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Arabic hyped up vs. Persian and Turkish? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Afgjasmine16 Triglot Newbie United States Joined 6007 days ago 29 posts - 55 votes  Speaks: Pashto*, English, Hindi Studies: Bengali, Tamil, Indonesian, Turkish | Message 57 of 71 21 October 2010 at 1:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree with the orginal poster. I tried Arabic and it's still an on/off thing for me but I compleatly fll in love with Turkish and have yet to go back to Arabic. Ironically, where I can never find any Arabs and when I do find them, they almost never want to talk in Arabic. I find Turks alot more accessible and they will actually talk to you in Turkish! I live in Phildelphia, and their are many many Turks here and I would a really good size of Turkish super markets and resturants. When I go there and try to converse in Turkish, they always 100 percent of the time answear mein Turkish, recomend me Turkish Cd's and Turkish movies. The Arab place I went to, of course they were just as nice but for some reason did not want to say anything in Arabic. They will either say they want to practice their English or that they dont know Arabic well enough to talk. However, I never had this problem with Turks.(I cant really speak for Iranians becaue I have not met any in this situation but I know they are very passionate about their language.) Turkey is also a very nice place to go, I think its the best place to start for westreners introduction to the Middle East, as the culture is exotic but not as shocking for them. I guess Egypt could be considered like this too, Im not really sure. But I have no idea why Arabic is so popular to learn, I do like Arabic, but once I started thinking about the dialects, I really gave up, you can almost find no one who speaks the particular dialect you want to go for and modern standard is way way way to hard! I have foudn Turkish much more useful, I really like Persian and hope to learn it one day.
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| nebojats Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5197 days ago 89 posts - 120 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Italian | Message 58 of 71 26 October 2010 at 5:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hey!
I was just chatting with a friend who speaks Uyghur as a first language. I asked her about its mutual intelligibility with other Turkic languages. I know some people here are sticklers for proper spelling, but I won't alter the original quote. Here it is: "yeh all the turkic languages are very intertwined .. like uyghur u know.... we can pik up kazakh, uzbek, khyrgiz..basically most of the central asian countries' languages REALLY fast n even turkis h" "i think perhaps 70 percent of it just by listening esp with khazak , khirgiz n uzbek.. mayb a little too exxagerated with 70 but its more than 50 % at eleast turkish is a lot harder" 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| nebojats Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5197 days ago 89 posts - 120 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Italian | Message 59 of 71 26 October 2010 at 5:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Also, I just had a thought about the Turkic languages. Their mutual intelligibilty levels seem about on par with those between the various Arabic dialects. Some can understand one another pretty easily, yet some are completely unintelligible. Yet they all have much in common, and are differentiated by their particular contexts (history, location, political situation, other languages nearby, etc.).
Both also have a pretty similar coverage... 200 to 300 million, roughly. Is it too gross of a generalization to say that if there were a Modern Standard Turkic, the Turkic languages and Arabic dialects would be on pretty similar footing? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| LatinoBoy84 Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5576 days ago 443 posts - 603 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Portuguese, Latvian | Message 60 of 71 27 October 2010 at 3:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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You mean like romance languages have interlingua? MST would be a great language for
Turkic speakers if it drew from all branches of the Turkic family. Edited by LatinoBoy84 on 27 October 2010 at 3:56am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| nebojats Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5197 days ago 89 posts - 120 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Italian | Message 61 of 71 27 October 2010 at 11:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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I was more thinking of an MST that would function similarly to MSA.
I suppose you could argue that Interlingua is attempting to act for Romance languages like MSA acts for Arabic dialects, although not nearly as successfully. What would be the MSA of Romace Languages would probably be some sort of Latin that never died out and evolved into a lingua franca. I think a better comparison might be Standard German. It, like MSA, acts as a sort of standard that compartitively few people speak, but speakers of the various dialects can learn easily to communicate with one another. Interlingua seems fundamentally different from Standard Arabic and German in that it's synthetic, whereas the standard languages serve more as a sort of model. The model might not actually be spoken, but it acts as a sort of example against which the dialects can be compared and measured. I know this is a poor metaphor, but say half of people speak Purple. Half of people speak Orange. The Standard Color would be Red (Orange is defined by how much Yellow it has and Purple by how much Blue). However the Intercolor would be some sort of Brown (mixes Orange and Purple). Edited by nebojats on 27 October 2010 at 11:20am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5321 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 62 of 71 27 October 2010 at 12:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
Being German, I have to disagree. While MSA is to most Arabs almost like a foreign language, many though certainly not all Germans can easily switch from speaking their local dialects to standard German and hardly anybody has problems writing standard German. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| nebojats Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5197 days ago 89 posts - 120 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Italian | Message 63 of 71 27 October 2010 at 12:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@doitsujin:
I speak neither German nor Arabic! But I've heard other native German speakers echo your sentiments. This is from the "Which World Language?" thread:
Standard German obviously is far more successful at uniting German dialects than MSA is at uniting Arabic dialects. I think they still have a similar function, though... I think MSA evolved out of the Pan-Arabism movement as a way to unify all of the dialects (can anyone back that up?). The main difference seems to be degree of effectiveness. Wouldn't you say that MSA has more in common with Standard German than Interlingua? That was the point I was trying to make. Edited by nebojats on 27 October 2010 at 12:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5321 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 64 of 71 27 October 2010 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't think that there was any kind of concerted effort or "Pan-Arabism movement" to create MSA, because MSA is in effect only a modernized version of Classical Arabic. Even today many Arabs disagree about the exact definition of MSA and some lump it together with Classical Arabic. Recently some textbook authors came up with the term Formal Spoken Arabic to describe some kind of simplified MSA, which of course is also not clearly defined.
I don't think that you can compare a conlang like Interlingua with natural languages. BTW, Standard German is no more special than any other official version of any other language. Edited by Doitsujin on 27 October 2010 at 1:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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