There are only 3 tenses: Also it's derivational language which mean once you learn about a verb you actually learn about the whole lexical family of the verb.
In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabic (kitaab, kaatib, maktaba) which is the same root (k,t,b) and with simple rules you can discover all those words or even invent them if not used previously The big problem of arabic as language is arabic societies/people/... but the language itself is a gem.
https://blogs.transparent.com/arabic/the-arabic-morphologica...
I don't see why the word for "author" has to be derived from the same root as "book", logically speaking. There are a great deal more things than books that have authors.
The reason why this particular root that you've picked produces differences between "book" and "library" in most European languages is because they had two major sources from which their roots were borrowed: Latin (where "book" is "liber") and Greek (where "book" is "biblio"); and both roots were borrowed and used in this case. However, for most roots, the principle is exactly the same in European languages - a single common root produces a whole family of words, and new words are derived as needed. It's not something that's unique to Arabic.
And those things all have their own words for their authors, as well.
poetry - sha3r
poet - shaa3r
composition (the noun of the verb) - ta2leef
composition (the thing written) - mu2allaf
composer - mu2allef
letter, correspondance - resala
messenger - rasool
correspondent (like a news reporter) - murasel
You can also use kaateb for the author of a letter or perhaps a poem, but not really a symphony. Just like you wouldn't use author. Pardon the use of the numbers in words - it's how people represent letters that aren't in English in Arabic.
Note, by the way, that your examples showcase the same pattern in English - the author of "poetry" is a "poet", the author of a "composition" is a "composer" etc.
I was more replying to your comment than continuing GP's argument, but I believe what they were trying to say is that the system used in Arabic is very regular and predictable. If I didn't know English, I might say that the person who writes poems is a poemer. Or a poetrier. I might try to use "to poetry" as a verb.
I wouldn't really make that argument because through learning Esperanto I realized that a truly logical language would make nearly no sense. You can't just invent any word you like in Esperanto, although it is sometimes billed that way, and you can't in Arabic. But at least it's very predictable and, at least, you can derive the meanings of an already-written text fairly easily.
The problem (touched upon in the OP) is that each dialect has its own domain of vocabulary, so even apart from foreign/native language influences, the classical vocabulary that sticks around in each dialect varies widely from one place to another. Some people use the verb for "work" to mean "work" and some use the verb for "preoccupy oneself" to mean "work."
2 of may favorite things about the language: 1/ fun fact is that the vast majority of verbs have only 3 letters in them 2/ Pronouns make a distinction between one, two or more people, and even indicate whether the subject is present or absent. I find it extremely powerful.
While words "transformation" might seem cool and convenient, there is no common rule on how to predict final meaning.
Also the pronunciation is very (VERY) important. One tiny mistake and you will end up telling your girlfriend that you have a gift from deep of your dog (كلب/ Kalb) instead of deep of your heart (قلب / K'alb).
In Arabic pronunciation is straight forward, in english pronunciation depends on each word (a,u,o) can have a different sounds (depends in which word used) and the emphasis also is a dark magic :D there are no such exceptions in Arabic
Arabic can be difficult but simple. English can be easy but complex.
As he pointed, you might tell your girlfriend this is a gift from your dog (كلب) instead of heart (قلب), but I'm sure that if she is a native speaker, she'll understand correctly.
I've seen the same mistakes happen in other languages, but the native speaker usually miss the meaning.
I think this relates to the fact that Arabic spoken language has a vast number is unique dialects, and they mostly understand each others dialects, unlike other languages that differs between dialects mostly in spelling sounds.
It is also highly regional. Someone from Glasgow pronounces things rather differently to someone from Brighton.
I don't speak Arabic, but my understanding is that someone from Morocco can't necessarily hold an easy conversation with someone from Qatar.
Whereas, I can name very few varieties of English that aren't easily mutually intelligible with basically all of the rest of the English-speaking world - patois and gullah, for example.
"I read that magazine": do I mean regularly, or that I have done in the past?
"The messenger wrote down Lincoln's address": was that his home, or his speech?
The context would need to be quite explicit to work around problems such as this.
“Dog” and “cat” have different pronunciations in English, and therefore mean different things.
There are many word pairs in many languages that are written exactly the same way but have different pronunciations and different meanings.
The verb "lead" and the noun "lead" (i.e., the metal) are two different words, pronounced differently. The fact that they are spelled the same is just an example of how the English writing system doesn't encode the English language perfectly accurately.
It's like confusing thumb with sum
Given that learning the language (in any form) is probably going to be a huge challenge the prospect of spending years studying the idiom only to end up in an arabophone country and not being able to fluently converse with anybody felt discouraging.
I eventually decided that I would focus on learning Russian instead, an other very difficult but obviously completely different languages (although it also features declensions and relatively simple conjugations minus the aspect thingy).
Do you think I was mistaken?
Written (formal) arabic is a different story though, I think that's what's commonly taught for non arabic people
But even within these dialects, there are regional dialects that might be difficult to understand even for native speakers from that same country.
For example, Tunisian Arabic can (roughly) be divided into northern and southern dialects. I've met people in the north who think I'm from Libya because of some words that are shared with southern Tunisian Arabic. Tunisia is a relatively small country, so imagine the variation in dialects in Egypt!
If you're interested in learning Arabic, don't let this scare you! The "generic" Egyptian, Lebanese, and Syrian dialects will easily be understood by most Middle Easterners and a fair chunk of North Africans.
But note that Egyptian Arabic is very different from Lebanese and Syrian Arabic (which both are in the Levantine Arabic family).
Would you say this is true of spoken english as well? By that I mean, a large amount of the difficulty involving english involves our train-wreck of spelling rules, spoken english on the other hand tends to be reasonably easy to become functional in (apart from idioms). Would you say that Arabic is simpler than purely spoken english as well?
I see might not be difficult for me to learn it since I know Swahili (the most commonly spoken language in East Africa, which has Arab influence) since those words are pronounced respectively: Kitabu(book), Katibu(secretary), Maktaba(library).
Arab is not really complicated. Trust me, I'm accustomed to more troublesome dialects in Africa.
I'll never regret what Arabic has taught me directly and indirectly about the world.
I have seen a lot of the contrast of the myopic sheltered culture of middle class Northeast US I grew up in. And I learned Europeans borrowed and saved a lot of important knowledge for safe keeping with the Arabs in Arabic. I see certain artistic themes go so far back even beyond classical Arab history and they give evidence of that. Ditto for math and science.
Ugly is beautiful too, man.
من يعلمني حرفا فصرت له عبدا!
For he who teaches me a letter, for him I become a slave. I saw this old trope on a classroom board studying in Cairo and it has stayed with me all my life.
Perhaps, not so much philosophical...
This is exactly the situation with Hindi (and I'd venture to say all Indian languages). The colloquial (or at least urban) vocabulary seems so much smaller than English that it's just faster to code-mix in English words and phrases in a lot of situations. And insisting on speaking in Hindi would require a lot more metaphors and indirect expression than seemingly how the same thing would be said in English.
Even if a Hindi word exists for a very specific concept, and the speaker knows the listener probably knows it, it's considered less pretentious to use the English equivalent than to use the ten-dollar Hindi word.
Why is that?
Reverse snobism towards the upper or more educated classes?
As an outsider who knows very little about Indian culture, it feels wrong and sad.
These days using a difficult Hindi word (especially one derived from Sanskrit, or one that sounds Sanskrit-ish) in place of a common English term also signals that the speaker supports the political right wing.
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.
Language is political.
If a different political situation had come about you could see French, Spanish, Italian and Romanian dubbed one language named Neo-Latin, this language wouldn't be very mutually intelligible either
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.
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.
"The one thing not mentioned in the article is the idea of registers, which is the vertical transition between intermediate stages between full dialect and full MSA depending on the socio-lingiustic context of a conversation or other language production opportunity."
That’s a better analogy.
There’s no scientific reason to say all the Arabic dialects are “the same language” whereas all the modern Latin dialects are “different languages”.
I definitely disagree on this. Sure, for some concepts, that might be true, but Arabic vocabulary and verbs are so diverse that there are many things that are much easier to say in Arabic.
Combined with the fact that written words are much shorter, you can easily see why Arabic Twitter is thriving so well. Before the tweet limit was raised, Arabic tweets could hold about the equivalent of a paragraph of information. Now that it's been increased they're essentially blog posts.
You know, and I don’t mean to question the veracity of your statement, I don’t think you are a native speaker at all. I think you grew up hearing enough Arabic to understand it and speak it. I would bet you speak and think in English and not in Arabic.
So just like every other language.
First rule of languages: Languages are not logic. If somebody tells you that their mother tongue is more logical than language X, it's in most cases just bias of the native speaker who is not aware of the difficulties.
Second rule of languages: There are no easy or hard languages. Whether a language is easy or difficult to learn, depends entirely on the languages you already speak (and, of course, the environment, e.g. whether you have access to learning material).
(edit) Big exception: Writing systems. Learning 5000 Chinese characters is objectively harder than learning how to read Spanish. Unfortunately, a difficult writing system has also a negative impact on speaking skills because it hinders you from quickly extending your vocabulary by reading books etc.
True enough. I learned two of the languages I know by reading books (after starting with magazines etc). I never used a dictionary - not once. Because when you finally associate a word with its meaning, through understanding, you don't forget it, unlike with a dictionary (which can't give you the exact meaning either - just the nearest translation). But I can't use that method with languages with a different writing system, not in the beginning at least.
Interesting...how long did it take you to become proficient? And does proficiency in speech your reading ability?
Before that I had been reading a magazine about stuff I was very interested in (I for one need more motivation than just 'learn the language'. I believe my interest in what I was reading was crucial, without that it wouldn't have worked).
Then I read a couple of relatively short books about science, again not too difficult. At a later time I picked up a book in the international section in a book shop while travelling for work (lots of hotel time..), and since then I just continued.
And yes I think it does help a lot with my speaking proficiency too (I think that was what you meant by your last question), although it does absolutely nothing for my pronunciation..
Each of them has its own infuriating challenges, but they all share one big characteristic: Native children learn to speak them well around the age of seven. After that age, most children just add advanced vocabulary. Each of the four languages is by far the worst in some regard, but in a real, practical sense all four exhibit the same overall difficulty for a comparable group of learners.
I've heard that the age is the same for most languages, not just "my" four. For Arabic too, or is it one of the exceptions?
>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.
My experience was that English and Urdu are much worse grammarwise. In the latter, it's not so much that there are exceptions to rules - it's that the rules are the exception. Most of the language doesn't follow grammatical rules. It's not as bad in English, but the problem exists. When I used to help people learn English, I could see how frustrated they would get whenever they'd ask a question and they'd be told "yeah, this is just how it is".
IIRC, most of formal Arabic is covered by first level grammar rules. The thing I found interesting about it is that the exceptions themselves have rules. So it wasn't a case of "just memorize that this is an exception" that you'd have for other languages. It was "Here's the exception to that bigger rule, and you know if a word/phrase should follow the exception based on these rules". I think the challenge you speak of is that sometimes even the exceptions had exceptions.
I'm not a native speaker, so I may be wrong. Overall I found it the most structured language amongst all of these. It's not simple, but it's not haphazard.
(Speaking only of formal Arabic).
I'll just put this out there, I find Arabic very descriptive. Think about the food! Lahm w Aajeen (Meat and Dough) is a meat pie that you have for breakfast. So many food items have names that are just the ingredients!
Also, while yes, the written form differs from how you speak, I speak Lebanese to any other person whose dialect is is different, and they will understand me. Whether Syrian, Iraqi, etc.
And for the record, I've been to Yorkshire, England and I had so much trouble understanding what the heck they said. I'm confident this problem occurs in many other languages, and not just Arabic.
Also, depending on where you come from in the country, you will have a different accent e.g. North Lebanon vs. South Lebanon.
In Canada, if you're from Newfoundland, you will definitely have an accent and people from anywhere in the Country would notice it.
No language is perfect, you just have to roll with the dice.
It could be correct in the opposite side too, there is many Arabic sentences that need longer words to translate to English.
Edit: typos.
So are we talking almost different languages, or minor differences?
As for your other criticisms, I mean they sound a lot like English criticisms. Because English has a lot of those problems too, at a greater or lower scale I can't say. But I wonder.
Well that's a stretch. I am also a native speaker and given Arabic(s) has its quirks it can be extremely fluid especially when politics leave it alone.
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.