Learn to write Arabic!

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Athelwulf, Mar 21, 2007.

  1. Hani Registered Senior Member

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    I doubt you even know Arabic. There is nothing called "Lebanese Arabic" aside from Syrian Arabic. Lebanese is a mix of different Syrian dialects due to the fact that current Lebanese are all immigrants from within the Syrian interior. Reading Lebanese histroy would make this easy to grasp. Lebanese is mainly a Damascine dialect with some influence from Aleppo dialect.

    I'm planing to write soon anout the differences between different Levanitine dialects.
     
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  3. Hani Registered Senior Member

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    Lebanese resembles much rural Syrian Arabic.
     
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  5. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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  7. Diode-Man Awesome User Title Registered Senior Member

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    Arabic reminds me of the "Elvin" Lord of the Rings style writing. Has a sleek/ancient look to it.
     
  8. John99 Banned Banned

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    There is no written language like English, and there is a reason for it. Look at pages formatted in English and then look at Arabic or Chinese for example. I am not English either but come on.
     
    Last edited: Jun 21, 2008
  9. DiamondHearts Registered Senior Member

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    Arabic and Chinese are very, very different languages. I am not Arab, but I find it very easy to read and write Arabic, it is even easier to learn than English. All the words are pronounced and reading is very simple, unlike in English with words such as lightning or taught, etc. For people who grow up in Arabic or related environment, English seems just as strange as Arabic seems to you.
     
  10. Zephyr Humans are ONE Registered Senior Member

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    English is difficult to learn to read because it isn't spelled phonetically. In this respect it doesn't fit in with other European languages - one can learn to read Spanish or Polish in a few hours, if you already know the Latin alphabet.

    It's funny that English, the language with the least logical spelling, has ended up the most widely spoken

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    Beautiful the Tengwar may be, but they are a dyslexic's nightmare. Many of the letters are reversals and rotations of others.

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  11. DiamondHearts Registered Senior Member

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    The result of the colonization by the British Empire. It has nothing to do with the language, but with the military power and conquest of the British.
     
  12. OilIsMastery Banned Banned

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  13. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    French is arguably as bad as English. I'd say it's a little easier to read but harder to write, so it comes out about even. You can sort of guess which letters are silent when you're reading words, but when writing a word you can't imagine which silent letters to add, or how many of them. Both vowels and consonants can be silent. Aiment is pronounced "em."
    Mandarin has more native speakers and it doesn't even have spelling.

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    Language follows the coin, and the Anglophone community of nations has been dominant economically for many decades. That will undoubtedly change. Aramaic had its day, as did Latin and Greek. Chinese or Spanish could be next.
     
  14. Medicine*Woman Jesus: Mythstory--Not History! Valued Senior Member

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    M*W: I think it will be Espanol.
     
  15. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Language follows the money, not the labor. Los latinos hablarán el chino.
     
  16. Zephyr Humans are ONE Registered Senior Member

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    Although the other languages had local rather than global prominence. The dominance of English was backed by two major technological shifts: first the Industrial Revolution which spread from Britain, and then the Internet which spread from the USA. For how long have we been able to send messages around the world at effectively zero cost? It's difficult to imagine the world before then.

    Do you think there will be a new revolution favoring another language, or will it just be a gradual power shift this time?
     
  17. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    True, but those localities were rather large. Aramaic covered all of "Western" civilization at first, and continued to be the lingua franca of western Asia through the Greek, Roman, Arab and Ottoman hegemonies. When the Middle East broke off from Western civilization, Latin was the language of government, scholarship and religion for Europe until quite recently.

    Yes there were several other civilizations but despite their impressive cultures which were in some ways arguably superior, they lagged behind Europe in the key areas of scientific and economic progress. The Greco-Roman model and the ever-growing region it defines came to dominate world civilization. So despite the billions of people who speak Chinese, Hindi and Arabic, English for better or worse is the world's most important language, like Latin and Greek before it.
    Which is an offshoot of Britain. We regard King Arthur, Shakespeare, Robin Hood and the Beatles as "our culture" and until the end of time Americans will always die to protect England.
    Not for us older people.

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    Most of my Esperanto "pen pals" in the former Soviet bloc still haven't got e-mail.
    One of the things you learn from history is that it's difficult to make predictions across a paradigm shift, such as the transition from the Industrial Era into the Information Age. English is rapidly becoming the world language that Esperanto aspired to be. Despite being economic powerhouses, the Chinese and Japanese people are not promoting their languages for the obvious reason that they're horrible for a computer keyboard. India is fast becoming an economic powerhouse, but linguistically it's an English colony. Latin America is proud of its languages, but it will never discard Spanish for Portuguese or vice versa, so it can't present a united front.

    It's quite possible that English will continue to spread because it has so much inertia behind it. How many billions of lines of computer code--civilization's new infrastructure--are documented only in English? By the time America's hegemony fades away, its language may be the only one in which business and science can be conducted. Very much like Latin after the fall of Rome.

    Or perhaps Aramaic is a better analogy because of its strange history. The Aramaeans were just one of the peoples the Assyrians conquered, but their language began to spread among the neighboring captive tribes. Eventually the Assyrians made it the official language of the empire. After their empire waned, Aramaic continued to be spoken throughout the Middle East for two thousand years, despite the comings and goings of various ethnic groups and the rise and fall of empires. Whether the people of the Middle East were ruled by Persians, Greeks, Tatars, Moghuls, Arabs, Ottomans or Britons, through sheer inertia they kept speaking Aramaic.
     
  18. hypewaders Save Changes Registered Senior Member

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    I'm partial to the Levantine dialect. You can download (for free) the Foreign Service Institute's LA course, including the audio portions here:


    This is a spoken-language oriented course, that doesn't teach Arabic script (but that's relatively easy to learn). I've used it some for review, because I'd like to keep a Libnaani accent, as much as I can.
     
  19. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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  20. PsychoTropicPuppy Bittersweet life? Valued Senior Member

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    Must say, in spite of being completely unable to decipher it. I think the Arabic script is beautiful. =)
     
  21. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    So which populations does that correspond to? I'm guessing the Lebanese and Palestinians. Neither are ethnically of Arabic origin; they're more closely related to the Jews.
     
  22. Norsefire Salam Shalom Salom Registered Senior Member

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    Levantine is Lebanon, Syria, parts of Jordan, and parts of Palestine
     
  23. mike47 Banned Banned

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    What does it say here ?.
     

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