General Language Thread

The old discussion on last page reminded me of how english speaking media has no concept of "old people speak more grammar accurate native language while young people use slang based on english words" for the obvious reasons

Old people do speak slang, it's just that it is either outdated or has entered the lexicon and stopped being slang.

I admit that I am not very familiar with Arabic-derived writing styles as I should. Can anybody summarize what makes them unique compared to Western or Eastern approaches?

• Right to left, like its fellow Semitic writing systems Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac.
• Also like the above scripts, the Arabic script functions as an abjad rather than an alphabet. That means that by default, only consonants are written down; you figure out the vowels from the context.
  • These languages are built around what's known as triconsonantal roots. Most words are made up of three consonants, and you derive their declensions by shuffling around their vowels and the appropriate prefix/suffixes.
• Arabic is written in cursive, so most letters have different forms depending on whether you're writing them at the beginning, middle or end of a word. Might sound intimidating, but it's honestly one of the easier bits once you get down to it, at least compared to some of the beefier alphabets like Thai or logographic scripts like Chinese.^* "Average writing system has 50 characters" actually just a statistical error. Spiders Hanzi, which lives in a cave and generates 1,000 new characters per day, is an outlier and should not be counted.
• It's usually limited as a learning aid rather than something used day-to-day by native speakers, but Arabic has optional diacritics to indicate short vowels. These are the fathah (ـَ), indicating an /a/ sound; the kasrah (ـِ), indicating an /i/; and the dammah (ـُ), representing a short /u/. You'd usually only see these in resources meant for non-native speakers, though.
• As an impure abjad, Arabic does have access to long vowels, which are typically indicated by one of three consonant letters in a context-sensitive fashion. The alif (ا), analoguous to the Hebrew aleph, marks a long /ā/ when placed in this context; the ya (ي) marks an /ī/; and the waw (و) marks an /ū/.
  • A tiny handful of Arabic-derived writing systems make themselves easier to learn by having these vowel markers (plus a few homebrew ones) follow every consonant, removing the guesswork and turning themselves into full-blown alphabets. _{This message is brought to you by Uyghur Gang}
• Just as a quick example, let's say you're writing the name of the Lebanese singer Fairuz (فيروز):
  • fa, ف, is the starting /f/ consonant.
  • ya, ي, here is an unvoiced /y/ consonant; if it were used as a long vowel, then the first syllable would've been pronounced "fī" rather than "fay".
  • ra, ر, is an /r/ consonant.
  • waw, و, normally the consonant for /w/, is your long vowel marker for /ū/ (rhymes with "goo").
  • And finally, zayn, ز, is the ending /z/ consonant.
• You can usually tell Arabic-derived scripts apart by the presence of extra letters meant to accommodate the language: for example, Persian has "پ" to represent its native /p/ sound, while Jawi, which is used for several Southeast Asian languages (mainly Malay, pre-Latin), has "چ‎" for the "ch" sound.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Sep 22nd 2020 at 6:10:37 AM

Little bonus.

When in doubt of how certain words are meant to be pronounced, try to look up its Spanish or Portuguese equivalent, the Iberian languages have a lot of loanwords with pronounciation almost intact from their Arabic roots.

What is with the Uyghur gang comment?

Edited by Redmess on Sep 22nd 2020 at 2:29:45 PM

"Brought to you by (insert anything here) Gang" is a meme.

It's a full alphabet, with explicit vowels, rather than implicit, context-sensitive ones as in OG Arabic script and other abjads. So let's say you're writing the word aptomobil (ئاپتوموبىل) for "car" (from the Russian avtomobil, автомобиль):

• ئ (no idea what it's called) is your starting "this is a vowel" marker.
• ا (Arabic alif) here marks an explicit /a/ vowel sound.
• پ is an unvoiced /p/ consonant, carried over from Persian.
• ت (Arabic ta) is a /t/ consonant.
• و (Arabic waw) is an explicit vowel for /o/, rather than a long /ū/ as in Arabic.
• م (Arabic mim) is an /m/ consonant.
• و again for the second /o/.
• ب (Arabic ba) is a /b/ consonant.
• ى (dotless Arabic ya) is an explicit /i/ vowel.
• ل (Arabic lam) is your ending /l/.

That means that most written words are half again as long as they'd be in other Arabic-derived scripts, but you can easily figure out how they're pronounced at a glance as a non-native learner.

Aside from the widespread Uyghur Arabic script, the language is also written in Cyrillic and two different Latin scripts, both of which use the letter "X" in rather idiosyncratic ways: the (ironically older) Uyghur New Script was adapted from the PRC's own transliteration reform for Mandarin (Hanyu Pinyin) and uses it to denote the /sh/ sound, while the newer Uyghur Latin Script is based on existing transliterations of Arabic and Russian and uses it for the /kh/ sound.

Wow. Thanks for all that information.

@Redmess: Its different thing I'm talking about, I'm talking about how teachers of your own language are worried about native language being over taken by english loan words and slang and such

That can certainly be a concern, though. I am certainly seeing an overeagerness of universities to do everything in English, even in cases where the vast majority of students are Dutch. The problem is that it devalues Dutch as an academic language when everyone starts speaking and writing in English instead.

Academia is an interesting case. At levels where there's information being generated and disseminated beyond just the institution/students in the institution, it's necessary to make sure it's able to be read/heard/understood by the widest number of academics, and that currently usually means business being conducted in English. And within the institution, even if there aren't that many in comparison to in-country students, they might still be able to pull in foreign students they wouldn't otherwise be able to.

...She says with only experience in institutions in English-speaking areas. But I have had teachers and fellow students whose first language isn't English. In fact, foreign (and non-native English speaking) students are a pretty big number of students in my huge University area.

Well yes, but the majority of our students are Dutch.

My friends often insist on speaking English. They spend so much time on English-language sites that they seem completely unable to discuss their interests in Dutch.

I find it slightly annoying. Especially when they get me doing it.

I can get where @ Redmess is coming from actually.

We have to remember that bilingual education is not widespread so locking everything behind the English language means that a lot of Academic or Technical information is unreachable from a good degree of your population.

And that is without running into the problem of your own language being devaluated, which lowers the interest or appeal of translating things into said language and further cements the English language as dominant.

I would know, despite Spanish being supposedly the second language of the world behind Chinese, it has nowhere near the recognition or utility of the English language.

Guilty as charged. I have the exact same problem where I find it easier to talk in English. But I still think we undervalue Dutch all the same.

Exactly. It is a real problem when Dutch students can't follow along in a Dutch course because the text book is only in English (or German or French, occasionally).

And sure, we get English and German and French in high school, but having a high school level grasp of the language is quite something else from reading an academic text book in that language. And that's not even going into how terrible language education often turns out to be.

Edited by Redmess on Sep 23rd 2020 at 3:49:29 PM

Where's our universal translator? They promised us a universal translator.

Yeah, I wasn't disagreeing with your point, I totally get it. I guess I was just noting that at higher levels of academia, a lingua franca is kinda necessary for a wider audience given its international nature, which has an impact on the issue.

Although the need to address an international audience isn't exactly unique to academia. Websites, as has been pointed out. Like this one.

English: "I am the universal translator."

Edited by raziel365 on Sep 23rd 2020 at 7:24:41 AM

I'm not disagreeing with you either.

It is a big problem in devaluating our language though, especially since the Dutch already have a cultural inferiority complex as it is.

It doesn't help that Dutch sounds too close already to English unlike the other Germanic languages.

... No, no it does not. Not at all.

I grew up with a lot of german on TV. Learned english from games, TV, movies and books (and school)

An issue with english in academia is that certain fields move quite fast. If you have to translate everything first, then publish in your native language and translate it, you're basically perpetually behind.

Edited by devak on Sep 23rd 2020 at 10:30:47 AM

*Sees a video with Dutch being spoken*

Ok. I take back what I said. It was stupid, like really stupid.

I have heard that in certain areas around the world, people who are not overly familiar with either language will sometimes mistake German for English.