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Comment by johnyzee | Hacker News Reader

I believe Arabic is the language with the largest variety in sounds. A lot of these sounds don't exist in other languages, such as the deep-throated 'ain and the seemingly many different ways to make an 's' sound, each with subtle differences. A friend of mine said it makes speaking very relaxing as it involves so many parts of the throat and mouth.

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.

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Arabic doesn't have a very large sound inventory, but some of the sounds are pretty unfamiliar to people from an indo-european background. I believe there are only two kinds of /s/ (س and ص).

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.

> 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?

There's some discussion of this exact topic on Language Log here:

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...

Just because of Anglicization and no standard way to do this. His name has 2 Arabic letters that are not found in English, 3ain and Qaaf. The rest of the variation is also due to English not having a consistent way to spell itself and no consistent way to transliterate Ar --> En.

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'.

actually three letters, there's also the Thal, which is like a "d" (Dal) with a point on top of it, and pronounced as a deep version of "th." So it's basically Qathafi. But given the fact that there's a "chaddah" on top of it, all hell breaks loose when you're trying to write it in English.

Yep, forgot about the thaal. And yes, the shaddah is one of the big reasons for different spellings, some choose to put one meem in Muhammad (like I do), some try to be more "purist" and put double as is normal spelled in English. Mu3ammar has one shaddah on the second meem and a another shaddah on the thaal in Ghaddafi.

How about ذ (zal), ز (zaa) and ظ (sor)? Perhaps they are more 'z' than 's'? Then there is ث (tha) though that is more of a 'th' sound I think, but people in the subcontinent pronounce it as an 's'. The differences are really subtle to me.

The pronunciations you've listed are used in some Arabic dialects. In classical Arabic, ذ is pronounced as <i>dhel</i>, and ظ is more of a <i>dhah</i>.

the pronunciation you mentioned are actually for the letters د and ض

No, they aren't. د and ض are pronounced as dal and dahd respectively. I know this because I'm a native Arabic speaker.

http://arabic.speak7.com/arabic_alphabet.htm

I'm a native arabic speaker too. I think I misunderstood your intention of using "dh" in "dhad", I would have used "thad." This misunderstanding stems from the fact that we're both trying to write a sound that cannot be expressed correctly in latin.

This conversation would be much more productive if you both used IPA rather than trying to write sounds that don't exist in English :P

It's way dialectical, of course, but in MSA at least 'ز' is a [z] sound, 'ث' is a [θ] (as in "three"), while 'ذ' and 'ظ' are variants of [ð] (as in "the")— with ظ being the pharyngealized version, similar to 'د‎' and 'ض'. The differences are much easier to hear than to reproduce :P

Arabic has a large variety of sounds - but I think no more than other languages do. For example, Arabic does not have a p sound or a g sound. My native language, though, has 4 types of t and 4 types of d, 2 types of k, 2 types of g, etc.

>I believe Arabic is the language with the largest variety in sounds.

You believe wrongly. There are languages with far bigger phonological inventories. Practically every language spoken in the Caucasus region would fit this criteria.

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