example, "s" in handwriting sometimes looks like a slash ("/") followed by a backwards "c".
Take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet#Table_of_basic_...
Go View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) to have the Arabic examples render correctly.
Rendered perfectly fine in Firefox 7 on Vista 64-bit.
http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
Definitely worth a read for anyone who missed it the first time. Warning: contains irreverent references to pg.
(The OP made it sound like elites studying Arabic for their ambassador posts is something new. It just faded in popularity when religious fundamentalists started to rise in influence.)
A friend of mine (also native English speaker) lives in Taiwan and has learnt traditional Chinese (rather than simplified, as is now taught and used in China). The character memorization, to me at least, is horrifying. But the grammar is fairly simple (apart from tonal variation in words).
The evolution of languages (linguistics I guess) interests me greatly so first up, thanks for the post.
With all these different language systems, one has to wonder how they evolve.
Several events in history are of particular interest.
The first is what happened to English. English in the 10th century was basically the same language as German (Althochdeutsch or Old High German, to be precise). In 1066, the Normans conquered England, bringing French which became the official and court language of England for several centuries.
This had several important effects:
Firstly, many words migrated to English from French and Latin (although there were Latin words previously). Often the English form was "low brow" whereas the Latin/French version were "high brow".
Secondly, without a central authority enforcing a language standard, the language evolved hugely. Old English for Modern English speakers is basically unreadable. Middle English is mostly comprehensible. This was a massive change.
Along the way, English basically lost the concept of case (apart from pronouns), gender (again, apart from pronouns) and word agreement. Grammar was also greatly simplified (almost everything in English is done on word position rather than word ending like most Indo-European languages).
The TL:DR version of this is that there is a reasonable case to be made that a central authority actually stifles language "innovation". If true, one could argue that how arbitrary (rather than regular) a language is is a measure of the state control over that language during its history.
I don't presume to argue that this is true but it's an interesting idea.
The second interesting historical event was the switch in 1929 from the Arabic alphabet to a Latin alphabet for Turkish, which had a massive increase in literacy in the following years (since the alphabet is simple and phonetic).
The third interesting event is the rise of computers. I would argue that is was almost inevitable that this would happen in a country with either the Latin or Cyrilic alphabets. The reasons are:
1. Limited number of characters (think: keyboards and character sets); and
2. Limited variation in those characters (in English: uppercase and lowercase). Compare that to Arabic.
IMHO (1) is incredibly important. In Mandarin, if I want to tell you a new character I have to show you. There is no way to describe it. In English, a new word can be communicate verbally. I don't think you can overstate how important this distinction is.
Asian computer use has evolved a number of schemes to get around these issues, such as character combinations to represent certain characters (which, again, you have to learn) and, more recently, the use of graphics pads to draw characters.
The last thing I wanted to mention was this paper [1], which shows a mathematical relationship between languages becoming regular and the frequency with which words are used (the more a word is used, the longer it takes to become regular).
Anyway, enough rambling on my part.
Old English and Old High German being "basically the same language" is a very ignorant thing to say and categorically wrong. Old High German might have been much more close to Old English than modern standard German is to English but they weren't mutually intelligible and they were clearly different languages even at that time. Major differences between the two had arisen many centuries earlier. Take for example the High German consonant shift. Now, would you please explain why you would say that both were "basically the same language"?
That's still a big problem for a universal language of the internet though, since written Arabic is highly non-phonetic.
On the contrary, and as I understand it, in Arabic there are rules on how to change the shape of letters in certain contexts. In Arabic it's part of the writing system, in Western European languages it's not.
I think we are saying the same thing here.
> There are the diacritics to think about, but outside of the Quran they are simply ignored.
They are not ignored - when they are present, attention is paid to them. I think what you mean is that Arabic speakers, knowing what the diacritics are, do not bother writing them down. That is not because they ignore them, it is because we have paid such close attention to them when learning Arabic that we no longer need to be reminded of them.
> That's still a big problem for a universal language of the internet though, since written Arabic is highly non-phonetic.
Arabic is highly phonetic, and if being phonetic was a criterion for being universal language of the internet, English should be disqualified immediately.
On arrival in England at the age of 10, I had no idea how English people knew how to pronounce their words. Now I know that non-Arab speakers may think the same way about Arabic because we do not write down the diacritics by default... but it is easy to buy books that have these diacritics written, and thus to crack the code.
But English seemed designed to trap foreigners into mispronunciations, to the great amusement of my classmates. (Traveling to America after college, it was mostly place names that tripped me up.)
Arabic letters look different depending on whether they are in the initial, medial, final position in a word (as well as having a 4th form when they appear in isolation). However, there are patterns of similarity so it's not as difficult as having to learn 4 completely random shapes for each letter.
There are patterns (17 by my count?) among which letters differ only minorly, so it's not as bad as learning four forms for each letter, but there are some additional gotchas too. For example "ل-ا" ("laa") is always written as a single character "lamalif": لا. (Bonus knowledge: that's also the word for "no". You can see it at the beginning of the Shahada: ...لا إله إلا الله <- "There is no god but God..." etc.)
You're wrong in that there is no way to describe characters in Chinese to other speakers. There are certain words you use to describe strokes. The equivalent in English would be something like "there is a cross on the left and a flower on the right." Chinese speakers do this all the time, so I'm kind of surprised you jump to this conclusion when it's clear you aren't knowledgeable on the issue.
[1] http://necromanc.blogspot.com/2006/05/most-complicated-chine...
[2] http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/437-most-comp...
Most simplified characters can be explained with a handful of strokes. Furthermore, many of them can be broken down into "radicals" which are commonly repeated patterns.
First of all, [1] is ridiculous. Second of all, you just do it recursively. I would describe the first example roughly as follows:
Walking radical (162); cave top (116); to the left a left-right combination with "moon" on the left (74) and a thread radical (52) above "long" (168) on the right; in the middle "speech" (149) above "horse" (187); to the right, a left-right combination with thread above "long" on the left, and a knife radical (18) on the right; under all of that, a heart radical (61).
Numbers refer to the chart here
http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/radicals.php
In practice, it is very common for two Chinese people to meet for the first time and explain to each other which characters their name are. This normally does not involve pulling out pencil and paper.
龘 == three dragons stack
驫 == three horses stack
It's pretty simple and straight forward.
Some characters would be harder for me to remember than this, because this particular character is made up of common used components.
Have you actually studied hanzi? It is very easy to describe a character verbally, and if you live in Asia for any period of time, you will see that people do this quite often. There are only 214 Kangxi radicals[0] (plus some variations based upon how much space is available). Clearly not the same as having 26 letters, but not unmanageable by any stretch of the imagination.
The second difference is that characters are "spelled" in 2 dimensions. Once again, there is a set of rules for radical placement, and if you're familiar with these (as you would be if you'd studied Chinese or Japanese), it is very straightforward.
I had a friend of mine show me how to explain how to write her name in Japanese. There are even special names for the different radical forms (e.g. ninben vs. ningen).
Yes, it's possible, but nowhere near as easy.
This isn't strictly true. Some characters are simple combinations of radicals and other characters and can be sufficiently described as saying "the radical for x and the character for y." For example, the word for hungry (饿, è) is a combination of the radical for "eat" or "food" (饣, shí) and the character for "self" or "me" (我, wǒ).
I'm only a beginning student of the language, so I can't claim that many other characters are as simple to describe.
“Lieberman, Michel, and colleagues expect that some 15 of the 98 modern irregular verbs they studied -- although likely none of these top 10 -- will regularize in the next 500 years.”
Now, is this based on previous evolution of verbs? Because the past thousand years have had a certain feasibility of communication, locally, nationally and globally. I think the past 100 years with the advent of radio, television and now the internet, language is really going to evolve at a rate previously unseen in history.
The whole globe is connected, textually, verbally and visually, and it's immediate and constant. The past thousand years the only way to get your novel usage of a particular word or grammatical construct was to either go to some venue and talk, send a letter, or write a book. Now you can spread your literary love everywhere, constantly and with a wide audience. And not only to people with your local dialect, but every dialect. What a melting pot.
I'm quite a lover of language evolution. I moved to Italy a year ago in a very multilingual office, and my French and Italian colleagues noted how nice it is in English that you can verb nouns. It hadn't occurred to me that this wasn't possible in French or Italian. I expressed that though English is quite liberal and almost anything goes in a lot of areas, I still wish that people were more accepting of linguistic novelties. People scorn you if you play with language, or actively drop old ways, or invent new words, with the exception of high school kids who, in my experience, are the most inventive English speakers I've seen. When I was in school the amount of new language and idioms introduced every week was overwhelming.
I'm quite descriptivist, though. I like dictionaries that are extremely up to date, like [Wordnik](http://www.wordnik.com/), that encourage people to just use words freely, and take 3 seconds to explain to their partner in conversation what the word means, without fear that their new word isn't cromulent! (I just added "cromulent" to Chrome's dictionary.) Some words I like to use when talking to myself (hey, kids do it, so sue me), are words that don't exist already but are the 'root' of existing words, like inane (“That's quite ane.”), edible (“I think I'll ed some peanut butter sarnies”), etc.
Anyway, I'm rambling, too.
Also immediate communication can slow down a language, and homogenize it. Radio and TV certainly brought the German dialects closer together.
It depends on the patterns of communication. The internet allows lots of small groups to interact with each other all over the world. That has a different effect than the few to many pattern you get with traditional mass media.
You might enjoy http://verben.texttheater.net/Englisch and if you know German, you might enjoy http://verben.texttheater.net/ even more. On the German version they are doing stuff like inane, ane, or overwhelmed, underwhelmed, whelmed.
1) In the 10th century, (Old) English and (Old) German were already somewhat divergent, and not really mutually intelligible, but closely related.
2) The same goes for Norman and French. While in the same language family, these were not quite the same language.
3) Have you read any Chaucer? I'm not sure I'd call Middle English "mostly comprehensible". It takes a lot of work and a good ME dictionary at hand. By contrast, Early Modern English (think Shakespeare) is more in the line of "mostly comprehensible".
4) It's not just the fact there was no central authority that caused English to massively change. There still isn't a central authority, but change has been slow and non-radical for the last 500 years or so. Having a central authority doesn't really prevent change, either, although it might help to slow it down.
5) It's not at all clear what you mean by "arbitrary" in your claim about language change and state control, but you certainly have not backed up any claim about languages under "state control" being more "regular".
6) The alphabet switch for Turkish did not succeed because the Latin alphabet is "simple and phonetic". The Arabic alphabet is also simple and phonetic, as is (or as could be) any alphabet. It was not a great fit for the Turkish language, however, and the Latin alphabet (with a few additions) mapped better.
7) But much more important than any facts about the Latin alphabet was the fact that Kemal Ataturk was a dictator who pushed through a massive literacy programme on the population (who, it should also be said, was basically supportive of this goal). Had he done an alphabet reform instead---adding a few letters to the Arabic alphabet to make it a better fit for Turkish---and accompanied it with the same literacy policy, it'd do just as well. (Better, arguably, because it would have left the writings of the Ottomans much more accessible to the literate modern population.)
You might be right about computers arising in alphabet countries (I'd broaden that to any non-ideographic writing system, including Greek, Korean, and those of the Indian subcontinent and southeast Asia), but it might be more accurate to say that if computers had arisen first in China they would have looked very, very different. (Even in Japan, they might have gone the route of kana-only systems first, in a similar way to how early western machines had ALL CAPS interfaces.)
(And like a good wine, he gets better with every passing year since his dead. When I was in Ankarka in 2008, they had pictures / flags of him on the high rise buildings covering five storeys.)
I can't say what Vietnam looked like before the change, but certainly today there's writing blazed over everything in the cities - and there's very little in the way of images or pictographs to indicate what a shop might sell to an illiterate (I may have been unaware of other indicators). They do make prodigious use of diacritics to adapt Roman script to Vietnamese, though.
It was while puzzling over these diacritics that I finally realised that English uses (needs?) these as well, we just don't write them down - wind (moving air) and wind (make a coil) are pronounced differently, but without diacritics, someone has to tell you how to do so.
The Chinese composition just has many more variables than the English alphabet (it is a few hundred, IIRC)
To put it simply, Arabic sentences are divided into two main types: "verb" sentences (first word is a verb) and "noun" sentences.
Verb sentences are structured as (from right to left of course):
verb > subject > object
Each word ends with a different short vowel depending on its place in a sentence. The subject for instance always ends in a dhamma ('u' sound), while the object ends in a fatha ('a' sound).
Unlike with the English language, rarely do you find someone who follows grammatical rules in everyday speech. Only scholars or teachers who use formal language apply such rules when speaking or writing.
The vastness of the language is also why Muslims resort to a tafsir (or explanation) of the Quran to understand certain verses and chapters. Words sometimes mean something else when found after a certain word or in a certain context.
Surely they do follow grammar, albeit the grammar of whatever colloquial Arabic they are speaking, rather than the grammar of Modern Standard Arabic?
In terms of colloquial Arabics, do they have less complex inflexional systems compared to MSA (in the same way that Italian and Spanish do compared with Latin)?
Arabic speakers tend to diss their dialects and dismiss them as 'mere speech', but they're just as rich as any other language.
Besides, nobody would write an article in Egyptian Arabic or any other dialect for that matter because it'd simply be a waste of time.
Nonsense! All languages and dialects (not just prestige ones such as MSA or Standard English) have grammatical rules. If a language didn't have grammar, it would be impossible to express the distinction between "the dog bites the man" and "the man bites the dog".
Why is this? Well, in the Qur'an, they are written (as are all short vowels). Also in some voweled classical Arabic poetry. But even in formal, MSA, they aren't pronounced!
So you have a grammatical marker that isn't written, and isn't pronounced outside of certain unique contexts.
You can converse in fluent MSA, read virtually any non-religious text, and never need to see these case markers. Of course for Muslims (the majority of Arabic learners) they are important.
In older times however, most Arabs used to incorporate these short vowels into everyday speech. It was normal for them.
I find this somewhat fascinating because if I or any other casual speaker were to attempt to do this, we'd have to pause for at least a few seconds before each word to figure out which short vowel goes at the end of it.
It's pretty sad that Arabic speakers have gone backwards instead of advancing in the language, but I guess it's a price we must pay.
The real barrier for me though has been that Arabic (like Hebrew) is written without the short vowels in all text except for children's books and religious texts. This means that if you don't know a word, you can't pronounce it properly.
People just get used to it, I guess.
font: 2em 'Al Bayan', Nadeem, 'Simplified Arabic', 'Arial Unicode MS', sans-serif;
I read somewhere once that Arabic is also the language with the largest vocabulary of words - something like three million versus one million for English. Don't know if this is true or not.
The root/pattern system and degree of inflection makes it hard to count words in Arabic (since things like pronouns tend to stick to the ends, throwing off the count). But it is very rich in vocabulary. Arabs love parallelism in writing, and seem to have three versions of every word for that purpose.
English-only speaker here. I've seen about 50 different variants of "Muammar Gaddafi" rendered into English - is this due to different ways of Anglicizing the same name, or does he really have a 50 different ways of writing it, or something in between?
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2989
From the post and the comments I found the following two links interesting:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/02/libya
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/513/how-are-you-sup...
You can also see this in the most common Arabic name as well: Muhammad. Some spell with three ms, some 2. Some spell with u and some with o.
Personally, to be pseudo-unique snowflake (and to give myself a leg up in SEO) I spell my name a little unusually as 'Mohomed'.
You believe wrongly. There are languages with far bigger phonological inventories. Practically every language spoken in the Caucasus region would fit this criteria.
I assume this in reference to the predominant 2nd language for most people? If so, something I've always struggled to agree with is the implication that English is the second language for so many people only because of some fortuitous timing on the part of the British Empire. Technological advancements have certainly helped, as has the fact that as the British fell from their peak the US (also English speaking) came to take it's place. But is it really just a matter of timing within a generation or two most people will be expected to be somewhat fluent in Mandarin?
Maybe I'm a bit naive because I was raised speaking English, in an English speaking country, and only fumble my way through a couple of other languages enough to not get entirely lost as travelling. And I can understand the reasons why English can be so difficult for foreigners to learn because, even moving to the UK I discovered entirely new ways to pronounce words I thought I already knew. But... and I think it's a big "but"... something that has always seemed almost unique to English in my limited experience is that you can speak it badly and still be understood. You can speak it really badly, and while people might chuckle at the way you've turned a phrase you'll still get help. When I compare that to my experiences throughout south-east Asia, Italy, France, and Spain nothing further could be from the truth. Inflections or emphasis on the wrong syllable can have drastically different meanings that elicit confused looks or something altogether wrong.
I just don't see Mandarin doing the same. But maybe I discount the importance of the economy as a driving factor too much.
Thanks
This is the first time I hear the plural : ustaath -> usaatatha, I am a native arabic speaker and we always use asaatitha.
Also an old side project of mine, http://yoolki.com for en-ar transliteration
See this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic (Examples of major regional differences) for more info on the differences between regional dialects.
It's definitely worth the effort though.
I agree with that, however I disagree that having a different perspective on English makes me a better English speaker. Writer -- perhaps -- but still nothing that a smart native English speaker who spent some time in school reading Shakespeare and the classics could not beat.
> If you don't feel knowing a second language is helping you use your first, maybe you need to look more closely at how you use both.
I can speak English, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and French. The last two are a bit rusty but I bet I could catch up pretty quickly if I had to. The problem is that, while I speak and write English very well, I possess no "secret power" that would let me beat native speakers of English. Proof: nearly all great writers who wrote in English (or any other language) were native speakers. Knowing the ways of Lisp gives a C programmer a "secret power" which he or she can apply even to the procedural language that is C. Knowing the ways of Russian or French gives me no such advantage with English (except obviously for the occasional French phrase or word root -- but those advantages are insignificant compared to the tremendous advantage of being a native speaker).
I would say that this concept that Latin is a key to European languages is a big fat lie. In the former Soviet block (which is where I'm from), Latin was not taught in schools. About half of my former high school classmates now live in a different country and are fluent in the language of that country, whether it's English, German, Spanish, or Italian. Most of the Americans I've met know only English, some bits of French/Spanish, and some bits of Latin.
I'm not saying that learning Latin is completely useless -- I am simply saying that I believe that whatever advantage it gives is insignificant compared to actually going to the country and speaking the language. As a matter of fact, I believe that teaching Latin/Greek in American schools is a giant conspiracy designed to making pupils appear educated without actually giving them practical knowledge.
Which is completely different from the situation with programming -- where, if you are really, really good with math and logic, you can pick up pretty much any programming language relatively easily.
English lacks many of the concepts that exist in a lot of European languages; no grammatical gender, almost no noun case, verb conjugation has little inflexion, etc, etc. Since Latin possesses these features it is a useful reference language for many European and even many non-European languages.
Now, I'm not sure where you're from exactly, but a lot of the languages in the former Soviet block also do tend to exhibit a lot of these features so Latin would probably not be as needed there.
What is hard about programming has very little to do with learning a programming language and everything to do with more abstract concepts and ways of structuring solutions. The equivalent of CS concepts like object orientation or functional programming would be types of writing such as essays, or newspaper articles. Even though I can't write Russian, I still know how I'd structure an essay written in Russian. Even though I've never used Ruby, I have a fairly good idea of how I'd tackle any particular category of problem using Ruby.
The difference is that the vocabulary required for writing Russian is vastly larger than the equivalent vocabulary in Ruby.
Thanks for putting into words what I meant but wasn't sure how to express.
Huh, I wonder if this came about naturally, and if it did, I wonder if it has any tie-in to the number of items people can hold in their heads at one time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_...
> ييي ععع ههه ككك للل
Which for me looks like (asciified):
> USUSUS 010101 UtUtUt UfUfUf UnUnUn
I'm guessing I'm missing a font or something? (Firefox 6)
Interestingly Chrome auto-corrected this.
Mac OS X 10.6.8 / Google Chrome 13.0.782.112
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
It's funny because Classical Arabic do not sounds like Hebrew at all (except some very basic words). But Ancient North Arabic very similar to Hebrew and other Canaanite languages.
Languages and genetics are two very different things. The reason, that Ancient Hebrews spoke Semitic language doesn't mean they were "Semites". Many people in Canaan were speaking Semitic languages, so it might be Ancient Hebrews just adopted local lingua-franca.
If you can get everyone to switch to something like 'Judaeophobia', I'd personally have no objections - but sometimes you've got to work with the vocabulary that already exists.
Well these numbers originated in Arabic, and since Arabic is written right-to-left, writing numbers in Arabic actually follows a more logical order: start with the lowest-order digit, and move on to the higher-order ones.
Apparently when the concept was brought into Europe, they failed to account for the different writing directions.
• "Arabic numerals" aren't Arabic. They're Indian. They come from the Brahmi script, which is written left to right.
• The prevailing numeral system being replaced, Roman numerals, also placed the most significant digit on the left, so it's unlikely that this was something that was simply forgotten.
• Western languages (usually) mention the most significant digit first when reading the number out, which makes it convenient for it to be written that way as well.
The entire time the positional notation didn't change with alphabet
Actually, the modern positional system was created, in its entirety, in India. This includes the use of zero.
al-Khwarizmi gets credit largely for introducing the Indian system to the Arabic and Western world. He is the reason that the Arabs and Europeans use Indian numerals, though they've since mutated in look over time.
A summer program is $15k USD; a full semester is $16k USD.
If you want to learn a language, and have a spare $15K and the time for intensive classes, you're far better off just booking a plane ticket, going to wherever it is, and hiring a private tutor.
Let's say you wanted to learn Chinese. You can live very, very comfortably in Beijing on about $2k USD per month, including the cost of a private tutor, food, entertainment, and travel.
That means six months in-country for less than the tuition of the Institute. Six months of daily use plus intensive study will move you, terms of proficiency, ahead of 90% of people that hold degrees in Chinese.
You could do something like this even in less westerner-friendly countries, and learn a million times more than you will at any language school -- there is absolutely no substitute for actual experience.
(similar to how people with papers from a degree mill be looked upon more favorably by certain companies than those who learned programming on their own)
Also in slavic languages "slovo" means word, so "slaveni" are ""people who speak (the same language),". But it become "sclavoni" in late latin, since appareantly many slaves were slavic? Should I avoid learning any language which has derived from latin because I'm slavic?
Words have ancient roots, in times where there wasn't yet the concept of political correctness and we still have traces of it in every language.
2) "Slave" (عبد) means black just as much as "nigger" means the same in English. Or "chink" means Chinese. It's a pejorative term. Anyone decent enough would simply say "black" (اسود) or "tanned" (اسمر).
Black man = رجل اسود
Slave = عبد
Apparently, to a person who only knows english, which is a very inconsistent and mixed language, these features could look extremely neat, but the reality is that they are quite common.
I don't know enough to comment on the issues of language, but Maciej speaks Polish, French, and Russian. This is like the umpteenth comment that has assumed the author only speaks English. A curious pattern.
When English speakers look to learn an "exotic language", the general go-tos are Chinese and Japanese, which have comparatively very simple grammars. Thus in the exotic language category, as the author points out, Arabic is a very intriguing choice. (And while many Indo-European languages may share a few related grammar rules, using the Latin alphabet hurts your candidacy as an exotic language.)