Why Arabic Is Terrific (2011)

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 &quot;Arabic&quot; courses&#x2F;material) and regional&#x2F;national dialects (and the differences between those various dialects themselves) may make it a bit less practical than you&#x27;d hope (and a source of disappointment when you go to actually speak with people!).<p>Permit me to plug a pet project of mine:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arabicreference.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arabicreference.com</a><p>It&#x27;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&#x27;ve been neglecting it a bit recently, so I apologize for any bugs and for the lack of an SSL cert).

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:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Maltese_language" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Maltese_language</a><p>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&#x27;s one of the most common sounds in the language.

Excellent article on a very logical language. However this part:<p>&gt; No other language will make you work as hard to avoid speaking formally to pairs of women<p>Arabs actually don&#x27;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&#x27;t deal the difference between &quot;those two females ran&quot; vs &quot;those two males ran&quot; vs &quot;those males ran&quot;, etc.<p>But author summarizes it:<p>&gt; 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

&quot;1. There&#x27;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.&quot;<p>Is there a term like &quot;Brook&quot; is to &quot;Spook&quot; like &quot;Brogrammer&quot; is to &quot;Programmer&quot;?

I love learning writing systems and think the Semitic languages, including Arabic, are especially fun to learn and write.<p>I thought about trying to learn more Arabic for fun, but this part convinced me not to bother:<p>&gt; My absolute favorite is that all non-human plurals are grammatically feminine singular: al-kutub hadra&#x27; (الكتب خضراء) &quot;The books, she is green&quot;<p>After attempting a minor in French, I hate dealing with arbitrary gender in languages. I&#x27;m convinced that the grammatical construct of gender exists only to make it easier to identify foreign or uneducated speakers!

&quot;Unlike the rest of the language, numerals are written left-to-right.&quot;<p>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.<p>Interesting to learn though that in Arabic it is still pronounced from left to right, up until the tens.

Discussed at the time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2909136" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2909136</a>

&quot;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 &#x27;apple&#x27; and &#x27;elegant&#x27; do not start with a vowel.&quot;<p>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.

My best friend has a little site which I’m always trying to get her to do more on. If you’re attempting to learn Arabic it may help.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rememberarabic.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rememberarabic.com&#x2F;</a><p>She has a very definite style:<p>&gt; When writing the rules for Arabic grammar, someone decided that Lakin should be called the weak version of &#x27;but&#x27;, and Lakinna should be called the strong version of &#x27;but&#x27;. If someone can decide that, then I can decide to create a Hammock of Freedom. So I did.<p>Go check her out. I’m seeing her for a walk in an hour, I can pass on kind comments. :-)

I&#x27;m trying to learn Egyptian Arabic and the resources available are incredibly frustrating. It&#x27;s a very popular language yet nearly all the beginner resources are for Modern Standard Arabic.<p>It&#x27;s almost like being forced to learn Latin first before you can learn Spanish.

I crammed 3 years of Arabic study into my 2 years at Cal. The logic of the triliteral root system is partly what got me interested in programming.

You can hear some spoken Arabic and a comparison of some of the dialects here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;WEwgafTDrOU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;WEwgafTDrOU</a><p>I think it&#x27;s an awesome sounding language.<p>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

&gt;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.<p>&gt;The first is that texts from over a thousand years ago remain accessible to modern readers. If you&#x27;re an English speaker, where even texts from 200 years ago can be rough going, this is quite a treat.<p>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.

&gt; The Feminine Plural<p>&gt; 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.<p>&gt; 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.<p>All Romance languages I know (French, Spanish, Portuguese) work like that. For example in Portuguese: <i>&quot;They play football.&quot;</i> is <i>&quot;Elas jogam futebol.&quot;</i> if it&#x27;s about the women&#x27;s national soccer team but <i>&quot;Eles jogam futebol.&quot;</i> if it&#x27;s an all male or mixed team.

But most importantly, you can use an Arabic letter, teh (sounds like t) as a smiley face: ت<p>See this happy fellow? ت

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)

&gt; This idea is so cool that you&#x27;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.<p>Is there a large overlap between constructed language enthusiasts and Runescape enthusiasts? That seems kind of strange to me.

My favourite bit, after the comments about the screaming eagle?<p><i>This is where a douchier person would write &#x27;colophon&#x27;</i><p>But overall it did its mission: it made learning arabic feel linguistically interesting.

&gt; Arabic, on the other hand, twists healthy minds in twelve ways:<p>I only see 11.

The ambiguity of the term &quot;terrific&quot; seems uniquely suited to describing Arabic.<p>For non-native readers: the word means both extremely appealing, and also mortally horrifying. It is best used when both apply to some degree.

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.<p>If you speak French the Arabic language texts and practice books are better than what I&#x27;ve been able to find in English.

Bonus points for not being on Medium!

Proto-indo-european also had extensive use of ablaut, and a dual number.

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&#x27;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.

Japanese grammar is decidedly not vanilla. Arabic is actually much more similar to English and the ind-european languages.

I wonder if this is still true: &quot;right now the road to bro advancement leads through an Arabic classroom.&quot;

The books recommended seem to have less than stellar reviews, unfortunate

Have you tried Hebrew?

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 &#x2F;d&#x2F; sound, or merge with the pharyngealized &#x2F;dh&#x2F; 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.<p>It is even mis-transliterated as &#x2F;d&#x2F; in the linked article in (hadra).