
Arabic, a great language, has a low profile - js2
https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2018/10/20/arabic-a-great-language-has-a-low-profile
======
theprotocol
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.

~~~
Uberphallus
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.

~~~
andyshuxin
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.

~~~
usrusr
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.

------
glangdale
The "Idle Words" blog, home to the infamous "Dabblers and Blowhards" takedown
of Paul Graham, also has a good article on Arabic
([http://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm](http://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm)).

Opening paragraph:

I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for
International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in
more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and
is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called the Defense
Language Institute, where young men and women learn how to eavesdrop on the
nation's enemies, provided that the enemies speak slowly and limit their
conversation to hobbies and the weather.

~~~
pferde
Thanks for the link, it is an excellently written article, which manages to
poke fun at Arabic's various weird quirks, and convey author's enthusiasm
about how cool the language is, both at the same time. Very good read!

------
CydeWeys
As a typical American who mostly just speaks English, the #1 most useful
language I wish I also spoke is Spanish. It's pervasive, both in the US and
elsewhere. I'm currently in Barcelona for a conference and this is the third
time in 1.5 years I've been in a Spanish-speaking country for a conference.

The only other language that can have a similarly credible case for learning
it would be Mandarin, but unlike Spanish, that's only good for one country.
For anyone living in the Sinosphere, that would obviously be the best choice,
but for someone living in the US, Chinese isn't nearly as important. Plus,
Spanish is way easier to learn, given that it shares an alphabet, similar
pronunciation, and through casual exposure you likely already have a start on
a basic vocabulary.

As for Arabic ... yeah, that's far down the list. I've only ever been to one
Arabic country (the UAE), and more people there speak English than Arabic.
Obviously that's atypical for Arabic countries, but way more westerners are
likely to go the UAE than to, say, Egypt.

~~~
jpatokal
That's a rather US-centric worldview. Looking at the official languages of
countries, French and Arabic are probably the most useful worldwide, with
Spanish third and Chinese (Mandarin) indeed largely useless outside greater
China.

[https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/35348/as-a-
native...](https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/35348/as-a-native-
english-speaker-which-two-further-languages-would-give-me-the-most)

~~~
CydeWeys
The better stat to use is # of speakers worldwide, not official languages:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers)

The top 10 list is, in order, English, Mandarin, Hindustani, Spanish, Arabic,
French, Malay, Russian, Bengali, and Portuguese.

English we already speak. Mandarin is primarily useful in China and not so
much otherwise. Hindustani has the same problem but for India, and there's
also a good amount of overlap with English there too. Spanish is the next
language in the list, above Arabic and French. Incidentally I speak some
French, and didn't find it that necessary for navigating the two French-
speaking countries I've visited so far. English was widely spoken and
understood.

And I have to point out the irony here of being accused of being US-centric
when I'm talking about _Spanish_ , and of visiting other countries where
Spanish is dominant (Spain and most of South/Central America).

~~~
jcranmer
The interesting statistic is to look at languages with much higher L2 speakers
than L1 speakers. English, French, Malay, and Swahili are the main languages
in this category, with Russian and Hindi having roughly as many L2 as L1. What
these statistics are telling you is which languages act as lingua francas
among non-native speakers. By contrast, languages like Spanish, Mandarin, and
Japanese are spoken by a large number of natives but don't have much use for
non-native speakers. It's less useful to learn those kinds of languages unless
you specifically want to talk with those speakers.

------
lgessler
This article was hailed by Language Log as being mostly right in its
scientific treatment of language[1], which is unfortunately pretty rare in
journalism.

[1]:
[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=40379](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=40379)

~~~
titanomachy
Interesting that he says MSA is further from region arabic than Latin is from
Spanish. Provides useful context for people familiar with European languages.

~~~
nealdt
It's a somewhat misleading comparison because nobody uses Latin today. MSA
however is the language of the news, media and academia so everyone can
understand it.

~~~
umanwizard
People did use Latin even into the 1800s for a similar purpose in western
countries.

------
joaodelvalle
Duolingo has been postponing its launch of Arabic for English speakers for a
while. Now, next date is March 1st 2019.
[https://www.duolingo.com/course/ar/en/Learn-Arabic-
Online](https://www.duolingo.com/course/ar/en/Learn-Arabic-Online)

~~~
lozenge
Duolingo only teaches vocab and shows you example sentences to teach grammar.
It doesn't have any explicit teaching, which means it's less effective the
further the language is from English. But, they just like advertising their 30
or however many language options.

~~~
arijun
I disagree. I'm using it to learn another language that is far from English,
albeit one with much simpler grammar. I find it more effective than a grammar
heavy course. You can know every rule of a language and still not be able to
speak it at all. What you need is internalization of those rules via practice,
which Duolingo provides.

~~~
Tor3
It depends heavily on the language course. Duolingo's Italian course actually
manages to teach grammar and usage through their standard translation setup,
while their Japanese course does nothing of the sort. It does not work very
well for the latter, I've been through most of it by now and it's just
translation-translation-translation, which doesn't teach you much at all,
because the translation to English really doesn't work with Japanese. For
example, they keep translating 'itadakimasu' (いただきます in Hiragana) to "Let's
eat!", but that's not what it means. Otherwise the taxi driver wouldn't ask
you '1980 yen itadakimasu'.. :) (and that's just one, there are so many.)

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Are you sure you don't mean "gozaimasu" in the taxi driver example? I learned
what little Japanese I do know from Duolingo and it was somewhat useful on a
recent trip to Japan. Our tour guides were mostly impressed and certainly
didn't point out any glaring issues with it (although that could be Japanese
politeness).

~~~
Tor3
I'm absolutely sure - I've lived in Japan, and my wife is Japanese.
'gozaimasu' is a word you add to a sentence to make it (even) more polite.
E.g. 'Arigatou' \- thanks. 'Arigatou gozaimasu' 'Thank you very much' (or
whatever way you want to think about it). Same with phrases for 'good morning'
etc. As for the taxi driver phrase, it goes like this: Normally when you ask
for something in Japanese you would use for example 'kudasai' (=> 'give me',
to the extent that it can be translated). But the taxi driver is _serving_ the
customer, and then that word is out of the question. Instead he is thanking
for being given, which is basically what 'itadakimasu' means. And that's why
that word works as something you say just before eating, but also why it does
_not_ translate to "Let's eat!". And working through phrase after phrase in
Duolingo with only that kind of translations just doesn't work very well. And
then months of comments and questions from users where they take the
translation literally and figure they can use the same word as a metaphor in
Japanese, the way the _English_ translation can be used as a metaphor in
English.. sigh. You don't learn how the language works that way. It can work
as a (small) supplement when learning the language with other better tools,
but I will state that you _can 't_ learn Japanese through only Duolingo. While
you can actually learn Italian that way.

~~~
Riverheart
Any free alternatives to DuoLingo's Japanese offering or general advice?

~~~
Tor3
An easy one is to start with Human Japanese (Windows, Android, or iOS). The
'light' version is free on Android and gives you the first chapters (seven,
IIRC) to give you a taste of it. After that there are lots of resources.

~~~
Riverheart
Thanks :)

------
tragomaskhalos
Language buffs should also check out Maltese, which is basically a form of
Arabic written in a Latin script with a heavy admixture of (mainly) Italian
and English loan words

------
ramigb
"But Western students who sign up for a class in it soon discover that nobody
speaks this “standard” as a native tongue; many Arabs hardly speak it at all.
"

This is not completely true! I'm a native Arabic speaker and MSA is the
official language of newspapers, news segments, and legal documents,
governments speeches even wedding invitations and not to forget the Quran and
the Arabic bible. So it's spoken and written widely but people tend not to use
it that often because it's easier to use shorter words that most of the time
sum longer sentences.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
There are many places on the margins of the Arabic world where people lack an
_active_ command of MSA (as opposed to a merely passive understanding), and
where newspapers may well be in French instead of MSA. After all, an active
command is learned through formal schooling, and regrettably there are places
in the Arabic world where children do not get much formal schooling.

------
fatihdonmez
I'm turkish and because of hidden arabic imperialism and assimilation rooted
deep in islam, I refuse to use even arabic words which are common in turkish.

~~~
bovine3dom
You'd have a hard time doing the same in English:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Arabi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Arabic_origin)

Some quite common words are on that list: jumper, cat, fanfare...

~~~
kkarakk
this is not a fair comparison. arabic words when spoken, are always assumed to
have religious connotations first whereas english is always assumed to have
contextual connotations first. it is a huge distinction

------
diminish
Somehow the sound of Arabic accents are quite harsh among all languages I know
to my ears. Only German is somewhat harsh - I have a lot of pleasure with
Rammstein the metal/rock band sound in German. I always thought metal music
would sound quite nice in Several Arabic accents as opposed to let's say a
softer language like Italian. In short metal/hard rock in Arabic would sound
wonderful whereas in Italian not.

~~~
nerdponx
There is a great punk band from New York with all Arabic lyrics:
[https://haramharam.bandcamp.com/](https://haramharam.bandcamp.com/)

~~~
brusch64
Wow - they are great. Thank you for that link! And I don't think it sounds any
harsher than other hardcore punk in English.

------
anonu
I would disagree with the articles analogy of MSA to arabic dialects is like
Latin to Romance languages. The difference is not quite that stark with
Arabic.

~~~
amasad
It's pretty stark. I speak Laventine and I struggle to communicate with my
North African friends and often end up supplementing with english.

I'm not sure I'd go this far but some scholars make the case that the dialects
are not really dialects, they are there own language that were influenced by
Arabic.

See for example Taleb's argument on Lebanese being a language
[https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-
ge...](https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-genetics/no-
lebanese-is-not-a-dialect-of-arabic-e95320c164c)

Historically it makes some sense because North Africa and the Laventine didn't
have much in common with Arabia before Islam so they must've had their own
local languages (say Berber or Aramaic) that was influenced by Arabic.

~~~
Pharmakon
Plus you get the influence of colonial powers like France in North Africa.
Tunisian for example is... challenging if you come at it from the perspective
of something like Kuwaiti Arabic.

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

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

~~~
amasad
haha only on HN. And thank you!

------
m23khan
Urdu is a language which I speak and admire - for the reason that the Hindi-
Persian mix along with the Persian syntax/alphabet gives it the ultimate
flexibility.

You can capture any sound/accent in Urdu. What I mean is you to take any word
in any language and if you wanted to write it as-is in Urdu syntax, you can do
so with 100% accuracy.

~~~
mkaziz
Disagree. I am a native speaker of Urdu, and Urdu is effective only with
significant English loan words. The Persian alphabet also makes little sense -
we pronounce seen and suad the same way but write them differently thanks to
the Persian alphabet being forced on a language that wasn't meant for it.

~~~
m23khan
regarding seen and suad, please check out: [https://www.quora.com/What-is-
difference-between-se-%D8%AB-s...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-difference-
between-se-%D8%AB-sin-%D8%B3-and-swad-%D8%B5-in-the-Urdu-alphabet)

And as for the using persian script for urdu, without going into political
stuff, I think it is a huge advantage - Persian script is not only used for
Persian and Urdu, even Balochi, Daari (Afghanistan), and Pashto uses Persian
script. Moreover, by virtue of knowing Persian script, it becomes immensely
easy to pick up Arabic (at least reading it).

Then there are few other languages such as Sindhi (Pakistani Sindhi) which
have a Persian-based script (few other characters on top of Persian which are
specific to the language).

Which means, if you can read Urdu, with little effort, you can start reading
Arabic/Balochi/Sindhi which means you can read literature from Pakistan all
the way to Morocco.

------
msvan
Chinese also had the same "issue": it is more of a family of languages rather
than a language. But the Chinese government has been pushing pretty hard for
Mandarin over the past 100 years, such that it has now become _the_ Chinese
language. It has cost them a lot of linguistic diversity, but they probably
think it pays off in the long run.

~~~
village-idiot
France is doing the same with French.

~~~
rvense
French was a minority language in France until the 20th century. The other
languages were basically beaten and shamed out of school children.

~~~
toomanybeersies
Same situation with Italian.

The introduction of the radio and the television played a big part in the
shift to Italian and French becoming the normal languages for their respective
countries over the multitude of regional languages.

~~~
pjmlp
I really enjoy that Napolitan and Sicilian dialects are kind of still being
spoken.

~~~
JBReefer
Sicilian is still spoken a bit in the New York Metro area - a lot of New
Jersey Italians that speak fluent Italian have trouble communicating with
people in Italy, because it's Sicilian!

------
davewasthere
It is a great language to learn. I speak a bit of Khaleej Arabic, and maybe
twenty years ago, could read the characters (I'd struggle a bit now) so could
read anything that was transliterated.

But it's logical and very easy. Well worth learning even just the
fundamentals. There are a few sounds that us English speakers don't
necessarily use natively, but on the whole, it's a lot easier to learn (I
find) than say a tonal language.

~~~
sdiq
Kaif halach? As a Muslim who gets to hear Arabic several times a week in the
mosque and who lived in the Khaleej, too, picking Arabic has been a not so
easy thing for me. I think any other language not formally read would still be
difficult for me. However, I can read Arabic though still can't speak.

------
greeneggs
Peter Hessler wrote a wonderful New Yorker story about Arabic and Egyptian
Arabic, mixing history and language history, politics, and his personal
history in Egypt. It goes into much more detail.

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/learning-
arabi...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/learning-arabic-from-
egypts-revolution)

Some random quotes:

> Over time, Arabs came to associate any encouragement of vernacular writing
> with colonialism. By the nineteen-fifties, allegiance to fusha was critical
> to pan-Arabism, because the language created a bond across the Arab world.

> At public universities, math, medicine, and some hard sciences are taught in
> English. Centuries ago, Europeans needed Arabic to learn medicine, but
> nowadays even Egyptian medical students don’t use Arabic texts. “What
> happens is that you reserve Arabic for traditional knowledge,” Doss said.
> “And it becomes more conservative.”

> After the Chinese, textbook Egyptians seemed remarkably uninspired by
> development. There were no production quotas, no economic plans, no
> infrastructure projects. The word “factory” did not appear in the book.
> People said things like “Ya hag, I’m an engineer and after five years of
> university, I’m working as a waiter in a restaurant.”

> The language is wonderful for Wanderwort. Arabic imported “shah” from the
> Persians, and then the phrase al-shah mat—the king died—was introduced to
> English as “checkmate.”

> Translation into fusha can clean up a politician’s words. For example, in
> April, 2016, President Sisi discussed political reform with representatives
> of different sectors of society. Speaking Egyptian, he stumbled: “The ideal
> shape that you are calling for, that idealism is in books, but we cannot
> take everything you think about with paper and pen and then ask the state
> for it, no, it won’t happen . . . but we are on a pathway in which we’re
> succeeding each day more than the day before.” In Al-Ahram, the quote
> appeared in fusha as: “Idealism exists in books, but we’re walking the
> pathway of success, and we will succeed day by day.”

> During the last century, publishers sometimes rejected books that used
> Egyptian, and even novels about everyday life, like Naguib Mahfouz’s “Cairo
> Trilogy,” featured fusha dialogue that no Egyptian would ever speak.
> Egyptian Arabic still lacks a standardized orthography, but its use has
> become more common during the past fifteen years, in part because of the
> Internet and texting. Nowadays, a writer like Rakha can publish in Egyptian,
> but to some degree it’s too late, because people rarely read Arabic books of
> any sort. For Rakha’s third novel, he’s writing in English, primarily
> because he wants to attract readers.

------
xvilka
Also there is a poor support in software, for example in console tools: [1]

[1]
[https://gist.github.com/XVilka/a0e49e1c65370ba11c17](https://gist.github.com/XVilka/a0e49e1c65370ba11c17)

------
Gormisdomai
Arabic's grammar system should also be fascinating for any computer scientist.
The majority of MSA vocabulary is generated by predictably transforming "root
strings" of 2, 3 or 4 letters. Beyond just English style conjugation, this
means that every verb can predictably be transformed into a set of nouns,
every noun can be traced back to to its original root verb (the same for
adjectives and adverbs).

For example

Root: KTB Kataba (he wrote) Kitaab (book) [thing you write] Maktaba (bookshop
/ library / office) [place you write] Kateb (clerk, writer, author) [writer]
(and so on for words that don't translate directly into English)

Root: AML Amala: (he did / worked) Amal: (~action) [thing you do / make]
Mamal: (factory) [place you do / make] Amel: (~worker) [doer, maker, worker]

So on for words like (kitchen = place where you eat, pilot = person who
flies).

The previous comment arguing that Arabic is too rigid for new vocabulary
overlooks how this rigidity allows for a very well structured grammar, that
ability to express thoughts and ideas thag just fall out of a result of the
combinatorics.

Similarly, this means that contrary to previous comments, Arabic is also /very
well/ encoded for many tasks. Once you know your roots, is very easy to
reverse engineer what a lot of commonly used words mean. What's more, you can
(and people have) exploited this to write very efficient semantic compression
algorithms for Arabic text.

You can't see it in the English letters but these transformations are super
algorithmic, you do them by just doubling consonants or adding vowels and it's
very intuitive for native speakers.

There are only about a total of 6000 lexical root words in Arabic, so on a
computer you can represent each word by encoding it's lexical root, and the
grammatical transformation on it. This results in compressed text which is
also still very easy to analyse for meaning and sentiment.

You can check out the literature on Arabic natural language processing to see
more like this, and a lot of them double as helpful tools for learning Arabic.
Google once made an API which would take written Arabic text and infer the
locations of all the pronunciation marks from the context and vocabulary, so
you can turn text into a form that's easier for beginners to read. Yamli is a
popular tool which automatically transliterates Arabic that has been written
phonetically in Roman characters back to correctly spelled Arabic letters, so
if you've heard a word but don't know how to spell it you can still Google it.
I'm sure there are many other cool things I don't know about too.

There may be a lot of spoken dialects, but written Arabic is potentially one
of the most standardised and carefully encoded languages there is.

~~~
bunkerbewohner
It's certainly interesting in theory. But in practice, how do you distinguish
between a bookshop, library, office and desk when all of those things can be
referred to by "maktab"?

And does inferring / generating words this way actually work? For example, can
I say "makra" (مقرأ) for "Library", a place where you read? Based on the verb
"yakra" (read).

~~~
Cyph0n
> But in practice, how do you distinguish between a bookshop, library, office
> and desk when all of those things can be referred to by "maktab"?

Bookshop: matjar/dukkan (shop/store) kutub (books)

Library: maktaba

Office: maktab

Desk: maktab

The difference between office and desk is found from context.

------
gumby
I learned MSA and some Egyptian and there really are things you can say in it
that are almost impossible to express in English (or the other European
languages I know). This is true of any pair of languages of course but
structurally the root system allows much more nuance and overtone than more
workmanlike languages like English. I believe Hebrew (which I don't speak!)
has a similar structure though I've been told by Hebrew+Arabic speakers that
Hebrew in practice is less so.

It's a real shame the contemporary literature is so small.

~~~
jl6
Have you got some examples?

~~~
getcrunk
I have very limited knowledge on the topic so take what I say with some
skepticism, but one thing is that most words are formed by a variation of a
three or four letter root word. So this gives a lot of flexibility and
subtlety to the language. Context is everything. A root word for example made
up of the letters d - r - b in its most basic form means to hit. But that same
root can be used to mean depress (as in a pedal) or separate things (sort) or
ring a bell or to agree on a time and place for a meeting, to be unrealistic,
to make and example or analogy. The dictionary entry is multiple columns. And
this is common in the language.

Further to the competent speaker this results in no difficulty understanding
the language give the next point which is its grammer. Words and therefore
phrases and scentences have their grammatical role signified by Vowels.

~~~
thaumasiotes
This isn't exactly an unusual concept; you can see the same thing in earlier
English, preserved in different forms like "rise" (present) / "rose" (past) /
"raise" (causative).

This was once considered significant enough that a distinction was drawn
between "strong" irregular verbs that inflect through a vowel change (rise /
rose; grow / grew; swim / swam...), and "weak" irregular verbs that derive
their irregular past form from the regular one (bend / bent; sleep /
slept...).

~~~
getcrunk
Yea it goes further than that in Arabic. In the example of r s e only vowels
were modified for tense in Arabic you will add consonants to radically change
the meaning. Same in hebrew as another commenter showed much better than I did

~~~
thaumasiotes
Changing the vowel to form a causative verb from a base verb goes a little
farther than "only vowels were modified for tense".

It's a productive system in modern Arabic and a fossil of earlier times in
modern English, but it's not different in kind.

~~~
gumby
The root properties of Arabic go far beyond the example you gave of schwache
Verben in germanic languages or the historical PIE/PIG roots that give us
names like Rhine/Rhône (i.e. Fluß).

For example the word (as written) k-t-b (كتب) means "write" but could just as
much mean letters, writer, books etc; these stems are really how you think of
the word at a much deeper level than you get out of English etymology[+] or
(IMHO) Hanzi radicals. Arabic has some limited case, but the grammar is quite
different from PIE languages, lacking a "to be" verb and adjectival/adverbial
distinctions (a fast car and a car that was swift are differentiated only by
the article).

~~~
gumby
Oh I forgot my footnote

[+] I really love that English is pretty conservative in spelling so that you
can often tell the meaning of the word by looking at how it is written.
Languages like German that reform their spelling periodically to match
pronunciation shifts snip those connections away (while French goes the other
way...there's a reason why a spelling bee can be prime time television in
France).

------
Bombthecat
It is on my list of languages I want to learn! Because I think it will be the
second most spoken language in Europe. But as others already wrote: the
dialects are very strong and different.. So, not sure which one to learn :)

Any advise? Or maybe prediction which will win the "language" war in Europe?

~~~
avar
> I think it will be the second most spoken language in Europe

Arabic has 4-12 million speakers in Europe depending on how you count. If we
take the most generous estimation (12 million) which compares 2nd and 3rd
generation immigrants to native speakers it's at best the 13th most spoken
language in Europe[2].

Why do you think it'll displace all the languages that are currently ahead of
it?

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#Immigrant_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#Immigrant_communities)

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#List_of_la...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#List_of_languages)

~~~
User23
Parent is extrapolating from the trend.

~~~
avar
Such an extrapolation doesn't make sense. You could also assume that all of
New York would be speaking Italian by now given historical immigration rates.

Foreign languages only tend to have staying power until the 2nd or 3rd
generation. All these immigrants are going to public schools in their
respective countries where the official language is spoken, it's expected that
they speak it at their jobs etc.

------
Paraesthetic
Having learned Arabic because my ex girlfriend was Jordanian I can say it is a
difficult language, but anything gendered is frustrating and difficult. Its
the writing that gets me, the right to left thing is entirely a new way of
thinking.

~~~
umeshunni
As someone who studied elementary Arabic as a child temporarily living in an
Arab country, the only bits that are left with me is the script. 25 something
years later, I can still read elementary Arabic words I see on the internet or
in TV, but I have forgotten most of the vocabulary and grammar.

------
growlist
I find the general throatiness and swallowing of sounds in Arabic to be far
from melifluous.

~~~
eudora
Common misconception. Arabic sounds lovely
[https://youtu.be/WEwgafTDrOU](https://youtu.be/WEwgafTDrOU)

------
browsercoin
not to mention the most beautiful (imo) and has some pleasant Farsi spoken in
Iran.

~~~
gnulinux
Farsi is an Indo-European language. Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language. Farsi
is genealogically closer to English than Arabic.

~~~
browsercoin
im a fucking idiot.

~~~
gnulinux
No, it's a fairly widespread misconception. People also think Turkish is also
somehow related to Arabic and/or Farsi whereas Turkish belongs to a yet
another language family (Turkic Languages) and is genealogically entirely
unrelated.

------
biggio
Arabic is a horrible language both written and spoken. Turkish on the other
hand is a beautiful language and it should be more popular.

~~~
Insanity
Any arguments as to why that is so?

~~~
biggio
Turkish is regular and straightforward. Arabic, not so much. As for speaking,
you have to speak like something stuck in your throat and it doesn't sound
that pleasant to be honest.

~~~
Salamat
I think Turkish lacks consonants so it was tough for me to learn it with
vowels flowing freely like there is no tomorrow. That throat sound, they call
it glotral and it is there in many languages such as Spanish German and Irish
and Scottish. kh' as in Scots 'loch' or German 'mach' but the Ein sound is
toug: Ayin the sixteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician
ʿayin Phoenician ayin. Hebrew ʿayin ע‬, Aramaic ʿē Ayin.svg, Syriac ʿē ܥ, and
Arabic ʿayn ع‎

------
z92
To me Arabic seems to have two dialects mainly. Egyptian and the rest.
Egyptian being so different as to sound like a separate language.

And as for Iraqi, Syrian, Gulf, Arab or rest of North African Arabic -- those
are more or less the same. And if you learn MSN you can cover those.

~~~
csomar
> And as for Iraqi, Syrian, Gulf, Arab or rest of North African Arabic --
> those are more or less the same.

This is very wrong. The is a massive difference between North African and the
gulf arabic. So massive that the speakers will have to revert to the standard
arabic to be able to communicate.

------
sandworm101
Except for arabic numerals. All of science, in every language, uses arabic
numerals. That is a really big deal we rarely even mention.

~~~
ianbicking
I've been struggling some to describe numerals and Mikey's to my small
children, and it often feels like they area backwards. As you describe this I
wonder: are we literally writing them backwards?

~~~
gumby
In Arabic numbers are written in the same order as in, say, English, Thus
Arabic is little-endian.

I grew up with the Hundu digits (and the European ones!) which look more like
the digits we use here than the actual arabic ones.

~~~
rleigh
Is the Hindu and English ordering the same? If so, it's gone through two
endian changes from India to Europe!

~~~
improbable22
Yes, everyone writes the tens to the left of the ones on the page.

Most of their names (at least in Hindi) are recognisable from
enlish/latin/greek. Looks like that's not the case in Arabic, unsurprisingly
really... unless 7 = سَبْعَة = sabʿä = sabbath counts, but I suspect we got
that from semitic.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numbers_in_various_lan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numbers_in_various_languages)

