Why Arabic Is Terrific (2011)
idlewords.com
idlewords.com
Permit me to plug a pet project of mine:
It's basically an online version of Hans Wehr, the de facto standard dictionary for students of Arabic. You can search by root or by word and provides form I vowelling, masadir (infinitives), broken plurals, and other useful information organized by form. I know there exist other good dictionaries out there, but I never found one I quite liked as a reference as much as I enjoyed Hans Wehr. I hope someone else finds it useful! (I've been neglecting it a bit recently, so I apologize for any bugs and for the lack of an SSL cert).
Do you have any plans to open source the work you’ve done and allow contributions from the outside? I could easily see value in doing this for Lane’s Lexicon as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language
As a Maltese person, we were required during the 1980s to learn Arabic as an additional language in school, a task made considerably easier by the similarities between the languages.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/accents-are-fo...
"People talk about a 'window of opportunity' for learning language," Kuhl says. "The implication is that if you miss that opportunity, it's too late. I don't agree. It is more difficult with the years. But not impossible."
Personally, I think the largest difficulty is the amount of practice required. Kids can babble about all day, but as an adult, even investing an hour a day into language practice is hard to find the time for.
As a native speaker of both Arabic and English, I have no trouble with pronouncing letters in either language.
This is a neutral and more grammatically correct version of the language. Its use is mostly limited to the written medium, but is also used for verbal communication in news channels and academic contexts.
>neutral and more grammatically correct version of the language
is nuts. Arabic isn’t a language any more than the Romance languages are. Moroccan, Egyptian and Yemeni Arabic are at least as divergent as Spanish, French and Romanian. FuSha is like if the entire Romance speaking world wrote in Latin.
The academic contexts FuSha is used in are also limited to primary and secondary instruction, Arabic language and religion mostly. Tertiary education across the Arab world is often conducted in English or French so the educated classes will speak at least one of those languages at a near native level. That’s part of why there are fewer books translated into Arabic each year than into Dutch.
It’s especially apparent when after learning to make the “p” sound, ESL (or ETL/EFL even!) Arabs go around saying “apsoloutely no broblem.” The most common reverse substitution is probably “peautiful” with considerable emphasis on the p.
It doesn't help that alphabetical writing systems are sold to us from young age as if they were actual representing the sounds. They are not, and in more subtle ways than you'd think.
For example, in the context of B's and P's, English has "explosive consonants". In many words the "p" sound is actually followed by a puff of air. But this also happens incidentally when B is followed by some other sounds. Imagine pronouncing "beautiful" without emitting any puff of air after the B and you'll notice you sound Italian or Indian.
So, if your native language doesn't have the p sound at all and you learn it from examples in English it's quite likely you'll latch on the "puff of air" feature of exaggerated explosive variant of the p sound you might be practicing a lot.
You'll then hear a similar sound in beautiful, and try to repeat that too but native speakers might percieve that as a p sound
I remember looking up from my grammar book one day I felt particularly stupid and saying to one of my classmates that this language must have been thought up by a sadist on a bad day! To which they replied that he was, in fact, probably having his best day ever.
(I never learned to speak it, properly, but I feel better for having attempted)
After some research, although I had a flawed understanding of vowels and consonants, I think it's classified as a semivowel.
So is a "Hay" (ה) with a Dagesh (usally not written) at the end of a word is pronounced short way back in the throat by Jews who came back to Israel after exile in North Africa (Tunisia, etc.)
Basically "ah-in" or "ah-yin" ("ah" being pronounced like when a doctor tells you "open your mouth and say ah"). It makes the use of that letter much closer to "a" (א or ה in Hebrew).
We don't really involve the deep part of the throat, though I think it's pretty well known that you're "supposed to".
: We have a muscle in our throat which is never used except in vomiting. Think about that and pretend you are about to be sick. You will find that what is normally called in English gagging is actually a restriction in the deep part of the throat. If you begin to gag, and then release the airstream from the lungs, you will have produced a perfect : (called :ain in Arabic).
I can't speak for the other Romance languages, but that's for sure the wrong way to make that sound in French, and a lot of people can't seem to hear the difference.
There's a reason some comedians make fun of european languages by clearing their throats. The rolled consonants are throaty, not mouthy (a word I just made up right now, sue me).
No need for suing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental,_alveolar_and_postalveo...
Another fun trill is the bilabial one [2], like imitating a fart with your lips. It doesn't really qualify as a rolled R, though.
The normal (American) English term for this is "raspberry".
That’s the stuff. Thanks for the vocab lesson. And look at that map. Most of northern and Central Europe is a guttural r.
You trilled R motherfuckers in French class ignored your poor teachers’ pained expressions for years, while the rest of us wanted to go up, pat them, and say it’s okay, we share your pain.
Apparently I have some unresolved hostilities toward some people who got A’s but had disastrous pronunciation.
I’m a bit of a parrot and so sounds I can’t reproduce draw me in like a moth to a flame. The click sound in some African languages and the very guttural singsong of Vietnamese/Thai are my only nemeses... so far.
An articulation point is simply supposed to be the place where you put your tongue. In this case it's so far back in your throat, I'm not sure you actually can put your tongue there.
But the muscles are in your tongue, the articulation points are just places in your mouth. Like the palate, for palatal consonants, or lips for labial, in some more familiar examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharyngeal_consonant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_consonant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_of_articulation#/media/F... (9 vs 10)
I say letter in quotes because I'm not sure of its status as a letter or not, I think it is a letter but my Arabic game is pretty weak.
Also, what about the word for "thing" شيء it's not placed on the yaa, but written by itself. Or the plural form, things: أشياء has two hamzas in it, only one sits atop an alif.
So that's a thing.
Growing up in Israel, among "Arab Jews" who did not have this problem, I was reminded daily of the difficulty I have in pronouncing my own name.
It's in the word "Saudi" for example - right when you transition from the a to the oo sound, your throat just does a bit of the work along with your mouth.
There's another letter that's way harder in my Arab-Australian opinion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qoph#Arabic_q%C4%81f
That one legit is close to a cough, just higher up in the throat.
> No other language will make you work as hard to avoid speaking formally to pairs of women
Arabs actually don't speak this formal way and may look at you strange if you do (they may not even understand in countries like Libya or Egypt); most of the colloquial dialects skip most of these rules, and don't deal the difference between "those two females ran" vs "those two males ran" vs "those males ran", etc.
But author summarizes it:
> The second is that spoken Arabic has diverged substantially from the written language, so you can study it formally for years and not be able to understand a television commercial
Is there a term like "Brook" is to "Spook" like "Brogrammer" is to "Programmer"?
- The Zen School of Me.
:)
It's a weaker connection, but rhyming with "Boast" it maintains the clear "Bro" prefix and is distinct from other spoken or written words.
I wonder if spies now prefer to be called ghosts instead of spooks because of the latter's racist connotations, or have they reclaimed the term and wear it as a badge of honor? ;)
I thought about trying to learn more Arabic for fun, but this part convinced me not to bother:
> My absolute favorite is that all non-human plurals are grammatically feminine singular: al-kutub hadra' (الكتب خضراء) "The books, she is green"
After attempting a minor in French, I hate dealing with arbitrary gender in languages. I'm convinced that the grammatical construct of gender exists only to make it easier to identify foreign or uneducated speakers!
The good thing is that it's truly a structural, mathematical language now, though still hard to learn, and it can avoid the whole his / her awkwardness for people whose gender is unknown to the writer. The gaps left by the Arabic words dropped from common use was filled by French (11% of its corpus is 1:1 to French) and if you know a Romance language, you can make pretty decent guesses.
The bad thing, on the other hand, is that Turkey is full of ancient history, and so much of that history is adorned in Imperial Turkish, using Arabic alphabet that no one can read. Even if they did, they wouldn't understand, since Imperial and Modern Turkish has diverged so much they are no longer mutually intelligible, not even the slightest clue.
It makes you feel like a foreigner in one's own country, in a way. Always found it funny that I can understand Middle English from 1300s, and I can read inscribed colonnades in Rome from 500 BC – but I can neither read nor understand Turkish from 1922.
Do you have a source for that at all? Lack of grammatical gender is a feature of the entire family so I would be surprised if there were somehow "remnants" of it that were present as recently as Ataturk's reforms. Removing loans that happen to be gendered in their source language don't really count.
It's really sad that a language has more than 700 years was changed because of man ego and hate to a religion. even if you agree with the guy, killing a language because of hate it's really a shame.
The reality is, Turks historically had a distant relationship to Islam, being the last major adopter of the religion, and Turkey’s Empire has kept and retained, in some cases proudly, many traditions that were openly in violation of quite a few tenets of the Muslim religion, traditions coming from Turks’ pagan past, from Europeans, and from everywhere else.
Ataturk’s ‘revolution’ was much more incremental than most people realise. Just like you cannot plant a parliament in a country that was previously governed by tribesmen, you cannot come up with the idea of ‘secularism’ in a country who was ruthlessly monocultural before and have it survive past your death. For better or worse, the laws Ataturk enacted had its roots in the culture of the land, and that’s the only reason he could, and that’s the only reason they survived past his death.
Muslims were a minority in the Ottoman Empire until the last 50 years of its 600+ year existence. Laicite is just a natural extension of the culture of tolerance that allowed the OE to even exist in the first place, and the extinguishment of which ultimately led to its downfall.
[1] Slightly funny anecdote: When in school (maybe class 5 or 6), I once mixed up the dates of the English Grammar and English Composition semester exams (they were within a day or two of each other), and thought that the next day's exam was Composition, so did not prepare (because you do not prepare for composition a.k.a. essay writing, you just do it on the spot). Turned out that it was actually the Grammar exam, for which you can prepare. I was surprised and pleased to learn later, that I got as good a grade / mark on it - a high one (as I could guess) as if I had actually prepared for it :) I think I had and (still have) some natural aptitude for English grammar, and maybe of some other languages too, for which I am thankful. Good fun.
[2] I studied both Hindi and Sanskrit for many years in school (and did well on both), but don't remember all the grammar rules now, I just speak Hindi naturally, same for English grammar. Native Hindi speakers have told me in the past that my Hindi is pretty much indistinguishable from that of a native speaker.
I don’t think it’s an obsession with sex per se, as much as just a legacy many thousands of years old. Some suggest it didn’t even start as a male/female thing, but perhaps animate/inanimate. It’s worth noting how many very different languages globally have grammatical gender, and that in many of them, the gender of words frequently contradict what you’d guess, as well as reverse gender in many situations. Learning languages like German and Icelandic, you’ll be warned not to think of words as gendered so much as just categorized arbitrarily, because grammatical gender and natural gender so often have nothing to do with each other.
Anyway, the rest of the article is pretty interesting too!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Useful_ro...
Indeed! In Arabic, the sun is feminine and the moon is masculine; quite the opposite of its sultry huntress associations in the Greco-Roman world!
It was always kinda suspicious to me that in Polish (and other Slavic languages I think) feminine nouns end in -a, and genitive of masculine nouns also ends in -a.
Genitive denotes belonging among other things. So, if you have name "Mirosław" the female version is "Mirosława", and accusative for something that belongs to Mirosław is also "Mirosława" (for example "Mirosław's car" is "samochód Mirosława", and "Mirosław's wife" is "żona Mirosława").
It's kinda fucked-up, but it's not something people consciously think about, and at this point I think it's harmless.
Also it's not really about sex. It's just an arbitrary division. For example one rare synonym for "a girl" (dziewczę) is neuter in Polish :) Male mouse is still a "mysz" which is feminine (it makes every kid in Poland think Mickey Mouse is a girl), there are more such examples :)
For me it's like articles in English - they have some use, but making them mandatory seems like a lot of boilerplate for little reason. What's wrong with saying "some book" vs "this book" if you care about definitiveness of a noun, and skipping it when you don't :)
These words can serve a kind of poetical function; but in principle you could use the generic one — “ko” in Japanese and “gè” in Mandarin Chinese — for everything, and it is even accepted that as a foreigner you will. However, doing so is taken to be a sign of infelicity with the language. One instructor related to me that failure to use an advanced counter when the opportunity presents itself is a sign of poor education, rather like missing the opportunity to use a word like “infelicity”.
It makes pronouns more useful.
"I put the book and the apple on the table. Throw him/her/it away"
If apple is neuter, table is masculine and book is feminine (as is the case in my language) - "him/her/it" is uniquely identifying what you want to throw away. In fact my language goes even further and there are 5 grammatical genders (masculine is subdivided into personal/animate/inanimate). And there are distinctions between fully-feminine plural and mixed plural so you can uniquely identify groups of people with pronouns if one group has males in it and the other one doesn't. Like:
"Eve's sisters met Smiths family yesterday, I invited them(mixed plural=Smiths/feminine only plural=the sisters)"
I agree it's weird when you think about it, possibly not worth it, but I like the quirkiness. It allows for brevity that is very hard to translate properly, especially in dialogs.
Everyone makes this mistake. It is rather the case that in English (and other languages) numerals are written right-to-left. You can tell since, when reading right-to-left, you will know exactly what each number signifies. If you start from the left, you will not know what the first number signifies until you have reached the end of the whole number.
Interesting to learn though that in Arabic it is still pronounced from left to right, up until the tens.
I'm a native Arabic speaker, and yes I still struggle to both: speak P and hear P, Put no BroPlem!
In computer speak, the way we write numbers in English is 'big endian'. We write the most significant digit first.
The most common 'little endian' system is postal addresses, where we start with the smallest unit (name) then in, some cases, house number, street, city, country.
Note that roman numerals are commonly written in big ending way. So this practice is very old.
Is this for real?! Do non native speakers of Arabic (and similar languages) not hear the common sound at the start of words like apple, elegant, ignite, umpire? I find that hard to believe since they are saying it.
So sound wise they all start with a glottal stop that we don't notice as it isn't written as such?
http://www.rememberarabic.com/
She has a very definite style:
> When writing the rules for Arabic grammar, someone decided that Lakin should be called the weak version of 'but', and Lakinna should be called the strong version of 'but'. If someone can decide that, then I can decide to create a Hammock of Freedom. So I did.
Go check her out. I’m seeing her for a walk in an hour, I can pass on kind comments. :-)
It's almost like being forced to learn Latin first before you can learn Spanish.
Also see: https://www.quora.com/Which-language-is-older-Hebrew-or-Arab...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_langua...
I think it's an awesome sounding language.
The differences between the dialects are huge though, but everyone will understand Lebanese Arabic and Egyptian because they make the most tv and movies ت
>The first is that texts from over a thousand years ago remain accessible to modern readers. If you're an English speaker, where even texts from 200 years ago can be rough going, this is quite a treat.
The former has less to do with the latter than you might imagine. Many languages without a supposed divine mandate are also readable many hundreds of years later. English is in the minority in that regard, in that its history of being influenced strongly by conquest locks off its older writings to modern eyes.
> 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.
> This gives Arabic a total of twelve personal pronouns. No other language will make you work as hard to avoid speaking formally to pairs of women.
All Romance languages I know (French, Spanish, Portuguese) work like that. For example in Portuguese: "They play football." is "Elas jogam futebol." if it's about the women's national soccer team but "Eles jogam futebol." if it's an all male or mixed team.
Yeah Sanskrit has a neutral as well. Makes the language much simpler. (In my opinion) .
See this happy fellow? ت
Is there a large overlap between constructed language enthusiasts and Runescape enthusiasts? That seems kind of strange to me.
This is where a douchier person would write 'colophon'
But overall it did its mission: it made learning arabic feel linguistically interesting.
I only see 11.
For non-native readers: the word means both extremely appealing, and also mortally horrifying. It is best used when both apply to some degree.
If you speak French the Arabic language texts and practice books are better than what I've been able to find in English.
Realistically, arabic is difficult, and actually speaking street arabic is frustrating.
Source: Currently doing arabic, spending the month in Jordan on vacation doing an arabic intensive, using al-kitaab in both classroom settings and self study.
Arabic is, however, definitely terrific. I'm definitely going to blow all my vacation days next year to come back again.
It is even mis-transliterated as /d/ in the linked article in (hadra).
Go to this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharyngealization
Then click on the "pharyngealized voiced alveolar lateral fricative" speaker icon to hear it. Note that it sounds very close to the "pharyngealized voiced dental fricative" right above it in the list, which is why people tend to interchange them.
Here is a video with a man explaining the differences and showing how to pronounce each of them: https://youtu.be/U0qr9XxJges?t=99
Here's a chart like many of the ones I was taught with https://wayofislam.fandom.com/wiki/Makhraj
Let me know if you have heard it before :)