
Why Arabic is Terrific - ColinWright
http://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm
======
hsmyers
Great article on one of my favorite subjects. In the 80's using an IBM PC with
a Hercules graphics card I wrote an Arabic word processor so my partner could
write to his family in Farsi. The problems of right to left and differing
letter shapes depending on leading, middle and ending position was an
interesting challenge---not to mention the problem of vowels that occur above
and below the letters. That said, I could have done without the attack on DLI
---actually having worked with graduates (speaking Korean and Vietnamese) they
spoke as natives including idiomatic expressions. Oh well we all have biases
and the rest of the posting was excellent!

~~~
idlewords
I have no doubt that DLI students are at least as accomplished as any civilian
language learners. My beef is with the idea that most Arabic education in this
country is done for the purposes of military occupation, but as you point out
that has nothing to do with the substance of the post.

~~~
wbruce
It really wasn't so much the politics of the post that bothered me (I'm a
"pre-occupation" Arabic DLI graduate whose politics probably closely match
your own) -- it was your mischaracterization of the 63+ week program there as
limited to "hobbies and the weather," said from the comfort of a (somehow more
extensive?) 9 week program at MIIS. I have a stack of Arabic books, about as
tall as me, from the DLI course that shows this for the hyperbole this is. The
idea that someone is favorably comparing the extent of MIIS Arabic curriculum
to DLIFLC is frankly just a bit laughable.

~~~
idlewords
I intended that more as a comment on how frustrating it can be to study
Arabic, where years of effort leave you barely able to follow a TV broadcast,
and not as a slight on the DLI, which is probably as intensive a program as
anyone can pursue.

I can see how you can read that comment as a dig at the DLI, but that wasn't
my intent.

~~~
wbruce
Thanks, good to hear (worth noting that I didn't mean my reply as a dig at
MIIS, either). I really did enjoy the article in other respects; I have a
severe love for the language, even to this day.

------
bluishgreen
"The combination of numerous dialects and a formal/informal continuum is
pretty much unique to Arabic and gives rise to fascinating situations watching
Arabs calibrate their language based on the situation and the linguistic
background of their interlocutor."

Nope, not unique.

Tamil (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language>) is the same way. I am a
native tamil speaker.

~~~
idlewords
I stand corrected! I guess since each dialect gets a country or two to itself
it's easier to notice the situation with Arabic.

~~~
Sharlin
Finnish, my native language, has this to a lesser extent. Historically, there
has been a significant regional variation in spoken Finnish (although modern
communications and inexpensive travel have greatly diminished the
differences), but the more formal the context, and the more diverse the
audience, the closer one's speech tends to the Standard Written Finnish.

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?

~~~
bane
And in the US as well. There are some isolated regional accents that are
virtually unintelligible to people from other parts of the country. It's not
perhaps quite as pronounced as in the British Isles, but it's definitely
there. But everybody understands a midwestern accent (the kind used on
national news broadcasts).

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.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_English>

~~~
szopa
That's sort of confusing. In a number of places I've read an explanation that
what is described in the Wikipedia article as "Mid-Atlantic English" was in
fact higher class New York English before WWII (one of its most characteristic
features was a non-rhotic "r"). These sources also tend to use Franklin Delano
Roosevelt as an example of this sort of accent.

For example: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_dialect#History> (that
article quotes the

~~~
bane
It's sort of both.

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.

------
Jun8
Interesting post but the OP is linguistically naive, which is generally what
happens when English speakers encounter another language with more interesting
(i.e. exotic") morphological, phonetical, etc. elements. If Arabic if your
first foray into a highly inflectional language, it might look fairly exotic.
If you had studied, say ancient Greek or Latin, first, it might look less so.

"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.

~~~
yariang
> This comment about Chinese and Japanese (totally unrelated > languages with
> very different writing systems, is laughable.

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.

~~~
Jun8
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.

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.

~~~
idlewords
What I mean by vanilla is that neither language has grammatical features that
are particularly difficult for an English speaker to internalize.

~~~
anghyflawn
Uh, really?

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.

------
gmi01
I am a native Arabic speaker, I enjoyed the article, however there are a few
mistakes.

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

~~~
idlewords
2\. About 41% of plurals in an Arabic corpus are broken
(<http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/acl2004/emnlp/pdf/Goweder.pdf>). Since most
feminine plurals are regular, this means most masculine plurals are not.

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.

~~~
saljam
I'm a native Arabic speaker, and I agree with you on point 10. If you've
learned formal Arabic properly - i.e. attended school - then even texts from
the pre-islamic era should be accessible. (Mostly poems, see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muallaqat>)

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...](http://arz.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%88%D9%8A%D9%83%D9%8A%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A7:Introduction_in_English))
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.

------
blahedo
To get a sense of the status of Arabic dialect with a referent that might make
more sense to a western audience (or maybe not), try this approximation:
Arabic now is like Latin a millennium ago.

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).

------
gwern
> The combination of numerous dialects and a formal/informal continuum is
> pretty much unique to Arabic and gives rise to fascinating situations
> watching Arabs calibrate their lanugage based on the situation and the
> linguistic background of their interlocutor.

Not Chinese?

(Also, #9 hardly seems like an item to include in an article explaining 'Why
Arabic is Terrific'. 'Terrifying', perhaps.)

~~~
Jun8
The concept of dialect is quite vague and is generally determined politically.
Some like the Chinese "dialects" are generally mutually unintelligible and are
actually different languages. On the other end of the spectrum, one may
consider Norwegian/Swedish/Danish, which may be treated as dialects of teh
same language practically bur are considered separate languages
(<http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1120647>).

~~~
just_the_tip
"A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

~~~
vbtemp
\+ a million if I could. One of my favorite quotes. It's from Max Weinreich,
right? "A sprakh iz a dialekt mit an Armee un Flot"

------
pknerd
Without having any intention of sounding bias,let's ignore that it belongs to
some faith, if Arabic is recited properly then it does sound amazing even if
you can't understand it at all. The sounding of Arabic Alphabets is in such a
way that which I hardly found in any other language. Even in my own native
language which is quite rich. Do listen a bit:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riW4W66ptqI>

~~~
johnyzee
The linked hymn is also very beautiful:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdCPDP5qHy0&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdCPDP5qHy0&feature=related)

~~~
pknerd
Original version is here:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW1s5Ny_4rk>

------
vbtemp
Hebrew has virtually the exact same properties, and is quite simple to learn
as it is extremely regular, and like all Semitic languages is based off a
three-root system. In fact, in a number of conversations with my arab friends
I'm stunned just how similar Hebrew and Arabic are (both in good and foul
words) and in grammar.

~~~
andrewem
A friend who's a native Hebrew speaker told me that modern Hebrew initially
lacked foul words, and so they were borrowed from Arabic.

~~~
philwelch
That makes sense, as modern Hebrew is largely reconstructed ancient Hebrew
with added words for things that were invented in the past several centuries.
I don't think the people who reconstructed Hebrew would have gone out of their
way to include foul words.

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.

~~~
beagle3
Israelis curse in a mix of Arabic, Russian, German, Polish, Yiddish and
recently even English -- but at least at this point in time, Arabic is the
dominant source.

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.

------
csomar
_There are a few words that take a regular plural suffix, but most of the time
to make a plural you have to change the structure of the word quite
dramatically:_

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.

~~~
jawher
> The structural change is regular. That is you don't have to learn each name
> plural.

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)

~~~
cabalamat
> 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.

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)

------
ziyadb
The most interesting part is the deviation of spoken Arabic (which as
mentioned in the article, varies by region, e.g. Saudis speak different Arabic
from Jordanians, or the Lebanese) from written Arabic. I'm a native Arabic
speaker but most of my education and upbringing were in English, so I tend to
use the "higher form" i.e. written Arabic, when communicating with fellow
speakers. And yes, it is terrific indeed.

------
damncabbage
This is a great article, but Firefox chokes on the <?xml ... ?> block at the
top, and switches to ISO-8859-1 encoding.

Go _View - > Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8)_ to have the Arabic
examples render correctly.

~~~
sbierwagen
Ah, but _which_ Firefox?

Rendered perfectly fine in Firefox 7 on Vista 64-bit.

~~~
deno
Firefox 9.0a1 (Nightly) / Linux 3.0 x64 has this problem as well. Might be
problem with platform rather than browser itself.

------
onan_barbarian
Thought-provoking, but with some comedy gold scattered through it. I thought I
vaguely recognized this guy's sense of humor and/or the blog title, and sure
enough:

<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.

------
rdouble
As a side note to the side note, the "Arabist" tradition in the US State
Department has been around since the mid 1800s. Robert Kaplan wrote a great
book about it: [http://www.amazon.com/Arabists-American-Robert-D-
Kaplan/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Arabists-American-Robert-D-
Kaplan/dp/0028740238)

(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.)

~~~
idlewords
Arabic programs were tiny pre-2001, and now they are extremely oversubscribed.
Curiously enough there are still very few people who make it past third-year
level :-)

~~~
rdouble
In any case, you may like the book I linked to in my post.

~~~
idlewords
Thank you, it looks terrific! Just ordered it now and can't wait to dig in.

------
cletus
I'm a native English speaker. I studied a little French and speak (and can
read/write) some German (with limited vocabulary). For the English speaker,
German grammar is painful enough (3 genders, agreement of nouns and adjectives
by case, number and article, separable verbs, etc) but, based on what reading
I've done, German is still "Latin lite".

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.

[1[: <http://www.physorg.com/news111241495.html>

~~~
blahedo
There is a certain amount of misinformation in this post that I'd like to
clear up:

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.)

~~~
devijvers
Be careful who you call a dictator. While Ataturk has been President of Turkey
for 15 years (until his death in 1938) he encouraged a multi-party system.
However, during his lifetime several parties were formed and again self-
dissolved or dissolved after an uncovered assassination attempt on Ataturk.
It's only in 1945 - after Ataturk's death - that the multi-party system in
Turkey took off for real.

~~~
eru
From what I can tell Ataturk was mostly a benevolent dictator.

(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.)

------
Cyph0n
Yep, Arabic is indeed a fascinating language. I'd like to add that Arabic
grammar is extremely difficult, at least when compared to English. It takes
years of study just to understand what short vowel to place at the end of
certain words.

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.

~~~
Mvandenbergh
This is sort of true, but short vowels at the end of words (the case system)
are not generally useful for non-Muslim language learners.

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.

~~~
Cyph0n
Agreed. I only mentioned this to show that Arabic is complex, especially for
people who want to study the language in detail.

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.

------
Mvandenbergh
I agree totally with #1, the root system is very cool. The diglossia has two
sides to it, on the one hand it makes it harder to structure learning because
the basic phrases that are the bread and butter of every other language
learning program are usually expressed only in the dialects and may not even
have agreed upon spelling in the written language. On the other hand, if you
just want to speak, you can spend relatively little time on grammatical
features like the dual, because many spoken dialects barely use them.

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.

~~~
hermanthegerman
Hebrew has a vocalization system to signal it, though (for educational
purpose, for example).

------
hermanthegerman
Thanks, that post was fantastic. Having the arabic words in larger font size
would have been great, though - really hard to look at them and spot the
differences in that size (and zooming all the time is annoying).

~~~
azernik
This is something I find on all kinds of Arabic sites (including news outlets,
corporations, and governments), as well as signs and print in Arab countries -
the default font size for Arabic is generally (to me, as a recent student of
the language) illegibly small.

People just get used to it, I guess.

~~~
asuth
Yea -- when we have arabic text on Quizlet, we override the font to this:

font: 2em 'Al Bayan', Nadeem, 'Simplified Arabic', 'Arial Unicode MS', sans-
serif;

------
johnyzee
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.

~~~
idlewords
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.

~~~
defen
> 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?

~~~
genieyclo
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'.

~~~
leviathan
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.

~~~
genieyclo
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.

------
glenngillen
"The language of the National Designated Other is bound to switch to Chinese
in a couple of years"

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.

~~~
idlewords
I'm talking about the language of the perceived (US) national enemy. This used
to be Russian and is now Arabic.

~~~
glenngillen
ah! Wasn't a phrase I'd heard before. Makes much more sense in that context.

Thanks

------
samuel1604
I learnt hebrew at the jewish summer camp and that made a hell lot easier for
me whilst learning arabic for my US government contract (field) work...

------
sethg
As someone who has learned classical Hebrew and Aramaic up to the “if I
torture the page for long enough it usually confesses”, I love the root-and-
pattern Semitic grammar, up until the point where _I have to look a word up in
a dictionary_ , because a lot of root letters actually drop out of the
inflected forms, so I have to flip back and forth looking for possible
candidate root forms. And prepositions are just tacked onto the beginnings of
words, so especially in un-vowelled text, one can confuse a preposition for
part of the root. And Talmudic commentaries are often written in a mishmash of
Hebrew and Aramaic, because after all, if you can’t read both Hebrew and
Aramaic, you shouldn’t be reading the Talmud in the first place.... Good
times.

------
patrickas
Very interesting article.

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

~~~
idlewords
It's the first time you hear it because I got it wrong - thanks! Fixed now.

~~~
patrickas
You should also fix dukkan -> dukaakiin to become dakaakiin

~~~
idlewords
Fixed. Thanks for these corrections, and please feel free to email me
(maciej@ceglowski.com) if there's anything else I've garbled.

------
drtse4
Great post.

See this <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic> (Examples of major
regional differences) for more info on the differences between regional
dialects.

------
_corbett
Arabic is terrific and difficult. I studied it for years, including moving
twice to the Middle East but in just a few months of study was better at
German than at Arabic simply because of the cognates.

It's definitely worth the effort though.

------
bluekeybox
One of my friends (who studied philosophy) and I had a discussion the other
day about differences between natural and programming languages. I made a
point that my knowledge of Russian in no way helps me speak better English (we
both agreed on that), while a C programmer who also knows a language that
relies on a different programming paradigm, for example, Lisp or Prolog, is
likely to be a more effective C programmer than someone who hasn't been
exposed to that paradigm.

~~~
athom
That's interesting. I found my German lessons did help me better understand
the underpinnings of English. Of course, that may owe more to the teacher, and
English being a Germanic language probably helped, but knowing a second
natural language does give you a new perspective on your first, and additional
languages broaden that even further. 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.

~~~
bluekeybox
> knowing a second natural language does give you a new perspective on your
> first

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).

------
tomtom101
Really great post. I studied Arabic for 15 months at the British Military
language school and after working as a "Terp" I went on to run the policy for
language support to the British Military. I encourage you to continue with
your studies as the more time you spend learning the language the more
rewarding it becomes. Once you start to move away from MSA and learn dialects
it becomes much easier to speak, but even harder to listen. Good luck and
great post.

------
iamwil
"Some words have separate broken plurals depending on whether you're talking
about a small or large number (the cutoff is somewhere around seven)."

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_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two)

------
bane
Anybody interested in written languages can get lost for hours here
<http://www.omniglot.com/>

------
dmoney
_> For exmaple, here are some "words" consisting of a single letter repeated
three times:

> ÙŠÙŠÙŠ Ø¹Ø¹Ø¹ Ù‡Ù‡Ù‡ ÙƒÙƒÙƒ Ù„Ù„Ù„_

Which for me looks like (asciified):

 _> USUSUS 010101 UtUtUt UfUfUf UnUnUn_

I'm guessing I'm missing a font or something? (Firefox 6)

~~~
amirhhz
View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode

Interestingly Chrome auto-corrected this.

~~~
dmoney
That worked, thanks.

------
nivertech
Funny thing, that Ancient North Arabian [1] sounds almost like Hebrew.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_North_Arabian>

~~~
idiopathic
It's not funny, it's inevitable - Arab and Israeli tribes were all Semites
(which is why accusing Arabs of being anti-Semitic is annoying, as it implies
that we are not Semites) they share a common genetic and cultural heritage,
and their languages evolved from common roots. If you ignore the current
crazies on both sides, Judeo-Islamic tradition makes far more sense that
Judeo-Christian one does.

~~~
nivertech
All you said is right, but please don't mix concepts.

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.

------
njharman
Whatever author has planned for a career I hope he dumps that and decides to
be a writer of some sort. That was a truly superior read.

------
jinushaun
This is why I love linguistics. Languages are so fascinating. Humans invented
so many different ways to speak and write down ideas.

------
cefarix
Have you ever wondered why numbers are written backwards in English? Why do we
write the highest-order digits first and proceed to the lower-order digits?

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.

~~~
wheels
That's wrong in a couple ways:

• "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.

~~~
cefarix
I know they are Indian. I am from South Asia. However, the modern system was
first created in Arabic. Also, I am talking about the placement of the digits,
and this came to Europe from Arabic, not Brahmi.

~~~
mwerty
That does not explain why the Indians did the same thing (I'm assuming)
without arabic influence.

~~~
nikcub
They did. The Indians invented both base10 and positional notation. The
Persian's picked it up from the, and a few short years later the Arabs picked
it up. It was bought to Europe via Fibonacci's _Liber Abaci_.

The entire time the positional notation didn't change with alphabet

------
donw
Marginally on-topic, but I just looked at the tuition for the Monterey
Institute.

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.

~~~
idlewords
I have no idea where you got those prices but they are not correct.

~~~
donw
If you mean the MIIS prices, I got them here:

<http://www.miis.edu/admissions/tuition>

~~~
idlewords
Yeah, those are for an unrelated program. See the SILP tuition, which is
around $3k.

------
hackermom
If you're looking for something that is terrific for real, read up on Japanese
- its entirely syllabled nature is fascinating.

------
coldarchon
The reason why I will never learn Arabic is that "black man" and "slave" use
the same word in that language ..

~~~
saljam
1) It's also the first part of some of the most popular given names.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_(name)> The word for slave simply
doesn't have the same meaning as in English.

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).

------
llcoolv
to be honest most of those neat things exist in many other languages - for
example all the slavic languages + the more conservative germanic ones have a
way root+prefixes/suffixes that plays a similar role. also most of the slavic
languages have separate endings for feminine/neuter plural and slovene even
has the dual.

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.

~~~
timsally
> _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.

