Explanation: Arabic has maintained a great literary continuity through the centuries, in part due to the importance of the Quran as the literal written word of the Divine. A translation of the Quran is only a commentary - nothing more - meaning that written Arabic has had a sort of ‘hard standard’ that has bound together diverse locales with a common written form of the tongue.
TIL. That’s cool
Depends, it also means that written and spoken arabic diverges strongly in some places, which is not a good feature for a language.
Native Arabic speaker here. Can confirm.
Although it’s not always as easy as it sounds because many words and expressions from back then aren’t relevant/in-use. Also, reading poetry from the pre-Islamic era is significantly more difficult. We still have volumes of literature (specifically poetry) that predates Islam.
The reason the language is so resilient is the use of the Quran as a reference (all translations of it aren’t considered Quran, but commentaries), and the fact we have institutes dedicated to maintaining and standardising the language as part of the Arab League (ALECSO and its subsidiaries, etc). Also, all nations of the Arab League enforce a rule that stipulates that the governments, newspapers, media/TV, and academia are required to use Modern Standard Arabic for official business across all member countries.
Regional dialects are kind of hard to understand at first, but generally speaking, we do understand each other regardless of the dialect if the two parties communicating work at it long enough. The hardest dialects to understand are from them pesky Moroccans/Tunisians with their French-every-other-word bastardisation of the language, but we figure it out eventually.
Edit: and I’m not bashing Moroccans/Tunisians/Algerians. We love you guys! ❤️
Edit: spelling, grammar
I wouldn’t hold the French influence against them tbf
Neither do I. We have the same problem with English and German here in Egypt (especially in the recent decades and with the advent of the internet)
Edit: also in sciences and tech, it’s becoming near impossible for the regulatory bodies involved to keep up and we have to use loan words to refer to things even in official documents.
institutes dedicated to maintaining and standardising the language as part of the Arab League (ALECSO and its subsidiaries, etc)
With successes like Arabic, French, Korean and Turkish I don’t understand how the “Descriptivism vs. Prescriptivism” debate in the anglosphere is “Descriptivism : signature look of superiority”, especially since their linguistic rules are filled with more exceptions than rules, and their spelling is atrocious (although I blame the Latin roots for that, since germanic languages manage just fine)
Depends on what you consider “success”. English is the number one second language, after all. And besides, French, while highly regulated, is full of insanity like 420+2 you would expect a prescription would iron out, meanwhile the parts of English that were prescribed, like is*land or not ending on prepositions, are notably more weird than they would be normally.
Depends on what you consider “success”.
Being a well structured language that is consistent and easy to use. As in “high quality tool”
English is the number one second language, after all.
McDonalds is the worlds best resturant with that kind of logic.
McDonalds is the worlds best resturant with that kind of logic.
It is. It’s the best at not being shit. You don’t expect a gourmet meal, but you get very standardised food no matter where on the planet you are.
Even Michelin star restaurant give you the shits more often than plain old MickeyD’s which never fails to have the same mediocre quality.
Just like broken English.
Finnish can do a billion things English can’t but English has hundreds of thousands of words, nearing a million if you count obsolete terms, whereas Finnish has barely 100 000 even when you do count even obsolete terms.
So just like with McD, it’s the usecase which matters. “Best” is such a subjective term if you don’t define it.
“Best” is such a subjective term if you don’t define it.
i did define it though.
Oh. Please do point me to where you did such.
Depends on what you consider “success”.
Being a well structured language that is consistent and easy to use. As in “high quality tool”
That’s the thing, though: McDonald’s is well structured, easy to use, and consistent - unlike French. And, incidentally, a high quality tool isn’t necessarily easy to use - like French.
In fact, I’d argue English fits your three criteria: as it’s effectively a pidgin at least once over, it lost damn near all grammatical structures (rendering it simple) and therefore depends on rigid (consistent) word ordering (structure).
English absolutely has grammar, it just has very analytical grammar, unlike many other indo European languages
it lost damn near all grammatical structures (rendering it simple)
But not consistent
and therefore depends on rigid (consistent) word ordering (structure).
yeah, having one aspect have rules but other parts descend into complete chaos because it’s a bastard langauge doesn’t make english consistent
English is a vibes based language with lose grammer and spelling that enables people who speak wildly different native languages ti fairly effectively communicate. It’s the giant bin of random Lego pieces of human languages. It’s unruly, but anyone can pick it up fairly quickly and get to work.
Eh it could be argued this would be better if a more standard language with fewer exceptions were used though. They’re not using English because they had a real choice between different languages.
yes. which is why it sucks. It’s like, yeah a swiss army knife is pretty cool I guess, but I don’t want to debone and chop up a chicken into cubes with it.
Quran is a little archaic becaues of some words, but fucking hell i understand the quran better than somebody from Morocco. They speak their own language
You know it’s bad when you can’t tell whether the words they’re saying are Arabic or French.
A month ago i was on a plane and there were lots of moroccans. They fucking spoke arabic + french in the same sentence. Just straight up interrupting the french sentence and continuing in arabic/vice versa.
I thought we had a problem with loan words from english here, but magrebis are on a whole other level lmao
This is how bilinguals of any languages speak so it’s not surprising. I read some study a while ago that said that if you have more than one native language it kind of works in your brain as if you have just one language, but it has all the stuff in it from both languages, which is why it’s so easy to switch. I’m sure you know that some things are easier to express nicely in some languages, or don’t translate easily, so it’s quite useful to do this.
I’d consider myself both a native in english/arabic (as in, i can speak fluently, like a native) and it usually is pretty disorienting to abruptly switch from one language to another, but that’s probably just me, not sure about others ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Code-switching - it’s not uncommon, but also not universal amongst multilingual speakers.
I think bilingual in the linguistic sense is more if you grow up using both languages a lot in early childhood, and especially if you use both in the home, and not so much about the final fluency. I do this kind of rapid switching between Dutch and English because I grew up speaking Dutch at home in an English speaking country. But I wouldn’t say my Dutch is really perfect, I am missing quite a lot of vocabulary after decades in an English country and I don’t know a lot of formal/polite speech. But I can easily relate to how they are mixing the languages, it is quite natural. I also find it disorienting to switch to languages I learnt later in life, even one I learnt to a very high level, and I don’t often mix at all with that one.
I have this exact situation, but with Russian. Both my parents are Russian, I was born and am living in Germany LOL
So I kinda see myself as a German Russian (not Russian German mind you :p)
My parents (mostly my father) did sent me to Russian Saturday school from ages 6 to ~14 (?) after which I had the privilige of a Russian literature tutor together with my sibling for a few years (yes we did cover Pushkin, Pushkin, Pushkin and Pushkin.). Great teacher, I didn’t appreciate the opportunity enough back then.
I feel like I’m lacking quite a bit vocabulary, but think I have the basis that once I do convince my brain that reading Cyrillic is fun, even if it takes me a bit longer, I will be able to slowly work myself up to the classics of like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy political theory and the whole wealth of Soviet literature…
It often makes me quite a bit sad to be conscious of how underdeveloped my Russian is :/
Also school friend of mine grew up trilingually (Russian German mother from Kazakhstan, Canadian father; obviously grew up and lives in Germany) BTW LOL.
We spoke exactly the same languages (German, Russian ans English) and RLY enjoyed mixing them during our breaks.
And yes, we did spent a lot of lunch breaks playing Durak XD.Yeah should’ve mentioned, that’s what i meant; i learned both alongside each other at young ages (though i grew up in a mainly arabic country, not english)
It’s called code-switching and it seems to vary based on speakers, guess i just can’t do it.
Why is this surprising to you?
Everyone living abroad that i have met so far ended up mixing words of their native plus the local language, sometimes some lingua franca (haha) usually English mixed in between.
I had funny conversations about German bureaucracy with Syrian refugees. “So i got a letter from the Ausländerbehörde and they said that my Antrag got rejected curses in Arabic”
Makes sense if its people living abroad, but these people in particular were normal magrebis just on vacation lol. I’ve also never heard one speak in two different languages in the same sentence, not even loanwords, just going back and forth completely from both. Yet then again it’s not everyday i meet one anyway, so i could just be clueless about this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Latvia is funny one, like speaking in Latvian with some English sparkles, greeting in Italian and cursing in Russian
Oh, and there’s the infamous “ok labi davai čau” that manages to cram 4 languages into a goodbye when closing a phone call
The western Mediterranean is a huge mix anyways. Spanish has many words of Arabic origin. Darija has many word of Spanish origin. Spanish ojalá for instance is just inshallah. Italians and Spanish usually can speak with each other in their respective language. I had a conversation once with a Moroccan living in Italy using my poor level of Spanish. Southern French youth is increasingly using Arabic words learned from the Diaspora.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the mix ends up with a new common language being formed in a few centuries.
It’s called code switching and is extremely normal in bilingual communities.
It’s called code switching, and apparently it’s common in bilingual communities. On the topic of Arab code switching, rich Egyptian do it too but with English. Now that I think about it rich people not code switching is probably only an Arabian Peninsula thing.
I’m fortunate enough to [mostly] not meet any rich snobs, so i can’t confirm or deny this 😆
Philippines with their English and Tagalog meshup is similar, and for extra fun they added some Spanish in it as well.
Ah, Taglish, sounds painful as hell lol.
A lot of north African Arabic dialect words are straight up french words transliterated to Arabic. That’s in addition to the lebanese dialect having some, and also many Lebanese people knowing French as a secondary language
Also hello buddy!
That’s interesting, checking a moroccan arabic dictionary from french loanwrods i understand almost nothing xd. Though we do have some basic loanwords like cafe and telfizion
And hi! Always good to see you :D
I know nothing about arabic, but in my opinion it’s the prettiest script.
My work focuses on digitally processing texts from between 15th and 17th century in German. It’s a pain and i look with envy to my colleagues working in English and French (around the same time). On the other hand, i like the challenge. :-)
I feel like 15th and 17th century German isn’t that hard??
Like yeah, archaic words here and there. Lack of standardized grammar so you have to pronounce some words first.
Still, I can understand most of what Walther von der Vogelweide wrote in the 12th/13th century without too much difficulty. I think it’d take me a month to read fluently.
You probably missed the “digitally processing” part. Reading it isn’t that difficult (still much more than french or english) but due to spelling variance and some other challenges it is mich more difficult to adapt existing models and architectures designed for modern German to premodern German.
In my case, working with administrative documents, there is also a problem concerning gerne-specific words (old terms for legal xoncepts basically) which for example are not well understood by systems created for modern German.
Oh right, I thought of digitally processing as just digitalizing which isn’t quite the same.
Yeah, that sounds painful to attempt. I can imagine it’s like trying to process German text today written in dialect (like the Bavarian Wikipedia).
I think I read somewhere that Chinese readers are able to read 2000 year old texts with relatively little difficulty.
Chinese speaker here: No, we are not. Classical Chinese is a very different language but generally the basics are taught in school. It definitely takes significant effort because the grammar and vocabulary are completely different.
Yeah that’s apparently a thing. Same principle too, except with logograms rather than an abjad.
“understanding it all” eh~
“Whatever letter you don’t know is I”
Read it all, maybe. But understand?
Wouldn’t this mean that their language has not evolved which kind explain why their thinking also seems pretty archaic on a few important issues… honor killings just the tip of the iceberg?
That’s an ignorant and racist comment dude. Grow up and do some research. We have institutes that develop and maintain Modern Standard Arabic across most Arabic-speaking countries.
their thinking also seems pretty archaic on a few important issues… honor killings just the tip of the iceberg?
“Their thinking” is what led you to algebra, modern medicine, geometry, architecture, and astronomy. You’re judging entire peoples based on some bad examples? That’s like me judging your entire civilisation based solely on the actions of white supremacists and other hate groups or cultist shit.
We have a multitude cultures too. We have many religions (and not just Islam). We have many ethnicities (and aren’t all Arab). We have good people and bad people. Just like you do. Does that make us any different?
arabic =/= islamic, by the way just like english =/= christian
people’s inability to seperate language from national identity, from religion, is the same reason people are still to this day, dumbfounded or in denial that some of the most ferocious resistance of the russian invasion of ukraine are from primarily russian speaking regions.
just because you are A and B, does not mean you are automatically C.
No, not at all. I’m going to assume this is ignorance rather than malice.
You do realize honor killings are overwhelmingly more common in very much non-Arab South Asia right? No of course you don’t, or you’d never say such a thing. Also, because Westerners get on my nerves with this stuff, see how your own country is doing first.
No, thats a completely insane conclusion.
Personally, I would prefer a more progressive society based on the exchange and mixing of ideas, over a society based on the imposition of ideas through force.
