I absolutely agree - Arabic is a beautiful language and a joy to learn, and it is particularly appealing for those who enjoy structure and regularity (e.g. CS and math folk!). Be forewarned, though - the significant differences between MSA (modern standard Arabic, the focus of most "Arabic" courses/material) and regional/national dialects (and the differences between those various dialects themselves) may make it a bit less practical than you'd hope (and a source of disappointment when you go to actually speak with people!).
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).
You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for something like this, without the time to implement it myself. All these years I’ve had to use http://ejtaal.net/mr/ but it’s just getting quite cumbersome.
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.
I'll try to answer my own question: I knew Wehr's dictionary was fairly old, but it may be old enough that it has entered public domain. There are still major publishers that publish the dictionary, but it may well be public domain.
Anybody who finds Arabic interesting might also like to take a look at Maltese, an Arabic offshoot which is the only Semitic language written in Latin script:
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.
And then there is this beast: ع a consonant pronounced so far back in the throat that you must wait two hours after eating to safely attempt it. Naturally it's one of the most common sounds in the language.
Its formal name is 'amanual autoasphyxiation', because to pronounce the 'ayn, you simply attempt to strangle yourself without using your hands.
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)
: 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 also have an Arabic book (which was super fun to read on plane post 9/11, oops), that likens it to Scottish's glottal stop, which seems right on in retrospect:
Hamza is a letter (basically it is what the letter alif is supposed to be, the long vowel usually written as alif is not a letter itself). But for historical reason it has a very weird set of orthographic rules where is can or can not be seated on other letters depending on the context (and unlike other Arabic letters, the context here involves the vowels).
The reason why I would say I think it is a letter, is because it can be a letter in a root. Like in قرأ, the letter Alif is not considered the third letter in the verb, hamza is. I had to look it up, the grammatical term for it is الفعل المهموز, and all of the examples I can find have it placed on the alif in the root form, but it changes depending on how you conjugate it.
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 yeah that helps me articulate, but I’m still fuzzy on if there’s a different muscle back there that Arabic uses, or if the answer is “yes, it’s a variant on the same thing”?
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.
Ayn is a voiced pharyngeal fricative, ghayn is a voiced velar fricative. My intuitive answer was wrong, I thought the difference was one is fricative and the other is not... at any rate, those are points of articulation, not muscles.
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.
Yeah I dunno how to tell you this, but those of us who make the rrr sound at the back of our throats roll our eyes at you when your backs are turned.
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).
There's a (not so) fine difference between the rolled/trilled R [1] and the guttural/uvular R [2]. The former is indeed produced by vibrating the tongue
I notice you don't link the Wikipedia page about the rolled R [1], probably because it contradicts you. There are many kinds of rhotic trills and the guttural R (aka uvular trill) is one of them.
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.
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.
The Hebrew Ayin (ע) is also pronounced as a glottal stop in some communities -- Like the Jews who returned to Israel from communities in Syria and Iraq).
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".
Oh man, it's not that bad is it :-) but yeah I was trying to think of a way to explain this in text and it's hard... but the closest English equivalent I can think of is the diaeresis, like when you say "naïve"... except, imagine if instead of blending the 'a' and 'ï' together, you made as hard of a constant-ish boundary as you possibly could. I think that's a rough approximation?
I'm not sure I can describe any better, but I think most English speakers would tend to produce a glottal stop [ʔ] between the vowels in response to that description, rather than a pharyngeal fricative.
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.
Can you figure out which dialect the original author is learning here? From some of the vocabulary I'm pretty sure it isn't the Damascene Arabic I learned.
It’s formal Arabic, i.e., Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).
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.
The local variants are actually older than standard Arabic (they all seem to stem from a common source). The standard Arabic is a synthetic language invented by grammarians who selected what they considered the best of all Arabic dialects at their time and formalized it. The general wisdom that the local variants are deformed form of the standard Arabic is not supported by linguistic research.
It’s more an inability to grasp it rather than an inability to produce that sound.
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.
The mechanics of speech is complicated and most of the people most of the time have no idea what is actually going on, pretty much like with breathing.
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
The expert quoted in that article disagrees with the idea that you can't do it:
"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.
Excellent article on a very logical language. However this part:
> 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
"1. There's something about intelligence agencies - maybe the familiar comfort of a three-letter acronym on the wall, maybe the late-night spanking parties - that draws fraternity boys like ants to a picnic, and right now the road to bro advancement leads through an Arabic classroom. Their complete lack of a sense of irony allows these students to combine sincere appreciation for The Fountainhead with a desire for a lifelong career in government service, and the hardest part of studying Arabic is having to listen to their asinine opinions after they have gained enough proficiency to try to express them."
Is there a term like "Brook" is to "Spook" like "Brogrammer" is to "Programmer"?
Brost! Aha yes, rhyming with "Boast" gives it a nice ring, while the pronunciation and meaning of "Brook" is kind of ambiguous.
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 love learning writing systems and think the Semitic languages, including Arabic, are especially fun to learn and write.
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!
This is a common opinion even amongst language specialists. So much so, in the process of modernising Turkish, about 90 years ago, whatever little concept of gender Turkish had was completely stripped from the language, leaving only 'it', alongside its conversion to Latin alphabet.
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.
Turkish from 1922 is Ottoman Turkish. Most Words are from arabic.You should work on a Ottoman dictionary and to understand Arabic Words is easy because
The Root/Pattern System of arabic Words.
To read arabic Letters in turkish is a bit difficult than Latin Letters but not very difficult after learning words.
> So much so, in the process of modernising Turkish, about 90 years ago, whatever little concept of gender Turkish had was completely stripped from the language, leaving only 'it'
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.
I don't believe changing Turkish to latin alphabets was about process of modernising Turkish but because of making distance to Islamic roots here, any thing has relation to Islam was removed like Arabic alphabets, changing the capital to Ankara, Changing Mosques to museum.
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.
That is a little bit of a revisionist history, curiously perpetrated both by Turkish conservatives and liberals. For the liberals, it’s the case of, ’look how backwards the country was in the Empire, and Mustafa Kemal saved it from certain oblivion, vote for us’. For conservatives, it’s more ’Mustafa Kemal destroyed our glorious Islamic past by making Turkey into an European nation state, and suppressed all dissent for the contrary, vote for us’
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.
>.. like you cannot plant a parliament in a country that was previously governed by tribesmen.
I don't know which is your country. But you dont know anything from history. Ottoman is one of the greatest country in his ages.
like suleiman the magnificent and the Mehmed II the Conqueror. He conquered Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) It is widely quoted as the event that marked the end of the European Middle Ages.
One area where lack of gendered nouns is valuable is for non-binary people (those who are neither men or women). In languages like Arabic or Hebrew, this gets very difficult as a binary gender generally must be assigned to first-person pronouns to be grammatically correct!
In those cases, you assign to default (non-inflected) gender of the language (in case of Arabic, singulars default to masculine and plurals default to feminine).
Japanese and Chinese lack plurals and grammatical gender but have noun classes that influence how things are counted. One counts “1 little animal of cat” or “2 flat thing of paper”.
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”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class#Common_criteria_f... has some more fun ones. When I first heard of noun classes in school, we were introduced to them via Borges' story about the Chinese Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge[0] (which may have been inspired by Chinese noun classifiers?).
In case that actually dissuaded you from learning and you would want to otherwise, I want to point out that gender is extremely simple in Arabic. It is not at all arbitrary in the way Romance languages treat it - nearly every word is clearly masculine or feminine (with very few exceptions, like war, sea, sun) and treating all nonhuman plurals as feminine simplifies things rather than complicating them.
Are there any semetic languages that don't have arbitrary gender rules? Correctly gendering numbers (depending on the gender of the noun being counted) in hebrew is hard for native speakers.
Is there an actual purpose for gendering in languages, beyond obsessing over sex? What purpose does it serve? Are languages without gender somehow less powerful or efficient or expressive (or romantic ;)?
Wikipedia’s article on grammatical gender offers some strong reasons, the main one being disambiguation of antecedents (for example, which of multiple objects in the sentence the subject or verb is referring to) and homophones (different words with the same spelling or pronunciation).
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!
Another interesting thing about language differences, is that some languages don't have articles (like "the" in English - if I remember my English grammar [1] and my Hindi and Sanskrit [2] correctly, heh).
[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 speak Persian quite fluently and Persian is completely free of articles. It is also an absolutely gender neutral language (Persians really have to ask if you are talking about a woman or a man if they need context). Besides that, there are no irregular verbs at all. I love it.
Cool. Interesting. Then it must have diverged somewhat in that respect from Sanskrit, because both are descended from Proto-Indo-European languages, I've read. Sanskrit does have genders, IIRC - masculine, feminine and neuter. Sanskrit is also supposed to be a very regular language. I studied it for 3 or 4 years in high school. After you know the basics of some vocabulary and some grammar and some rules for joining words (called sandhi), you can easily understand compound words and even make up your own, like in German. Also, Sanskrit poetry can sometimes have good wordplay because many words have many different meanings (each).
Articles seem completely pointless to me as a Slavic speaker. In my language you can specify the a/the distinction if you want by using equivalents of "this/some", but it's optional and most of the time you just use the nouns alone.
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 :)
One theory is that gender in languages aids in first langauge acquisition (while making second language acquisition more difficult). Children learning their first language are helped when there are multiple, redundant ways to recognize words and phrases.
Gender in modern European languages is primarily not about sex; in addition, the word itself just means "kind", in the same sense as "generic". Historically, there was only an "animate" vs. "inanimate" gender. The feminine gender developed from a couple suffixes (think -ic, -al, etc. though these are different suffixes) reanalyzed into a separate gender. Unfortunately nobody really knows why female names are feminine and male names masculine, unfortunately, since we don't have any evidence of PIE names.
> Unfortunately nobody really knows why female names are feminine and male names masculine
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.
Yes, this similarity between a suffix that eventually came to characterize the feminine gender and the male genitive was present since Proto-Indo-European. Some hypothesize a connection. Similarly, the feminine and the neuter plural in languages that still have the neuter plural usually have the same form, since the neuter plural and the feminine both evolved from a collectivizing suffix (transform a noun for sth. to a group for sth.).
I agree, this plagued me throughout the years I was living in Brazil and I still can't fathom how a language (Latin in this case) could evolve with the concept of gender applied to inanimate objects!
> I'm convinced that the grammatical construct of gender exists only to make it easier to identify foreign or uneducated speakers!
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.
"Unlike the rest of the language, numerals are written left-to-right."
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.
It actually used to be right to left, just like the language! In some formal communication it's still the case, like when news channel announce new year "one and eighty and nine hundreds and a thousand. The change to read from left to right started fairly recently in the twentieth century, along with the change of the order of alphabets from أبجدهوز to أبتثجحخ.
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.
Yet historically English numbers were little endian, base twenty: "four and twenty" etc. Base 20 comes from Celtic roots I think, so perhaps other European languages have a similar history too.
Actually for example 1959 in Arabic the modern way to say it is "A thousand and nine hundred and fifty nine - الف وتسعمائة وتسعة وخمسون" but we also can say (and this is the old way) "Nine and fifty and nine hundred and a thousand - خمس ﻮ تسعون ﻮ تسع مئة وألف" which from tight to left.
"Glottal stops are everywhere in English but we are not trained to hear them, so a long portion of one of your first Arabic classes will be devoted to blowing your mind with the fact that English words like 'apple' and 'elegant' do not start with a vowel."
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.
They start with 'ap, 'el, 'ig, 'um, where the apostrophe is the tiniest catch in the throat. You can pronounce them without the catch, but to our ears the difference is inaudible, because we don't make a distinction. Arabs do.
> 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. :-)
I'm trying to learn Egyptian Arabic and the resources available are incredibly frustrating. It's a very popular language yet nearly all the beginner resources are for Modern Standard Arabic.
It's almost like being forced to learn Latin first before you can learn Spanish.
Hebrew, at least as far as instances of Hebrew writing, is _much_ older than Arabic. There are 3,000 year old Hebrew Inscriptions ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zayit_Stone ). The Zayit stone was found 31 miles south west of Jerusalem and its dated as 10th century BCE.
That's because Hebrew died out for over a thousand years and is now a revived dead language. The lack of a vulgar dialect prevented it from changing, similar to how Latin has not changed since native vulgar speakers died out (or rather, their dialects became so distinct that they are now considered different languages e.g. Romanian).
Hebrew never "died." That is revisionist propaganda. People have been continuously speaking Hebrew in Jerusalem, Judea, Sumeria, and nearby in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Gaza for the past 3,000 years, as well as using it for prayer and study while in exile.
Source? Obviously people have been speaking Hebrew all over the world as part of prayer and study, nobody would dispute that. But to my knowledge nobody was using Hebrew as a day-to-day language until Zionism became popular in the late 19th-20th centuries.
Wikipedia disagrees and says that as of the second century CE it ceased to be used as a mother tongue and was only used in the context of religious rituals, etc up until its revival. The article is decently sourced.
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
Wow, I'm thoroughly impressed how well he nailed that. For reference, I speak Egyptian Arabic and know speakers from nearly every country represented in that video. Very neat.
>Muslims believe that Arabic as written in the 7th century A.D. is the language of divine revalation. This has served as a tremendously conservative force on written Arabic, with two important consequences.
>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.
Had the experience in the National Palace Museum Taiwan of both Taiwanese and elder Chinese (the ones who don't only speak simplified but can handle traditional) looking at thousand-plus year old artifacts and mumbling to themselves, way beyond what an english speaker will try and do with roman or greek inscription.
> 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.
Yes for the "groups of women" part, but no for the dual formation. So for Spanish you have to learn masculine singular and plural, feminine singular and plural, but not masculine dual and feminine dual.
If I remember my Sanskrit correctly, it too has duals. But not specifically gendered duals. So two of them are going is written the same way irrespective of whether "the two" are male or female or neutral.
Yeah Sanskrit has a neutral as well. Makes the language much simpler. (In my opinion) .
Traditional Arabic (fusha) is closest to Modern Standard Arabic. Everyone who said msa or fusha is generally relegated to academic or formal use is not incorrect. But fusha is still widely in use by Muslim scholars (clergy-ish). It is necessary to do an advanced study Islam, Quran and majority of Islamic texts (legal, spiritual, theological) and new texts of a higher academic caliber are still written in fushah today (albeit with voweling)
> This idea is so cool that you'd think it came from a constructed language, and yet Arabic has actual native speakers who live completely normal lives and will not try to talk to you about Runescape.
Is there a large overlap between constructed language enthusiasts and Runescape enthusiasts? That seems kind of strange to me.
Interestingly, "terrific" in Arabic means "فظيع", which has exactly the same ambiguity as in English: it can be used to refer to something extremely appealing or extremely horrific.
I really enjoyed learning Arabic and this article nicely calls attention to a number of the highlights. As my first non-indo-european language it helped change some of my perspectives.
If you speak French the Arabic language texts and practice books are better than what I've been able to find in English.
Sort of off topic. I still remember this project we inherited from DLI ages ago. Folks there were having difficulty with storing UTF-8 strings in JavaScript. Whenever a character gets truncated (due to db length limit), Netscape would complain and die. Someone apparently discovered that you wouldn't get the error if the broken UTF-8 text was in a JavaScript comment. So every text string in the program was a function that parses its own source code for a comment. It was a hilarious hack.
Al-kitaab is a diffcult book to self study, and somehow an even harder one to work with in class. While it's inefficient, somewhere around book 2 you've aquired enough vocabulary and grammar to speak in fusha, although unless you've really followed through with a dialect for ammiya you're going to need a tutor to help you out. I wouldn't put too much stock in the reviews for the textbook.
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.
A not very well known fact is that Arabic has a pharyngealized lateral fricative letter (ض) which a lot of people mispronounce as eather a pharyngealized /d/ sound, or merge with the pharyngealized /dh/ sound (ظ). Both of which are incorrect. Apparently there are still some people in Iraq and parts of Saudi Arabia who maintain the correct pronunciation.
It is even mis-transliterated as /d/ in the linked article in (hadra).
That doesn't sit well with people reciting the Quran as how it was originally revealed :) This is why there was a lot of care taken in writing out exactly how each letter is to be pronounced, and was passed down one generation after the other.
Yes, Arabic is sometimes called “لغة الضاد” or “the language of ض" as it is considered a very important characteristic of Arabic, and almost (I once looked it up) entirely exclusive to it (there are some tribal languages that include the emphatic pharyngealized voiced alveolar stop).
Except that the original (classical) pronounciation is not a (pharyngealized voiced alveolar stop), but a (pharyngealized voiced lateral fricative), which sounds very close to (ظ), and explains why many Arabs merged the two sounds together. The alveolar stop is a new letter, and seems to have come out of Egypt because they had a hard time pronouncing the original latter. See this video about how to correctly pronounce it: https://youtu.be/U0qr9XxJges?t=99
Which is in general an OK way to go about it, as it is a difficult letter (not many languages have lateral fricatives after all). This is the correct way of pronouncing it: https://youtu.be/U0qr9XxJges?t=99
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.
Usually, as part of basic madrassa education, we're taught the points in the mouth from which the various sounds originate and we practice it. This gives traditionally educated Muslims nice (although perhaps a very academic) pronunciation. It's part of the knowledge needed to recite the Quran properly.
Permit me to plug a pet project of mine:
http://arabicreference.com
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).